Entry Note To Self...the edge

Journal Entry: 12/11/18

The Ecology of the Mind...where the sky meets the sea

On my morning walk I noticed the beauty of the the sea meeting the shore. The ecotone, that defined space where two habitats merge. That threshold where water meets the shore, where the forest comes to meadow, or where woodland ends at a cultivated lawn. It is the edge habitat where everything — soil content, vegetation, moisture, humidity, light, pollination — changes. It’s also where species from both sides converge, rendering it a place of complex interaction and diversity. The edge...

Things are always happening there. The small sea birds as they scramble from the edge of the waves, poking their beaks in the sand looking for that bite size crustacean. The Osprey as they break the edge of the water then towers to the sky with their next meal. Life just seems to happen on the edge.

It is a place of constant change and unexpected appearances. Such a distinction can be helpful when you are trying to distill a nebulous idea into a handful of words, or just in reflecting on a memory from our past. It is nothing more than noticing that space where broken sea shells become the sandy shore... just a glance is enough to remind us of the intensity and yet simple complexity in these places of transition, where one thing manages to become another. Edge walking with our mind and bodies.

We are all edge walkers when you really think about it. Always looking at the edge for our inspiration, our thrill our transition. Looking outward at the horizon or inward trying to discern the edge of our soul. That edge between depression and happiness, between control and freedom. The edge between love and hate, compassion and resentment. Life happens on the edge and we all are just edge walkers between life and death...make your distinctions well my friends...Doc

From Inside The Sane Asylum...Give me a break

From Inside The Sane Asylum...give me a break

Every language has its own collection of wise sayings. They offer advice about how to live and also transfer some underlying ideas, principles and values of a given culture / society. These sayings are called "idioms" - or proverbs if they are longer. These combinations of words have (rarely complete sentences) a "figurative meaning" meaning, they basically work with "pictures". Like "birds of a feather flock together."

I don't want to pull any wool over your eyes, but to make a long story short and  please take this with a grain of sand, since it comes from the horses mouth and not hearing this through the grape vine. At times I don't play with a full deck of cards. Off my rocker you could say. There are times I go barking up the wrong tree and at the drop of a hat will beat around the bush. I don't think I have ever cried over spilled milk, but I am guilty of adding insult to injury and I have been known to put all my eggs in one basket...

Enough of this bull shit, I need a break before I taste a dose of my own medicine. I don't want to ever be caught dead...what a visual that is...be back soon...your guess is good as mine. Just experienced a blooming idiom...Doc

Entry Note To Self...goodness perhaps?

Journal Entry: 12/11/18
Let me say this about Goodness.

It may be that in goodness we may see, not a reason for life nor an explanation of it, but an extenuation. In this indifferent universe, with its inevitable evils that surround us from the cradle to the grave, it may serve, not as a challenge or a reply, but as an affirmation of our own independence. It is the retort that humour makes to the tragic absurdity of fate.

Unlike beauty, it can be perfect without being tedious, and, greater than love, time does not wither its delight. But goodness is shown in right action and who can tell in this meaningless world what right action is? It is not action that aims at happiness; it is a happy chance if happiness results.

Plato, as I best understand it, enjoined upon the wise men of his day, to abandon the serene life of contemplation for the turmoil of practical affairs and thereby set the claim of duty above the desire for happiness; and all of us, I suppose, on occasion we all have adopted a certain course because we thought it right even though we well knew that it may never bring us happiness, neither then nor in the future.

What then is right action? For my own part the best answer I know is that one given by Fray Luis de Leon. ”To follow it does not look so difficult that human weakness quails before it as beyond its strength. With it I can end my book.” The beauty of life, he says, is nothing but this, that each should act in conformity with his nature and his business.

As I ponder it today, it seems that way to me...Doc

From Inside The Sane Asylum...emoting

Journal Entry: 12/1018
Emoting

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I stop near the playground and watch this child about three years old as he throws a temper tantrum all curled up at his mothers feet...and think he just has been handed what he thinks is a bad deal.

How does one react when life hands us a bum deal? It’s learned behavior. But from whom do we learn these adjustments?

If the world changing Genie dropped down beside me this morning and offered me a change to the world. Would it be world peace or some grand economic, political, or social revolution? I think I would go for something more simple and fundamental. Maybe I would just want to teach people, from a very young age what their emotions mean. Maybe it would be the first thing I would teach a person at all.

It strikes me that we spend most of our lives, from the day we are born, in a kind of haze: consumed with, and overwhelmed by, these mysterious things called emotions — but rarely do we understand what they are trying to say. And perhaps if we did, the world would be a little less tribal, fractured, angry, because we would be less reactive, nervous, conflicted. The first and last thing we are ignorant of is ourselves.

