Intercellular Implications

[Intercellular Connections. By r.f.Michelle-Pentelbury. Oil, 16x20. To Sidney Art Show, 7th Sept. 2014]

I suppose some will relate. The fingerprints of those we love and may not see again give us pause before we wipe them away from our crockery, the bottles they drank from, the bedding in which they slept. Grief does that. It is a sweet emotion that will have one lifting the absent loved one's sweater to the face, as though the garment itself will reach out with ghostly arms akimbo and embrace you. And it is the friendly ghosts of those we love that accompany us, in the car, in the elevator, in the hallway and in and about the rooms we both have occupied. But the real-real persons are not there. Not anymore. Perhaps not ever again. And grief squeezes at the chest.

I've two pebbles given by a friend. I've a glass bubble. I've a small seed-pod resembling a bird's brain that I picked up in the Kruger Game Reserve. I've things that had I had my own children I may have given to them; but being childless, the horse-statue, the train-engine, the teddy-bear are connections to more than an unfulfilled boyhood; they are touchstones to the pleasantries of a distorted past. (For what else can one actually deem one's history to be called unless it be picture perfect, entirely commensurate with those who recall 'back then' and relate to the same impacts?) Corroboration is a most treasured thing. When the item at hand still resonates with the presence of the giver then is sentiment silly? But even more, when the stories of the past have been experienced by one's brother in much the same way as oneself then the reassurance of impressions, especially after a long three or four decades of reiteration, is an affirmation indeed. Sentiment is both mental and actual. Things have great meaning; memory has great power. And we are impelled by the importance we give to each. We keep stock of our treasures, material and mental, and we spend a lot of energy maintaining them. Or not.

Some of us are pretty forgetful. (It was interesting to have my brother, after a 40 year absence, remind me of some events that no longer resonated; yet entirely rewarding to have him confirm my long-held impressions and old-aged conceptualizations. But he was not at all affected by items that used to hang on our beloved Grandmother's wall; they did not register. Many of the photos I still have were of no meaning to him, and neither 'should' they be.) Thing is, this essay is not about the specifics of brother Andy and me; it is about the generality that we as humans experience with the detritus of our lives, and what any one of us makes of the flotsam.

As I type I'm sitting with a magnificent view across the Georgia Strait of Mount Baker, snowiest of the USA mountains. Andy and Elsabe did not see this. The weather was too turmoiled. Yes, mist and cloud quite often separates us altogether from the distant and makes the immediate that more significant. In life itself, many of us walk with our heads down in animated chatter with a neighbour, careful perhaps not to trip on the proverbial tree roots, but so engrossed as to be hardly aware of a life going on beyond ourselves. So too right now for so many of the Island View beach-going-passers-by in my shade spot under this tree. They do not know that Harville Hendrix and I once paused here, right here, in a lengthy conversation. That he is famous made and makes no difference to those noticing me. And so too from me to those going a-chat-chatting past me now; each is just an 'anybody'. (A 'somebody', most of us think, would be more recognizable.) Yet the intercellular-air circulates everywhere, connecting. The sea; intemperate air; all things; plants; creatures; people; we are each but molecules of a greater whole.

That's why I resonate with certain things. It's as though they retain the essence of the person I love who last touched them. Yes, the thing needs my knowledge thereof; and so I am inclined to sense for the loving fingers that wrapped the package of home-made marmalade, that stretched the elastic band. And yes, I can recycle such things. Let sentiment go. But not so easily the keepsakes given by people who mean a great deal to me, or that represent a story that can be begun by a glance. But yes, lose them, break them, have them stolen, and they were just things after all. Sentiment and silliness are the vestiges of the child in us still not sure of un-conditionality. Yet must it have to take lifetimes to feel oneself entirely worthy with nothing before oneself but a view?

One Wonders?

