Kohlberg's Coals

What fire imbues each of us? Why is it that in moments we are so mediocre, so average, so complacent? What is it that makes us glow, makes us impassioned, makes us reach for a Heaven even though it be beyond our grasp? How do we accept the intensity in others and yet be satisfied with its relative lack in ourselves? When do we make that essential shift that allows for what once was now to become yet something more? Wherein lies the furnace, the light, the ember that invigorates growth, potential, paradigm shifts, and the attempts at perpetuity itself? Rage, the poet says. Rage against the dying of the light.

Perpetuity. Incoherent as is the concept, it is not the stuff of stasis. For an organism to stay alive it must move, indubitably,though indistinctly, and some things even indefinitely. It is the definite end that defines life. To be alive a thing, a being, any one of us must resonate in response to the very atoms around us, or desiccate, dissolve, immolate, and die. Yet denser things do live longer, paradoxically; the fragile and specialized die from non-adaptability. The average persists longer than the rarefied. Is that why we more readily take on the relief of not having to think about our thinking, of not having to question our right to be?

Kohlberg (1927-1987) held that we are fundamentally imbued by one of eight moral precepts. Such alternate stages of thinking may well invigorate us in a given moment, but we tend predominantly to confine, define, habituate, and template ourselves in only one of the eight stages as a general continuum. As such, given Kohlberg’s levels (and par-phrasing liberally) we tend chiefly to be self-centric, ego-centric, family-group centric, socio-centric, city-centric, nation-centric, globe-centric, and universal. After all, said another 1950’s poet, weep not for whom the bells tolls, it tolls for…

And being at large in Stage Two thinking for the vast majority of us (according to Kohlberg) is where we predominantly are at. We do or do not do according to our ego-ic need of others to affirm our behaviour, existence, feelings, thoughts, intentions, habits, perceptions of life itself. So yes, I am concerned that you’ll think badly of me for forgetting your birthday. So yes, I am hoping that you’ll like me for sending you a get well card. And yes, I do drive in fear of the police.

But of the internal fire that provokes me or you to want to be yet more ~ how do I get past the need for your approbation, your approval, affirmation or commendation? How do I just do what I do because that which I do is done out of a sense of becoming a tree and not staying an acorn, being a butterfly in the making, a tadpole, a frog, a prince? And yet even more significantly, whether a lion or a lamb, how does the one allow the other just to be?

Not all of us like invigorated embers, like metamorphosis, like growth. So let us just be. Not all of us want to be different individuals. We’re individual enough. And not all of us wish to be other than we are. After all, as the good book says: Go to the ant thou sluggard, consider her ways and be… well, yes, elephant or mouse, we each have our place.

Still, how then do I improve my thinking in this essay? What fire drives me to be yet more? To be, or…

Positive Disintegration

Positive Disintegration

by Richard Michelle-Pentelbury on Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 7:41pm

 We all disintegrate. And we rise again. We leave one birth-year for another. We leave one grade for another. We move from one place to another. And for the most part we’re lucky if we see these shifts in place, time, and experience as positive. We grow. But we also experience the loss of a pet, the sudden accident, the brutal betrayal, the death of what was in exchange for what is now. And we disintegrate. How to make the experience, whatever experience, positive?

Shipwrecked, we examine and unpack the flotsam around us. Awash with memories, we may feel the fragmentation of the present but as an unwanted gift. The relative stasis of what was had a comfort, a familiarity, an expected quality that allowed our habits more readily to adjust to the slight rhythms of the seasons, of daylight-savings time, of stopping at alternate times at the usual garage for gas, or the usual store for groceries. But when that rhythm is really distressed, broken, disengaged, and afloat around us, we have little but the inner resources of experience and trust and hope that this too shall pass. And then? We arrange our new life, assume a new route, visit different stores, keep different hours, make different friends, and we grow in more knowledge, grow in having yet more, grow in exploring some other area, enter numbers into some larger phone-book, make an advantage of having once been so dislocated, or sadly acknowledge the disadvantage of no longer having that which made us once before more at ease. But do we really grow?

Our primary habituation is with ourselves. What if it is our predominant habituation? We do need the factor of ‘the self’ met, our want for sustenance and the immediate and our need for self-gratification. At its most elementary level of operations our jails are full of such persons. Next comes the factoring in of our need to satisfy the ego, best satisfied in the eyes of others, so we make left-right choices ad infinitum, perpetually choosing one thing over another in order not only to satisfy the self, but to be accountable to our continuing perception of some other’s approval. And then, now only at a Secondary Level of Positive Disintegration, if we’re brave enough predominantly to take on the vicissitudes and verisimilitudes of a vociferous populace, we vacillate vicariously between the exigencies of being our own person and wondering whether everyone else, or at least someone else, if not a group, club, clan, or ideology is actually perhaps not ‘more right’ than we ourselves dare to be.

