I spent a weekend in a writer’s workshop earlier this year. It was a wonderful time facilitated by Patrice Gopo. patricegopo.com There was a writing sprint – 12 prompts in one hour. I don’t write that fast, but others can. One prompt sticks in my mind: Who’s responsible for your mother’s suffering? Go ahead. Spend five minutes on that.

But that’s not what this post is about. It comes from a different prompt. Describe a morning that you woke up without fear. I really wanted to get this writing out to you months ago, as I felt good about what I wrote. But I had to find that photograph that directed my writing, and had to be a part of my story.

Finally found it today, and so friends, here’s a story.

I arise from my warm bed, into the darkened beach house. I switch on the coffeemaker, and silently leave the house filled with snores and slumber. Stepping onto the high deck, overlooking the ocean, standing on boards weathered by sun and spray, I look towards the horizon. Only a glimmer of the dawn to come, the lighter grey making only the slightest division between water and sky. I lower my eyes to the beach below, and slowly make my way down the stairs to the sand.

Walking in the boundary between water and solid sand, my senses are taking in the sounds and smells of the surf. The caress of the water across my feet, and the warm offshore breeze carrying the earth and the bayou out to sea.

Walking northward along the beach, the brighter part of the sky behind me, I view the liminal space between sand and water. The shiny light grey of the water washing up the beach. Transforming into a patchwork, and then fading to the dark sand.

No one else is witnessing this scene. This is for me, only.

Up and over each groin, jutting rocks out past the surf, the futile attempt to hold onto the sand. Ever so slowly, the sky’s color changes – grey, giving way to lavender. The ocean’s color, reflecting the sky also changes. The purple water, fringed in the white foam, pushing its way up the beach fades into darkness. I continue to walk, over groin and over groin.

Purple giving way to dimmest shade of orange. Water, sometimes purple, and sometimes orange shushes its way up the beach, like a parent comforting a child. I look back towards where the sun will eventually rise, much brighter than before to my dark adjusted eyes. As if my attention had been called, the first flight of pelicans tuck themselves below the wave top. Effortlessly gliding, nestled in the boundary.

Lighter still, water and sky, I turn back. Groin after groin, I walk back. The seagulls harsh call awakens. Walking up the stairs, quietly filling a mug with the dark brew, silently stepping back onto the porch, I sit down in the pastel blue rocking chair.

Steam lightly fogs my glasses, still waiting for the sunrise.

Watching carefully for the triangular fin that announces the dolphins.

Quietly waiting for my lover to join me on the porch.

Thanks for hanging in there – there are more stories coming soon.

This is the centenary of my mom’s birth. Lucille’s one hundredth birthday, had she not died some thirteen years ago. I’ve been thinking a lot about what she lived through.

World War I just not two years gone when she was born. I wish I would have had a chance to talk with my grandma and my mom about what it was like to have a German surname in those days. I can imagine that it didn’t always feel safe.

She was a young girl during the Great Depression and scarcity and poverty are hard taskmasters. I’m pretty sure the family kept a cow and had chickens in the village of Dexter, and so they had food, if not money.

She was married the summer of the 1939, the start of World War II, although it would take over two years before the US would get involved. Her first child, John, was born when she was only 22, and young men were enlisting or being drafted into military service. My dad waited until he was drafted into the Army, then shipped off to Burma for the duration plus six months.

Sometime later, her in-laws moved in and stayed with them until they died in the early 1960’s. I love my in-laws, but I can’t imagine six, then seven, and finally eight people in a four bedroom house with one bathroom – let alone in-laws that probably were clear about how things must be done.

Parents are a product of all that they lived through before becoming parents, and they do the best they can. I don’t think my mom met all the needs of her children, but she did the best she could, was loving, wasn’t abusive, was consistent and kind. One might want more, but kids rarely know what their parents are dealing with.

She was amazingly graceful as it came time to sell the big four bedroom house as her driving skills became worse and needed additional care. When it became more difficult for her to manage, and more difficult for Marcia and I to spare the hours of travel to get her to appointments, we moved her closer to us. And when she finally moved in a nursing home, again, she accepted it with grace (or at least never let on that it was less than good).

