Calm

Posted: October 29, 2011 in slice
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I like to hang around people in their twenties. They are in college, or in the beginnings of careers, or in love or not, but perhaps they want to be.

I love them. I see myself in them. They are dreaming and hoping for bread.

Yesterday, a large, black crow landed on the street in front of me, square in the middle of an intersection. He carried in his mouth a large, dry piece of bread. He threw it down hard on the pavement; it broke; he started his meal.

The light changed, a line of cars came at him from both sides. He took up the main of his  bread and flew.

We protect, our bread, the large piece of it at least.

When we are young, or old, our dreams of what we might yet get  take up our focus — and while large things intruded such as the rise and fall of the economy —  the flapping and gliding of our career paths, the loft and reach of our personal relationships, the competitive spirits of other people keep us moving, mostly.

A BMW ran fast in front of me last night on a freeway on ramp, cutting the line, forcing me behind its shiny, silver flank.

I have a sense of my right place in the line. I fumed a bit.

Nobody likes cutters. Such things cause fuming. For those who tend to take an  interest in getting bread, and keeping it, and in getting some place, cutters aren’t fun.

I hope for a great hope, for something wonderful, in the future. I hope hard for something full of beauty and refinement for all of the young people I know, and even yet for the surge and flap of my own dreams.

Dreams keep me going. I  hope for so much good for myself and my young friends.  I love dreams of good, of bread, of water, of love, of finding a good place in the line, and of finding out what was meant to be.

But one thing stands out today, and it isn’t that pushing forward, or line cutting or bread protecting.

Often, what is needed, on the way to somewhere else, in the flap and drive and hope of something better, in the middle of ambition is something found in Psalm 131.

1 My heart is not proud, LORD,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
2 But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.

David, perhaps on his way to being a powerful leader and a great success, calmed down his feelings. He settled his own emotions, he leaned into being weaned. In other words, he told himself that he no longer required the comfort he had before, perhaps from the family he came from, and that it was not his business, in the moment, to determine his place in the line forming up outside.

This is the task of the anxious twenty-something, and perhaps for many of the rest of us, to lean into the calm found in the present moment, to take charge of the tendency to be troubled by the not-yet-achieved future, and to choose to be content with the bread God has given us to throw down in our own intersection.

Contentment, self-imposed, on the way to being king, is good!

Wrath, Costco and Fireflies

Posted: October 23, 2011 in spirituality
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When I was eight years old, I kicked a rock down a road in anguish that I was going straight and very fast to hell. I saw myself as a muscle car on a straight road with the gas pedal stomped – tires burning and screaming, hood rising, trunk hunkering down, speedometer needle swinging hard to the right, the road blurring on either side, the focus narrowing down to a small, tiny bit of hard hot asphalt ahead that was going to rip me apart when I flipped at 130 miles per hour.

Someone’s life was going to end in a gruesome crash of punishment because someone was pressing foolishly on an evil gas pedal — me. Anxiety was among my earliest theologically inspired emotions.  When I thought of a force in the world greater than myself, I had a decidedly ancient Greco-Southern-Baptist response. God judged failures; large fire bolts were aimed at me.

It’s odd, my fear of the divine wrath, because in actuality my early life was filed with the small and the safe.  When my brothers and I were little, we liked to play outside at night in the summer in the large field in front of the house. On warm night, in the field, I remember tiny fire flies blinked on and off. Their tiny yellow lights flashed here and there, like Christmas lights moving in the air. In between one soft blink and another there was their flight, but we only saw the pulse and in that was the beauty of the thing. There was something there, alive, magically small, miniature light houses that could fly. It was astonishing to me. This was no thunderbolt; it was safe fire. There were also other things which I remember from the field that were small and fun, and we took charge of some of those.

In the summer the cow were allowed into the field to graze on the grass, and there were  tiny flies that buzzed around the cow paddies. And on their soft, steamy piles, the flies landed, which provided great sport for us. Out we came with our B-B guns, and the fun began. Each shot made a splash and left a gashing crater. If the shiny copper B-B’s were on the mark, then the fly disappeared into the goop, with perhaps a wing left flopping on the surface to signal the kill. “Hit” said the softly waving wing. There was no tragedy in this, only the hunt and the hit and the yell of victory over our small combatants. I remember one fly hit and seemingly sunk in the muck who rose and flew again, and in that moment I celebrated his escape and told his heroic story to my brothers. “He was down, in the B-B tunnel, and he crawled out, and he flew off!” We  loved the bold, triumphal comeback of the other side.

Small boys love to wage war on small things, and live happily in the diminutive world of small victories and small defeats and they do so without fear. Small boys, even ones who fear punishments, take dominion over fields and flies and wild strawberries and such . My brothers and I loved the tiny, wild strawberries as we did the flies and gamed for them too. They hid from us in low leaves and grass, but we found them everywhere.

I still remember the spots where they grew, the field were we played baseball out behind the grade school and the ditch along the highway, right in front of the shop where we painted my first car. They were different than store-bought strawberries in that they were much smaller, about the size of a little finger nail, but they were the same in that they were bright red with little brown seed dots and green leaf hats and tasty. The fun was in the hunt, and in the find, and the reward was immediate because we ate them unwashed, on the spot. The ripe ones were ambrosia, juicy and sweet, the ones with a bit of white or green on them were tart and tangy in the mouth. We learned quickly which to pick and which to not. Sometimes we piled the bright red ones high in discarded tin cans or in paper cups and carried them home with us, an attempt to save the manna for another day. But God wasn’t angry in the ditches; there was always more manna.

And when we went to school, there too, life was experienced small, and safe and approachable. One page in the encyclopedia housed a tree full of birds and another a field full of flowers, and the book told their names. The terrible “Tyrannosaurus” took up only a part of a page and was so small and smooth that I never remember being afraid of his open mouth. The saber toothed tiger with long teeth and sharp claws was glossy and flat. The vast ocean that looked so wet and wild was dry and calm, and the fearsome war heroes and their horrific battles were silent.

School books made life small, fly-like, quiet, safe — one dimensional. Life was presented to us flat, of course, for our safety and for the preservation of our teachers. No physical harm could come to us, even from our powerful teachers, because they were, by law, unarmed. Jonathan Swift pointed out, while on another educational errand, that we were delicious children, and so care had been taken. And we never took field trips to Jurassic Park, but we were taught that the terrible lizards were real, or that they had been somewhere at some time. Just because we only saw them in books, that didn’t make us doubt the fundamentally dangerous reality in any way, but the danger hadn’t come close to us.

