Elemental Enlightenment

My house is filled with light. You can see every dust speck. From early morning light, especially on sunny days, the light streams across the dark wooden floors, glistens off the countertops, and pierces into the crevasses. It all shows the detritus of human living; strands of hair; bits of lint; fingerprints; footprints; and every tiny crumb. Good thing I have no wall to wall carpet; the cleaning would never be as frequent! A good thing my home does not face in the opposite direction, for with the sun at my back I should be living in my own shadows most of the time, where the dirt easily lurks. But no, with so much light in my face, and beaming down upon and into my domicile, I am impelled almost constantly to be cleaning. Or should I just relax?

Our houses are actually a frequent mess. Disenfranchised bits lurk everywhere. We fragment at the seams. We drop and discard and disuse. We purchase anew and abuse. We take things for granted. We waste. We store and stack and supplant. And we arrange our knick-knacks in a sensibility of placement and preference unique to ourselves. And yet we all are much the same. We all have a-this and a-that. Even in our histories. (At least, the most generally privileged among us do: Our richness of materialism can hardly be compared to the disenfranchised, can hardly be compared to the critical mass of those without means, without substance, without the necessary articulation in one's own language, or similarity of skin tones sufficient for our own comparative compassion.) Huh?

Black lives matter. Blue lives matter. Gay lives matter. All lives matter! Yet we are hardly hurt when the wave hits "over there," when it is not our own daughter, son, relative or Race made a victim of circumstance. If I tell you a friend died, or my parent, or my colleague or my dog died, you yourself may sympathize with me, because you know me. If you know the person who died you would empathize even more. And what if the person was someone on your side of the family? What if it was your pet? What matters most is that with which we, "I", most identify.

Dirt and mess and spots are the fertilizer of our pasts. We have learned from our mistakes. And we cannot but help continue to make a mess, to produce dirt, and to create spots. Our inner and outer houses are more than the individual domicile of our spirits; they are the vehicles of our corporeal and collective passage. The deepest of the divisions occurs in the collective; we cluster in racial and religious and cultural and political communes, and we point out and discuss the dirt in each other's houses with an egregious contempt. Dirt's in the idiosyncratic idiolect of the idolatrous and iconoclastic. It's in our intensity of interpretation, indirect in its very directness; it is in the living paradox of presumptions and preference built into walls around us that become the places we live in. Our physical face and our habitual muscles and our interior plumbing and our emotional attachments and our mind-bending concepts and our spiritual-spirals take on not only our persona, but become our character. And in our houses (especially since the more carefully we look, the more the light reveals,) we become more and more aware of the ongoing amount of cleaning up we can do, we have yet to do, and will be doing tomorrow too.

"A life unexamined is hardly worth living," Socrates purports. Elemental enlightenment would reveal the unclear, the turgid, the scabs and scars and bad spots. Enlightenment going beyond the elementary begs yet more anxiety. The more light, the more we see yet to do. Yet there also is, with the unrelenting clarity of day by day, a growing consciousness that one can clean, but not be attached to cleaning. That's elemental. One can love without being needy. That's elemental. One can care without wanting reward. One can give without the recipient knowing. One can clear away the detritus and the debris without anyone noticing. All that is elemental too. (It is in our allowing for a consistent flow of "letting go" that living is not quite so elementary.) Yet in the light of our day, as well as in the dark of our sleep, we can continue to scrub away at our past, individually and even more significantly, collectively, now, and in all our tomorrows to do. So... Now to relax, yet still to do!

Personal Powers

I can walk again. Babies do not struggle; walking evolves naturally. The infirm, the crippled, the diseased, the handicapped, we know differently. To overcome the inherent problems of inability, disability, and chronic pain is actually insurmountable sometimes, despite all cures proffered, despite the pronouncements of miracles that enliven our way. Yet after 10 plus years of being dependent on a power-chair (since my degenerative spine does not allow for me to self-propel,) I'd had enough. So, like anyone training for a marathon, I added a pace or two more a day, and eventually my three paces reached ten, and twenty, and I could make the elevator from my apartment door, and then I could walk from the car to the home, and then I walked with my cane perhaps 50 feet, and now I can do 20 minutes or even more, unsupported. Yes, carefully, but I can walk again!