The thing that impressed me mostly about them was their curiosity. Not just my brother and my sister in law, but also my friends: Ardella and Jerry, Ian and Linda, Barry and Carolyn, Clive, and even by message-mail, Jessie, Sharon, Nancy Sinclair, and Justin (whom Andy recalls from 1966!) Yes, an initial family and friends group met us all in Calgary: Keith, Peter-son and Laura and children Sean and baby Jack, and Peter-elder and Karen, and Karen Weir and Lisa and husband Sean, and Rob, and our dear sister Carol, and our kismet middle brother Peter, and ... Is there someone I forgot?

Questions prove interest. Listening proves it even more. "How do you come to know Richard and Linda? Where did you two meet? What do you do for living? When was it you were back there?" And my favourite: "Why? Why did you choose that; do you like that; did you go there; why ask me that?" Questions stimulated conversation. Listeners proved interested. Questions created a sense of care amongst us. Not just from and to Andy and Elsabe, but amongst us all.

We are inclined to want things to be interesting. Whatever is outside of ourselves needs hold our attention for us to sustain focus, generally. The scenery, the conversations, others, the TV, the shapes and sizes and colours and tastes and textures and sound, it all needs be interesting afore we become interested, generally. Being ‘interested’ takes something else; it takes energy and a letting go of wanting something else to entertain oneself. (How to generate an interest in even a hairline crack in the wall? Imagination will allow the mind to create a novel from that little crack.) And those five 'W' questions, who, what, where, when, and why will make for one's life being a tapestry of riches of one's own gleaning, rather than waiting for the right channel, the right persons, the right view, the right whatever. 'Boring' happens because one allows boredom; we make things interesting because we are interested! And cultural 'niceties' need not contain!

"May I ask you another question?" Elsabe would often begin. It was charming. And so too for my brother. All my friends, despite their evident interest in this accomplished brother of mine, with his explications of Oman, and stories of helicopter rescues with the SA Airforce, and of the ordeal of their relocation from Bredarsdorp to Muscat (especially for Elsabe,) were also asked by Andy and Elsabe about their lives, their interests, and their connections to life, liberty, and the pursuit of peace. We all understood that happiness is but temporary, dependent on the serenity of the moment; it is being at peace that we seek; a comprehension and understanding and inclusion and integration of all the variables. And because of being interested (using one’s innate entelchy) we make life interesting!

Sentiment tends to rest on those five 'W' questions too. Its strength lies in one’s emotion and the reasons for keeping a thing. "I got this compass-sundial from Andy when he visited me after a 40 year separation. I am so proud of him! He is such an authentic and caring human being. He found it in an antique store in Muscat. It was used by British explorers in the 1800's. He knew it would suit me well. Yes, I shall treasure it. The time? No, I'm still working out how to use it, ha!"

Only when we no longer value an object, find no connection, are we more easily able to discard it. Then again, I've friends who keep very little indeed. One reads a card and immediately puts it into the waste bin. Is it because his sentiment is immediate, in the moment; his appreciation fully present? Another friend does not take nor keep photos. (His memory must be sharp indeed.) A name, a place, an event is recalled in precise articulation with a myriad of details. But I for one am not like that. I would retain the fingerprints of my dad's last whiskey bottle. (I am drinking as I type, with all the thought-laden heart-sore sadness of missing them, the last of sweet Elsabe's Grolsch non-alcoholic beers.) And as I take this picture of Andy's thoughtful gift, and submit it to my posting in my Blog of this essay, I wonder who shall in the future find the thing, and who shall be there to answer the many questions it poses. What hands along the way have held this treasure? What's its story? How does it work? Where has it travelled?" Ha! To what reaches may we not soar by asking more?

                                                                                   Ha!

Past Pleasantries

Which of us is not in pain?  We walk around with the past in our bones. We move with the constraints of the chains of indoctrination, the time-keepers of our own bodies, and the cages of our language. Hampered by our upbringing, held back by the limits of our schooling, and controlled by our countries we apply for visas and passports to get but two or three weeks away to go see someone and/or something else. And we work work work to serve the taxman, to serve our need to be commensurate with our status quo, to get more-better stuff to represent our achievement or to fill the endless hole of our dissatisfaction. How to guard against poverty in the inevitability of the self one day counted amongst the old aged? And it all can be so negative.

