On the Paper Trail

Cleaning up for the New Year. Weeding out the paper files, sometimes twenty years old. There are some massive bureaucratic efforts hidden in here. I’d call them heroic struggles. Mainly but not always with government departments. All these matters of status and achievement, finished and accomplished, at far more stress than needed or worthy. A will also is part of a paper trail. (People can get evicted from homes or saddled with lifelong financial bugs by wills). Correspondence with the long deceased. Antiquated essays. Notes on plans: for holidays, revenge, retreat. Grudges, complaints. Hospital stays. Rate notices. Receipts for compensations that compensate no one.

Beginner’s mind is full of mistakes. We’re always beginners at life. This leads to unastonishing results not only in words and ideas but also in actions and relationships. You may have been in a role for which you were miscast. But what is it? Which role? If you knew what to do you’d already be doing it. There’s a confusing conflict between effort and result.

The broken can’t really be mended. You have to make something else out of it. Shredding paper. Saving what must be saved. Letting go: new file, New Year. 

On Forgetting

 

November begins with the days of the dead: Hallowe’en, All Hallows, and All Souls. Nothing is forgotten: the bad, the good, the ordinary sinners like ourselves.

Memories come unbidden. Despite lies, denies, neglects, twists and turns of fates and their perceptions.  Nobody forgets. The body doesn’t forget its ancestors. The dispossessed never forget the Country.  The past thinks toward the negative to make sure you don’t repeat it but this means you repeat it again and again. Bending what is into what ought to be. The use of force is a road into error.

If you own something you can choose to do nothing with it. Let it live its own life. If you don’t have the power to leave it alone, you don’t own it. Justice is the virtue that gives back to everything that which belongs to it, so don’t place faith in power of forgetting, or spell of denial.

            Time is carried on the breath. What part of the life of our time are you not living? To whom, to what, to where do you belong? What gift or charge belongs to you? Nothing is enough: do what your strength will bear. That, too, is not forgotten.

On Eulogy

 

 Eulogy is speaking well of the dead. Related to forgiveness, absence of judgement, resting in peace. The beautiful princess and the compassionate Queen. It fills a liminal time with holy farewell. Since grief is an archetype, expressions of personal pain are soon provoked. Grief is contagious. Grief uncontained. Grief in the wild. Grieving anger.

We must experience the events of our own time. Some deaths are not spoken of, or not enough, such as the deaths in custody. In the prevailing aura of loss, histories are constantly mourned. Justified and sanctified. In the beginning is eulogy. Soon imminent causes come forward. This progresses into criticism, then to comedy. Within 48 hours people take sides and conflicts arise. This is a spiral, containing direction and pressure: a mass phenomenon. We live in a culture of ambient anger. On all sides. Also, each life contains continuous waves of grief, only lightly sleeping. Each family, too.

Why, then, eulogy?

The mind of God must contain feelings that are unknown to us, because it is qualitatively different to anything mortal. We remind the immortal of the noble, the good, the tragic. We remind ourselves of both pain and beauty.  Keep it simple. Love one another.

On Choosing Regret

We often find ourselves regretting those things we can’t control, including especially the past. Regret is reality; seeking to avoid it isn’t a pure motivation. We may regret giving in to fear, or allowing others to suffer. Are we justified in giving a warning or pressing a point? But resistance, even very slight resistance, is a sign of a loss of trust. Do you intervene, and lose trust? Do you stay silent, choosing regret?

Regret is sadness, related to repentance. A cousin, maybe. Less is more, and more is less, and less is also less. The great thing here is to know when you’re choosing it. Maybe we failed to produce the strength to ask for help. Maybe we became overwhelmed and didn’t persist. Maybe we lacked understanding, to see a complaint required no action, just there for the relief and/or justification it provides.

The old prayer book confesses things not done that we ought to have done. Because there is no health in us. Anyone can confess to things they have done; they remember themselves. Healthy people, who have been healed, are justified in admitting weakness. There is more undone than we know. It takes faith. 

On Handing Down

 

Everything seeks a level. When things tip too far, the wounds of history bleed again: they never depart. We deal with what has been handed down rather than written down; also, we need solutions to the solutions already in hand. It’s too late for Plan B; Plan Z will put you into negative numbers. Time to try something really different. Moments to mend the world, by fragments. Find something sufficiently small to attempt.

Is there enough time? Some things are eternal, and we are among those that are not. Maybe not enough time; but plenty of time; in fact there’s always the same amount of time. We have time to be honest; to be kind; to be reverent; to be civilized. In spite of many years of practice and many lacks. That’s what practice is: repetition, repair. We might prefer to have clean hands, like Pilate. Sorry. We might be cluttering up the mind with that which doesn’t need to be kept there. We could fail to despair. Now we hear only in part: in real time, but without real space. Hope hands us on. We are not here to be perfect, but to be forgiven.

On Keeping the Faith

Uncut footage. News before you see it. Dramas, catastrophes, disasters. Figures milling around, strolling through, passing in and out, stretching the time. Flowing through the narrative. Compression, containment, closure will meet the case. When asked “what have you done?” you think back point to point, bridging spaces. Asked what you’re doing, you come up with a story, with conditions (past), expectations (future), judgements (now). Are we among the extras, simply keeping the faith?

