It Matters Who You Are

It doesn’t matter who you were.  It matters who you are.

Likewise, it doesn’t matter what you did.  It matters what you’re doing.

And it doesn’t matter where you’ve been.  It matters where you’re going.

Some people are crippled by their past, the mistakes they made, and the failures they’ve been unable to come to grips with.  It leaves them frozen in place, restricted in their development as people.  Others live the same dynamic, but because of past success, a success that causes them to feel as if they’ve arrived, as if they’ve reached the top of the mountain.  They become as paralyzed, and as stunted in their growth, as those whose failure has caused their own inhibition.

Each day can be an opportunity to move away from the paralysis, to inch forward, if even with unremarkable effect.  Effort is something each one of us can engage in, and experience as progress, no matter the degree; like the sensation one might have when trying to walk across the room after one’s legs have gone to sleep from lack of circulation.  It’s not easy, but the effort alone will help to bring the legs back to life.  Effort cannot disguise itself as apathy.  It is the antithesis of that.  One can feel honest effort within one’s self.  And one can take heart in knowing that movement comes with that effort, whether the movement is easily measured or not.  Results are sometimes very difficult to see, but can often be illuminated by looking back, by observing the tracks connecting where we are with where we’ve been, not unlike the trail a snail leaves on the ground behind its own advancement.  And, lets face it, sometimes our personal movement, our progress if you will, is little more than a snails pace; but at least it’s movement.

And that’s what counts.  

It doesn’t matter who you were.  It matters who you are.

Likewise, it doesn’t matter what you did.  It matters what you’re doing.

And it doesn’t matter where you’ve been.  It matters where you’re going.

Passwords

You didn’t used to have to have a password to conduct your daily life.  I remember you had to have a combination for the lock on your gym locker for P.E., and for the lock on your bicycle if you didn’t want it to get stolen.  You also had to have a key for the front door of your house.  Oh, and when you got older you needed a key for the car, but as well as starting your car, it also unlocked the car door.  But that was about it.  Life was as simple as that.  You didn’t need to protect your bank account, your social networking sites, your credit card information or your identity.

But it’s not like that anymore.  It hasn’t been that way for a long time.  Now you have to have a password for anything you try and do; and let’s face it, a good percentage of our lives are conducted online, on a laptop or on a smartphone.  But just because the phone is smarter than we are doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s really all that smart.  After all, some of us are not so smart.  If we were we’d probably not be conducting our lives on a smartphone, an ipad, or a laptop where the government can monitor our affairs so easily.  We’d probably be out there doing our business in person, actually interacting with other people and places where we don’t need a password, just a drivers license so somebody can look at our picture.  It does, however, occur to me that a smartphone is smart enough to ask us for a password, and that’s where I begin to feel inferior, and discouraged.  I can never seem to remember mine, any of my passwords really, and sometimes I wish the damn phone, or the website, or whatever, would just forget to ask me. 

Now I’m not trying to disparage anybody, or the way of life that has evolved so conspicuously around us, but I can’t help being dispirited by all the security it requires of us to get through a typical day these days.  I mean I need a password to log into my email account just to see if somebody has something nasty to say about something I’ve written. 

I don’t need a password to open my mailbox at the foot of my driveway.

And I like that better.

Invisibility

OK, enough time has gone by since the latest school shooting (Sandy Hook) for all of us to get a little perspective on the larger issue.  Not the families of the victims, of course, or the others who were personally involved, but the rest of us.  Unfortunately, that has not happened, and most likely it won’t.  These incidents are so grief and anger laden that it is very difficult to step outside that realm to allow deductive reasoning to rule over the raw emotion that envelops us like a fog.  I do not blame anybody for letting emotion have its way after such a horrific incident, and especially when it involves children.  They were not my children, but they are in the greater sense that if we are all Gods children, then the elders among us are all Gods children’s parents.  I grieve for those children, but I grieve for the shooter as well.  He was also somebody’s child.