In school, the hunt and the find and the shot and the hit were all confined to the quiet of the page and so even international conflicts ended not in blood baths but in tiny back dots at the end of paragraphs. It was there on the page and at the desk and under the press of the pen that the huge and dangerous universals became the small and safe particulars. The small became the safe-large by virtue of repetition and the large became the small again by the example at hand. In short, we discovered the knowledge of the largest things in the knowledge of the smallest things. We found math in two plus two.  We found art in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers.” And we found war in George Washington crossing the Delaware at night. And this was our way of life, as we discovered it, and though such a childhood full of just this kind of page turning  I gradually came to change my metaphysics.

Today, I ate at piece of toast with my strong coffee. I put milk in the coffee to bring it to just the right light brown and smooth flavor that I like. I smeared homemade strawberry jam on my bread, covering my toast, my small field of wheat in bright fruit, my childhood on a plate. The strawberries were tamed a bit by all the added sugar, but they came through for me as they always have. The rosy sweetness kissed the buds on my tongue awake. In just moments, I could feel the sugar and caffeine hit my brain, that familiar ready-for-more, bring-on-whatever-is-next feeling. It is so fine. Small things have such powerful effects, suggesting the larger things of life to us with nod and hint and a semiotic gesture.

The bread of life has so little harm in it. It is eloquent of the love and patience and safety that surrounds me. Every bite is communion, and every day I eat it. My life is bludgeoned with soft bread. I crunched Special K for breakfast today. I had some frosted mini-wheats for a snack. In the evening, I tore small pieces of French bread off a loaf and dipped them in a creamy spinach dip. The evidence is overwhelming.

Before lunch today I went to Costco. I shopped, then before leaving, I picked up a Hebrew National hot dog and diet Coke. I covered the inside of the bun with relish, mustard, catsup and fresh onions. Then I found a seat on the strawberry red and white picnic tables and looked out over the store. Costco, like the bread I eat everyday is the absence of scarcity. It is a fragile shell around a substantial pile of food. If a tornado hit a Costco, the big, thin box of wall and roof and ducts and pipes would fly away, but the food would remain, on the medal shelves, stacked four pallets high. It is the food that makes the store. It is head-high everywhere, and in most places it towers twenty feet above the shoppers. It comes in such large quantities that the issue in choosing  things comes down to, “Can we eat that much before we die?” I considered the lemon juice recently, but the deal was two huge bottles linked together by a plastic strip. I passed it up. It was an excellent price, but only for a younger person with more time. I don’t want my children to go through my stuff after I die and say things like, “Wow, Dad was weirder that we thought. Look at all this lemon juice. What was he thinking?”

Not everyone can shop at Costco. I know that. It’s painful for me. Not everyone has enough. I read recently that an estimated 800 million people don’t have enough to eat each day. The information was flat on the page, but there is a terrible reality to this and it is one to grieve. There is enough land to produce the needed food, the amount of food, an abundance of food. And there is enough muscle and money to produce the food. But, what we do with this is our business and our responsibility, and what we have not done about this is to our shame, but the facts still stand. The world has been well-stocked. We have done each other wrong, but what we need has been provided. The gods are not simply angry. The smallest bits and pieces of good that we receive each day point eloquently to a profound compassion. The good just keeps showing up, even in the tragic, and my theology is leaning hard in a different direction now than when I was eight.

It comes to a basic bit of logic, really. There is so much that is good and beautiful in life –  the varieties of bread, the glowing fire flies, the red strawberries, the dark brown caffeine, the familiar people we forage besides, the potential to provide for everyone. And if there is an original source that all these fine and excellent things come from, a divine and amazingly creative source, and I have come to believe that there is, then all the good things come to my hands and my mouth and my mind from that source,  and as a result, I just can‘t stop thinking lately that I am loved, not punished, and that I will not be punished in the future. And I just can’t stop noticing that I am safe today, for the moment, and that all around me things signal, good. Despite the mess the world is in, it is massive really, the evidence of good.

This evening my wife and I lay on the bed in our room as the sun set, debriefing the day. I noticed a warm block of yellow light on the northwest facing wall. Odd, how did the sun get on this surface considering it was setting almost directly behind it? We looked around. I got up and walked over to the southwest facing window and put my hand in front of the glass to see where the sun was entering. My hand shadowed the bright sun patch on the wall, and then I noticed the mirror on the southeast wall. The sun was passing through the window, hitting the mirror and reflecting onto the northwest wall. The evidence of a loving warmth, at the close of day, was present, cleverly cast into our room, in the form of light. Something in me wanted to clap and not stop.

Fireflies, glitter paths, candles, light bulbs, lightening, computer screens, headlights, stop lights glittering on the pavement in the rain, luminescent fish and every other small patch or spot or gleam of light in the universe shouts, “Life, illuminated, good, safe, more!” Small lights gesture toward the presence of large lights. Radiance is a gift and it reminds us that we are loved. I no longer fear that the future will be lightning bolts frying me; I now feel it will be an evening sky warming me and charming me and seducing me to more starry light still.

I am thinking more and more this way now. This matters greatly, and it helps me move forward in the best way possible. This is no mere dabbling in metaphysics for temporary reassurance. This is no intellectual dilettantism, no spiritual reductionism, no oversimplification, no facile claim that the divine universal is only spoken in the trivial positive.  No, it’s bigger than that; everything implies the divine, the whole of life, the horror too.

Take war. Boyhood battles with flies pass, and boys turn into men and this turns into hitting in high school’s hallways,  shouting in family living spaces and ego thrashing in glass windowed offices. And young men go to war and send smart bombs rushing to do collateral damage, which is a euphemism for brain damage, which ends with unending weeping because the destruction can’t be fixed by any means that we know of once the mission is accomplished. Conflict may be flat history on a thin page for young school children, but it in reality it is three-dimensional, scary and bloody ugly. We contend, and we will contend, with each other, seemingly forever. Nothing is more certain than the changes that will come from the battles we will wage against nature and against each other and against the source. There will be more B-B guns fired at flies and there will be more concussive explosions on the human battle fields and more arms will fly off and more heads will spin across the dirt and family will rise up against family and nation against nation and more hearts will be broken and minds twisted into fear and unending hate before this is all done.  