Whenever musicians came to the nursing home, she always had two requests: Jesus Loves Me, and When The Saints Go Marching In.

The last words she said to us were ‘Happy Anniversary!’ as she died on our 25th wedding anniversary. The solemnity of the minutes after she died with three of her four children present (the fourth had transportation issues) was completely broken by a television suddenly blaring from down the hallway a scene from My Fair Lady, the musical number ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’.

Remembering my mom on her birthday, and the anniversary of her death is always with a smile and a laugh of that time.

Twenty years already. Really?

I have pretty vivid memories of August 22, 2000. It was a Tuesday, and I simply don’t remember what the morning and workday were like. I imagine they were unremarkable. An event on the bike ride home was life-changing, and in the moment, hours and a few days forward had a very real possibility of being life-ending.

I was rolling westward on Mount Hope, a major four lane thoroughfare from Okemos on the east, through East Lansing and Lansing. I was approaching the intersection of Mount Hope and Aurelius. This corner has a rural feel while being well within the city limits of Lansing. The northeast corner is a wetland, and former toxic waste site. Across Mount Hope is Fenner Arboretum, acres of trees and prairie. The southwest corner is a vast cemetery, and the northwest corner were greenhouses and a tree nursery. What it did not have was anyone or any place to get help.

Slowing to stop, I tilted my head to look at the red light facing me. A sharp pain suddenly occurred, and I thought, ‘Oh, great. A crick in my neck.’ In only a couple of seconds, the ‘crick’ was re-defining what 10 was on the pain scale. In just a few seconds more, I was sure this was either a stroke, or a brain aneurysm. With no place to get help, I resigned myself to bike the rest of the way home. The light turned green, and I began to pedal. Once through the intersection, a new thought, ‘I can ride my bike, so I guess it’s not a stroke. An aneurysm, then. Not good.’

I made it the mile and a half home, shoved my bicycle into the garage, and made my way weakly into our house. ‘Hello, Sweet Pea,’ greeted my wife, Marcia, ‘Are you okay? Do you have a migraine?’ My one syllable reply ‘No’ must have told her something. ‘Do you need to go to Emergency? ‘Yes.’ I muttered.

I think I went to the bathroom, changed from cycling shorts to regular shorts, and walked to the car. “Take the pork chops out of the oven in fifteen minutes. I’ll be back, or get someone to stay with you. Dad will be alright’, said Marcia in a raised, but calm, voice.

We went to the nearest emergency department, a mere five blocks away. For a couple of minutes, we waited patiently in the waiting room. The person ahead of us, an elderly man was speaking loud enough for us to hear, about a fall he had four weeks ago, and was just now seeking treatment. ‘I think I’m going to throw-up from the pain’, I told Marcia. Apparently, magic words in triage. I was quickly moved to a wheelchair, the other man moved aside, and I was taken to an exam room while Marcia was finishing the paperwork. My wristband had my arrival time of 18:13 or 6:13 PM, less than 25 minutes from the intersection where the pain started. ‘He needs a head CT, and morphine for pain’, the doctor ordered. In just a few minutes, the doctor reports back: ‘You have bleeding in your brain. A sub-arachnoid hemorrhage, an aneurysm most likely. We’re going to need to transfer you to Sparrow’s Neurointensive care, but there aren’t any beds available in the unit, so we have to wait until they clear a bed.’

I felt anxious, and scared; bad, but not too bad. My pain was tolerable, until it wasn’t. It was already more pain than I had ever felt, and now it was even worse. More morphine was given, and my mind went wandering. Disassociated sentence fragments: ‘A different room’, ‘a room with a monitor’. I hear a baby crying. The baby with a broken arm is playing with a ball with a jingle bell inside is what I hear, unable to make any sense of the monitor beeps and alarm signals that were actually happening.

Lying in a bed, in the dark, hallucinating – this is how it ends? Except that time has become fluid, now and then, past, present and future are watercolors running together. A real sense of fear that I won’t survive.

