Posts Tagged ‘randy hasper’

How To Heal a Heart

Posted: July 3, 2013 in restoration
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“I just wanted to give a little advice to help her.”

“Yeah, I bet that didn’t work.”

“No it didn’t; it blew up in my face, the little advice.”

“Why was that?”

“She didn’t want it.”

Of course she didn’t. It was something from the head, but the matter, it was something in her heart. It makes me want to go fishing, catch something, drag it to shore and feed the world with it. You can’t heal a heart with just a head. It’s like asking a bandaide to heal a cancer.

The mind can be a shallow thing, full of opinions, biases, judgments and stunning limitations. The heart is a deeper thing, full of will, personality, experience, dream, hurt, emotion, identity, desire, hate and love. The heart has a depth that the mind cannot fathom.  An idea won’t heal a heart. A rule  won’t heal a relationship. Deep calls to deep, experience calls to experience, brokeness cries out and clutches brokeness, weakness reaches out and gently touch weakness.

“Try saying, and trying feeling it as you are saying it, something like, ‘I’m so sorry you are hurting so badly.'” And maybe give up, thinking one talk, one time, and one little piece of ‘wise’  advice will do it.”

I wonder, could we learn to better sit with each other, for a while, for as long as it takes, and listen and really understand the best we can, and really “get it” and so find our way back to each other’s broken hearts?

We might; if we let heart cry out to heart.

 

Standing In

Posted: June 24, 2013 in helping
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As a therapist, mentor, counselor, doctor, teacher or pastor, one of the most painful things to watch is your clients returning to their own vomit.

“I went back,” she said.

It couldn’t be more anguished.

The return to abuse, addiction, dysfunction, dependency and harm – it is almost too much to take. When the helped ones return to the harm we helped them run away from, it is excruciating for the helper and the helped alike.

“Why did you go back?” we may ask them.

They don’t rightly know. We don’t always either. Sometimes they have lost the power to know, caught as they are in a mindless, addictive cycle and habit of harm, and we ourselves are sometimes shocked beyond the ability to keep reasoning well about the causes of such horrible things.

The worst comes when it comes to the kids.

“The children saw him hit you?”

“Her kids saw her passed out on the floor?”

It’s possible to give a child life and then begin to slowly take that very life by exposing that precious, fragile, developing psyche to what a human being, of any age, should never have to see and hear.”

What to do?

It’s not always clear. We do what should be done: we report abuse, counsel boundaries, protect children, advocate for recovery, make clear the choices and lay out the raw consequences.

But there is a tension present as we do our work — to do too much, to not do enough at all.

Broken people may break even the best of counselors, and we healing helpers, when we try to mend them, risk being just another sunken life boat in their sorry, slouching, smoking, sinking ship wake.

“I’m done with him!” we will be tempted to say.

Should we be? That is for us to carefully decide. But if a damaging cycle is to be broken, then someone must stand in like a champion and help break it. Someone sane must plant themselves at the fulcrum, between the teeter and the totter, between madness and sanity, between rescuing and empowering and tell it like it is.

Someone tough and smart, full of grit and dirt themselves, jammed up with raw, gut wrenching truth must say it like it is, and then say it again, and then have the stomach yet to say it yet again.

We caregivers, to help some of the most broken, must refuse to take an inappropriate responsibility for their irresponsibility, while still standing in and telling them to take a much needed charge of themselves and the ones they say they love.

It is a gift, this thing of standing at the fulcrum between order and chaos and holding forth with sanity and class and love, and it is a privilege to have the chance to do so.

If you’re called to it; then do it.

This matters!

It is life or death for some of them.

A Template for Living Well

Posted: May 29, 2013 in thriving
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None of us perfectly fit someone else’s template for living. We are unique, and here in the Unuted States we love to claim that. Each person is unique; it’s our folk wisdom National Anthem.

Maybe each person is unique, and each country is unique, but none of us should ignore a wise template for living. The good life looks surprisingly similar here in the US, and we who are older should tell younger people this. We should show them this, with our lives.

Look now, this is child’s play; no it isn’t, but we shouldn’t ignore life smart.