And more children will starve to death. They did today. And some of us will be drowned in the excrement of others, and it couldn’t be uglier than it is and than it will be. Before it is over, too many of us will flop a wing in the excreta of hate and revenge, and we will grimace with mouths full of filth and pain and we will again be so broken and fouled that we won’t want bread, and we will put our heads in our arms and close our eyes so that we won’t see the yellow patch of fading light on the wall of the bedroom.

Do we understand this? We must. Everything communicates something. In the small dose of violence that it has been our lot to witness comes to us the larger, more universal issues of systemic violence and racial hate and recurring wars. It is the same as the good. The small speaks of the large, both in the good and the evil. But the evil is from us, not from above, and this I have come to be sure of. This much is true. And this is where we too have some measure of comfort and hope. I believe that what is above is working to turn evil to good.

I have seen something bad turn out for some good. I have felt like pain wouldn’t end, but it did. Yes. I now know something I knew so much less at eight years old. In what is worse, I have a chance to see some of what is best. Just because my world is stupidly violent, doesn’t mean that the source of all that is good and right is so. That source is not. Instead the source of life is steeped in the politics of redemption and the passion for renewal.

I have come to believe that evil things can be recovered from, and to believe that the small good can defeat the large bad. Good has a way of leaking back in when one is open to it and the end doesn’t have to be dark. I have come to believe in redemption. We can be down, hit, mucking about in the goop with only one wing free, and yet fly again. Once, one who was strong kneeled close to one who was weak, and lifted up what was broken and carried it to a place where it became strong again.

This  happened, and it has happened to me; it has happened to me again and again. I remember my junior year in college so well. All the loneliness of growing up and living apart from my family and studying nihilistic philosophies and fuzzy-edged literatures and not having safe friends and family that I could disclose myself too and looking for refuge in stupid-brain experiences with immature friends, it caught up with me, and I was so hungry for soft bread and warm light and something tender and good and loving to believe in and to believe in me. I wrote in my journal too much that year. Writing in journals is sometimes eloquent of missing relationships, ones that offer safe places for transparency and truth.

And it culminated in me standing in a park in the city at cool night on a hill looking at the sky and shouting, “If you are there, do something!”

“Do something,” which means something like, “Don’t hate me, don’t condemn me, don’t make war on me, do not, not understand me, don’t leave me alone like this, don’t not pursue me, don’t not make right what I have made wrong, don’t be a distant and judgmental father, and don’t above all things, don’t leave me unchanged.”

I remember reading something in that time that tasted like good bread and shone like yellow light winging through the dark and felt like holy war on untruth. It was from the prophet Isaiah. “In returning and rest shall you be saved and in quietness and confidence will be your strength.”

These words weren’t frozen in print as I read them, they weren’t dead on the page, but instead they were as alive and real as they came off the flat, thin page and they formulated into something three-dimensional and sharp that entered me square between the eyes and proceeded into my frontal lobe at high speed. These words pierced my thoughts like an arrow fired from a bow pulled all the way back at close range, and they knocked back something that I hated and wanted to be rid of –  scary religious noise. The words struck me quiet, and they created a space inside for silent confidence to begin again.

The specialists of the heart call this redemption. It means that something lost is retrieved, something sold is bought back and something ruined is restored. And this is that way that redemption happens, like it happened to me, in a shout into the night and bit of truth on a page. It came to me as one bite of soft bread, one small light flashing in a field and one small line of truth struck deep.

What is it? It is God.

The religious sing, “Great is our God.” I have no quarrel with that. But I found him first and I find him most in what is small and safe.

I found him that way yesterday as my wife and I lay on the bed together and talked over our day, as we always do. And as I held my wife’s hand I knew that her small hand in mine was from him, from his Costco-style plenty for me and that it was such a perfect picture of his larger safe grip on me.

I found him today as my daughter Rosalind and I drove away from the house. She is learning disabled, and this has been hard for her and for me, but in the car, we talked about how many times we had ridden together in the morning, her off to school, me off to work, buddies shoving off together, from kindergarten to college, holding hands in the car, starting the day connected, and then going our own ways, knowing we would see each other again at night to sit, safe again, and watch TV and eat and talk and go to bed at peace with each other and life. This ride, this shared ride, slow not furious and fast, ending in safety, speaks books to me of the compassion of God that I have come to hold on to.

I have found the largest thing in the smallest things. And these things have been made small for me out of compassion for me. A loving maker is suggested, hinted at, gestured to and present in, the smooth, slow ride to school, in the small tasty bite at noon, in the warm rectangular glow on the wall as he day closes, in the next page turned and in the tender hand in my hand on each one of the very particular days of my life.

 

More Beautiful Than Previously Imagined

Posted: October 22, 2011 in beautiful
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What is really beautiful?

It is an old woman, in hospice, waiting to die, as she is remembering.

I know.

I saw her yesterday.

She is there in a dying place, seeing again those moments when she was young and agile. She is a young girl again, and her hands are moving now like the leaves in the wind-blown trees outside of her room.

You’d look at her, if you didn’t know her and not see anything of that, and only perhaps see age and disease  –unless you looked closely into her eyes and then, if you wanted to, you could see the young girl in the old woman. To see that kind of thing, it helps to know the person, and even then you have to look closely, and not blink at the dry, thin film of agedness and the unloveliness of the dying. You have to look past the things you tend to turn your eyes away from.

Sometimes I want everything to be beautiful, to live in a perfectly beautiful community of people,  in  a beautiful city, in a beautiful world set in a beautiful universe.  I want everyone to have all the beauty they need, but they don’t, and I don’t and it isn’t all perfect and it isn’t  easy to see the beauty through the aging and the dying and the brokennes and the stains.

Today I saw a man who has more than enough money not to have to work, work.  He worked; he put up new lights in an old church. And when he was done with the electrical part of the work, his specialty, he stayed to do the non-specialist part of the work, the clean up, the patching of a damaged ceiling, the covering up of the scars where the old lights had come down. Beautiful!

It is beautiful to see a person work who is not incentivized by money, to see care, work, love — gratis. My friend, the electrician, is  motivated  by his love for God, his desire to be useful and his care for his friends who asked. He earned nothing, but he did everything needed.