Lights switched on, the EMT’s arrived to take me to Sparrow. They lifted me from my bed to the gurney, connected me to a portable monitor, and away we went. There had been a bad storm with a lot of lightning. ‘Power’s out all over the place. I’ve never seen lightning like this’, said one of the EMT’s. I tried to figure out what roads we were taking by the motion of the ambulance. ‘Can’t take Pennsylvania, it’s flooded again under the railroad bridge’, the EMT continued.

Arriving at Sparrow, I can smell the rain evaporating from the sun-warmed concrete. (That smell takes me right back to the ambulance bay, to this day.)

The resident doctor, and a doctor just beginning her rotation in NICU, and a nurse went through the intake process. Simple questions to assess my brain function: What is your name? What day is it? Do you know where you are? Who is the president?

The nurse asked if I had an advance directive. ‘What’s that?’, I asked. She explained. ‘Do I need one?’, I asked. She responded, ‘Well, you’re conscious right now.’ I took that to mean that I was still conscious, but that could or would change.

Finally, I was all hooked up to the equipment, more drugs administered, and I was left alone. I realized that I had been holding on to the fear of dying, like a clenched muscle held for too long. Clearly, being intensive care meant that my condition was serious, if not, critical.

Somewhere in that brief interlude, I ‘heard’ words as clear as if they were spoken to me: ‘You’re going to be okay.’ It was not a thought that was circulating in my head, and it was attached to the feeling of being okay – simply okay. It was unconnected to an outcome, as if in the moment, living, surviving or dying were states that I would be okay in, no matter what.

Twenty years on, I still can be comforted by the simple thought: You’re going to be okay.

The places that I’ve worked have been on my mind for about the last three months. Sometimes it’s been in the form on nightmares (I suspect everyone has those kind of dreams). No place that I’ve worked has been ideally suited to me. Or perhaps, it’s me that hasn’t been suited to the workplace. I pick up quickly on the people at work I cannot trust, those that are gossips, those that I can’t be authentic with, or the deceitful.

I had an experience a few months back where I talked to two individuals with polar opposite views about how things were in their workplace. One said it was the best ever, the other the worst ever. How could their experiences been so different? They were different people, of course. Differing amounts of control over their workday, different genders, different departments, different responsibilities. And different experiences with the exact same person.

It got me thinking about my experiences in the workplace. Perhaps I behave differently with different people, treat them differently because of previous experiences with them. I probably should just strike the word ‘perhaps’, as I know I do. My coworkers make it into my dreams, and my therapy sessions.

My therapist and I have talked a lot recently about why I stayed for as long as I did after I became disillusioned. I think I had unrealistic expectations of my coworkers. I could have just lowered that bar to ‘I have a job – I get paid – that’s all that matters’. But then there were those that met my high expectations, and I hope that I met theirs of me. They were the ones that I could be authentically me, that cared about me, and I cared about them. I think part of my reasoning was that I couldn’t ‘abandon’ them.

A local theatre company recently had a play about workplace violence. Yes, there were polar opposite views of the workplace. Yes, there were toxic workers portrayed. Act one ended in a mass shooting.

While I never experienced workplace violence such as that, to be truly honest with you, there were some coworkers that I had ‘unkind’ thoughts about.

I have been thinking about those people that made it, at least, bearable, up to really good. Some of them read my blog. To them, I want you to truly know that you made a difference, that I still think about you, and appreciate you. It was you that were honest, that kept confidences, that I could be authentic with. Thank you. Let’s keep in touch.

The word sanctuary evokes a sense of safety. We think of the bird sanctuaries, the fish sanctuaries, and all of the other ones where the animals are safe from predation. What we mean to say about these sanctuaries is that we try our best to keep them safe from human predators. The animals that gather in these sanctuaries are not safe from all predators. The birds continue to prey on fish, the fish prey on each other, as do the land animals.

A lot of churches call their main gathering space a sanctuary. Some are sanctuary churches where people may go to escape a powerful government that wants to send them back to very unsafe places.
We dearly want to feel safe. Those that have been victimized, those that are survivors, dearly want a place where we can let our guard down. We all need that place.

