Requiem For Madiba

A dream maker has passed.

He saw visions the rest of us could barely imagine.

But mostly he saw the best of what we all might be.

He saw in us a spark of genius, talent, potential, divinity and brother/sisterhood.

Leaders like him scare me because they demonstrate what I am most afraid of: the me I might be if I allowed myself to believe the vision that is my birthright.

And he acted on it. Acted in the face of injury, insult, and prison, maybe even death. Hatred surely.

His path was the rocky one, the heroic undoing of complacency and comfort of the status quo. 

I have to wonder where and how that level of conviction and courage developed.

Was he told by his father that he was born to greatness? Did he win races as a child? Did he have a vision under the stars while working in the fields of Africa?

How did that tree of unshakeable courage take root?

Most likely it was the result of small things, messages, luck.

So many things can derail a man or a woman from his or her destiny.

However he got there, he worked from that base to set in place social and political structures that would allow millions the chance to better achieve their visions, heart's desire, their fullest potential.

No small feat that.

I see broken men all around me. Some of them broken by poverty, drugs, incarceration. Others by their own poisons, a self-defeating, inside job.

I am one myself. But I know that and watch for the signs that I am living under the shadow of the angry, broken, spiteful man. 

Broken men like me are dangerous. They tend to tolerate the breaking of others. They may even do it themselves. They are subject to angry leaders who blame others for problems. They identify with their wounds, their damage.

Mandela saw this and side-stepped it. He could have been a demagogue of indignation and revenge. He could have joined a long line of false prophets and dictators who enrich themselves on misery and genocide.

But he did not. He resisted black domination as much as he resisted white.

He saw past his anger and desires to exact a price for his sacrifices. He did not ask for the tooth or eye in payment for what was taken from him.

Yes, he was a political hero, a statesman.

But he was also a man who mastered his demons, a man who forgave, a spiritual example.

It is this that I toast. It is this to which I bow.

He has shown me that there is a man inside me, down there somewhere; he taught that I have to break my own chains as part of breaking others'.

He reminds me that it is my work to keep digging, to unearth the treasure of that shining, fearless, indomitable inheritance.

I raise my cup, lower my head, hear the music that runs through me and all things.

Adios, Madiba. 

Ode to Darkness

Dearest Darkness,

I wander your moonlit arroyos and thank you for the stars.

They are sharp as cut crystal this time of year.

It is because of you that I can see the stars, remember where I come from, be reminded of all I have yet to know.

Your cold pierces my comfort, the heat lighting my body.

I want to see you alone. That way you can tell me about the patience and vulnerability of stones.

They crack with frost but are not afraid to sleep for a time with a frozen heart.

I am not a stone, but can still learn from them.

We of this Earth sometimes fear what we might find in the secrets you harbor.

This narrow window of long desert night is also a delicacy, a rare and wonderful delight. I want to hide out with you, curl up close, light a fire, get a hot drink, cover with a quilt, and descend into you.

You bring gifts as wonderful and precious as the light's, but yours speak a language of dreams, and shadow. You restore what has been lost, open what is closed, free what has been locked away.  

You show me treasures invisible in the day.

This is time to find the truth of fire.

So for this season, I will take time to gaze at your midnight mirror, to hold close your emptiness. It is there that the future resides, what might be if I could only see.

I will sit with you, the dark, and invite you to sing your soulful tune as we whisper to each other in the language of winter.

I will try to love you no less than the light. 

Dancing With Compromise

My sons and other young people I meet and work with are at a crossroads. They are trying to figure out how best to be happy while making a living. They are new to the maze where reality engages with desires.

All I can tell them is that they have to referee a battle between hungry dogs. There is a war that is waged in the psyche between the need to be practical and the heart's desire, between the mind and the soul. Joseph Campbell famously said "Follow you bliss," as the guide for a life lived well and fully. Then there are the fairy tales of industrious critters making hay while others dawdle in order to be the ones who survive when winter comes.

Both bliss and street wisdom are great truths, often at odds with one another. They need respect and they need each other to thrive. They form one of the great questions that I have yet to fully understand. 

Together, they form a question that is a tough nut to crack, and even now, in my late fifties, I have little counsel for young people who are trying to map out a life, to make decisions about how to live.

For people like me, work is a requirement for survival, and income makes the difference between misery and comfort. Money talks and people respond. Poverty talks too, but people are deaf to what it says and usually turn away or wrinkle with scorn.