Those who marry when between the ages of 20 to 24 are nearly twice as likely to get divorced as those who get married between the ages of 25 to 29 years old.

Personal maturity matters when it comes to marriage. When it comes to being single too!

In our culture, people with more education tend to make more money. There are exceptions. Not that many.

  • High school drop outs: $18,734
  • High school graduates: $27,915
  • College grads (with a bachelor’s degree): $51,206
  • Advanced degree holders: $74,602

Does this matter? Well, people with higher incomes tend to live substantially longer than those without.

What doesn’t work?

Heavy drinking and drug use doesn’t work.

Research has identified subtle but important brain changes occurring among adolescents with Alcohol Use Disorder (AUD), resulting in a decreased ability in problem solving, verbal and non-verbal retrieval, visuospatial skills, and working memory.

Men who get divorced, and stay divorced, that doesn’t work so well either. They are at really high risk for premature mortality. It would have been better for their health had they not married at all.

Conscientious people tend to stay healthier and live longer. Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive generally prolongs life.

There isn’t a need to go on and on here. Point made; some ways to live are better than others.

Solomon wrote:

Nothing is better for a man
than that he should eat and
drink, and that his soul should
enjoy good in his labor.

This also, I saw, was from the hand of God.

It matters that we make decisions that move us toward maturity, toward stability, toward lasting relationships, toward meaningful work, toward being responsible, toward enjoying the life God intended for us to enjoy.

The good life has always looked pretty much the same. It is responsible, it isn’t drug and alcohol dependent, it involves having been trained in something, it is not too rushed. It takes work, it involves loving, close relationships, (whether married or single) and it includes God!

College isn’t for everyone, marriage isn’t always the good life, money isn’t a panacea, some can’t work in regular jobs. I’m not trying to promote a middle-class, materialistic ethic, but maturity, training, hard work and having enough to take care of yourself and others matters.

Here is the deal. Unique is often not that unique; noncomformity and irresponsibility may be kind of fun for a time, kicking back can be a kick, falling in love young is an awesome feeling, but ignoring a smart, responsible, proven template for living — it can be a disaster.

Seeing You

Posted: May 19, 2013 in people
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“Put one hand here, one there,” I said.

And off he went.

“Ah, I did it wrong,” he said

“It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t hurt anything. Ty it again. Just don’t stop moving when you put the drum down.”

I was teaching a fifteen year old to run a drum floor sander on an oak floor I was refinishing.

When we finished he said, “Thanks, that was interesting.” It was a good feeling for me too.

Working with young people — I like it, old teaching young, and young helping old.

Earlier in the day, in the parking lot at the church, I ran into Angelina. When I saw her, I got down on both knees. She’s five. We are friends. She comes to church with her grandma. Two years ago I adopted her for Christmas. She hasn’t forgotten. We always trade hugs when we see each other, and it’s safe and warm with us, like Christmas.

When I was in my twenties I remember wishing I had someone besides my parents who thought I was special, who believed in me, who would help me forward. It didn’t happen. When I was young, no one ever said to me, “Wow, you are going to do well as a thinker, as a writer, as a leader. Go for it!”

Very few people, besides my mom, saw what I was to become, and helped me move toward that. I didn’t get much help running the sander.

But more helping and mentoring of us all is needed, more seeing into what someone might be and calling it forth. More compliments are needed, more affirmations, more prophesy, more invitations to work together, more opportunity. More showing people how to do what we know how to do is needed. More crossing the generation barrier is needed.

Today I told a young mom who put on a garage sale for the church, ” I like you. You are really organized. You communicate well. I have something in mind for you. Let’s talk later.”

We will. She has got it, the organizational thing, the ability to make stuff mind, the smooth talk skill, the super woman energy source.

Last week I told my friend Glen, who was taking off on a camping trip with eight to ten boys and a few dads, “Man, I love your concern for young men! It is so cool how you have helped the kids in your group without dads. You are the real deal.”

He is! Glen is old, but he is helping young. He is believing in someone besides himself. Glen knows that young men without fathers should not be unattended. He is preventing something; he is crafting something. He is manufacturing social endowment, giving away the store, adding value to human beings.