Yes, there's a price to pay. Yet no matter who we are or what we do, we pay in some way or other for our achievements. We watch our diets. We are abstemious. We practice. We practice yet more. We budget time. We self-discipline. We read and learn and get 'personal trainers' and buy better instruments and get new shoes and expensive equipment and we do things to get more-better in a kazillion ways. And barring injury, we get fitter and fitter and keep healthy, despite our aging (quite naturally). Despite our slowing down, quite naturally. Despite the inability quite often of oneself (or of others) to keep up with a natural pace. Yes, most things are natural, until we are unusually taxed. We walk, we talk, we play. And then comes the Marathon, the Big Event speech, the Tournament, and we needs get fitter and healthy for it. Yes, there's a price to pay. Most of that price is very personal, quite different for each of us. There is little equity in life. We each pay our own price.

Ten years in a power chair takes its toll. It stops the lungs from exercising fully. Stops the muscles from working well. Stops the inner organs from functioning well. Stops the brain from being fed by exercise. Add to that the necessary blood thinners and the heart regulators and the pain tablets and one is a recipe for disaster. Like the event, just over a year and half ago, when my wife and I spent the night in the Emergency where I was diagnosed with multiple embolisms. It became a fulcrum for me. I decided that 'movement', despite pain, was worth more than the stasis by which I was protecting myself. Yes, someone shaking my hand as opposed to giving it a gentle squeeze hurts, to this day, but my vertebrae just had to absorb some of the impact of walking or I was beyond a recipe for disaster; I was an empty platter ready for the dishwasher!

So I began with steps. And three led to four. And four to ten. Last January I weaned myself off of the pain drugs, from three per meal to two, to one per meal, to just one a day now (to help me sleep.) Then too, I've some thirty or so books on neuro-plasticity and brain power and will power and self-power and the power of prayer and the power of friends and family and support and self-care and good nutrition and prayer by itself (see below). All culminate with the single directive: Up to You! One more step! One more crunch, one more curl, one more mile. Decide! Will power is commitment. Do it! Will power, within reason, is mind-over-matter! Yes? Yes!

We each have our own marathons. Some are emotional. Some are psychological. Some are physical. All are demanding. We sweat and groan and ache and feel as though we will break. We can cry with the unfairness of it all. Others actually say it’s our karma! Some have little clue of the endurance it takes to be in the race, this human race. They walk or even run, most fortunately. But most of us are dragging behind us or carrying our very own ball and chain; we bring along our history, our genetic makeup, our family constellations, and beyond all things else, ourselves. Individually! Yes, that I can walk a bit is one thing, my thing. It is not yours.

You too have your own journey, difficult as it is. This essay serves as encouragement; period.

On my bookshelves: 

Burning Betrayals

Betrayals burn. Those betrayed get hurt, yes, but those who do the betraying possibly sustain
 more. An essence of one's integrity gets lost. It's as though the inability to keep a secret, or to hold 'the other' in sufficient value enough to protect private information they shared with you has worked its way through the core of you, renders you rotten. At least, that's how I feel. And I have betrayed in my time. I've let slip the secrets of yore. After all, the passage of time gives one a sense of ‘it’, the secret, surely 'no longer' mattering. For instance, especially if it happened many years ago, surely it’s alright now to reveal the misdemeanour; yet we can be surprised when there's adversity to long-buried news. Why is it that we instinctually know that some things of our past are best left hidden in their closets? Yet which of us has no closet whatever to be found in the long-ago recesses of our psyche? Which of us has never (ever) told anyone else the secret that someone else shared with us? Especially when that secret has no real relevance or chance of being found out; across time zones; across continents; across cities; across social circles? Yet, we do! We tell, we expose, and we are left littler for it! If you're like me, you burn for it. Your integrity over 'that' matter, like your virginity, can never (ever) be retrieved.