On the other side, the universe dances when anyone finds his or her passions and lives by them. It dims a bit when the lights of talent starve for lack of expression.

The problem is that passion doesn't always equate to income. Sometimes it's hard to live on bliss.

So, how does one manage both the economic realities while feeding and living by dreams? How does one survive while fulfilling a calling? How does one make a living while trying to write?

And what if making a living precludes the writing, or the music, or the painting, or the dancing, or whatever it is that lights the fire of the heart?

The answers to these contemplations lie with the individual and there are as many as there are lives to reveal them.

In addition,the fight, it must be said, is often not a fair one. Few of us are asked what it is that we want to do, what it is that lights a fire in the spirit world, what fills us with energy and passion. As children, we see the calling, but, for some reason, over the years, we forget, or betray it, to be "practical." The consequence of such little attention to soul is complicity in its starvation.

Very few people fully taste and follow what it is that makes them happy.

On the other side, the voices of making a living and defining one's self as an income generator, are everywhere.

Before embarking on a decision, I recommend that seekers create a level playing field, say out loud what it is that they want to do, look at it squarely, and get some experience with success or at least practice before embarking on a direction, moderating the contraries. Then see how it turns out, benefits and consequences, and prices paid; take a cold look at the possible outcomes. 

The results of the struggle take many forms.

Down one path lies anger, compromise, bitterness, or regret at abandoning the dream to make a living.

Down another path lies a stack of rejection letters that do not pay many bills, exhaustion at having gone for it, but not finding the audience or the forms that resonated in a way that made money.

Of course there are myriad mixes of compromise and realization.

One can make a living, earn some time at the end of life and then go for it. One can steal time in the mornings or evenings to write while making a living.

One can find a patron or a sugar daddy/momma to pay the bills while chasing bliss, security and shelter from the storm while cupping the flickering candle.

One can live on nothing and be happy with that, on live well and just stuff the dreams into a closet of closed discussions.

Each of these is the story of a life, a story of happiness or anger and resentment, of sacrifice and reward or consequences.

For my part, I let doubt get the better of me and took the path of work. I only occasionally regret it. I have been lucky enough to taste both the rewards of creativity and the regularity of a pay check.

I would be lying if I said I was happy about it all the time. But I am grateful for the fullness that this life has been so far.

It has been a both/and compromise that was the best I could do, given my fear, doubt, need for companionship, clarity of heart. 

The dogs are hungry, as the great teachers say, and which gets stronger depends on the one we feed.

The Red Tree

Next to the UA Memorial Union, just west of the Alumni Plaza fountains, a tree has gone mad with color. This kind of display is not uncommon in New England or in the red maple hills of Wisconsin, but here in the desert, it is a sight.

It leaps off a page filled with cactus greens and tawny dying grasses. It is a diamond in a box of stones. It dances while students drag their feet to last classes of the semester.

And nobody seems to notice.

I saw David Soren, a classics professor and local superstar, walk right past it. I had to stop him to ask if he had seen the tree, and he replied, "No. I was thinking about my lecture."

Yup, me too.

At least I was until I looked up. Seeing it was like being struck by an arrow, or thunder. Synapses of association fired up and down my frontal cortex, my tingling spine. In current parlance, I might whisper O - M - G. So much poignancy in the autumns of my past:. an old truck rolling across Nebraska on the way to Colorado, a picnic lunch on a hill overlooking rolling fields with a woman I loved, solitary moments in the woods while I watched for deer and wondered what I should do with my life.

The cold water splash of memories passed and I resumed my walk to class. 

A wind storm is forecast for the rest of the day. Rain will follow. It will be near freezing tonight.

The leaves will be blowing around on the paving blocks of the Alumni Plaza by tomorrow morning.

The red tree will express flamboyance for a day, for just this morning, for right now, a perfect frame in movie that is over too soon, and then it will go to sleep.

The academic in me knows that the leaves have been cut off from life-giving nectar and no longer photosynthesize. The loss of chlorophyll has revealed the underlying pigment of the now dead leaf tissue. In dying the leaves shimmer in color, no matter who pays attention, or who is struck by the flying arrows of memory.

Teaching for a Living -- Twenty-First Century Style

He goes in early to plan for the day. It is still dark, but at least it is quiet. While he used to have his own office, he now shares one with two colleagues. It's harder to focus on planning and grading when there are teachers and students crowded together discussing essays, grades, attendance, plagiarism, and conduct issues, but teachers deal with it.