We need this. People around us need to be adopted, empowered, endowed. We need to tell more people, when we see them doing well, ” You are the real deal! You are something special! You are going to go far!”

What are we thinking, keeping quiet? We are not noticing potential, not seeing the amazing person standing before us, not affirming genius when we see it. We should not be so silent. We should enthuse over them all, the old the young, the disabled, the failed, the smart, the average.

We should smile over them, beam on them, hover behind them, like good parents, shouting, “You can do it! Go for it! You’ve got it in you!” And we should include them in what we do, and show them how to sand, to refinish and to redeem life.

It isn’t that we ever want to flatter, bribe or manipulate with pseudo compliments or false affirmations. We aren’t looking to use people to do what we need to do. No, we want only the truth about each one; we only want to speak out the real value and actual potential in each person, teaching as much as possible as opportunity presents itself.

What is needed is to give the young an opportunity. What is needed is to give the old a vision for passing along their own precious, rich, beautiful familial, occupational, psychological, spiritual and social endowments.

The thing is to get out of ourselves enough to recognize that the amazing people around us are headed somewhere, and that we can help them get there.

There are two ways.

We can walk into rooms as if to say, “Here I am!”

Or we can walk into rooms gushing in redemptive, life-changing honesty and humility, “There you are!”

This Is What I Do — Kind Of

Posted: May 14, 2013 in people
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What it’s like to do what someone else does?

What’s it like to be a rock star, the President, the criminal, the scientist, the spy, the addict, the mother, the etymologist the homeless?

I don’t know. I do kind of know what it is like to do what I do. It’s a bit complicated, but in a way I like, but maybe I can explain it to you. I have four vocations —  at once. I know the inside and out of a quadratic profession.

I am a thinker-writer-teacher-pastor, and I like that; I especially like the bleed between the four. I like the blood and guts and danger in the mix, and the safety in it too — swords, advances, battles, salves, bandages and medicines.

As a thinker I sit a lot and brood. I chew the conceptual cud.

Then I write. As a thinker-writer I become Adam, exploring Eden. I become Aristotle, sorting out the creation. I’m Linnaeus. I hunt for new species. I find little thought beasties. I name them. I tend to them with adjectives, feed them synonyms and poke them a bit with rhetorical devices. I classify the little lovelies, and groupify them.

I pick, sort and stackify words, sentences, larger units. At first, it turns out badly. Then I move them, again, again and again until I better like the ways the word-thoughts line up — just right, like school children at a classroom door.

Then I pat them on the heads, if they please me, and press “Publish.” Then people read them — a few do.

That’s a little bit what it’s like to be a thinker and a writer. Add eye strain, rejection and insecurity and you are getting there.

But it’s not like that. It’s never that clean.

Then, when I am the teacher, I throw the words I’ve discovered as a thinker and writer out of my mouth out into an open spaces with people in them. Then I’m like a Plato, Jesus, Pascal or perhaps Thoreau — or perhaps not. Its interesting what happens then. The ideas I send out scatter.

Written words hold their place a bit and shake, but spoken words run more crazy, like bottle rockets.

As the teacherly words come out of my mouth, they tangle up with the all the words that have ever been said before and with all the words extant in whoever is listening to me. Then my precious little word stacks bounce around inside their heads.

Then just for fun and to establish rapport, I may swing a verbal right jab or linguistic left hook or a kick in the funny bone or what ever comes to mind to try to get to the students. The goal is to get to them — fast and hard.

Sometimes my teaching words stick in people, like spears, and savage what they think, and sometimes the words I speak knock people sideways and they head off in a new direction. That’s kind of cool.

That happens less than you’d think. And then there are the weird things that happen to teachers. Sometimes the ideas I’ve delivered change shapes right in the air, right between me and the listeners, and magically becomes something I didn’t even say.

Then people compliment me or criticize me for telling them things the very stuff they packed into the room with them. It can get interesting. Sometimes it turns out great! I’ve gotten credit for many ideas that other people invented while I was talking. It’s one of the perks of the teacher — bogus credit.

That’s a bit of what it’s like to be a teacher. But not much.