Some betrayals are innocent enough. My most recent one was promising my renters over a pre Christmas drink that I'd not break their verbal contract with me until end of lease, end of September, 2016. Well, by mid January I'd not only forgotten that promise, I'd let them know they needed to vacate by the end of May! When called on it, I was truly astounded! I truly actually-factually had (conveniently?) forgotten, overlooked, neglected, and not checked in with my ‘self’ to see if I'd made a prior commitment. And today, nearly six months later, I still burn, hurt, feel upset, and deeply regret my selfish shallowness of process. Yes, I did need to sell that particular property! Still, was it just symptomatic of the long-line of betrayals that suited me, that rode with me as I wound my way through a past, en route to here? My making amends, offering alternatives, extending apologies all helps ameliorate my short-fallings, yes, but still...

Integrity is not a product; it is a journey. We make hundreds of promises throughout our lives, and some we keep, and some we break. We are fallible. We serve others, or we serve ourselves, and oft times the discernment at which is the better action (to keep things a secret, to uphold a promise, to prolong the entrustment, or not) dogs us. Not all secrets are good. Not all protection of another does oneself good. Ask anyone who suffers child-abuse. Uncles and parents and siblings and family members may be served some protection at the expense of oneself, but should especially not be served at the expense of continuing freedom to perpetrate their awful influence on others! And so, promises and secrets are not always to be honoured. Little in life is truly black or white. Ask any lawyer. Life is full of circumstantial there-unto's.

Thereunto allow me to advance my apology to whomever is reading this, feeling that I've in my turn betrayed something they've held dear. I think of students who clung tenaciously to a separate Faith, (yet I did not belie them). I think of friends who expected more of me. I think of colleagues who wanted more from me in terms of my supporting the status quo. I think of spiritual warriors who may expect a purity of complete and utterly ‘correct’ actions. Yet we all are on a journey. To exist otherwise is to be in stasis. And I personally have “miles to go afore I sleep, and promises yet to keep, though venturing some woods can be lovely, dark and deep".*

Betrayal burns in me. I shall choose yet more carefully my words, my promises, my actions; amend my course of thinking, feeling, and being. But, my friend, Batman, now that you told me who you 'really' are, I promise: I shall not in turn let your true identity slip. In doing so, I know by past experience just how much it can hurt others. (Yet still, history may castigate me for keeping your secret.) Sorry to know. Sorry to say. Sorry to feel. Betrayal burns, indeed.

*the poet: Robert Burns

Suspended Disbelief

Why do we feel for what otherwise is foolish? Men and women in costumes, wearing makeup, and singing their songs in heightened states of fancifulness reach into us from across the stage, or the screen, and pluck at our hearts. We need reality to breathe; we need fantasy to create. And in both we evolve. Or do all our instincts arise out of a need for survival? Suspended disbelief has us glued to the TV, to the stage performance, to the musical we've heard before, and we will talk about made-up lines and fabricated lives as though they were real. Very real. Like the shadows in Plato's cave that we watch dance against the wall; we give credence and veracity and vitality to their existence, and are tugged by our identifying. How else to look for Nimo? What else but throw a Hogwarts party? Why else attend South Pacific and feel it resonate? Make-believe! Yet I cried at Mike Johnson's raw soul-filled pain in South Pacific, on Saturday night (even though I too played that same part of Emile de Becque, twelve years ago.)

To construe, to imagine, to lie through the teeth, to create; these are the verbs by which we move mankind. Nouns by themselves have no life. They need a soul; they need a verb to live! Like formal sentences. A formal sentence can only be attended by a subject and its predicate. Boring! (Ah, but don't adjectives and adverbs really enliven life?) Yet it is not the nuts and bolts that really gets us, here; it is the feeling we feel when we give attention to that which, when made by man, is really not real. Images, artifices, icons, verisimilitudes, and bric-à-brac; it all can attract us, can elicit emotion, can start a collector on a pathway of addiction. (Which of us easily could miss an episode of, say, Down-town Abbey?) Identification is all! And what if you've never seen or heard of South Pacific? A young female in our animatedly acculturated company, in her 20s, had never heard the song, "Some Enchanted Evening," let alone been given the gift of Cable's profound reasoning: "You've got to be taught to hate the people your relatives hate!"