To be or not be? That is the third level of Positive Disintegration. The theory, posited by Kazimir Dabrowski (1905-1981), holds that in the Third Level one is predominantly conscious of holding onto one’s very own paradigm, yet still is integrative of others, being not distressed by the disavowal and disassociation and fragmentation and divisiveness of the ‘vox populi’. To be or not to be? And in ‘The Fourth’ level? There one serves entirely the needs of others, has sublimated the self to an extent that the ego needs no gratification, to the extent that the self has no desires, to the extent that the flotsam and jetsam of life has become but the boxes of mankind afloat in a universe of mankind’s own making.

And me? And you? As I look at the stuff that surrounds me, and at my attachment to it, I realize how very far I am from letting go of the things that still define me, the photos, the books, the music, the paintings, and the curriculum-vitae of a lifetime. And as I unpack yet another box, I wonder: at which point, beyond it all being consumed by some accidental fire, can I truly just… let go? To do, or not to do? The art, in either case is… letting go.

Message in a Bottle

Message in a Bottle

by Richard Michelle-Pentelbury on Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 10:54am

This will be my last missive from this address. I write as though having at last found a scrap piece of paper and a bit of charcoal. Around me is the detritus of my last life, the garbage bags, the devilish dust, the odd bits of flotsam from the surging seas of activity that has, wave after wave, altered the shore-line of my existence, rendered asunder my ship of state, and tossed me into a fragmented and dislocated existence wherein mere snapshots of free time allow for the looking up and grasping onto any memory other than the immediate. Moving houses will do that to you.
Some error in timing was made. We transitioned from the one shore to the other over a week, but the new refuge does not yet have telephone or internet connection, and since i have no cell-phone, no satellite connected palm-pilot, no ready address book, there was this distinct sense of being cut off from the past, from friends, from YOU, from life as I’d known it. And now  I write only because around me the sounds of the cleaning and dusting and last-minute packing done by the hired service is being done, affording me a moment in which to gather these thoughts in an effort to send them out to you. Soon this connection will be cut off too. Shall I post this in a bottle, this last message of mine from this last time in this old place?
While I was at work at Centennial the demands of picking up the pieces after my so very recent sojourn to Africa held me so captive that only the immediate was given focus. And given that one drives to work in the dark, and comes home in the dark, and is in a building of artificial light all day, it scarce seemed real that once, just a week and a half ago, I was under the African sun and skies, whilst now, here, I am as in Plato’s cave, the shadows on the wall dancing before me as if to make life real again. And that week and a half has been so filled with the students, the classes, the demands of mounting what is to be my last show, Pride and Prejudice, and then leaving in the dark to come here to this old house and to pack and take car-load after car-load to be emptied at the other house. Then too, there was the address to 2,000 persons to deliver at the Remembrance Day service.  Pride? Prejudice? Eschew the thought!
Boxes are so impersonal. They bear names like Kitchen, Basement, Bedroom, or R’s Stuff. And one carries each as though some sacred ashes are being transported; the condensed remains of what once was. Are our friends like that too? Are the names of Ian and Justin and Gus and Brian and Mike and Rob and Simon and Tony and Bert and Johan... well, are these persons and you too also to be but boxes in the jumble of memory for which I search as I scrabble yet once more for familiarity with things on some strange new shore?  The new tends to do that, for me. The new takes on an immediacy that packs up and condenses the past into entities given labels, at best. The new is examined and organized and mapped and referenced and made much of as one adjusts to the domestication of acclimatization. It’s much like the pot-plants that will need the new days and night times to adjust to their own new frames of new enlightenment. And the old memory remains packed up, or at best get searched for and then unpacked in terms of an immediate need. (Now then, just where did I put my precious marmalade?)
But of messages in a bottle, hoping that they’ll perhaps reach you, well.... here this one at last goes!
Now, do you receive me?  And if so, I really look forward to your response!

Choices!