And when I am a pastor my vocations kind of all combine. A pastor, as I understand it is a leader. He is a good thinker and writer and teacher who is taking people place — mostly toward God.

As a pastor, I lead a lot. That’s what I do. I’m not sure what other pastors do, but this is what I do. I lead other people into who God meant for them to be, and I lead places into what God meant for them to become, hopefully. That’s the medicine in what I do.

To do this I listen a lot, to other people’s words and to reality, and to my honed sense of what’s good and what is not, and I try to listen closely to God.

As I listen, I look for a pattern, a sense of things, a drift, a needed next step, a forming personality, a set of emotions that need validation and for a new word or concept. Often I listen through other people, listening hard for the thinker, writer, teacher and pastor within them. Then I help them explore and discover the medicine within the next clear step.

It’s my opinion that people trying to follow God often have a sense of what’s needed next, especially if someone is there to listen, challenge and affirm what they think they are hearing.

The writer, the teacher the pastor as I experience them are really the same thing. These professions are in interaction with each other and with a kind of deep looking, inside and out.

This is just a little bit like what it’s like to do what I do.

I love it!

If you did it, or anything even vaguely like it, you would like it too.

Tidal Worship

Posted: April 9, 2013 in church
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The water was high on the rocks in the flood control channel. I flew along parallel with the water, powering down the freeway, ogling the tidal flow beside me, eager now to see the marsh.

I accelerated up the overpass and swept down the other side of it, through a long banked turn, and there it was — the salt marsh, flooded. It was filled floor-flat. Where there had been mud, now there was a lake; where there had been sinuous narrow marshy channels, now there were wide rivers — marsh to bay, one body of water, with the ocean beyond, rocking the continents.

Life is tidal. I love it. I don’t. I don’t when my emotions flood me under. My experiences, thoughts and feelings, taken at the flood and not, at high tide and low tide, can be a little disconcerting.

Last Saturday evening I sat in Brown Chapel at Point Loma University and watched a band, all young musicians and singers, lead worship. People in the audience stood, some raised their hands, some went forward to stations to do art, to write, to reflect.

I did nothing. I just sat, and watched. I felt nothing. I didn’t stand. I never raised my hands. What was moving some of these worshipers, what filled them with passion, left me as placid as a mud flat.

It’s interesting, how we are differently moved.

And then again, the other day, driving my car and listening to worship song playing loudly on the car system, I broke and cried. It was a song I’ve heard many times, stored on my iPhone, but this time it washed me under.

What’s the deal? Obviously, the movements of our emotions, our spirits, these are not something we control. Our passions, our worship moments come on us as they will, not by choice or by plan but somewhat inexplicably — low feelings unscripted and high emotions unanticipated.

But despite this tidal reality, this emotional norm, we are easily made uneasy with ourselves. When others are moved by a worship service, a prayer, movie, song or other public performance, then sometime we too feel that we should be moved. In church, I have experienced an identity shift crisis over this. Should I be true to my own feelings, my own identity, or must I conform to the current group’s identity, their experience? It is common, in church, to experience a peer mandate to “get with it,” spiritually.

But when we experience church differently from others, the worship dissonance may disrupt our sense of harmony and create internal conflict. “What’s wrong with me?” we sometimes muse in worship settings. Others around me are most alive to the moment, I feel most shockingly dead.

I can stand should-to-shoulder with others who are pouring out their hearts to God in worship and feel nothing. I have even had the unpleasant experience of feeling critical of fellow worshipers, as I stood with them, and critical of the whole “worship” experience around me. It is possible, to be insanely yucked up while others are insanely fired up.

What’s wrong? Nothing. Nothing is wrong when we experience a worship disconnect more than is wrong with anyone else.

Jesus himself explained this quite nicely in John 3:8, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”

Jesus was saying that we who are born of the Spirit, the children of God, the ones who know and worship God, don’t control the coming and going of the Holy Spirit of God.

Face it, we don’t know when or where the Holy Spirit will flood us, move us, emote us, inspire us, and when He won’t.

