Category: Parable

I have a comfy leather chair in my home office where I often write and can look out three windows.

Today it is sunny and breezy.

I’ve just been working on some spring clearing, so my view is better.

The garden is dug and prepped for some planting.

I trimmed back some goofy concord grape vines that insist on being productive even though I have given them very erratic care.

The yard abuts my neighbors, John and Amy, and their two daughters. They have two horses in a field ( I can watch them from my chair) – a big black horse and a tiny one called Butterscotch.

The other neighbors, Katy and Nick, also have two children – a bit younger than John and Amy’s.

We’re a good crew. Even in the days of Covid 19 we can be neighborly…yet keep safe practices.

John and Amy also have a trampoline – a nice one with safe walls – a huge hit with the children. It is not unusual to hear children at all hours bouncing and laughing.

We have two fire pits – both of which have seen a workout in the last six weeks.

From what I read of our health crisis we are extremely fortunate. We care about one another, take care of one another, and appreciate one another – in a troubling time.

I’ve been preoccupied over the past two and one half years with developing a farm….and realized in the last month (with forced isolation) that I have neglected a very dear home asset.

So I’m headed in a recovery direction with home, garden, and yard.

It’s a lovely feeling to recover a landscape…at least for me.

We humans are supposed to be stewards. I think many of us take that seriously. At least in my community folks work hard at caring for their homes and property.

The afternoon sun gives perspective.

I spent twenty years in publishing – all of it in either academic or scientific fields.

It was a ‘mixed bag’ of everything from shoddy applied science to seminal work with Nobel Laureates.

The most interesting projects were when I was given an enormous and complex amount of information, data, observation, etc. to condense into a printed, published book. They made me sweat (sometimes literally)…but the finished book was always satisfying.

How to arrange a printed page became my rubik’s cube. How to visually ‘weight’ the information…how to order complexity…how to convey meaning/knowledge.

After perhaps ten years of practice I began to ‘know’ new information. I developed an ethic for understanding and conveying knowledge.

I also realized there is something to ‘know’…and something to ‘knowing’.

It was learned through practice, not intuition.

Various disciplines (science, theology, etc.) have distinct methods and ethics for knowing.

Once I understood ‘knowing’ and ‘the processes to know’ I began to evaluate everything differently.

It gave me perspective, belief, and faith in our human condition.

I believe certain physical practice also gives us the same learned knowing…and yoga is the best example from my life.

Animals ‘know’.

Culture is the result of shared knowing.

Truth is also shared knowing.

I was once told a joke (by a person of shallow character who enjoyed making fun of people)…a person was given a thermos container and told it keeps hot liquid hot and cold liquid cold. The person took the container and said ‘How do it know?’

‘How do it know?’ is a critical question.

One winter morning I found myself lugging a mountain bike onto a rack at 7am on a 10 degree morning.

It was cold!…but sunny and remarkably clear.

By 8am there were more than 10 of us headed into the woods.

Within 10 minutes one of the bikes decided to go no further. It happened in a beautiful little pine woods. Frost hung on the trees, everything was crunchy, the sun beamed down through the branches.

It was so harsh and beautiful that my mind became ‘stuck’ in those woods.

I was in my early fifties. All of a sudden time changed its meaning.

Time had always been this ‘treadmill’ of life events. One thing followed another in a known progression.

For a brief time in a very cold pine woods my life literally froze.

Albert Einstein first formulated the possibility of a ‘relative’ time. Later, numerous thought experiments in physics attempted to demonstrate certain perceptual paradoxes.

At its heart, time is a human perception. How we see the world and how the world progresses is critically a human/surroundings link.

My perception in the woods on that morning was the result of unique conditions. Conditions I had never experienced.

That morning taught me to be more open, more understanding, and more receptive to the unknown.

We stayed in the woods more than an hour. All of us were closer friends at the end.

Sunday, December 1, 2019

I just put up a Christmas tree.

A live cut one. The house immediately smelled piney delicious.

Last year I traveled the week before Christmas, so decided no tree.

It was a mistake.

Putting up and decorating a tree is an historical event for me.

The ornaments have their stories to tell.

There are big ones, tiny ones, fuzzy ones, glassy ones…a number of handsome handmade family ones.

Completing the tree is always uniquely satisfying…. as if I am gathering my family and community over the past years.

My children are grown. Although I have six grandchildren, I prefer doing the tree alone (or at least as alone as Lucille the Dog allows).

The reflections are many times private, so being alone allows me to be slow with the memories.

This year was particularly reflective. I spent time going through two large containers of ornaments and seasonal keepsakes that my former companion left behind in moving out of the house.

There were ornaments that her children and family made. There were ornaments about her two babies. There were ornaments from her best friends.

She wanted to throw them away.

I seem to live in a time where one can culturally ‘throw away’ family and community.

We are mobile. We communicate electronically a great deal.

Our laws encourage ‘walking away’ in the name of independence and individual rights.

I decided to put some of her ornaments on the tree.

As I write this I am looking at the lit tree at the end of a beautiful cold day.

The house is warm and cozy. Lucille lies fed and asleep at my feet.

The tree is a story – telling itself each day through New Year’s Day.

I am fortunate to have those ornaments. I am content in her ornaments telling part of the story.