Where did we fail, both the victims and the shooter?

Blame the guns if you must, but in doing so you would have to exclude the signs and root causes that most, if not all, of these incidents have in common.  The incidents, historically, have been perpetrated primarily by young men who have been marginalized, in some way or another, by a culture, and greater society, that does not value them as it does the social achiever, the athlete, the handsome, and the well-connected.  Most are isolated loners who have been driven into private worlds by bullying and its accompanying social ostracization, or by the invisibility that accompanies their own social inhibition.  Many parents fall short in their ability to meet the needs of the child, and many doctors fail the patient in their quick-fix practice of prescribing psychotropic medications to mollify the concern and mask the symptoms of a greater psychiatric challenge.  Shame on them.

Blame the guns if you must, but we live in a culture where we begin medicating our children as soon as they enter school, leaving them unattended in Grammar school, and left completely to their own devices in Jr. High, and High School.  We feed them movies and video games to keep them entertained and occupied so that we do not have to expend our precious energy actually parenting them.  Of course, as they grow older, and even more isolated, they naturally gravitate to more violent movies and interactive video games; ‘games’ that enable the powerless to experience a sense of power, as anti-social, and de-humanizing as that power might actually be.

Do you see the politicians stumbling over each other to keep the kids off of these medications, and to get standards of decency enacted with the movie and video game industries?  I think not.  The gun lobbies, as powerful as they are, are somewhat held at bay by the ideological division within the government; but the pharmaceutical lobbies, to this day, run unchecked in the halls of congress like a bitter wind fueling a high-desert wildfire.  The politicians owe the pharmaceutical companies their own re-elections, and are not about to work against their own political interests and ambitions. 

And we all know about the governments relationship to Hollywood.

Pathetic, at best.   

Blame the guns if you must, but there is an even more glaring, and egregious, connection to these horrific incidents than even the social isolation, the medications, and the violent video game indulgences.  The primary motivator, I believe, is actually the acute realization that a maladjusted social outcast comes to have; the understanding that it is no longer necessary for him to remain invisible in his own powerless little world.  The media’s spotlight on the many previous incidents has thoroughly enabled that understanding for him.  The exploitation of the events and the people involved, for purposes both financial and political, serve very well to create, and perpetuate, the very incidents they so righteously purport to be outraged by.

The shooter is identified, his picture sent around the world to find its way onto the front pages of every newspaper and media website imaginable.  His face, and history are broadcast over every television station in the country, and much of the world.  The shooter, even though he’d taken his own life, is no longer invisible, but now has an international obituary, and a life examined by all.  He has finally achieved his goal of visibility in the world.  He knew before hand that it would happen.  

I can assure you that if the media would agree to no longer publish the name, picture, history, or motivation of a shooter, there would be few to none of these incidents to have to report on in the future.  There would no longer be any payoff for the perpetrator.  These young men do not want to kill children.  If they knew their own invisibility would just continue, they would find a more acceptable way to gain the attention they so desperately need. 

But that’s not going to happen with how things are today. 

Of that you can be assured.

The demonization of guns is the political objective, and media-ratings is the financial one, for the predictable exploitation of these horrendous incidents; not to mention the exposure and notoriety that the individual reporters and so-called ‘journalists’ are sure to receive for their self-serving efforts. 

You can blame the guns if you must, but you will help facilitate the guns being taken out of the hands of stable and responsible Americans, people who won’t be there to protect you when you’re being threatened by the criminal element, or the deranged.  When the good guys don’t have guns, only the government and the bad guys will have them.  How would you feel about that?

Take the politically correct, programmed ideology, out of the equation, and how would you honestly feel about that?

Yes, blame the guns if you must, but I wish I could have been at Sandy Hook to save the children with a concealed weapon of my own.  And more likely than not, you’ve wished the same thing about yourself, or somebody else. 

Before that, however, I wish I could have been there in the shooters life to help save that troubled young man from himself.