Bigger than the Moment (The Remembrance Day Address to Centennial, Nov 10, 2010)

by Richard Michelle-Pentelbury on Tuesday, November 16, 2010 at 12:55pm

 Collateral damage. Innocent bystanders.  It is the stuff of war. It is the stuff of enmity. And it is those who come after us, who are closest to us, that suffer. You and I do things that are horribly human in the moment. We can get ugly. We can lie, cheat, steal. We can feel outraged and angered and brutal. And we each can pick up a gun and defend ourselves. We do not necessarily have to be conscripted into an army before we realize that we too can kill. I happen to know that much. As a young man I was forced into the South African army, 1971 to 1975. That’s what conscription does; it forces you into a certain way of thinking, sends you up the border, into the war, and demands of you that you defend your country. Go fight for your country. Fight for us! Fight for your place. Fight for your name. Fight for your sense of you. And should others be damaged, should the innocent bystanders of war be damaged, should the people, the populace, the children be damaged, well… that’s the collateral damage of war.
Here’s a little demonstration. Hold your hands out to the person to either side of you, like this, palms up and outwards. Connect, and one of you give a little push when I say so. Ready? Only one of you pushes. Push! Good? Now, hands down please. Now, who did not push back? Hands up, who did not push back? Great. Great. Well, pushing back, that’s instinctual. That’s how enmity and wars begin. We almost immediately push back. We push back when someone teases us, when someone is cruel, when someone hurts at us. We push back and do not necessarily allow for time and reason and distance and care and compassion to take its place. We choose to push back. And sometimes we have no choice, or so I thought.
Just over a week and a half ago I was in Africa. There I witnessed the ongoing collateral damage of a country still very much in the birth pains of post-war apartheid. The country is in a fearfully besieged mode. Fear rules. Self protection is constant. There are gates and spiked palisades and barbed wire spirals everywhere.  In the giant city of Johannesburg alone, I was told, there are over 20,000 rapes a day. Think of it, 20,000 ugly awful brutalities in a single city a day, to which we add to the whole country the robbery, the abuse, the murder, the molestation, the drug and alcohol vice, and that insidious and then horribly invasive disease, corruption. In fact, as I was driven through the once posh downtown district, now a third world ghetto of tension and strife and survival-ism, my entire being filled with frustration and heartfelt despair at the lot of the innocent children, so victimized by the ravages of the South African Apartheid past. Innocent children. Suffer the children. Collateral damage. Like the children in the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden, like the Slaughterhouse 5 victims of Kurt Vonnegut’s true life novel, the collateral damage to the innocents goes on and on. War after war.
In my Yotes-Time class last Friday I was talking about the early 70’s, when I was conscripted into the South African Army. Conscription. It means I had no choice, especially not if I wanted to honour my Family’s expectations that I defend them. Or what of the boyhood expectations inculcated in me by my old Pretoria Boys’ High School, where our cadet training was with the purpose of defending our country? Or what of my Church’s continuous urging that we defend ourselves against the very devil, communism? Or what of South Africa, my own Country’s belief back then that racism was to be legalized in the name of Apartheid? Ironic Afrikaans word, isn’t it? Apart-hate. A system of legalized racism. It was not abolished until 1994. Back in the 70’s, when I was in the army, the northern borders were to be defended against the warring insurgency of communist-backed rebels wanting to overthrow the white supremacy of our Apartheid Institutions. They wanted to gain control of our Economy. They wanted to reverse the order of more than a century of Colonialism and Nationalism and perpetuated Legalisms of privileges endemic to an all-white society. And the fact that the whites in question were bent on the self-serving ends of extracting from the invaded country its minerals, its ready and cheap labour force, its blood diamonds and gold was seen as a Right, given the history of nearly two hundred years of occupancy.
Sounds a bit like what we’ve done in Canada, eh? Yet here the First Nations people are but a small group.     
In Zambia, central Africa, where I was born and raised, the Bantu of Africa outnumbered us 20 to 1. And so they rose up against our injustices. They went to war against our perpetuation of incursions upon their freedom, our denial of their dignity, our removal of their opportunity, our economic disincentives for them to prosper. And the wars of Apartheid went on and on. All of my boyhood the war was “up at the border,” and I knew with a certain fearfulness that I would get conscripted to it too. Then, in 1964, we were forced to leave Zambia. Pets were shot. Things were burned. I knew then that one day I too would have to pull the trigger.