Or am I being too pedantic?

Yes, creativity is about fun and catharsis; a measure of pleasure to detract from reality. Does it have to be didactic? Does Creativity have to have a lesson, a meaning, a purpose other than to entertain, to make money, to provide surcease from the steady strife of reality? Yes, ‘a steady strife’ it is, this learning of formalities and correctness of behaviour and thought and expectation and rule and custom. How else did we arrive at the tragic shooting of the 49, earlier this month? How else did we sustain the Holocaust, the Crimean war, the War of The Roses? All of history is too full of reality butting up against reality for us easily to live without strife. We must needs populate history with the re-telling, such that we put words into the mouth of Anne o'Cleaves, or think we know what Beowulf himself felt, and then take someone else's' imaginings for reality!

How easily to distinguish between truth and fiction? How easily to allow oneself transportations of emotion during a musical about the five daughters of Tevye, or the seven Grooms for seven Women? How to disbelieve those who tell you 40 virgins await? How to unlearn the pain-body of history that says my Afrikaans fore-bearers were fed ground-glass in their porridge in British prisons, and that's why my mother's family hated my oh-so English father! How to let go being a

Jew or an Arab or a Black or even a man or woman and just be a Person? How else but...

"You've got to be taught to fear or hate, you've got to be carefully taught!"

Reality, creativity, thinking, and feeling; it all is one. "Nothing is good or bad but thinking (or feeling) makes it so," the poet admonished. Yes, creativity needs not be didactic. But at the very least it is best deployed to create a sense of universal compassion and care and responsibility, advancing our very evolution; or do we merely stay fools, lighting our way to dusty deaths?

Acceptance is All

Things die. Ideas, hopes, dreams, aspirations, animals, people. Sad, yes. Also, natural. What is there that has outlasted its immaculate self, its best self, its prime self? Yes, there's restoration and preservation. Yes, there are monumental embodiments of mans' deference to existing. But eventually? Look on my works, time, and see the dusts of disrepair. We all die. Everything, eventually, is replaced. It’s there, or it isn’t.

Like the Canada Goose I saw stumble, and fall. Had it not been in the road, in front of a bus, other accidents might not have happened. But the unforeseen obstacle, right where a busy intersection had customary traffic plying away at the hustle of needing to be somewhere else, created a consternation of calamitous proportions. Tires screeched. Brakes squealed. Did fenders bend? And the goose, unable to move, seemed shocked into non-reaction, resigned to accepting its fate. But since my vehicle was not in its lane, I steered cautiously past, and was soon away (again).

We are affected by all that goes on. And we affect so much more than we normally might imagine. Our actions have an impact that creates the chaos of fragmentation, disintegration, and the redirection of an otherwise usual flow of things. But not all is negative. We may well fly like butterflies and sting like bees, but we might in our wake engender a great deal of positive energy; create a climate of loving actions. Because one brakes for the deer that unexpectedly crosses the road, might one also not be at that crossroad when the goose falls? Perhaps not be at that coincidental spot on the road when from between parked cars the five year old girl runs out to retrieve her errant ball!

Thing is, there is a difference in responsibility once one knows the possible consequences of one's actions. Whether an individual, a group, a populace, a city, a nation, or even a species, we humans know better! Yet we persist in overpopulating. We persist in plunder and pillage and even raping our natural resources. We persist in divisive and hateful polemics. We persist in war and terrorism and avenging the past. We persist in greed. We continue to use and abuse and want more and more. I do. Do you? It is deep in our nature not to be able to stay small and self contained and satisfied with seeking, beyond sustenance, inner peace. The answer appears always to lie out there, somewhere, away from where we are. So we venture out and change our geographical locations, our familial ties, our familiar ways, and we challenge (or build) walls, and cross borders, and assume a new citizenship (at least, I did), and generate with our being a whole host of consequences that affects the traffic and the flow and the lives of all those who each must make some slight recalibration in their very existence to accommodate the fact that you too are on the road. It's natural. But does it have to be a Carson-ian 'Silent Spring'?*Thing is, once you know that you affect others, you become yet more responsible for your actions!