That is where it needs to begin.

Like A Tiger On Fresh Meat

Words on a page.

What are they but the fleeting thoughts of one human being capturing a moment in time for the eyes, and minds, of another? 

We are judged today, not so much by the way we treat others, but by the things we say.  And even more so by the words we put on a page.  They live on beyond us, and apart from us.  A writers words can be used against him, to indict him, to judge the entirety of his, or her, life by a few brief thoughts, whether they be well thought out conclusions, or meaningless frivolity inadvertently tossed about like scraps of bread to the birds.  It doesn’t matter.  They are given equal weight by the aberrant, and abhorrent, arbiters of righteousness; and by the pseudo-intellectual, infernal purveyors of social media, and other similar smut. 

Same difference I suppose.   

And those words on a page?  They are used against the writer as often as not.  That’s the way it is with some whose main objective is to satiate their own need for superiority.  They are quick to dismiss the thoughts of those who actually think them, those who have put time and reasoning into them, those who quite often have something of lasting value to say.  Ideas critics would not have even entertained, or had the courage to express had they ever had such profound, significant, or beautiful thoughts themselves.

It takes a certain courage to write.  The words are always written with indelible ink.  No getting around that.  Like spoken words, there is no taking them back.  But the written word is perpetual, eternal if you will.  They outlive the writer and the critic alike.  A writers primary intention will often be misunderstood, exaggerated, compromised, skewed and skewered by the reader.  But still he writes.  The writer stands naked, vulnerable to the slings and arrows, the nefarious intentions, of both the aggrieved and the egregious.  But still he writes.  The more passive-aggressive critics diminish the author with a snide and arrogant dismissal, as if his thoughts, even, were beneath their own bogus dignity. 

But still he writes,

while they are afraid to. 

Some critics don’t even bother to absorb and analyze the meaning of a piece any more.  They just scan until they can pick out what they believe to be a certain ideology of the writer.  They tailor their comments more to the perceived ideology than to the actual entirety of the authors expression.  They drool at the mouth when given the opportunity to judge a person by a snippet of their writing, something (anything really) that can be pounced on like a tiger on fresh meat.  But their assessment usually amounts to nothing more than the intellectual equivalent of spitting on the sidewalk.  It rarely adds to the discourse, or to the collective intelligence.

And I say to them, “If you have something to say, write something beyond your usual 140 characters, or less.  And if you have nothing of value to say, well then, continue to do like you do, and just criticize somebody who does.”

This Prehistoric Landscape

Moving through the valley of death.  Death Valley to those approaching the end of their lives, or who have been held in its grip, whether on their own internal journey, or a road trip they may have once been on. 

Death Valley, California, a place unlike any other place on earth; a depression in the land, as low as you or I have ever been, surrounded by mountains as high as we would ever hope to be. 

The earth’s own version of the manic depressive experience. 

Miles and miles of wide open space.  

Places some have forsaken,

afraid of their own freedom.

Mountains once moved by the faith of great men, now pass by my windows as I move across the land; as time, even, has passed before the eyes of others traveling these ancient roads well ahead of my arrival. 

Valleys long and promising stretch out beyond the imaginations of we who never took the time to envision them.  Taking time now, however, I am enlivened by their depth, by the enormity of their reach across the years.  I am enlightened by the infinite, immeasurable influence of their presence, and the nobility of their age.

Age that is valued, or so it seems, in all that is natural; all, that is, except for the men and women who have reached beyond the years of the young, years where they have finally come to understand that which would not be seen with youthful eyes; things that some fear knowing much earlier in life, terrified of not remaining young. 

Yes, we revere the age of the earth, but deride the wrinkled old men who may creak when they walk sometimes, or stutter when they talk.  We are afraid to be like them, and would not entertain a trade of the ignorance of our youth for the wisdom of age.

“Life,” some would say, “is a road trip.”

I would say it’s more like preparation for a road trip.