Maybe we’re not the hero here. Maybe not the victim, villain or victor. We might be the swing, moving from role to role. We could be one of the crew, setting up causes and contexts for things to come to pass. In fantasy, we’d see how we contribute to the scene. Are we being the best drug addict we can possibly be? Does our embarrassing child occupy our wholehearted attention? Have we successfully lost our latest job? Are we pursuing arts, sports, or meditation, somewhere in the midst of 10,000 hours of practice?

We are the matter, not the masters, of the scene. Every step has purpose, whether or not we change direction. We’re keeping the faith. Present among the presences. Following the Way. 

On Hastening On

The days, they say, are hastening on. The Queen has reigned for seventy years, her Coronation a blink away. The golden city rebuilds, remaking its past into new shapes. So many of my friends awake to news of dire disease. Things which have been brewing for ages boil over as new facts. That’s the value of history: perhaps a different solution would work better next time.

Procrastination, one of my vices, may be one of the deadlier sins. It’s connected to consumption — of opinion, technology, media — all hastening on to disappear. We try to hold to present concern and it slips from our hands. Why need to know so much? Since our time is literally measured in heartbeats, how much do we follow our hearts?

Do we have time for resentment, anxiety, fear? Should we waste time on addictions and avoidance? Should we embrace the time? It flees as we reach out for it; it decides for us; it crumbles our solid illusions. Change is both constant and sudden. And so, long life to Her Majesty, who has given all her days. Our days are hastening on as foretold from our first breath. Do something simple today. 

On Thinking On

The pandemic has added various items to the crowded space in Sherlock Holmes’ little room. Masks: is there one in my pocket, in the car, on my face? Turning down places I long to be, people I yearn to see, year on year, wondering if my friends will forget about me. Never go anywhere at noon: the casual approach persuades the public; the unmasked can’t be distinguished from the unvaccinated crowding your back. Nobody keeps records: you keep records, then ask yourself why? Testing stations close. Somebody’s doing the actuary on how many deaths are now ok. Lots more, think of that! Abandoned to the air.

As with all great plagues, economies duck and weave. Globalisation mugs us. Households falter; businesses fade. Dictatorships seize the moment to invade. No room in your mind for all the news. Stop pining for all the olds.

The pandemic provides a continual low-grade stream of anxiety. The feeling we ought to do something, control something, steady something. The minute you begin to relax, you want to go to sleep. You have to do more thinking as others do less. Not complaining; just sustaining.

Note to self: shoulders back! Don’t slouch! Keep on thinking on! 

On Feeling Fictitious

 

Mid-Lent, when things are getting real. The more the real, the more fictitious I feel. The pandemic has provided such an alternate reality that I seem to be myself as read like a character in a book. Or perhaps an image of myself as viewed through a home-made documentary. This isn’t the new normal, because there’s actually no old normal. That’s a fictitious idea. What there is, is eternal change.

It was St. Paul who identified “this mutable” which must become “immutable” in a spiritual body. There seem to be problems with the physical body and the problem with pandemic bodies is you’re going nowhere. Plenty of talk, through zoom, phone and video; not so much presence. It’s not uncomfortable: I’m a happy fictitious individual. Just strange.

Mostly we compare ourselves, in a negative sense, to those better off, while once we compare ourselves to those more struggling we risk self-satisfaction. There’s something to be said for the mysteriousness of living. I’m hardly invisible: there are dispassionate eyes watching wherever we go. Cameras, satellites, strangers in front of computers regarding everyone. Fictitious eyes. The eye of love is close and you can see its glow. May we make it so.

On The Days

 

I’m learning a piece called I Giorni which means “The Days”. Days may be passed, spent, or seized. I used to say when walking my dog Shadow, ‘The days of Shadow are good days.’ Those were days that came to an end. The days of the pandemic are strange days. These must also reach an ending.

While some parts of I Giorni are hard for me to play, parts of some days are hard to stay. Some are grim indeed.  But each of the days has its purpose.  Rainy days for growing. Shiny days for walking. Holidays for resting. Each day has its times. Who blames the high sun of noonday for not being the pale light of dawn, with intriguing expectations? The golden hour so perfect for photography is the dog watch of evening. Short, but excellent.

While merely a child, you’re a baby; toddler; primary; teenaged: growing into adult knowledge. For life. While merely aged, you’re old; an admirable antique; then an amiable ancient; eventually a surprising sage: growing on to wise reflections, should we live so long. Seeing through the ways. Tasting how the times play to themselves. Listening to the ages and the days. For good.

On Raging

The pandemic is raging. Somewhere beneath the sea, the volcano is raging; sea rages; winds rage; the waters washing out about the islands and sending the frail crust into the infinite transformational properties of the earth. The nations raging – furiously – and then we ask why? Why do they do it? I would really like to know.

The rich rage at failing to increase their already plutocratic wealth. Religious rage with zeal for their godly houses.  Politicians, despite the cults they profess, the corruptions they practice, the ideologies they idolise, rage against the intractabilities of governing.

Some are raging with joy. Transposed into another dimension by drugs, dance, or drumming. Dionysus on the dance floor. Raging with beauty, like avian flocks lighting up from the lakes at sunrise. Raging with grief, flooding tears of hopelessness and loss. The earth rages, shaking.

Wrath, a raging deadly sin, so common. We rage because so much fails us, so little contains us, we feel responsible for it all.

We can’t control the earth, the wind or sea. In the face of all this raging, we might try controlling ourselves: our temper, our envy and greed. The raging within. With God’s help.