Drunk drivers are an example. They show us how seriously maligned our sense of responsibility can be. So too for petty thieves. So too for each act that breaks ethical sensibilities. So too for the malcontent that no longer gives a damn about the noise he or she makes, or the bumping and bruising created by barging through another's psyche. We go quiet in the presence of hummingbirds. We teach children not to shriek with excitement in the presence of nature. We teach respect, accord, deference, gentleness, compassion, and love. Why is it that, generally, there are so very-very many who do not get that lesson? What happens to make people shoot and kill and harm and vilify and denounce and segregate and go to war? Is that what Lieutenant Cable cries when he sings "teach your children"?** Just where does history end but in the death of everything that exists, and the giving over to something else that in turn, too must die. Such is history. It alone, 'lives'. Acceptance is all, indeed, but in the meantime....  Take care!

* Carson, Rachel (1907-1964): Silent Spring.

** Rodgers and Hammerstein: South Pacific (the musical).

Simple Sighman and The Pieman

Simple thing, this living. You take nothing personally, you choose words impeccably, you assume nothing about everything, and you do your best with what you have and where you're at. That's it. No muss, no fuss. No controlling of others. No ulterior motives. No in-authenticity. No complications. Simple!

And then there's living. We want things. We need things. We desire. We dislike, despise, and denounce. We have passion, certain insight, experience, and un-deniable facts. We cannot let someone take our identity away. We each are unique. And yet...

Yet we apportion ourselves (and others) into neat striations of pie-charts and colo(u)r bands and 

Hierarchical-Templates. We adhere to Astrology. (Cosmology, naturally, appears too complex). We give ourselves birth signs and labels. We perpetuate the fragmentation of an ‘I’ versus ‘You’, and an ‘US’ versus ‘Them’. Each of us is an individual! Yet we at the same time look for bands and congregations and collaborations of people to whom we can give our accord. Birds of a feather flock together¹. "A fish and a bird may marry, but how will they live together."² And we participate in pogroms, in divisiveness, and party memberships. How else to be a Donkey or an Elephant? How else to be a Bear or a Dragon? How does one be a Beaver or a Loon? What country shall I say I originate from? Just who am I?

There are sufficient questionnaires developed to derive an answer. Who are you? Vocational counselors will give you advice. So will your parents, your family, or your church. Psychologists will have you check-in your Family Constellations. Psychiatrists will assess your very chemistry. And your culture will give you an accent, a set of conditioned expectations, and even a birth-right. Your identification papers, your numbers (especially your SIN number) will give you a social insurance against being ‘a-nobody’. (Imagine being a refugee, sans papers, sans proof, sans money, sans ability fluently to speak a new language?) What if you were sans technology let alone manual-skills-sophistication? Imagine taking a Kalahari Bushman and dropping him in New York?

And yet some charts will have you left without hope in their strange delineations of identity. Like looking at a map of the world and realizing you've only ever lived in one city. Perhaps you've been lucky enough to travel a bit; seen some of the world. But at the end of the day, you and I both resort to the life we know, the life in our immediate surrounds. Naturally. And so it is with Intelligences, we presume, especially as delineated in Howard Gardiner's heuristics. We resort to using one of them, predominantly. At issue is, depending on our way of viewing things, is there a chance we might not develop, exercise, or strain our other faculties? Do we have to get our 'knickers in a knot'? Must we be anxious when the occasion does not suit us? Must we give up when stretched beyond apparent capacity? Where's our entelechy, our inner drive?3 And worse, must we adjudge others when we see them not able to do what we (so readily) can do?

Thing is, at any time we forget we are a “whole human being”4, or worse, that so is another, we create for ourselves a microcosm of myopia, malcontent, and miscegenation. We are a murder of crows, a gaggle of geese, a babble of sheep. We cease to think truly independently. We cease to realize we are multiplicitous, multifarious, and universal. As such we easily become less global, less provincial, and even less countrified. We descend into the relative obscurity of a citizen of the city, un-noticing and unnoticed as we get counted among the moving masses; a bland face without being recognized as "petals on a wet black bough."5

You see, life ain't so simple after all. After all, which part of Everything is not? (Sigh?)