“Duh!” we don’t control God. We don’t control inspiration. We don’t control the presence of God. We don’t control the tidal movements of God. We don’t decide when we will be moved, when not. We don’t control the inner workings of our souls. We don’t have much control over emotions.

That acknowledged, here’s the deal: Don’t try.

I’ve been through it all — the ecstatic moments, the inert ones, the high tide, the mud. I’ve been struck emotional by the presence of God. I’ve been in his presence and felt absolutely no awareness of him. We all have.

The upshot of all this?

Relax. The tide comes in, the tide goes out; that’s normal, within you, with God.

Life, worship, emotions, your own soul — it’s all tidal.

Hungry for the Desert

Posted: April 4, 2013 in beautiful
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As I looked up, I saw one of the little ones jumped to a higher rock, slip — all gangly legs and feet — and slide down again from where it had started. It was a mistake of inexperience.

The lambs had been born in February, and now — only the beginning of April — there hadn’t been enough time yet for them to master the heights.

Through the spotter scope I watched three ewes and three lambs hop to another rock, stroll into a grassy spot to munch on the new grown green of spring, then scramble on up the high ridge. They stopped for a moment at the top, white bodies silhouetted against the bright blue California desert sky, and then disappeared.

To find these reclusive Bighorn Sheep, I had looked high, I had looked low, and I had looked  long, through the binoculars, and then –magically –they were present, like unicorns found when turning the page in a fairy tale. They were high in the rocks above me. When the rangers brought over the spotting scope, a small crowded gathered.

“Oh, I see them now. Ah, there are the little ones!”

We ogled and oohed for a while, a community of lookers, looking.

I loved the day in the Anza Borrego desert, the sheep, the fellow gawkers, all the wonders that we saw.

We hiked the cactus loop trail, clomping up the mountain between flaming magenta blooming beaver tail and hedgehog cactus. The chollas glowed all around us as if they had put on halos.  In a nearby wash we found a sand plant, growing by a cheese bush. It looked like a tiny pine cone with purple and white flowers popping from its dry, grey sides. It was small, and we had to kneel to focus in on its tiny flower-decorated sides.

Later we off-roaded back to a Kumeyaay Indian site where we scrambled through round boulders to find mortero after mortero in the rock tops, proof of family and community and lambs and ewes of a different kind previously thriving in the desert.

On the drive home, up the mountain and out of the desert, we switchbacked through the mountain lilac all purple and blue-flamed around us a wild turkey flushing in front of the car, sailing over the top of us to the road side, finely feathered and stately as it strutted down the bank and under the bright green trees.

We chatted as we swept up the fields and forests in our wake, trekking down from Julian and back to San Diego. I mentioned the very young homeless couple who I had found sleeping in one of the classrooms at the church last week. They broke into the church, ate up all the children’s snacks, smashed an unlocked storage cabinet, and when discovered in the morning, explained their behavior thus: “We were hungry.”

That gets it. These young broken ones, addicted to the meth, are very hungry, and I think they will be more and more.

And the mountain sheep and their lambs are hungry too, for the bright green grasses growing high on the ridges, and the Indians too, who lived here long ago, they were hungry, hunching over their morteros in the desert, grinding grain for bread and waiting to eat. And the sand plant hungry and thirsty too for more spring rain to sooth it’s drying sides, and the turkey crossing the road, headed somewhere to feed and drink in safety, and me and my friends too, headed back to our homes, from a day out —  all hungry.

I love the desert!

I need the desert.

It fills me up, just a bit, to live a little more, in a stunningly beautiful and hungry world.

Blessed Are The Poor

Posted: March 25, 2013 in Uncategorized
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“I’m frightened!” he said and clutched his little bag of chips with both hands. He was sitting on his nanny’s lap. The whale leaping from the water in front of him was way too big. It was a scary, crazy, child-eating whale!

When he left Sea World that day, he broke, on the sidewalk, yelling and screaming. It was all just a bit too much. He was eventually picked up and carried off to the car. He needed a good nap.

“Blessed are the poor…” said Jesus.