Rationally, we only need to read the news to know that churches aren’t immune or separated from the world. That clergy and parishioners are people and that they can and do sexually assault each other.

Often, people speak from their own experience. Male clergy that have only supported women survivors/victims of sexual assault by male perpetrators will use language that excludes male victims/survivors and female perpetrators. (I conjoin these two words survivor and victim because of a recent discussion that pointed out that there isn’t a switch thrown that transforms a victim to survivor – that both can and do co-exist in the same person) These clergy may not be aware that they further isolate, and in some sense re-victimize survivor/victims who identify as male.

For hundreds and hundreds of years, churches used only male pronouns to refer to God. By not including the broad spectrum of human genders, those that identify as not male were excluded from the divine representation. Some church denominations have worked hard on their language. If there is a God, and we are created in their image, simply standing on a street corner and viewing those that pass by should be enough to show that God cannot exist as one tiny segment of the human experience.

Raise the awareness, people. Any gender can be a perpetrator of sexual assault, and any gender can be a survivor/victim. Our language must be expansive in order to acknowledge, support and care for all people. As I said, if we don’t do this, we further stigmatize and isolate those that already feel isolated.

Peace and Love,
Harold

I have been in a phase lately where there’s been so much to feel, but precious little time to write it out. I’ve thought about writing quite a bit, working out essays in my head, but not getting them written out.

I did get a piece written for the Tower Harbour Yacht Club’s annual Blessing of the Fleet. This is my third opportunity to speak at their season opening. I think it’s hard to know what to say that will resonate with a group of spiritual strangers. The topic of faith rarely comes up among boaters. Writing essays here has honed my writing, and changed the focus of who I’m writing for. The Blessing of the Fleet 2019 was written for my pleasure, and not my audience, and they, like you, get to read my thoughts.

The Blessing of the Fleet is an ancient Christian tradition, believed to have begun along the Mediterranean Sea where priests would bless the boats and the captains, asking in prayer for a good catch of fish during the season, and the safety of those that go to sea. This is a practice begun centuries before weather forecasts, satellites and radar. A time when people sought a higher power with authority over the winds and seas, as us mere mortals had no such power.

Today, we still gather to bless our boats, knowing full well we are powerless to hold back the rising lake level, or flood waters.

All life that we know depends upon water: Water is life. This theme is found in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, in the Quran, in the sacred texts of almost every faith tradition.

As boaters, water becomes our life. We might drive many miles to be here on the shared waters of Lake Michigan. Many of us travel in the Winter to where the water is liquid and warm. As winter dragged on, my wife and I immersed ourselves in a Youtube series that kept the hope of summer alive in spite of the dark and cold.

We may own our boat, and rent a slip, but the waters are shared among all of us and the creatures within it. No matter whether your boat is powered by wind, or fuel, or paddle. No matter whether it barely fits in your slip, or tucks neatly in to the trunk of a car. The water is shared by each of us.

As we pass out the turquoise ribbons we will put on our boats, let it be a symbol that our boats are blessed, that each of us is blessed, and the waters we ply are shared waters. Tie it to your wheel, or your rigging. Place it where you’ll remember this day.

I’ve recently come across a Jainist sutra that spoke to me: The body is like a boat, and our soul is a sailor. As we turn our gathering to remember those whose ‘boats’ were here last year, but now they sail on different waters, I invite you to speak their names:

We gather up those whose names have been spoken, those that are known in our hearts and put their memory into this bouquet of flowers and place it on the waters. I close this time together with the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Crossing the Bar
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
I bid you fair winds and following seas this season.

 

 

My last essay was my sermon. It’s been a month or more since I preached. As an infrequent preacher, the responses from those that felt touched or moved by my words is powerful.

I don’t know what people that didn’t care for it thought, because they just pass by the receiving line. So all I really hear is really positive. As I poured a lot of thought, energy, and love into my writing, the positive reaction is very encouraging.

I had been reading Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind around the time that I preached. It is a book that looks at psychedelic drugs as treatment for mental illness, the parallels of the transcendent interconnectedness of the drug state, and the meditative state, how our minds close down in adulthood for the sake of ‘efficiency’, exploded open by drugs or practice.