Nevertheless, we are but a moment in time, 

and a grain of sand on this prehistoric landscape.

Social Protocol

What is this etiquette that calls for one to listen to the interminable rambling of the unconscious?  What is this code of behavior that dictates that the most obnoxious person in the room should have the most floor time?  What is this misdirected show of politeness that allows someone to talk about them self as if they were actually interesting to the other people in the room?  What is this decorum that allows the biggest braggart to get the most attention?

What is this dynamic that causes everybody else to hold their own thoughts and wait for the boor to finish talking (which he/she never seems to do)?

What is this social protocol that usually leaves the most interesting person in the room as invisible as the obnoxious boor is obvious?  What is this restraint that everybody seems to practice when they’ve been taken and held captive by such a rude and insecure narcissist?   

Well, I can only tell you that people become paralyzed by dominance.  People used to stand up, and against, dominance of any shape or form.  It is how, and why, we fought for our independence from England.  But no more.  No, not any more.  Now we cower at the intrusion internally while externally pretending to be interested.  Everyone has become much too afraid, afraid to be thought of as rude, or even worse, insensitive.  Political correctness has not only shaped the politics that are being imposed upon us, but is now also creating the kind of anemic numbness in us that allows governmental dominance over us.

How can we ever again expect to stand up to a repressive, and oppressive, government, or boss even,, when we can no longer even stand up to the interminable rambling of the unconscious and self-possessed blowhard at a dinner party?

Just asking.

Like Teenagers On Peyote

The following is an excerpt from my recently published novel, 'Wilderness'.

The South Fork of the American River, rushing down the mountain through the canyon like a freight train in places, and in other places, calm, collected in reflected pools, deep enough to jump from overhanging rocks, or float around in on a lazy summer day.  But it was just early spring, still cold, so we were not going to be getting wet, at least not intentionally.  About twenty minutes up out of Placerville, we parked off of Mosquito Rd., just the other side of an old suspension bridge that connects a population of rugged individualists living back in the hills to the conveniences of a moderate sized civilization in, and around, the Placerville region.  A lifeline kind of bridge on a dangerous curvy road that has always kept the out for a Sunday drive kind of folks away from the area.  It’s a pretty steep walk down to the river on a narrow trail, maintained only by the nightly procession of deer, raccoon, and other animals making the trek down the precarious hillside for a drink of cold, clear, refreshing mountain water.

This wasn’t Golden Gate Park, and Kevin was like a free man in paradise, if just for this one day.  After reaching the water we continued to explore upriver alongside the ever-changing landscape.  That’s the thing about these rugged mountain rivers, every fifty feet, or so, they’re a completely different environment, a different terrain, a different topography, a different setting.  The rocks change, the water changes, the current changes, the view changes, as does our relationship to it.

Like teen-agers on peyote at an amusement park, we were scanning the shallows for crayfish, salamanders, trying to catch fish in the shallow pools with our hands, turning over rocks to try and find garter snakes curled up, undisturbed, until our rude intrusion settled unsuspected, and unwelcome, upon them.  We watched dragonflies in aerial acrobatics, frivolously courting, what seemed like no fly in particular, and scanning the surface of the water for bugs to bring home to their main squeeze for supper. 

We watched a beaver intently gnawing logs on the shore upriver as if he had to get his shelter built by the end of the day or his partner might shack up with the old guy further upriver in the bigger house.  In the blue sky overhead turkey vultures circled a decaying carcass, floating lower to the ground with each pass around its lifeless body, eventually landing like a glider would, gently touching the ground, but then standing around waiting for the flock commander to sample the first hors-d’oeuvre of the morning meal.  A red-tail hawk watched from the highest branch of the tallest tree, content to do his hunting solo, and for game that still might have a fighting chance.