Or can we overcome? Can we find our foundations but springboards to our blossoming? Can we make of our country a garden for the thoughts of care and compassion and insight that it has afforded us? Can we, like a Mandela, make of our imprisonments a tapestry that brings insight and a lightness of being? Can we do it in the self, in our homes, be worthy simply by 'being'?

Time waits for none.

Four of us saw a life-raft of time carved out in the swirl of life around us and we clung to it as though time and circumstance were our only essence. And now, knowing that this day is our last (since aeroplane tickets and a September date was so long ago established) there is a wanting to extend the seconds and minutes and hours, as though consciousness might make longer the perception of time, if not the reality of it all. We do not know if death will take us sooner than we think, or might expect. But parting from those we love is death-like, for it takes away 'the other' in the unspoken recognition that one may not see each other again. And what should have been said? What might one have shared? What should have been given? What was it that one wanted to know? And we four, Two Brothers and Two Sisters in Law, on our 14 day raft in the great passage of time, took up each day as though it were a gift. Why should any meeting between people be any less?

Things, People, Ideas; these are the three legs of conversation and sharing. There is a poster that challenges the predominance of interest in the one subject over the other as inferior, mediocre, and superior. But one knows that we are all three. And every one of us thinks more deeply than we can ever articulate. We have thoughts of enlightenment that drift through us like breathing fairy dust, and we hardly can contain the essence, let alone capture the recipe. We ingest and imbibe and we discard; and who is to calculate the efficacy and worthiness of one thing from the other such that perfection of choice and deployment and comprehension is clear? Abstraction is caught up in frames of man-made time. Seconds become minutes, making hours, making days, making a week, two weeks, but in this case, there'll be no three. And away from our things, and away from the people we've shared, and even away from the ready interlocution of ideas, we have but the imperfection of memories to recall.

We identify, or not. Ian and Linda, Carolyn and Barry, Clive. Should you know them you'll enjoy seeing their names; know the connections and the bonds. If not, words like Tofino and Ucluelet, Middle Beach Lodge, Coomb's Goats, Spinnakers, Darcy's, The Beach House, and The Bard and Banker become just a series of names, or specific and precise and pleasant memories. To write or speak of these things to others (even with photographs at times) is still not to convey the actuality of so very many treasured moments. In the summation, it's the essence of vulnerability and integrity and reality and our willingness to share, particularly when one's counter-partners are empathetic and sensitive and compassionate. The details are in the living; feeling remains, even when those details disappear into the folder of the generalized memory: We shared time, and it was good!

Familial Feelings

We identify, or we do not. A listing of places we've visited can mean a world to those who've been there, whereas to others they are but unrealized and undiscovered words. So too for ideas and concepts and beliefs and contentions. Even when with 'other' people, strange or known, or when given a listing of familiar or unfamiliar names and places, we identify, or we do not.

As such, with the visit of my 'long lost' brother (though neither of us were actually lost), we met after 40 years again in Calgary (not forgetting the one week we were together in Bredarsdorp, South Africa, ten years ago). We stayed three days in dear friend Jessie Peter's vacant house in Calgary's Palliser neighbourhood (a pretentious name for a comfortable suburb). After the first night's barbecue at Peter and Laura's, our Calgary nephew and wife's house (since we both are his uncle), where Andy and wife Elsabe also stayed overnight, they were given a tour of the city the next day. That night we met up at Open Sesame, my favourite restaurant, and a symbolic beginning to the precious time we were yet, and are now indeed sharing. The details are in the names and places; it is in the accord between persons that one finds the measures of life.

At Open Sesame were Laura and Peter's children (Sean and baby Jack,) and Laura's parents, Peter senior and Caren, and 'my' Linda's best friend Karen, and Karen's daughter Lisa with her husband, also a Sean, as well as Linda's son Keith, and... Do you know any of them? And that late night, alone with Elsabe and Andy at Jessie's house, we four swapped our own stories, past and present. Words are like little clarifications; window-panes to the soul; and tears are jewels; gifts we give with grace.