1. Holland's Theory

2. Tevye (Fiddler on The Roof)

3. Morrie (Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom

4. Essential Entelechy (http://mrpswords.blogspot.ca/2016/05/essential-entelechy.html)

5. Ezra Pound

Essential Entelechy

"How do you make six halves out of one whole? Well?" And so, similar questions plague us.

Entelechy* keeps us at thinking about it. (Yes, it's a Greek complexity.) According to some, the degree of entelechy (an innate drive) determines a person's potential, or not. We are of a mind not to yield, not to give up, always to progress, or not. (And no, perseverance here is not 'obsessive-compulsiveness'; it is more about determination and endurance.) Most of us, it is deemed, simply accept the acculturation and habits of our forefathers (or mothers). We are not innately driven toward more insight. Rather, we give more energy to acquisition. Awards, trophies, products, and even Enlightenment is seen as an attainment. More is better! And the more readily we give our energy toward any given product the more readily we may be seen as one who 'makes the most' of himself. (Herself too). Thing is, entelechy has more to it than that. It is an integrative-force. (Some have called it a soul-force.) And controversial as it is, it enlivens our life, all our lives, known or not.

Metaphorically, we may be adjudged to be a Volkswagen, Porsche, Chevy, or perhaps a Pontiac. (Rolls Royces, we learn, may not be all they're cut up to be). Thing is, some say one can only hope to be the very best vehicle within which the stuff of ourselves is made. (And here the analogy falters, seriously: A real Volkswagen cannot wish itself into being a Jaguar.) Then too, vehicles eventually die. They go to scrap heaps and mayhap get amalgamated, refined, and may even reappear on the roads in altogether a different form. Some older vehicles are nourished and protected and safe-guarded and valued. But most have a predictable life-span. Yet most, even as old rust-heaps, remain recognizable. Humans too can alter shape, change engines, disregard traffic regulations, and are not confined to being one brand over the course of their lifetime. At least, certainly not all humans.

Outliers are defined as those who noticeably differ from the norm. Take Paul McCartney. At 73 he gave a concert that went seamlessly for over two and a half hours last night [April 19th]. The Vancouver Rogers Arena crowd of a staggering 16,000 people was thrilled. Tonight he does the same. He has what the New Yorker calls, 'resilience'. ** It is that quality that allows some individuals more easily to surmount their difficulties. And they do these things not so much with the help from friends and family, and even others, but with the inner fortitude of survival stamped so deeply within that it is as though they retain all the competitiveness of the atavistic sperm of their origins; they will make it! The best they can be! (**A link to the 'resilience' article is below.)

But here's where the 'kind of car we are' analogy really breaks down. It's not just survival, but familial bonding, egocentricity, socialisms, ambitions, and globalism that drives some of us toward higher and higher predominant proclivities. In other words, we tend toward operating generally from one of those hierarchical paradigms (let alone predominantly acting from a paradigm of Integrative Enlightenment). And so, if we keep with the concept that we're bicycles or scooters or motorbikes, let alone lorries, or taxis, or buses, we can easily be dismissive at seeing another in what we see as their 'active construct'. We may assert inherent limitations on their innate potential. Sadly, so may we also limit ourselves! We give up on our interests, waste our passions, or distract ourselves with the side-streets and window-shoppings of life. How to go from being "just a Mini" to becoming a Maserati? ("And why bother?" the bell-curve begs.)

We are divisible, top from bottom, left from right, front from back; that's six halves of one whole. (And so on.) But there's more. We're so multi-faceted as to be an amalgamation of very many experiences and insights and potentialities. Our inner resilience, our determination to do for ourselves yet more than that which has been done unto us, or for us, is the very stuff of a limitless entelechy.  It is the inner stuff that invigorates us when we're tested, rather than it enervating our sense of individuality; that's entelechy. (And if you've read this far, you're more than half interested! Ha!)

* Entelechy: Linda Silverman's Counseling The Gifted & Talented, pp. 44-46

** Resilience: http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-secret-formula-for-resilience