We spent the morning exploring, up and down the riverbank, both sides of the river, rock-jumping back and forth across the water like fresh cadets on a Boy Scout obstacle course, feeling more like fifteen than mature men in mid-life.  We joked about how you can make a man out of a boy, but you can’t necessarily ever take the boy out of a man.  Life gets pretty serious at times in the grind of the day-to-day, but when you get out on the river, or the mountains, or the lakes, there is a restoration that occurs inside, a re-coupling of the natural world with the nature of man, a returning to the simplicity of a less complicated life, a re-unification of one’s body with one’s perpetually dormant soul.  It is something I experience every time I get away.  Every time I get away.  And it is something I don’t ever take for granted. . . . . .

. . . . . . We took it kind of easy in the afternoon, content that we had already lived the best part of a pretty remarkable day.  I did some writing.  We sat around and rested, reflected, listened, and observed the amazing display of natural motion around us. The light and shadow changing shape on the water, the rainbow spray of mini-falls tumbling over boulders, the sound of water finding its path, winding its way down river around rocks and logs, fighting cross-currents even to establish its own direction.  The sound of unknown animals moving around, and through, the brush up the hillside behind us; the continuing sight of that one lone red-tail hawk, unmoved, and undisturbed, by all the unusual activity on this remote, but emotionally accessible river.

     Kevin and I drove home in relative silence, content to let the day speak for itself.  We had some pretty incredible visual images to dance around with, but none more captivating than the diminishing sky we were driving into as we made our way back down the mountain. 

     The tranquil sky, stretching wide across a lingering horizon, painted with the loving hand, and expertise, of one who knows what stimulates and invigorates the souls of men such as ourselves.  I do not suppose the artist chose to paint it for our pleasure alone, although I’d like to think that, but for others as well.  I can only hope that everyone else on the planet is finding a moment to embrace it.  The expanse that unfolds so dramatically before us creates, and enables, a similar expanse inside of me, from deep within the hidden recesses of my faith, and of my sometimes pain, extending outward now, opening my arms to the possibility of the unforeseen, the unexpected, and the mostly undeserved.   

          The tranquil sky.  It is an expanse that moves me to move beyond myself, beyond that which is hidden even, that which is broken, in disrepair, or disarray.  It is a provocation to rise above the weakness that is my own tired body, and the bitterness that is too often buried in my heart; above that which is frail, that which is decayed, and decaying, that which lays dormant collecting the insincere accolades of its own apathy, and that which seeks to extract the divine from its partnership with my quietly emerging soul.

     It is not every evening that the sky offers itself so willingly to me.  But when it does it announces itself like a trumpet call from across the great divide.  The sky, I believe, seeks to interweave its nature with my own.  A man would be a fool not to pay attention . . . . . .

Open Letter To A Clever (but anonymous) Poet

Words cannot be taken back as if they were never spoken. 

They were.

Mouths (and fingertips) speak things into existence. 

What exists in that realm cannot be made to not exist. 

It stands where it was formed.  It is one of the principles that adults come to understand about life, and relationships.

“I take it back” is a very poor substitute for an apology.

Forgive me for the analogy, but that is the common domain of adolescent girls who attack each other, take it back, and then go on together as if nothing had ever transpired.  Shallow at best, but when proceeded by an announcement of your medical condition, self-serving, to say the least.

I was not surprised by the fact that you could not accept a little honesty, even though solicited of me by you.  And I was not hurt by the adolescent tongue-lashing you felt it necessary to deliver (Did you really expect me to fight with you?).  I figured we were just at the point of relationship where you (historically) must have gotten used to pushing away whoever dared to care about you.  No big surprise.  I recognize fear when I see it.  As has been said, ‘This is not my first rodeo’. 

We live with our regrets.  Olive branches do not mitigate them for us.  It is part of what prompts us to seek to live lives that do not cause us regret.  Take that dynamic away and we live with nothing but regret. 

Re: your sarcasm; “Confessions Of A Lonely Drunkard (How I beat the bottle and became better than you’ll ever be)”, “My Disastrous Relapse”, etc. 