“Well, did you kill someone?” a student asked me, just a few days ago. I blinked. And in that blink I knew that my doing it was not as important as his being able to do it. The question for each of is: Could you do it too? Well, I’ve lived long enough and seen enough to know that even the meekest of you can be brought to kill another human being, given the right circumstances. After all, if it’s easy to push back, wait until someone is shooting at you. That’s what I want to address here: your part in all of this. Your choices! After all, we think we have choice, and then we fight or we succumb to the events, to the circumstances, to enforcement, expectations, and to the cultural inculcations of others. We find ourselves a weapon. Any weapon. Even a bad word will do. And we decide to use it. And we fire. We fire! We fire with hate, with thoughts of vengeance, with blows of anger, or with the certainty of self-righteousness. We fire with the self that feels defensive of its needs, its wants, its desires, and its dignity. We fire back if the self feels its aspirations threatened, its ego quashed, its resources overwhelmed. And it is in you and in me to do so, for we are all too human. This giving over to anger will happen ~ unless we be inclusive, assimilative, integrative; in fact, unless we become Bigger than the Moment. Let the other push. Give a little, smile, and work with him or her. Do the dance; give respect. Find your commonality. It all is a microcosm of the macrocosm; the smallest of things symbolic of the largest. It all is a spiral of activity advancing our evolution, the choices we make, one by one, each by each. And one minute of awareness makes all the difference, let alone the choices we make, moment by moment.
Just ask George Lawrence Price, if you could. He is said to be the last soldier to be shot in World War One, on this month, November 11th, ninety-two years ago. One minute made all the difference. A Canadian, born in Nova Scotia, conscripted (without choice) to the army while he was living in Saskatchewan, George Price was fatally shot in Belgium at 10.59 a.m., just one huge minute before the armistice. One minute before the cessation of weapon-fire! Had some miracle of modern texting, a cell-phone, twittering, or even an ancient carrier-pigeon delivered the essential message that the war was over... would the other have pulled the trigger? Strange how in one minute “the other” is the enemy, and then in another minute by some stroke of the pen, some order from above, some word from beyond, some inner call to the private conscience.... one can altogether stop from pulling that trigger. One minute more, and George may well have lived beyond his 25 years.
25 years old. That’s what I was when I went AWOL (absent without leave) from the South African Army. After five years of conscriptions, in and out again, I came to my senses. I made my decision. I could no longer defend racism. I would no longer fight. In 1975 I stowed-away aboard the S.A. Oranje, a Union Castle steam-ship bound for England. In my renunciation I became a fugitive, an expatriate. When I reached London I borrowed an old Raleigh bicycle, got a tent, a sleeping bag, a knife and a camp-stove from the Salvation Army store and cycled all the way up Britain. I traded my sketches for food and the right to sleep in a field, and even bartered my sketch for a ferry across the sea from the northern tip of Scotland to the Orkney Islands. And there I met a Canadian who suggested I come to Canada as a political refugee. And so, in 1980, I became a most grateful Canadian citizen. I made my choice! But then again, speaking of collateral damage, I did not see my mother for over 35 years. Dad died before I could see him. And just 6 years ago my two brothers and our sister and I were at last re-united. And then, just this last month of October, only three short weeks ago, I was reunited for the first time in over 45 years with my youngest brother, Johan. Why only now? Well, having gone AWOL in 1975 I was under too much threat of court martial or worse to go back. And now, this year  invited back to Africa to do a series of presentations on guess what?: Interpersonal Dynamics, I was honoured to be sharing a message about being considerate, being compassionate, being integrative, being assimilative, absorptive and responsive, just as I’m doing with you. Responsive. It is not about pushing back!
Choices. You? We all make sets of predominant choices as we move within the elementary needs of the Self; submit to the dictates of the enclosed Family, adhere to belonging to an esoteric Club or to the dictates of a fixated Clan. Our Egoic nature wants to be the best, even if it means hurting others. We may wrestle with our inability to accept another Group due to their politics, their religion, their beliefs. We may need to have others’ admiration, to Control others, to Dominate others. We may desire to have Fairness, and we may feel anger and revenge at injustice. We have all of these warring things spiralling within us. In simplistic terms, it’s a perpetual dichotomy of Fear, or Love. Choices.  Our world is rather a mess because of it. So much around us is fragmentation, divisiveness, and war. Then too, there is heroism, honour, ethics, and love.
Essentially, it comes down to our Choice. And choice, straightforwardly, is about our Evolving, or not, whether conscious of choice, or not. In the act of meta-cognition, in the very practice of thinking about our thinking, we’re able to make decisions before we pull that trigger, before we say that word, throw that punch, or give that attitude. We do have choice! And the death in wars of every person in the long history of hate and enmity toward this very Today is honoured, if we remember: most of us want Peace. As a Goal it began and continued with each of our Fallen. As a Goal it can find its home in you. Peace. It’s about the Choice to be Inclusive, Integrative. In essence, it’s about being Bigger than the moment. Lest we forget.  Peace. And please, make good choices!