The little four-year old, on the sidewalk breaking down, was blessed, I think, because he was poor, and he knew it, poor in emotional reserves, poor in self-control and in poor in comfort. And so he was blessed by his nanny, holding him at the whale show, picking him up off the sidewalk, carrying him home to rest.

There are many kinds of poor, and there are many possible blessing, but it is safe to say we are all poor; and therefore, we might all be blessed — maybe.

There is poor in righteousness. That pretty much covers the globe. There is poor in health. We all get there one day. There is poor in self-control, (which is episodic for all at best), poor in insight, poor in resources, poor in wisdom, poor in freedom from addiction, poor in peace, poor in love. It goes on, and on, and on beyond on until it is obvious that it is all.

Poor, and frightened and screaming, eventually —  all!

On the same sidewalk — all.

Poor — all!

And so all are all blessed, according to Jesus, if I understand him right, if we realize, recognize and embrace our poverty. If we don’t we aren’t blessed because not knowing we need, we won’t look up, won’t ask and won’t say, “Thanks,” and therefore will miss the blessing of being helped.

It is only when we honestly realize that we are poor that we know we need something more than ourselves and look up and get that needed help. Blessed are all the poor who open the door to the rich comfort of God. Blessed are the nannied.

There is one way more that the poor might be considered blessed. They have the opportunity of figuring it out.

Today I’m poor —  poor in peacefulness. I’m upset.

I’m doing my taxes. That’s enough right there to turn the stumach acid pump on. And there is more, much more, of life, to stress over, responsibilities to mangage,  payments to be made,  contracts to be signed and killer whales to stay out-of-the-way of. There is, life! It’s a kind of constantly stressful poverty.

But I am realizing that each moment has its answers, its solutions, its calm-making decisions, if I will just figure it out. The tax questions, after some hard work, are now answered on my worksheet page, and so will all the other pressing business be answered, as I, figure it out.

It is a blessing, to get to figure it out. It is a blessing to have poverty of some kind, to have taxes of some kind, and to have a brain of some kind, and to get to figure it out after some fashion, and to get up off the hard sidewalk and go home and take a rest afterwards.

Poverty is always our blessed opportunity to figure it out.

And so, happy indeed are the poor, for a least two good reasons.

One, they will be helped, if they look up from their tantrum and ask.

Two, becuase they don’t have enough, they get the blessing of figuring something out.

Happy indeed are the thinking, thankful, receptive poor.

mixed

Posted: March 13, 2013 in people
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P1020582When I came around the corner of the breezeway in the church, I was a bit surprised to see a shopping cart stuffed with suitcases, and on the hall floor a rectangle of lumpy sleeping bags and blankets. Then it came to me; a bedroom had been set up in front of my office door, the lumps, under the blankets —  people sleeping.

I had just walked to the office from a large room down the hall where polling booths had been set up and volunteers were in place to receive the ballots of people coming to vote in the special election of a new senator.

There the stuff to make a senator; here, a temporary homeless camp.

Sleeping bags, ballots, blankets and voting booths — the ebb of life mixes the levels and layers which ferry us along, some on concrete, some on mattresses, some with acceptance speeches in their dreams, some harboring alarms and starts and stops and frights all night.

I recognized them, woke them, offered a bit of food from our pantry, and sent them off with some little plastic bowls of peaches and a kind goodbye. They had been at church on Sunday and it came to me with a slight shock that I had never before woken parishioners sleeping on the sidewalk of the church.

But really, this is no anomaly. This is life everywhere. The poor and rich rub shoulders all over the world, one huddled under a dirty blanket, one housed and roofed and clean and safe and voted into power not far away.

It is our nature to seek out a compartment, a place, a niche and corner for the classes, the races, the ages and the genders. You live here, you over there, you up high, you down low, you in this church, you in that, you with this role, you play that, you sleep here and you can lay out over there. We tend too much to craft walls of common social bricks, of preferred addresses, and of identical building blocks.

We tend to set up our camps where we get what we want, moving to the suburbs for the schools, the inner city to blend in with our people, moving downtown to be upscale, moving to the country to get away from the city. We move west or east or north or south to find that little nook, that sequestered cranny, that briefly quieted corner where we can toss out a blanket, lie down a moment with our people, shield off something fearful and recover from our differences.