It is a kind of dancing, I think, to care for a person who is dying or to restore a  building that needs to live again.

We are quick to praise beauty when we see it, the full moon rising in the early evening sky, the lovely girl strolling past us along the way, the sheen of a new car rolling smoothly down the city street.

These are beauty clichés.

But twice lately, I’ve seen the real thing. I ‘ve seen deep beauty peeping from the wrinkles of an old face, and  I’ve seen warm, alabaster light glow from the old ceiling of a sacred space.

There is more to this world  than youth and glitz and everything up and to the right on the graph.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow.

I am looking forward to seeing the beauty hidden in the seam and crack of life.

I am looking forward to something more beautiful than previously imagined.

Beautiful Fish

Posted: October 17, 2011 in beautiful
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I dreamed last night that I was by a large blue lake. I was eager inside; I  wanted  to fish.

Suddenly, no words spoken, someone handed me a fishing rod, baited and ready.

I cast a smallish bait fish, which had been perfectly placed on the hook,  into the large lake in front of me and immediately I felt  a taut line, a jerking in the rod and a sudden sense of surprise.   It took a few seconds to apprehend the reality — a large catch was on the line.

I reeled and immediately there at the bank, appeared a giant, blue fish, its mouth upturned,  looking straight  towards me.

It was certain that the line would break if I tried to lift the fish up the steep bank, but suddenly the fish was out of the water, on the bank, cleaned and ready to grill  — a feast prepared,  enough for a crowd of family and friends and strangers.

It’s interesting, my dreams. These days, I’m having fish dreams.

And it’s interesting, my reality. These days I’m seeing extreme need.

It’s the norm. You don’t have to go far to see it; just get out, look around, or stay home, and look inside.

Yesterday, I saw a man moving slowly home leaning into his walker.

I saw man who had to be lifted into a car, from a rolling chair, by a friend.

I saw  a  woman cry.

I saw a man who tried to talk and couldn’t.

I saw a family who didn’t have enough to eat.

I saw a woman pray, for relief.

I saw a couple try to connect after years of disconnectedness.

I saw children playing today, but I know that no one is saving money so they may one day go  to college.

What should we do, with extreme need?

Fish.

Why?

Because a rod and bait have already been handed to us …

Because there are fish in the sea waiting to be caught…

Because we must not hide from our own ….

Because more can be done than we have yet thought or imagined …

Because God himself will give us large, cooperative, blue fish to put up against extreme need…

Because of love…

More thoughts occur. They make me feel quiet.

What about you?

Come fishing with me.

How to Recover from Being Radiated by Someone’s Personality

Posted: October 15, 2011 in conflicts
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Many people, you know, have been  radiated.

But  maybe you don’t know that, because mostly, when you see someone, it’s not the first thing you notice.

I ran into a friend in the grocery store today. We caught up. The first thing I noticed was her unique face and her smile. We all have the same pieces, eyes, mouth, nose, ears — but “wow” and “superwow” again; those smiles are each perfectly special.

She mentioned getting forced out of her last job. That  came up because she was telling me she was looking for new work.

“I think it was a personality thing,” she said. Then I could see that she had been radiated. A “personality thing” — that’s code for someone decided they didn’t want her at her workplace, and a few conversations were had behind the scenes, and then, she was history.

“I know,” I said, “It’s something I’ve experienced too.”

We chatted a bit more. I said, “Hey, I’ll pray for you.” I did, as I walked away, and later too, because, “I know.”

It’s common, to get nuked, by someone else’s personality, or their agenda, or their insecurity. At work, church, among friends and in the family, if you live long enough, you will be blasted by someone else’s poor management of  their own issues, and yours.

I know another person who used to work for the same organization as the girl I met in the grocery store. She recently told me she had gotten a new job. Why? She too was radiated a few years back. It was so bad, she lost her opportunity to even work in that field anymore, despite her good credentials, and she had to go back to school and retrain for a different career. Fortunately, that worked! I’m glad for her, but she still isn’t “okay” with what happened to her.

Why all the radiated employees? Many CEO’s, supervisors, “bosses,” and just plain people aren’t good at conflict resolution; they bring to their conflict win-lose solutions. They win, the underling loses. Why?  These human resource brokers tend to see the world as black and white; one person is wrong, someone else is right, and so they “do what they have to do” by making the party at fault (in their minds),  the loser. This is interesting, painful, maddening, hurtful, harmful, crazy, radiating!  And yet, often,  the core issue, is the power broker’s own personality and problem solving weaknesses, which have created, at least a part,  the problems.

And so, radiation happens.

But here it the really fine news! For those of us who  have gotten up close to  personalities that are leaking nuclear power plants,  we  have choices, afterwards, which  can successfully mitigate the negative and harmful effects.

To help you thrive, after being radiated, here is what you can do, as I’ve learned it from my own experience.

Never stop moving forward into the next thing God has for you. God, the God who sent  his son Jesus to die for a sin-radiated world, is the God of radiation recovery. God, as he exists in his absolutely crazy-good-loving-redemptive personality is always trying to help you move into a healthy, radiation free future. Retrain, retool, rethink the future, try again, go back at it, when you fail again, get up and try again, never stop moving, except to rest and eat. The enemy — it’s quitting!

Forgive everything! Christ forgave you; forgive everyone else. Yourself, your boss, the organization, the people who don’t apologize,  the people who apologize except that it’s for the wrong thing because they still don’t get it, their friends who helped them hurt you, your friends who abandoned you, every-freaking-body on the planet, forgive them,  if that is necessary. Forgive and then, when the memories come back, forgive again and forgive for the rest of your life, if that is how long it takes. That doesn’t mean you quit saying what happened was wrong; it doesn’t mean you forget it; it means something like you do all you can to make it right and then you leave it in God’s hands.

Why? If you don’t forgive, you’ll radiate yourself.

And lastly, learn from what happened. Nothing is simple. “They” did something wrong, you can hold on to that if it is true, but so might you have made mistakes in  what happened and in how you have handled what went down or in how you will handle it in the future.  You have a personality too, and it can radiate people too, especially if you have been hurt. It’s been said that hurt people hurt people. It’s true, and so be careful, because you don’t want to become a hurt person who hurts other people. Don’t do what was done to you in any way, shape or otherwise twisted form.  That will make you similar to the people who hurt you, and you don’t, trust me, want to be like them.