Waiting to Be Filled

To sleep or to arise and go now? The reality of early morning alertness percolates in my brain. I am brought awake as if returning from a journey in the foreign land of sleep, and the images clarify as out of the mists of the mind i am become restless by my own comprehension. And then, worst of all, the eyes open. Regularly. And i lie there in the 4.00 a.m. Canadian dark, but begin again to hear the internalized birds of Africa. They start at the first sliver of dawn, soon after four a.m., and the initial tune-up becomes an orchestra by 4.30 a.m., when there is light enough outside to read. In Africa. But here in Canada the dark is a heavy cloak that undisturbed weighs down around the house and presses up against the windows, black and impenetrable. And in its solidness, though i rise regularly to type at this communication and await the exact minute at which i must prepare to get ready for work, i become ensconced by the framework of artificial light that i click on around me, even as i eventually prepare breakfast, and then must inevitably get into my vehicle and head East, along the top of the ridge that leans down into the continuing darkness of the valley; there on the horizon at about 7.53 a.m. to see the first horizontal crack of the dome being lifted from the earth, and light, red and orange and then yellow, begin to pour in.
We make much of different time zones. We make much of the immediacy of our lot. Like the cat that belonged to Schrodinger, we come alive only when we are observed to be observing, for until then are others, are the birds, are the elephants of Africa really not just pop-up phrases closed down under the subconscious lid of our own cognizance? Are we really on a perpetual loop, repeating and repeating and repeating our lives intertwined with other lives so that as we intersect in the multi-dimensionality of our existence we give unto that which we see an accord, a recognition, a value, a substance even, but having passed beyond we make for ourselves only an immediate past, present, and future? Does that elephant still stand in the scant shade of the Mopani tree under the blaze of the Kruger sun? Does he sleep in the dark? Does the Denman Island ferry run? Does the kanoodle-rock of God’s Bay still feel the heat of my bum? Does the life of another bruit and boil and percolate and perpetually produce and also run?
Simplicity is deceptive. It is accomplished at the intersection of a myriad molecules made manifest in a recognizable action. To one that same action is chaos, to another it is sense. And in the mind of the early morning riser, simplicity is in that there is no rest. So we meditate. We breathe deep. We do the alphabet backwards. We regret the lack of sleep. But eventually we get up and try to make the light come to us by virtue of the things we do, and in the turgid toiling of exposition toward some fruitful dénouement, we find time wasted, restructured, reframed, or perhaps made productive.
Retrospect is preferably about meta-cognition. We review the situation. We check into our dreams, our past, our journey, our present, and the now. And in so doing we bring on the light, bit by atomic bit, sliver for molecular sliver. Or does the light then in turn arise to find us, but wee bits of dross and drab, waiting to be filled with its very gold?  

The Gift

13) Listen Here (I don’t like to talk about myself but...)

(A Reunion Retrospective; An Esoteric Evocation). (29^th October: The Last Day in SA!)

It began with Brian and it ended with Brian. He’d organized the Committee. They invited us. We came, we saw, we went. Veni, vidi, vici. Brian met me in Jo’burg airport, came to see me off there too. And he bore gifts all the way. Then I met Quenton, who came to visit my hotel with a gift from Harold Thompson. And that night I met Mike. And Mike brought groceries, the transport, provided the room, and slept on the couch. And then arrived Rob, who surfed into our spirits, gold as the sun. Next came Justin and then Bert, and that was followed by Tony and Simon and Doc and Peter and Don and Ken and Glynn and Gus and Mike-Mc and Gerhardt and Vernon and Cameron and Leonard and… well, you’d know so very many of them if you were there too.

There were teachers of yore, and of now. Keith and Ted (and his Jenny too) and Tony and Digby and Mulvenna and Erasmus, Laredo, and…, well, you’d have had to know them to appreciate the myriad memories each conjured.