But when I go to my church, and I see the mix, the family who drove over in the Lexus, the family that walked over from the homeless camp, the one who took the trolley, the one who came in the Mini Cooper, the family from Peru, the one from Porta Rico, the beautiful woman from Jamaica who lives alone, the man with the addiction to power, the one addicted to meth, the woman who just moved up from Mexico with her children, the navy couple from the east coast, and I see them sing the same song and lift up the same hearts in the same place, then I know the truth, we are much the same.

Mix, toss, mash, mingle and lump together — the church is a sacred corner, a wooden floor and a cross-covered roof where we may see we are the same. There we all, with hands raised — children of one father, with identical hearts weighed down the same sins, weak and strong all in need of the same forgiveness — there, we cry out to the same savior.

I like the mix.

Good With Not Perfect

Posted: March 5, 2013 in people
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ExplosivesToday I noticed that my beautiful skin has sun spots on it, lines and wrinkles too — and one bulgy place, near the middle.

Also, I noticed again that my terra cotta kitchen floor has a dark scratch in it. I have a rug over the scratch, but it slips from time to time, and shows the mar.

Today I ate, steadily — therapy for scratches, and spots —  and I watched Romeo and Juliet die eloquently, in Fanco Zeffirelli’s movie version of Shakespeare’s tragic love story.

Life with or without the Capulets and Montagues, feuding in the background, is often far from perfect. Family isn’t perfect, and we aren’t either. Somebody told me recently, “I don’t like my voice; it’s nasally. It sounds like Yzma, the old lady in the The Emperor’s New Groove.” And there is more than that which is not perfect.

Last week, my uncle Jerry’s wife passed away. I talked with Uncle Jerry on the phone last night. He was watching some nature DVD’s, and feeling lonely —  of course. He said that he had gone out to the a swap meet that morning, looking for art, as he always does on Saturdays. He’s incredibly knowledgeable about American art. He was kind of wondering if going out was okay, seeing how little time had passed. I told him I thought it was.

Life isn’t perfect — or when it is — it doesn’t stay that way for long. Nothing survives the clot and rot of time’s inexorable march into dust.

But in our minds we want it good, better and we want it best. Perhaps we too much want it perfect.

Perhaps we want too much the enviable body, the together look, the perfect floor or family or schooled and accomplished self.

But it’s come to me of late what a fool’s errand perfectionism is, a false companion, to us all.

I’ve noticed lately how beautifully imperfect all things present themselves. I happened across on an old rusted trailer last weekend, rotting in a field. There, in the moment, it was a sort of amazing piece of dying artwork,  colored in rust —  a ripped, deteriorating, eroding, fading wonder. It was splendor in decline, but still splendid.

Take the human body. Most bodies, after the early years, aren’t taut, toned, sculpted, curvy or proportioned perfectly. They aren’t like the ones in the  magazines, they are not like the bodies on TV or in the movies. But bodies, not perfectly shaped, not the advertizing standard, not the current culture’s fickle fashion, are yet all amazingly beautiful.

Small, large, skinny, layered, lumpy, protuberant, muscled, flabby — all good. Skin itself  is always beautiful if we just accept it as it is — in rolls, puckered,  smooth, wrinkled, lined. It is all gorgeous and amazing as the protective human fabric we model for each other everyday.

It would be best to be done with wanting things to be perfect. If they are, we should enjoy them as that, but if they are not, and they will be not perfect longer than they are perfect, we should enjoy them just as well.

Exult in imperfection! Take pleasure in used. Accept scratches. Revel in spots. Even, make friends with death.

And, be particularly kind, I’d say, to family, and avoid feuding, with others and yourself. And most personally, be easy on your body, your own artfully deteriorating trailer. Gentle your needy. Honor your cracking voice. Savor your rust! Tender your fat. Love your jiggly parts. Be kind to your scrawniness. Shepherd your shyness and your sadness too. Make friends with your forgetfulness. And love your skin, that sumptuously beautiful bag that yet retains your lovely, sagging warp and woof.

I’m good with that. I advise you, to be happy, be  good with all that too.

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