The next day the family of us travelled in three separate cars for the two or so hours East, to the Badlands, and the Tyrell Museum's Dinosaur Provincial Park. Linda and Elsabe and Andy and I were in our vehicle; Laura and Peter and children, Sean and Jack, went in theirs. And 'my' stepson Keith and his friend, Rob, went in Keith's car. Got it? After a ginormous time with incredible dinosaurs we stopped en route back at Horseshoe Canyon, then later The Station, converted into a restaurant, in Strathmore. That night again we chatted into the wee hours, all alone with my warm-hearted younger brother and his perceptive and rich-of-soul pretty wife.

Then, Canmore's Spray Lakes road, Banff's Mount Norquay ski-lift road, and then down into and through Banff's town up to Sulphur Mountain Gondola (too cloudy to take). So on to beautiful Lake Louis, with supper in the chateau's Grizzly Saloon, and then on to Golden, where we turned North to Glenogle Lodge. Dorris and Norbert, the proprietors greeted us, she with hugs. That late night we conversed in the lounge, a grizzly bear skin and an elk head mounted beside the fireplace. And yet more doors were opened, more windows peeked through; vistas revealed.

The following day we visited Hemlock Grove, Giant Cedar boardwalk, and Skunk Cabbage boardwalk. We stopped off at The Railway-Looping Tunnels, Three Valley Gap, and... There was the Ramada at Kamloops, and Stanley Park drive in Vancouver. And the magic of the ferry between the smaller islands to Sydney, on our island, and at last the drive to 'our' Victoria.

On the 26^th of August we shared the last sips of Dad’s whiskey, found beside his bed, 2004.

This morning as I type a man with his phone to his ear at Tofino's Middle Beach Lodge (a five hour drive to 'our' extreme West coast) stands on the vast lounge deck overlooking the sea. He listens intently for long minute stretches, nodding, and when speaking gesticulates, as though 'the other' can see. And as I watch it strikes me that we are like that, conveying our messages from inside ourselves with gestures and feelings and thoughts and care, whether or not the other person can get or respond to all the details. We are so much more than is the immediate. And as subtle as it all is, feeling is all. We forget the details, eventually. Yes, feeling is all.

Brotherly Bonds

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences-leave-epigenetic-mark-on-your-genes

It seems self-evident. We mimic our parents in many ways, some overt, some subtle. We share talents with great-grandfather, or we inherit traits directly from father, or mother, or... The point is, we are usually proud of such things. And sometimes we are embarrassed and resentful. Balding, or bandyness, or meanness of spirit or quick tempered or being too short may build up a sense of wishing one were otherwise; but now, thanks to the scientific research in the essay as shown in the link above, one can overcome the genetic transference of the past, but one must really truly want to try! And then one must really truly practice different habits, over and over until a genetic transference of energies overcomes the basic DNA. Is this not the Lamarkian giraffe theory, in which the animal, wanting over centuries to reach the tree tops (or needing so to do) innately affected its genetics and grew a longer neck? Is this not what Darwin suggests as a species alters to suit the climate, the geophysical properties of its environment; and for humans the metaphysical properties of mankind's thinking? For we are what we think! At least, Alan Watts would have it so. And so would Khalil Gibran. And so would Jesus. And so would Plato. And so would.... You?

I watch this brother of mine, the youngest of we three. After a forty year absence seeing him again is a revelation. Apart from the natural disassociation we have (given the intervening years) in which our stories are so dissimilar in terms of the voyage (yet so very similar in terms of being a human), he is so very much like me. Physically. He is much like our middle brother too. We have the same kind of hands. The same sort of body. The similarity of chin and nose and neck. We have a ready kismet between us. We have the accord of familiars. We have an adult sensibility and nothing to prove. But three or so years apart physically, we are men who've made life interesting because we are interested in life. And we have miles to go before we part.