And there were the old Pretoria Boys' High School grounds. The speeches. The tea. The Assembly. That song. There was the luncheon. Mike’s Last Supper. There was that water-shed breakfast, followed by sports for some, the Jo’burg drive for Mike and Rob and Justin and me. There was that late dinner and the speeches and the presentations. There was the waking up to know it was the beginning of the end. There was the drive to the airport for Rob, and the going to the BBQ for others. Then there came the parting from Simon and Tony and Tony and Sandy and Justin and the doing of the long drive with Bert and Rita to the dorp-hotel en route to the Kruger. And then there was great Letaba and the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of birds and animals and the ‘grr-rr’ of the road-surface. And that Thursday night there was the return to Pretoria to the posh paid for City Hotel, and dinner with Roy. And Roy’s friend Neil came in the morning to take me to go and do the BDO presentation, where I met Gill, and… but you’d need to have been there. And then came Brian again, and we drove back down to Jo’burg, and then back up to Pretoria’s Blue Crane for lunch, and I presented for the AIDC, where I met Pat and Colli and the Prof and Johan and… but you’d need to have been there too.

Brian, after driving me through my old haunt of Danville, drops me off at my Aunt’s in Valhalla. First meeting since circa 1967. Then there is her husband. Late into the night. One learns yet more to listen into in an African night. Then there was the next early morning drive with my first (time ever met) cousin, Stanley, to the Joburg Civic theatre for my presentation, with the meeting of the incredible Gladys and Andrea and Janet and… but you’d have to have been there too.Vernon Matthysen and Quenten de Kock were! Then it’s back to Pretoria to meet with Bernadine and to have the distinct privilege of being presented to by Stanley, and then to meet Betty and to have yet another African night with Clive where one listens, oh, how one learns yet more better to listen. Then came Stanley again and once more we were off to the airport, where who should be waiting in surprise for me but… Brian! Brian who…

And now, shall I go on? Or has this diary-like entry caused even you to cease to… listen?

The Family of Man (kind)

12) The Family of Man (Friday 29^th October, 2010)

Pleased to meet you!

We have our own comprehension of the re-created past, our own apprehension of the ever-present, and our own projection of the foreseen-future. It lies often in the immediate contact with another individual. This South Africa reunion (October 13 to 29) brought me very many new friends; gave back old friends; and even revealed a brand new family. And while the microcosm is endemic to the macrocosm, there is the relevant reality of the moment by moment integration of new places, new faces, and old memories. I am, in brief, grown altogether more aware of The Family of Man. It arises in that a name no longer is just a name. No wonder the listing of Biblical ‘begats.’ Just names? No, ancient Souls. Names were, are, and will become people. And therewith my long-held walls of indifference and abeyance and judgemental-ism and self-protection and self-interests have all but vanished. Names have faces, and faces become people, people with a name.

I’ve gained a brand new brother, Johan, eleven years younger than me, seen last but for a week or so when he was 16. His wife is Estelle; their son is Scott. There has also evolved a renewed inclusion of my long-lost sister, Carol, seen only three times since I first met her in 2004 for the first time since she was a baby. Her husband is Pierre, and they have Pierre-son, and Jean-Mali, and Ivan, all grown young men with a mission and a spirit and a soul. There too has been a reintegration after 45 years with my aunt, Meisie, only seven years older than me (being my mother’s youngest sister). Her husband is Clive. I got to befriend, respect, admire, and include their 36 year old son, Stanley (with his soon to be bride, Berdine). Then too, there is Stanley’s twin sister, Betty. And what of Betty’s children and husband? Also, what of the call from Dubai of Meisie’s oldest, Engela, and her husband Jerry, and their son…(?) And speaking of Dubai, that’s where my youngest brother Andy and his wife Elsabe are working, and now there’s their grown-up daughter, Tammy! Then too, what of my brilliant middle brother, Peter, and his wife Brenda, and their Xavier, with his Michele and their Talia and Damon? And then there’s their Peter-son and Canadian wife Laura, and their two-year old, Sean. And their brother, Aaron, is teaching in China (where he’s met a Suzie!) And what of the remarkable 25 month year old, Aiden; Zoe and Deon’s child, who are the… well, what a complicated and complex thing is not this extensive Family of Man? So too, back in Calgary, what of my own lovely Linda and her 26 year old son Keith? Yet, how is it, really, that any one of us can really call another ‘mine,’ or ‘theirs’? Which part of it all is not of the Divine? Which part of it all is not The Family of Man? And which one of the names (any name) is not given dimension by an adjective, like talented, tall, accomplished, beautiful, thoughtful, kind, considerate, caring, generous, and smart? After all, each name has validity beyond the obvious. We’ve not yet mentioned Aunt Joan. An individual’s existence is as full of potential and fragmentation and integration and the sense of life longing for itself as is the next, and we discard, demerit, disown, disavow, and disdain one another at the precious price of our very own making.

Come, let us be kind to mankind; let us share the burden. Perhaps that’s why we are called man-kind. Perhaps that’s why we indeed are one big family, the Family of Man.