There will be classes to run soon and the papers that go with them. And then meetings to review curriculum, re-format supervisory checklists, recruit faculty to serve on committees, assess the work of the past semester, get the annual performance review together. Time then to micromanage and plot performance of both graduate student teachers and students. Then there will be editing of submissions for the magazine and correspondence with both writers and other editors.

He has been at this for about 25 years and has not seen a salary increase, in real dollars, in that time. His work load has also increased from four classes per semester to five, with some service thrown in. It would have been slightly better, financially, and more secure, to teach high school than it was to come back to the university, but it seemed like a good career move at the time.

He was on a multi-year, renewable contract, but now he is on a year-to-year, re-apply contract, part of a growing workforce outside the tenure track. He does not belong to a union. He did belong to an "association" when he taught in the school district, but it did little to increase wages or improve working conditions in a "right to work" state.

He takes extra classes and works summers to make up the difference between increases of expenses and flat salary. There are occasional speaking and conference presentations for which he receives an honorarium.

The longer hours have helped, but he can only do so many.

Costs are up; income is flat; assets are already maxed out. 

Even with the longer hours and extra jobs, the rising cost of college has left him in the red. But he is lucky.

He has benefits that most can only dream of: good health insurance, some retirement contributions from his employer, long-term disability should he need it. Younger workers are not so lucky. Benefits like his are disappearing because costs have to be cut. Everywhere there is deficit. The younger faculty see this and hang on for a while as adjuncts before leaving to find something better paid.

Like others in the middle class, he has less and less purchasing power. He makes ends meet, usually, but that is about it. His children will graduate from college. He is lucky there too. Graduation rates of high schoolers have been flat and are dropping as funding for colleges goes down and tuition goes up, and up, hundreds of percent increases over the last 15 years.

His partner works too. That is a given these days.

He refinanced his house to help pay for college, a better car, and that medical emergency. But the value of the house went down and now he is under water.

Flat wages have led to longer hours, working partners, more debt.

Wages won't go up because no one lobbies for them or makes policy to support workers like him.

If middle class purchasing power goes down, businesses cut back. If businesses cut back, tax revenues go down. When tax revenues go down, education and infrastructure spending decreases. Students don't get as good an education and can't afford college. A less educated workforce means lower quality and decreased productivity. With lowered productivity and quality, capital goes global to make a better deal, get a bigger return.

It's a complex, vicious cycle, and he is caught in it. 

Wealth has been redirected to the top. The uber rich have had their way for the last three decades and have done very well while the middle class has been fleeced.

It's up to him and others like him to wake up, do their homework, and shape policies that will make working for a living worth the time they put into it.

The sun is coming up. It's time to meet that first class. 

 

A Few Kind Words For Purple Toe Nails

Megan and I hiked Wasson Peak before joining friends and sons for Thanksgiving dinner.

The walk was a good one: sun, wind, expansive vistas. And having some time to think and talk combined all of the ingredients to cook up a sweet morning. We would walk the Sweetwater Trail to Kings Canyon and then up to the Hugh Norris Trail. I love the names and have a history with this place.

We will climb about 2,000 feet. My shoes don't quite fit, but I don't care. My toes will bump against the boots on the way down and I will get the usual blue toe nails of the weekend warrior hiker.

That unsuitability of boot to foot was not the only thing out of whack, though. We had some bones to pick and took the time to bicker. Never underestimate the power of people to find something wrong with a gift horse. Yes, our dream day wasn't all puppy romps and love light.

Couples who have been together as long as we have need to vent once in a while. The shortcomings of the partner fester when days are too busy for honest tete a tetes.

And we are diverging some in what we want for the coming years.

There are "pressures." She wants me to give things up. I want her to give me time and space. We are on the cusp of a new stage of life -- empty nesters.

So, as I loaded my pack, it began.

My foibles as a handyman, thoughtful kitchen cleaner, desires for bike rides instead of chores, and choices about clothing accessories all came spilling out in not so pleasant tones.

And I can give as good as I get.

So you can imagine this lovely day as two lone hikers in paradise tromp along in fumes of irritation and disappointment. Silly.

The point of this is not to be right, find fault or air dirty private laundry, but to ruminate on the over-inflated expectations of relationships.

Specifically, we Boomers and others tend to expect a partner to be and do and fulfill everything we want. We have learned to want both security and passion, fidelity and hot, kinky sex, intellectual stimulation and toilet fixing, physical beauty and lots of free, leisurely time, super man and intimate man (or woman). This list is long.