I think being buoyed by the positive energy of the readers and listeners, coupled with a heightened awareness of the mystical placed me in a receptive place.

It was the Tuesday after I preached. It was mid-March in Michigan. That means the grass was a sickly yellow, flattened by the winter snowpack. Nothing green was in sight as the winter dormancy carried on. In other words, the scene wasn’t what you would expect to have a transcendent experience. I had had breakfast, and I was standing in my bedroom, getting dressed and looking at the scene before me.

It was then that I felt so amazingly loved by the world and everyone on it. And just as I thought, ‘Wow’, I had the major shift to ‘I love everyone and everything in the world.’ I was awestruck in that moment, and I sat on the bed and looked out at the sickly yellow grass and saw astonishing beauty, and my love flowed. ‘Even him?’, to that one who has harmed so many in our country. Even him. Wow.

A month has passed, and the awesomeness has faded somewhat. The process of understanding the experience, and making meaning from it continues. I know right where the feeling is, and I go back to it like a talisman, and I feel it just as plainly.

I’ve spent the better part of the month thinking about love. I’ve been thinking of my loved ones, and that amazing expansion to ALL of the loved ones in the mystical experience. I’ve been thinking about people that I love, and still love, even separated by space, time or boundaries. For me, in my pondering, love doesn’t have an off switch. I’m careful about saying, ‘I love you.’ I don’t want to make others feel like they have to say it back to me just because I feel love for them. I’ve spent most of the month wondering how I was going to put into words the experience I had which really cannot be expressed by words. Ineffable.

I’ve been thinking about the dystopian despair, fear and cynicism that dominates and dictates our culture, and how we interact. I reflect, and experience anew, this astonishing love that disrupts all of that: I will not despair, fear or be cynical when being loving will change all of that.

I know where I was mentally, merely two years ago, where I couldn’t feel that I could love myself. It’s a feeling that I will remember, and contrast with a feeling of love pouring forth in extravagant portions.

The poets have said: ‘All you need is love….Love is all you need.’

Love to you.

Harold

 

I write this after have made a late-Winter trip to check on Arcturus. Mainly, it’s to check on the tarps that protect her from worst of the winter weather. This Winter the winds have been strong, so I’ve had to re-set some of plastic pipe framework we use that gives our boat a Conestoga wagon appearance.

I borrowed a borescope camera from the public library and took a look around the icebox that’s on board. I had a suspicious that the insulation wasn’t very good, as we’ve seen packing peanuts end up in a locker and near the bilge. I though I must have spilled some out of a shipping box, but I’d clean them up, and a couple of weeks later they would come back. The camera barely entered the space around the ice box when I ran into the packing peanuts. They probably would be better than nothing if it wasn’t for the uneven distribution, and the lack of anything to trap air around the peanuts.

I started to remove them. One trash bag (wastebasket sized), two, and then I half filled the locker space near the icebox. I gave up the proceedings, and vowed to return with a big shopvac for more progress and less work. I took out three bags today, and I estimate at least another three. I’ll figure out a method to get better access and install some poly-iso foam boards in place of the peanuts. This will all be sealed up with spray foam and tape where needed.

And it’s March. On my mind is an anniversary of restarting therapy two years ago. It has been two years of attaining most of the goals that I set for myself. Two years of taking much better care of myself. Two years of building up better boundaries for myself. Looking back, I can see how low I was, and how close I was to disaster. And sitting here, two years on, I feel pretty good. I might always need medications to get my brain chemistry into the healthy zone. I don’t expect to end therapy anytime soon, but I can imagine stretching out the time between sessions. I believe I am going to make it.

I’m also thinking of friend that is looking for a therapist, and all that that entails. When you start therapy, you feel pretty much like shit. And the progress seems really slow at first. I think I’ve written about the sudden realizations when I’ve felt better. If you know someone that is in therapy right now, would you tell them how strong and courageous they are? Tell them how much they are loved. It means a lot. And ask them if they would accept a hug. You might tell them about a hugging meditation from Plum Village https://plumvillage.org/mindfulness-practice/hugging-meditation/ that you learned about.