Take your hurt and learn to be compassionate towards others. Having been radiated, “You know,” and your knowing is a powerful force inside of you to understand and to be compassionate, and to be gentle and to take some pain out of the world, instead of smashing more pain back into the world.

The best radiation therapy in the universe is found in understanding and in compassion, which we all know by its more noble name — love.

Figure it out; people need you to work this out. You’ll meet them tomorrow in the grocery store. They will have just been radiated, and you will do best with them if you can say, without any residual toxic resentment inside of you, “I know.”

Being Content

Posted: October 9, 2011 in beautiful
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“Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.” 

 Ben Franklin

It’s hard to get the contentment thing right, but we want to, for being content is at the heart of being happy. Being content is the highest form of being rich.

So how can we be more content?

To move forward in contentment, first we must come to understand the moment, each moment. If the moment asks for someone  to be helped, then it is not the time to be content with the status quo, and we won’t really be content until we do something.

I helped a friend obtain a trusted counselor last week. Looking back, I am content. I saw that she absolutely needed someone to unburden her soul too. It was unacceptable for me to do nothing. I am content, having done something.

Each moment asks for something. If the moment begs for art, then it is unacceptable to be content with utility. I put up several new, beautiful lights in my home this week. They glow with a warm, soft beauty in the dinning room and kitchen nook. I am content with them. Nothing more is needed there.

Recently I met with a friend to discuss money. We determined needs, we explored sources of income, we made plans to prosper. We applied knowledge to problems and found solutions.

If the moment begs for knowledge, it is unacceptable to be content with ignorance. But what then? After addressing need, we are ourselve in need. The moment then requests, rest.

And if the moment asks for rest, then it is unacceptable to push anymore. Driven isn’t wise when our bodies are tired. Driven isn’t called for after we have just enjoyed a success. Hungry for more, at some point, should be laid aside when we have had enough.

What is called for after success is  contentment, the contentment found in celebration and rest. “Just one more thing” after “one more thing” is a fast and furious route to too many crazy things ad nauseum, but contentment is it’s own reward.

And so we need to learn to exercise contentment  everyday.

Content is what we need to be at night, when all that can be done has been done.

Content is what we need to be at the end of the day, when what has been given is all that will be given.

“Godliness with contentment is great gain.” That is to say, the content have learned to accept what God has allowed.

Being content is what makes poor men rich and rich men richer.

Time is Going Very Fast Now

Posted: October 5, 2011 in cars
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When we boys were in grade school, my dad cut the body off an old Plymouth. While it retained some dignity with its front fenders and hood still intact, from the dashboard back it was just frame, with a gas tank and wheels at the back. But the old Plymouth had one after-market upgrade; to give the driver a place to sit, dad welded onto the top of the fame, a metal folding chair.

The stripped car was a great way to get around the campground which my parents managed, and we boys further celebrated when we discovered that the back tires, virtually weightless, spun easily under acceleration. The whole thing was a massive tribute to my dad’s unbridled creativity, regardless of the fact that it was a death trap.

“Pops!” we boys teased my dad recently over pasta, “We all drove that old Plymouth around the camp when we were just kids, but if we had fallen off the seat, we would have run over ourselves! It didn’t have a safety belt.” And then we all laughed, Dad too. We grew up in the pre-safety days America.

I love my dad. My dad has given me a good legacy: a love of cars. I love cars, with good seats or bad. I love a fast drive up the winding curves of Sunset Highway into the Luguna Mountains. I love a slow cruise along the cliffy beaches in La Jolla, and I love the extreme left lane on Interstate 5 through the Camp Pendleton area.

But I don’t like the drive I made recently to Los Angeles.

“I’m excited that you’re coming,” I heard my dad say through the tiny speaker in the phone. He sounded small, but he’s isn’t and he doesn’t live in a small town. He lives in densely populated city of Alhambra, in Los Angeles County.

I was driving up the next day to see him and my mom, because the week before my brother Steve had called me from Pasadena. Steve was concerned about dad. He said, “I think you should consider coming up here.”

And after that, my wife said, “Go, you really need to go.”

So I went. I really wanted to go see my dad. He’s eighty-four, and not doing so well. But a few things were working against me making the trip.  I didn’t have a lot of time off work, and I didn’t really want to make the drive from San Diego to Los Angeles and back in a twenty-four hour period. I don’t much care for that drive. Many people don’t. You plan around the traffic, or you get engulfed. And to be honest, although I didn’t admit it to myself at the time, I didn’t want to drive toward or in anyway through the possibility of losing my dad.

Some of my San Diego friends will only drive through Los Angeles at night if they are headed north. Actually, it’s better to enter LA county after it has gone to bed. I haven’t forgotten the family trip from Chula Vista to Santa Clarita on the eve of Thanksgiving several years ago. The 5 turned into a massively long parking lot, but nobody ever left their cars. The trip took five hours. It shaped how I see life. I’d rather fly places. Last year we flew from San Diego to London. I just didn’t want to drive.

The magic motorway from Sand Diego to LA is not one drive; it’s several. It’s the drive through the megaregion of Southern California, through Solana Beach, Encinitas, Carlsbad, Oceanside, San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Mission Viejo, Irvine, Santa Ana, Orange, Anaheim, Buena Park and you get the idea; it’s the drive through an extended chunk of time; and for me, it’s the drive through the shoulder pain I have when I drive too long.

Of course, I went anyway.

My dad’s pacemaker has quit working. But did it ever really work, correctly? He doesn’t much think so. It was too fast; it was too slow; it was reset; it was set again. It’s like the Los Angeles freeway system, it’s like the internal combustion engine, it’s like all of technology — a work in progress. The pacemaker was reinstalled; the surgery site bothered him. He swears he isn’t getting another one, despite the fact that his heart was recently clocked at thirty-five beats per minute.

Now his knee has gotten painful. Mom said that the doctor said to him, “You’re eighty-four Mr. Hasper, and you have arthritis.” Mom told me that the doctor said this to dad three times.

Driving to LA and back I thought about how I hate that. I hate the doctor implying that my dad, who has always been so alive and worked so hard and overcome so much, is so old that nothing can be done to help him. I also hate my dad being told anything three times. He knows how old he is and he knows precisely, in a way which no one else knows, that his decline will eventually be irreversible. His own dad died a few years ago; he has told me that he’s aware that he’s next on the runway, and then me. That’s comforting.