And nobody can be all things to someone else. No real person anyway.

Relationships have gotten very difficult and I feel inadequate to meet the expectations, the demands.

I don't blame my partner for this, but rather the times, the cultural stew that shapes these crazy needs.

As we plodded along up the beautiful, sunlit trail, I mused on my defects. They are many. And I want to be OK with them or willing to work on them in my own time. I don't need the constant reminders of how I fall short. I just want to be accepted for who I am.

But if want to get something, you've to be willing to return something. Can I do the same for my partner?

I see that I am in the same quandary she is. I want her to be beautiful, playful, financially independent, supportive of my interests, out of my way. I also want her to fit some of my fantasies. I put impossible demands on her too.

So we walk along, each less than happy with the other on a stunningly clear gift of a day.

But as the trail wore on, the dissatisfaction began to fade and the effort of the climb put me back in my body. It was Thanksgiving, after all.

I reminded Megan of other hikes -- the moonlight hike up to the peak from the Esperanza (hope) Trailhead in June, the time we watched the lights of the city glitter below us like diamonds. Or the Christmas hike when a bitter wind blew through the needles of the cholla so hard you could hear them whistle. Or the time the sky was lit blood red with a sunset that made the cacti shimmer in the low light.

She softened in my eyes. She is lovely in her desires, her restlessness. I see the mystery of her that I saw many years ago when we first met. And now she is going through yet another transition. She wants me to grow with her. I am afraid and reluctant to let go of what I know, what I want. We will have to work this out.

She is aging. I am too. That adds another layer of urgency. We both feel the need to go after what we want. Limits loom larger as bodies decline, opportunities move out of reach.

I am aware that she cannot be all things to me, nor I to her. And she is my partner.

As such, I have been wounded by her; she by me. I see all too well that she is flawed. I am too. She has also enhanced my life in ways I can only vaguely fathom. She has been party to the alchemy that moved me from boy to man, my finding joy in learning to father, to provide, to surrender to things bigger than myself, my boyish ego. We have been on a spiritual path in which we have both shed confining skins in order to learn to both give beyond what we thought possible and receive beyond what we could imagine.

The walk hurts sometimes, but, I take steps forward, so far on the same trail, even though my toes will show bruises for my efforts. What to do with all these stirrings of the heart, these crazy, impossible desires, this life passing faster and faster, the end that grows closer with each step?

For All of This

My cat loves me. For that I am grateful.

Kind people populate my days. I have enough income to buy food, have a roof, and educate my sons.

I do not fear for their lives when they walk the streets at night. I don't have to listen for mortar shells falling from the sky while I sleep.

I do not spend my days asking if there are openings or whether or not businesses are taking applications. I have enough money in my pockets for a burrito whenever I want one, which is a little too often. I have a nice cushion around my middle. 

I have not been displaced by events beyond my control, but have been free to migrate for work and play.

I am not tied to an IV pole. My body is not in constant pain. I can hear people when they talk to me, look them in the eyes, decide how best to respond. My brain can focus and gives me too much to think about. My heart seeks connection.

I do not have to join the indigent because I can't pay hospital bills.

I have not been robbed or been the victim of crime for a long time. I do not fear that I will be raped, nor do I stay in at night for dread of harassment. I walk around stores and clerks smile at me rather than follow me. I would make the perfect shoplifter.

I only get punched playing soccer, and injured riding my bike. I accept the risks.

And no, I am not a Republican. I do not take credit for my good fortune. I know that I am privileged beyond what many of my brothers and sisters on this planet can imagine.

My heart longs for companionship, meaningful work, affection, and peace. I love the longing. I still know desire.

I feel that I can act, that my limitations are as much mine as outside of me.

Social structures impede me no less than anyone else. I have been told I can do whatever I want.

I am not a slave.

I am not incarcerated.

I know that I am not free unless I help others to be more free. 

I get to consume. My choices matter in a small way. My dollar can be a vote for quality, responsibility, and fairness.

I know that I am brainwashed by advertising, that I judge others by what they wear, how they talk, when they are selfish pricks. But I know that they are not just their actions and mistakes. That it is not my place or power to find fault with anyone other than myself, that I only have power over my own actions and attitude.

I know the 12 steps.

I know that I have f*&$ed up big time in my life, and I have many amends to make.

I am human and alive for a little while.

I will remember.

For all of this, I am grateful.