Spring for us northern hemisphere folk is less than two weeks away. You can make it. I can make it.

Share your love.

When you live in Michigan like I do, the winter can just wear you down. Lately, it’s been so cold to make you not want to go out-of-doors. The snow in Lansing has been uneven, a nice four or five inches followed by rain only two days later. And then it’s the clouds that go on for days, and days. The sky might clear just before sunset.

So, when I got a great deal on a brand-new, but never used, no longer needed, won’t someone take this off of my hands and out of my spare bedroom sail, I was told by my dear wife that we needed to go to Pompano Beach, Florida to pick it up. Although it’s lightweight, the package would be pretty big.

We left on a miserable, schools are closed, winter’s day driving at speeds around 40 to 50 miles per hour until we got to the point where it was no longer icy. That was about three hours of what would have been a twelve hour driving day that expanded in fourteen.

It’s a very long way to southern Florida, and our two day journey was over 1450 miles.

But the next morning, after spending two hours in the bright sunshine on the beach, I almost forgot about the long drive. I didn’t quite realize how much my body and my mind was craving the warmth, and the bright sun (neither of which are available in Michigan during winter). I’ve been supplementing vitamin D for about a year and a half, I use artificial sunshine (a very bright light panel) and all this helps but it’s not like sandals, shorts and a t-shirt with the bright, dare I say, hot sun shining down.

It’s a Michigan hot sun. I’ve only been in Florida twice during the summer, and that’s a totally different kind of weather that unless I’m neck deep in the ocean, I’d prefer not to experience.

We’ve spent a few days exploring Merritt Island, bird watching and alligator watching, the latter something one doesn’t do in Michigan. And we’ve adjusted our plans to stay in the deep South one more day to avoid the cold rain, and to delay the inevitable journey back into winter.

A delightful respite that I hope carries me through until the snow melts away for the last time this winter.

The strangest thing about traveling from the cold to warm is when the temperature for the car heat switches seamlessly in air conditioning. And this morning as we travel home, the 78 degree setting of A/C in Titusville became heat as we entered Georgia.

I’ve been thinking about the questions of therapy. Not the plaintive ‘How am I going to make it through this alive?’ questions, but the repetitive check-in questions that really need to be asked at every session. I am going to share them with you, because I think they should just be part of the practice of being human, and honestly answered may do much to help us get through another week.

‘How has your mood been lately?’ This is like taking your temperature, or the barometric pressure. Day by day, over a week’s time, and we’re in touch with the highs and lows of our mood, and some of the events or feelings that can push our mood up or down.

‘How have you been sleeping?’ Sleep is so important. I know that when I’m not sleeping well, my mood sinks. And when my mood sinks, I don’t sleep well. It’s a good measure of anxiety. I prefer uninterrupted sleep, but that is not often possible living in an urban environment. Noise will wake me. It’s supposed to, by design. A survival mechanism, certainly, but triggered too often and your peaceful night’s sleep is wrecked. I’m hearing the words of a friend right now, ’Earplugs,’ she’d say.

‘How are your family members?’ The health of your people, and that includes the four-legged family members, affect your mood.

We all have our worries. Often, work or money, or lack thereof, has a huge effect on our mental health. Relationships, struggles with a balance of quiet, alone time and community time, the relentless darkness and cold of a Michigan winter. Feel free to add whatever else distresses you here, and you have a pretty good picture of how worries stack up.

Rarely in therapy do we talk of the current events, although they certainly have an effect. The destabilizer-in-chief is not good for my mental health, and so I have had to pull the plug on paying attention more than a handful of minutes per day. There are others that can stay involved and stay healthy. It won’t be me right now.

And that’s okay because that’s self-care. Intentionally not doing the things that are unhealthy, and doing the things that are healthy. My unhealthy things have been pushing myself to do more, getting caught up in negative emotions, and putting my needs last. My healthy things are walking and biking, being in nature, sailing, writing, and adding the things that bring me joy. 2019 will see me at more live music events because for too long I’ve done without that.

Stay warm, folks – we in the mid-west are in for it.