Please!  Don’t waste my time with your drivel, ego, promises of success, failure, or threats of failure. 

If you want to show the world how smart you are then show the world with your life.  Everything else is just masturbation. 

I’m as real as its ever going to be for you, my friend, and if you can’t handle it I understand.  Maybe you can find reinforcement in somebody who requires only that you be clever.

I will not indulge your anger, your hostility, or your drunken tantrums.  Theoretically, I have less time left on this earth than you do, and I do not intend to waste any of it.  So if you’d like to be honest with yourself, grow up, be a man, with a measure of self-respect to accompany such a commitment, I’d be happy to walk that path with you for a while, until you have the strength, determination, and fortitude to stand alone. 

And if not, well, my time is better spent elsewhere.

I am certainly not required to care about you.

Meekness

Monte Poole, a San Francisco Bay Area sportswriter offered up the following definition of meekness, and because it is so rarely demonstrated in our present day culture, I thought it warranted some attention.

He wrote, “Meekness is strength brought under control for the benefit of others. It’s being in the right but making sure not to use it to make others feel bad. It’s having power, but being concerned enough about those beneath you to alter your behavior for their sake. It’s being cognizant of how your superiority, your upper hand, your favor, impacts those not in such a position.”

I think of modesty when I think of meekness, and I think of sensitivity.  I also think of acquiescence; not to the power of another, but to their diffidence.  It is not necessarily a badge of courage, or accomplishment, to dominate another individual, to ‘one-up’ them, or to diminish them in the eyes of others.  It is more an indication of arrogant insecurity than anything else.  Any physical, psychological, or intellectual bully can do that to the less powerful.  It takes a more fully realized individual to make a less powerful person an equal.  

Meekness is not only a character trait to be cultivated in ones self, but it has a clear, and very practical application as well.  It has long been said about the treatment of others, “Be careful whom you step on on your way up because you’re probably going to see them again on your way back down.”  The truly meek among us do not have to concern themselves with such eventualities. 

What if we as a culture practiced the principle of humbling ones self that another might be exalted?  If you believe in the principal of ‘what goes around comes around’, the concept of ‘karma’, you would be determined to allow meekness a position of prominence in your own life.  It makes no sense to conduct one’s life and relationships with aggressive disregard for others. 

One dictionary defines ‘meek’ as ‘showing submissiveness and lack of initiative or will’.  But the contributor has it wrong, failing to understand the greater principle, and deeper meaning, of the word.  It takes great strength of character and personal confidence, to conduct oneself with a measure of meekness that enables another rather than reducing them.

That sportswriter has it right.  I have been quite aware of the dynamic he has so eloquently described.

But it never hurts to be reminded.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

Matt. 5:4-6

Fourteen Suggestions For A Satisfying Life

1.     Be honest with others.

2.     Be honest with yourself.

3.     Do not think more highly of yourself than you do of another.

4.     Do not think less of yourself than you do of someone else.

5.     Learn to compromise with others.

6.     Do not compromise yourself in order to fit in, otherwise you’ll find yourself fitting in with people you have no respect for.

7.     Treat others with respect whether you have respect for them or not.  

8.     Do not demand respect from others, but require it.  Have self-respect, otherwise that respect will be elusive. 

9.     Memorize, and learn to say and mean these five simple words.  ”Y’know, you may be right.”

10.  Do not expect others to live up to your standards, but require it of yourself.

11.  Do not lower your standards in order to live up to them.

12.  Do something with your life that you love.

13.  Give of your time, your talent, and your resources when and where you can.

14.  Embrace faith in God, but do not suffocate yourself in its company.

This is not a difficult list to embrace.  The honesty part is the hardest if you are not used to being honest.  It took a lifetime for deceit and disingenuousness to become so thoroughly rooted in your life, but once you decide to actually be honest it becomes second nature.  Like breathing, you won’t need to even think about it.