I left for Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon, pulling out onto the 5 North and sprinting up the freeway, determined to make a quick go of it. In San Diego, we say we are going to Los Angeles when we mean that we are going to any of the cities in that vast urban sprawl that makes up that flat, smoggy, spreading web of rooftops to the north. And so I drove toward the LA complexity, up the mighty 5 North (formerly the 101 here and there), which runs from Mexico to up through Washington, up that huge artery that continuously carries the aspirations and the regrets of families and businesses and loners.

And I drove with a vague awareness that a great deal of thinking has rushed up and down that freeway, that when I drive it, I drive with millions who have driven it before and with their millions of jumbled and complicated thoughts both good and not. In some way, they have proceeded and will yet follow me.

I powered north, from Chula Vista to Alhambra with only a few slows. Good trip! I paused briefly in San Juan Capistrano to refuel, the car and myself, not far from the old mission. It’s a historically fascinating place. The Serra Chapel of 1777 is the oldest building still in use in California and the only surviving church where Father Serra said mass. It’s a reminder that many earlier people have traveled this path north, native Americans, missionaries, explorers, colonists and restless entrepreneurs.

From a gas station I called my mom. I told her, “My smart phone actually messed me up on my last trip. What are the freeways I take again?” I’m not sure why I can’t remember the best route to their house, but LA is like that. You check your route because the exits come fast, to the left and the right, and with so many cars around you, last-minute changes of lanes don’t work well.

I could hear her pulling out a paper road atlas. On the phone I could hear her and my dad muttering over it. They couldn’t remember the freeways either, and so they figured it out, again, the 5 North to the 710 North to the 10 East, the Santa Monica Freeway (the busiest freeway in Southern California), to Atlantic Boulevard, north.

I remember being at my uncle Jerry’s in LA for a Christmas party a few years back and watching the “Angelenos” stand around discussing which freeways to use to get somewhere someone at the party wanted to go. They had lived in the LA area all their lives, and they still had to stand around and discuss, at great length, how to get somewhere. The discussion felt a bit like warning sign, kind of like a road sign I saw on the East coast a few years back, “Dangerous Intersection.”

I drove to my parent’s house in two hours, and I drove home the next day. When I got to Alhambra my mom told me that my two brothers and their wives were also coming over for dinner. And they did come, and then I knew that we all felt that need for some time with him and each other. So we ate pasta that mom made, and we laughed and told stories about cars, about the Plymouth with the folding chair welded onto the frame and about the GTO my brother drove for a few months after he graduated from high school. It was powered by a pavement ripping V-8, but it didn’t have disc breaks, and you simply couldn’t stop it once you got that lengthy expanse of sheet metal hurtling down the street.

I also brought up the car my dad bought for the family when we were in high school, a 1966 candy-apple red Ford Fairlane. Suddenly everybody got lively. It was a 1966 with a 390 cubic inch V-8 sitting in front of some comfy black leather seats with dual glass packed mufflers streaming out the back. Stomp it and you were greeted by screaming tires, an eight cylinder roar, and a neck jerking blast into space.

Oddly enough my dad loaned the Fairlane to me when I was still in high school. I took it out on a gravel road and floored it in a turn. The thing that puzzled my friends and I next was how to get it out of the steep ditch that it was suddenly bottomed out in. I still remember the cars entry into the culvert. There was a great gravely roar that indicated that the whole thing was being torn to pieces and a huge bounce and rumble as it landed at the bottom of the ditch, but when we got out, we found that the candy apple paint was untouched. And so we built a rock ramp and drove it out of there. I never told my dad about this until he was old, and the car was long sold, and Dad was too feeble to do anything about it.

We boys and mom and dad had a great evening together, fueled by the great combination of dinner, laughter and dessert, and the next day, I powered back the same route I had come, Alhambra to San Diego on Monday afternoon and into Chula Vista in slightly under two hours. It was a good commute.

Coming home, I raced down the 10 East from Alhambra, exiting oddly in the left lanes to get to the 710 South. The freeway bounced the car unexpectedly, as if the construction workers had been unaware that they were making a roller coaster out of what was supposed to be flat and even. I took the 5 South through city after city to the 805 South to the H Street exit in Chula Vista, to home.

When I left from Alhambra to come home, my mom came out to the car, put her arms around me, rested her head on my shoulder and said, “I love him so much,” and she began to cry. “I don’t know what I’ll do without him,” she said to me, thinking ahead to what she knew was coming. I held her close and kissed her head. I didn’t cry, but I felt quiet inside, like there was a huge expanse of space inside of my mind that I wasn’t sure how to get across.

Coming home I didn’t play the radio. I didn’t play the book on CD my wife had sent with me. And, I didn’t play Pandora radio through my smart phone. I had options, but I only wanted to sit, drive, think. I watched the road and listened to the smack of the road on the tires, a hard thump here, rhythmic pops there, a smooth quiet glide again that made you wonder why it wasn’t all made smooth. But it wasn’t.

After I graduated from high school, I drove my 55 Chevy hot rod up to Iowa for the summer with a friend and we built sections of Interstate 29 south of Council Bluffs. This paid for my first year of college. I worked on the machine that lay steel rebar in the road. It was grueling labor. We whipped long metal rebar out of twisted piles of steel and we lay them in troughs that ran out of the back of the machine. Sometimes we went down onto the road and tied shorter cross pieces on the rebar with thin wires, twisting the wire around the bars with a little tool with a wooden handle. Then the great cement machines came and laid down a thick grey slab of cement, floating the bars in the middle of the massive river. We made history, we made a concrete corridor, we made place that people could pass through, to go see their fathers and to return again.

I have a connection, with freeways, I find them interesting, Interstate 29 Iowa, Interstate 5 in Southern California. In East Los Angeles the 5 is old. It’s narrow, near Downey, dropping down to three lanes. There one drives through a kind of narrow urban canyon.

 The 5 South, in one of it’s narrower places, fit my mood as I drove home from visiting my dad. I had a sense of traveling in the direction that I had to go through cities that I didn’t want to stop in to get back to a place I needed to be.