Habits are handed down by our commonalities. As cultural specimens we are Italian or Greek or Jewish or Portuguese or Afrikaners. One could go on. As a member of that larger gene pool we exhibit the status quo, and it too has a bell curve. Within each culture are the most liberal and the most conservative, the most intelligent and the most disadvantaged. And there is good and bad, and potential unrealized. Mankind is seldom seen globally. It is us, and them. We, and they. And we sit in judgement of those who have less than, exhibit less than, care less than, are educated less than, or god forbid, are less clean than ourselves. It is the way of we humans. It seeps into our genetic codes, these traits. And unfortunately, if altogether true, no child is indeed a tabla rasa (a blank slate), but comes trailing clouds of the aforementioned, with glories, or with turmoiled intangibles. And to affect all of mankind by each individual realizing he or she has a specific responsibility to the whole is not only idealistic, it is impossible. Or is it? The internet has already linked the most poor countries with the most 'civilized'. And one by one each are hearing that others in the world truly feel and need and prefer and wish for much the same things as themselves, despite all evidence of war and hate and xenophobia and racism and greed to the contrary. In each phrase given to children, let alone our actions, we do promulgate the future!

But this brother of mine is already aware of these things. He has traveled, seen the world. He is authentic and genuine and considerate and compassionate. If enlightenment may be defined as a journey and not a product, then like me, and like you, he is evolving. He sees a moment's lessons and potential. He contributes. And he, like our beloved middle brother too, has climbed out of the cage into which we were conscripted as boys and has advanced far beyond the prophecies of a culture that would have enslaved us. Yes. We are more than survivors! And the future is yet more too.

 

                 [No, not Richard, Peter, and Andy, but this photo could have been us, ha!]

Red Light Reasoning?

I ought not to have gone through that red light. We do things at others' peril; and we do things at others' good. At issue is knowing when the choices we make, consciously or unconsciously, affect the whole. For a life unexamined is a life perhaps less anxious, less self-reflective, less narcissistic, and less stressful, but it is a life, nonetheless, that also impacts others. And each of us is on this planet as participants in the whole.

The red light was awfully long. We had waited perhaps three minutes, with no cars yet coming, let alone anyone waiting behind us, when I decided it was foolish so to be caught by a light. And given that our trip was very long, and that we had several hours yet ahead of us, and that there was no one, no house, no pedestrians, no vehicles, not even a policeman to see me, I checked yet one more time, and crossed the road despite the red light. Civil disobedience is such. It aims to allow for the video of me, if there is one, to record that the light's sensor needs adjustment, that the traffic patterns ought better dictate the length of the light, that anything would be more-better than so to test my impatience. Yes, I'll pay! Yet I did not (and do not) feel fully justified.

Jason Majid was with me back in the early 90's, a gifted student of mine who for some reason was walking beside me when we were probably searching for some or other set piece for our drama production. "You're not going to jaywalk?" he remonstrated, just as I set off. "No cars," I ventured back. "Wait," he begged. "The laws are set up to protect the people, to assure drivers of not having people in the road, to ensure we don't get hit. Let's please use the crosswalk." Now, Jason nowadays is a prominent lawyer, and his words were not exactly as penned, but you get the gist of it. He impacted my sensibilities that day. The ethics of that which we do is significant, for society needs laws and regulations despite their common sense too. And we can do much harm when we cross against red lights.

"Wait!" A woman urged anxiously from behind me, just last week, as I was about to cross against the pedestrian light on my power-chair. Some three or five people had walked across in our direction, despite the red hand, and I presumed it was safe and so, like a child, I started off and would have been directly in the path of the oncoming vehicle, had it not been for that woman's kind constraint. We affect others. We are examples. We lead and teach and promote and guide and do for ourselves as others will follow suite, consciously or unconsciously. Or am I not my brother's keeper? Do I really not care that others may indeed be affected by my actions?