As I drove, I drove through history, the history that shaped the freeway and the culture that it created. At the beginning of the 20th Century, people were still traveling around on horses. The fledgling automobile was a novelty, until Henry Ford brought out his Model T in 1908. The car was produced and reproduced until May of 1927. People could afford these cars and so they bought them and fixed them and raced them and lived in them, but they had no idea what was ahead. The country was undergoing a huge transportation revolution.

The nation fell in love with the independence automobiles provided. Soon cars glutted the dirt roads of America and propelled the development of new surfaces to roll along on. Dirt roads were paved, highways were constructed, and still there was not enough traveling space.

It’s a hugely important chapter in our national history, but it’s also an important chapter in my family’s history. My dad told me, during my trip to see him that he bought his first car in 1943. It was a 1930 Model A Ford. The first freeway he drove on was from Pasadena to downtown LA.

In 1940 the Pasadena Freeway, the 110, or the “Arroyo Seco Parkway” as it was originally called, opened to cars. The ensuing LA system was built around this. My dad lived in Glendale, and he drove the 110 after he got back from the war and met my mom and started our family. The 110’s short on ramps, twisting turns, sudden dips, absent shoulders and scenic landscape are all reminders of a time when cars were slower and fewer. But this was the way of the future, and this transportation history created, in part, my trip to Los Angeles.

The idea of a freeway, worked, and San Diego followed suite. The lone traveler in his or her personal car, on a road with no stops, was born. The first freeway in San Diego was U.S. 395, now the 163. Construction began in 1942 and it was opened in 1948 as the 395 or Cabrillo Freeway. It’s wide, grassy, tree-lined median makes it still the most beautiful freeway in the city.

And it came to me on my drive, that this past had created, in part, my present movement through time and space.

As I drove home, I sat still and alone, in my personal car, cushioned in leather and fine wood and painted metal with my right foot on the gas pedal and my SUV rushing down old pavement, past old block walls, through large billboards and industrial buildings and my mind rushing down an unknown road into a future that I couldn’t see. I traveled in a controlled, historical, channeled fashion as my mind wandered through history and into the future, down ancient, twisting, unposted mental roadways.

In Anaheim and Irvine the freeway opened up. The signs for Disneyland came into view. I thought about my friends who had told me before I left that they were going to the theme park for the weekend. I’ve done that, gone to Disney land with my two daughters and wife. Disneyland is fun with kids. It was a different feel, the trip to Disneyland. It wasn’t like traveling to go see your dad when he is figuring out how to be 84 years old and you are figuring out how to feel about that.

The freeway was twelve lanes now. In Irvine the retaining walls along the edge had beautiful flowers set in them. Instead of a narrow corridor, there were now hills and sky. I felt for a moment as if I had escaped. It was 2:30 pm and I could feel the freeway in Los Angeles filling up with traffic behind me. I rushed away from the rush and felt a sense of relief. I had escaped.

I flowed along now at 75 and 80 miles per hour, staying in the left lane and letting the car run. At 80 mph the tach said 3,000 rpms, just right for cruising. In San Juan Capistano the huge retaining walls along the freeway suddenly presented me with huge, beautiful concrete swallows who seemed to be flying along with me. I flew with them and then outran them quickly. I was feeling better.

My dad and I had talked about what you do with what you get. “Life is going by fast now,” he said.

“Does it seem to get faster as you get older?” I asked him.

“It is just flying by,” he said. “Last week, this week, then it’s next week. You can’t belive how fast it goes.” My mom agreed.

Time for him was just absolutely flying now. I wonder why? Perhaps it is because there is so much behind him that looking back over so much road, in one glance, gives the illusion of greatly increased speed. I have a bit of a sense of it too now. I’m not so far behind him.

But his body isn’t going faster. When my dad got up with us from the front room, to go out to the car when we went out to breakfast, he grabbed a cane, paused swaying, lurched forward unsteadily, and proceeded as if he might fall at any juncture. He didn’t once complain, about going slow while going fast. I’m think that I’m learning something from him that I will need for myself later.

I had thought I’d stop on the way home, in San Juan Capistrano, for a brief rest. My wife and I always stop in San Juan Capistrano. We exit the freeway on Ortega Highway, near the old Spanish mission. There are lots of bathrooms and food stops and a Starbucks, but this day, I didn’t stop. Something in me didn’t want to stop. I wanted to go home, V8 fast, I wanted to keep going very fast.

And that’s one of the things that’s gotten me to thinking, the fast thing, which I grew up with, but which isn’t always good.

I shared my trip to see my dad and my concerns about him with a friend recently. She had an interesting response. It “seems as if you were [on the trip to see your dad] in a hurry to get it over with.” She wrote in an email to me. “I was the same when my dad was dying. But with my mom, I found I wanted more to savor each moment I had with her.”

She is right; I am rushing. I rush around a lot.

The other day, I sped up as I got closer to home.

The 5 South seemed to open up to me after San Clemente with the first sighting of the sea. I have always loved the views of the ocean from the 5. They remind me that life is bigger than I thought. I passed quickly over the freeway landscape, past the fields of drying fennel south of the San Onofre Power Plant.  

Just past Del Mar, I noticed that the vista to the sea was spectacular, the eroding cliffs, the palms and pines and flat, spreading water, they seemed more beautiful than ever to me. I always think of home as near the ocean. In San Diego, the 5 runs close to the ocean and the bay. The freeway includes the water. I saw the water, I knew I was almost home.

But not for long.

Soon, because, as my dad said, time is flying so fast now, I’ll pull myself to my own feet here in my own living room, and head back onto the road again. I’ll drive to Los Angeles, up both old and new stretches of freeway, because I’ll get a call from my mom, or maybe it will be my dad, because who really know which of them will go first, and then I know I’ll cry. And I’ll drive back up the 5 again, this time with my wife and two daughters.

And this trip will feel different from any other time. I’m not looking forward to the drive.

But it will not be unfamiliar, for out on the 5, where we pass through towns known and unknown and go very fast, we travel in familiar spaces, and we go to places that many other people have gone before.

I will go, to one of my parents and she or he will be alone,  and I’ll be fatherless or motherless for the first time in my life, but I will pass through the Southern California megaregion among millions and millions of people.