"So I hid under a blanket in the back of the jeep and did not pay the ferry toll," the young man grinned as he told us the story. Yet he had plenty of money. And of course, my mind reached to remind him of the stages of Kohlbergian  thinking, that at its very best, we are aware of how we might affect the whole. That the ticket taker, as a result of discovering him might be constrained now to have to come out of her booth, to walk around and examine inside every vehicle from then on, as a new policy, and thereby incrementally delay the boarding time for everyone wanting to get onto a ferry forever afterward was not in the young man's mind at all. Yet as I told him, when I was a stowaway back in 1975 aboard the S.A. Oranje from Cape Town I did not think how my discovery might affect the ability of guests from then on to visit their departing friends and family before the ship leaves. (Here in Canada, with the cruise ships docking so frequently just across the harbour from me, there is no more going up to visit the innards at all!)

"A gentleman is defined by what he does and thinks when all by himself," I pretentiously wrote not too long ago. And didactic as my meaning may come across, there is some value for me in our examination of all that we do, and don't do, as it affects our friends and family alike. Or am I truly not my brother's keeper? And am I truly just a person who may do as I damn well please? 

   

Reservations? (penned Aug 18/2014)

Awakening is not necessarily a waterfall. Fulfilment can be quiet, and deep, and ever wider.

But the Calgary Glenmore Reservoir is not so peaceful now since the summer walkers are noisy with chatter and quite a few families picnic at the BBQ stations in animated excitement over their munching, while various parents guard their excitable children. Two men stand too near my vehicle, and through the open window I hear their unselfconscious vulgarities over the many fish they've caught, both fanciful and real, both metaphoric and actual. Such are the days of our lives; we grow from overly guarded children into constrained adults to become contained old agers, and then we seem to drift off and away. And it all might be good, if only we'd see it as such. But our world has much pathos and greed and hurt in it, and many succumb. They succumb to a dreariness and to an ennui, and succumb to depression and victimization, and to sadness as a consistency, or to a compromise of personality, and their character may get maligned, confused, abused, and calumniated. Yet not you! And not me! We survive! In a measure, we even thrive. And we accrete as surely as does this burgeoning reservoir, or do we?

It is apt, this typing of a letter in front of a reservoir. Reservoirs collect and contain and keep safe the very lifeblood of cities and towns. We depend on their waters. Like depending on memory. To be in poor Amnesia's state of mismanaged memory must be like being bereft of a lifetime's riches, reduced back to the child without more than the immediate, and worse, without much of a future either. One gathers so much stock from memory. And not to recognize the photos or the real faces; and not to recall the real places; and not to know if you love someone (or if you even like them); and worse, perhaps even to fear the apparent stranger before you, is such an awful drain on the richness of the reservoir in one's own mind; memories we each expect as our privilege. We gather things and memories like sentiments and scars, like treasures and troves, or we imbed ourselves with memories such that they affect our character, distill throughout our personality.

One thinks back and feel this intense sense of the years and months and weeks and a day that have gone into the making of any 'today.' I am grateful that circumstances allowed for me to be here at the lip of this reservoir again. But I confess I am largely unaware of the constant stream of consciousness that is filtrating into my reservoir of a sense of life and my love for being; it is a containment of the very things along life's pathways that have given me a collective sense of the journey's value along the way. How rich anyone of us is for knowing each other, for caring so, and for being able so to share too. And how hurt we can be by the moments of disassociation.

"Give me your wallet," a teenage girl demanded of her father, "I want to buy ice-cream." Not too reluctantly he fished it out. She took it without thanks or comment and walking away shouted at her baseball friends playing catch, "Anyone want ice-cream?" I watched the father pause and hold his breath. I watched her waddle off. I watched other youngsters come join her for the free offerings, and even as I type, I now watch her coming back, with some dozen or more ice-creams, and not one person thanking the dad. But my watching may be askew. And in some other season of this young lady's life she may rescue someone bereft, or succour someone hurt, or provide ice-cream to the poor. It is for the father to make his stand, yet in that too is a matter of imposed values. We each have stuff that comes into our reservoir, and we each have drains upon it too. And the cauterization of that which is depleting, or the siphoning off of that which is fulfilling, or the necessary filtration of that which seeps into our systems is not all just entirely up to ourselves.

Or is it?