And we will hit some traffic, I’m sure, and have to stop, and start again, but as I pass through their cities, many of them living there will know how I feel, and I will then know, out on the road that day, how they feel too

 

social confidence

Posted: September 25, 2011 in becoming, thriving
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Our level of confidence defines the quality of our social relationships. When we are insecure  our relationships may seem fearful or dangerous to us. When we are confident, our relationships tend to feel energizing and safe for us.

What to do?

I’ve been thinking about this and something interesting comes to mind.

Think about this if you are want to thrive more socially.

I remember going to a young couple’s party at their house one evening a few years ago.  I hated the whole experience. I felt very insecure there.  Come to think of it; they were very insecure too. An atmosphere of social ineptness reigned.  We sat on couches around a coffee table, but there was no coffee to spike our energy and no comfortable table of conversation to chew over.  The young couple and some other people present controlled the conversation. I couldn’t think of things to add.

Wow! It sucked! It felt unbearably awkward. My wife and I left early. I felt like a social failure, no confidence that evening, no social success that night. But now, years later, with much social water having run under and over my bridge, I better see the truth of the thing.

We are powerless in social relationships, when we think we have no control. This sense of powerlessness adds to any insecurity we might already have, and when other people control the conversation, when the turf is theirs, then this is very confidence-deleting for us.

I see now that much of the insecurity was within me, and then so was the solution. I let it happen. I did nothing. I thought of myself a guest with no responsibility. Not good, now I realize, not good.

I’ve changed. Enough weird parties, enough awkward conversations, enough counseling,  enough personal responsibility to make social events happen —  I’ve begun to have different experiences.

Recently I met a quiet and awkward young couple. I asked them questions. I expressed interest in their personalities. I took time to explore some things we have in common. I invited them to meet me again for coffee. The next time we met, they told me that they had really enjoyed their previous conversation with me and they wanted to talk more, to get to know each other.

What a difference a few years makes.

The real difference? My level of confidence. I’ve gotten more confident, more secure. I know who I am now,  and I am not afraid to let that be the social oil  or the social glue in awkward situations.

I used to think of myself as socially powerless.

Now I have come to generally think of myself  as in charge of any social situation I am in.  Wherever I go, I consider myself a co-host with those present. I see myself as in the position of  a self-affirming impresario, one of the masters of conversational entertainments. I see myself, in the role, if needed,  of group discussion leader.

This isn’t a total panacea. There will be and even lately has been social awkwardnesses. I mistook someone recently for someone else! Awkward! I still sometimes want to leave the party early.

But things have largely changed for me.  I like it. I  refused to be as silent as wall paper. No more. I now  refuse to engage in debilitating social silence. I refuse to be socially helpless. I refuse to act like I have no control. It’s good; it’s better this way. This is working for me, because social confidence is largely a matter of self-perception and self-actualizing behavior.

If you and I see ourselves as  leaders in  social situations then we usually will be.  Act confidently, and we will generally act socially competently.

Social confidence — it’s a way of seeing, and it’s a way of chosing, one thing and not another. It is about chosing to take control. It is about chosing to not be socially helpless.

Parties, better? They can be.

Take charge, my gentle friends and thrive!

On Being Human

Posted: September 19, 2011 in becoming, people
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“I think you think that you can’t  hurt me when you say stuff. But when you say stuff it does hurt me. I know in the past I acted all tough and hard-headed but I’m not like that now.”

He sat on the couch in front of her and put his fist on his chest and coughed.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You used to say that nothing could hurt you, and I guess I thought that was true.”

“Well, it’s not anymore,” he replied. “You see how I’ve been lately, all emotional with the kids and with you. I see that what I’ve done has hurt a lot of other people and I’m sorry about that and I’ve been apologizing for that.”

I turned to her and asked, “Can you see that he’s been different lately?”

“I can,” she replied. “It’s like he is becoming more human.”

It’s interesting, the degrees of things, the way things change.  We are all becoming, everyday, perhaps more or less human.

What does that mean? I’m not entirely sure, except to say that part of it can be explained by the progress or regress we make emotionally. To be human is to feel —  pain, love, depression, happiness, guilt, tranquility.

To petrify emotionally is to lose our humanity. To turn to stone regarding other human’s feelings is to lose the human quality of our relationships. To grow numb, to fail to understand or care when our behaviors bring pain to others — this all is part of a process whereby we grow inhuman and inhumane.

This matters.

We must not lose the affective domain or we lose our humanity.

To be human is to be emotionally rich. To break, to soar, to break down, to take courage, to pick ourselves up and explain to someone else how we really feel — this is what it means to be an integrated person, a complete personality, a fully human being.

As long as we can be hurt then we  retain the ability to understand someone elses’ hurt.

To the extent that we can accept and honor our own emotions, then we will be able to accept and honor other people’s emotions.

Feelings feel feelings.

Feel.

Be human.

Thrive.

Self-judgment

Posted: September 13, 2011 in self
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Many people these days seem to be off put by judgment.

They don’t like politicians who sling mud at opposing parties. They don’t like religious fanatics who pronounce judgment on sinners. They don’t like ex-wives who tell the kids that dad is a jerk.

That’s interesting. I find that all very interesting.

Someone told me recently that they were embarrassed by their own skin, literally,  how it looks, how it feels.

Someone told me recently that they lacked confidence, with others — almost always.

Someone told me recently that they had a lot of guilt, when really, as far as I can tell,  this person has done nothing much wrong. They aren’t old enough!

Someone confessed to me, “I don’t know if I’ve done enough good to outweigh the bad I’ve done.”

People don’t like judgment and yet it  seems that many people are  the harshest judge of themselves that they know. People judge themselves in ways that they would never judge others.

I heard that someone told their friend a while back, “People don’t like us!”  I know both these people. It isn’t true. Both are liked.

Most all of us, if we hear a baby crying will pick up the baby and comfort it, not scold it. And yet when we cry inside, we too often scold ourselves for the very feelings we should embrace, comfort and sooth.

Yesterday, at a picnic I attended, one of the little boys present whacked his head on the tailgate of a pickup. He bellowed. I held him. He leaned into me. He was comforted. His mom came. He was comforted again.

This is the model for how we should treat ourselves. There will be jugment, but better yet is discernment, and better yet is tolerance and compassion and mercy.

We would all do well, I think, to hold ourselves more when we whack our heads against life, and to bring a little pat and not another whack to the little one within.

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