Perhaps that is hoping for too much. Maybe it’s enough just to say that we should know ourselves as more than consumers, rational beings, little calculators of desire. So first I will explain a little what emotions mean — and then I will encourage you to ignore everything I have said.

Happiness, when you think about it, is the most mysterious thing of all. It is not just pleasure, satisfaction, gratification, or delight. So what is it? I read a paper today finding that generosity is linked with happiness — and then it tried to trace the neural mechanisms thereof.

Ah, there we go again — eliding what our emotions mean. So in my mind: happiness just means that we are growing. A moment of happiness is an instant in which we are maturing and developing. That is why generosity is linked with happiness — we are giving, but we are also receiving the message that by giving, we are growing.

But what is it in us that is growing? Well, it is just me — my truer self? my self-expression? or maybe my natural faculties ?  

The truth is we do not have a good word for it, because we have not thought well about it. We are born with a certain nature. A tiny baby possesses the capacities for empathy, for love, for closeness, for intimacy, for truth. And as adults, somehow, these are precisely the things we lose. And so growing means that those capacities are able to be expressed in more sophisticated and powerful ways — not suffocated and denied. That is our possibility — and when it is realized, even in small ways, there is happiness.

Babies are of course also hungry, needy things. They get angry and cry. Anger is the frustration of possibility. It means that there is an opportunity for growth that has been stifled or thwarted. The baby wails when the bottle is not given on time. And so do you, when you are rejected, ignored, denied.

Anger, then, is a message of deprivation. In just this way, anger is also a cry — for all that is missing in the expression of possibility: intimacy, closeness, respect, truth. It means that you have come close to having it, and then, somehow, it was taken away. It is only natural to cry out for it. But if you understand all this, then anger, too serves a worthy purpose: it reminds us both that there is always another chance for possibility to be realized, and that we are meant to realize ourselves.

The meaning of anger is that we are being deprived of fullness, just like a little child — and once we understand it, we can surrender the hot, bitter fury of going empty a little, and choose, instead, to focus on finding, creating, giving, sharing fullness.

Sadness is the loss of possibility. You grieve when a relationship ends, when a loved one dies. What has really happened? We say that “a part of us has died”. We are precisely right. It is a part of our possibility that has died. If possibility contains intimacy, closeness, respect, love, truth, then the curious fact is that our possibility is not really our own — it is more like a conjoint interdependence. And that is the message of sadness — its beauty, its power, its strength: that we are never really alone, because it is precisely through our loneliness that we learn possibility can never only be realized by ourselves at all.

The meaning of sadness is to remind us of our fragility — not just our own, but all life’s — and if we really hear that message, then a little miracle happens: fragility becomes the source of all our strength. We grow gentle, merciful, empathetic, graceful, light, free. Then we are maturing into fullness at last.

So...Happiness means realizing possibility, which teaches us about our nature, and challenges us to respect, support, and nurture it, not just in ourselves, but in all.

Anger means the deprivation of possibility, which teaches us emptiness, and orients us towards fullness. And sadness means losing possibility, which teaches us fragility, and gives us strength. And each of these messages teach us great secrets about life. But we must learn from these messages.

Now. I told you that I would end with asking you to ignore me. Here is why. It it not just because I cannot do justice to emotions in a few words, only scratch their rippling surface. It is not even because I have used a kind of framework of possibility to explain emotions, and there are many theories we could choose. It is because there is a deeper message inside all these messages your emotions are telling you still.

What is an emotion, when you think about it. Perhaps emotions are just messages. Not a single human being since the dawn of time has been able to define what they really are, and so we are stuck with this strange word, that we still cannot pin down.

What are they, then? They are something more like the self inside and beyond all selves. If I say “sadness”, the strangest thing of all is that you know precisely what I mean. I don’t need to define it at all. Even a little puppy can sense it. In this way, that our emotions are the common fundamental elements, the hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon of our existence, life is something universal. Isn’t that strange and fascinating? A little beautiful?

Emotions, then, are messages. But not just from your unconscious to your conscious, or your child self to your adult self. They are messages from life to you, about what life really is. Something more impossible than you suppose. You are in every life, and every life is in you. And in that way, even your wounds are as beautiful as the burning stars...you are the web of LIFE!...Doc

Inside The Sane Asylum...

From The Road Series...The Maestro

It's strange the people we pass and yet not experience...if only we look in their silence we might hear the echoes of their life. Such was a time on this cold and gray autumn day...

As I passed his fingers were pressing the silver keys with loving art, 
and the flute he was caressing with the silence of his heart. 

"Play something for me maestro"...

In his fading eyes was a story of life that was written fair. 
The morning sun glowing and warmed the winter in his hair.
There was a glow of un extinguished embers deep in his eyes,
as he nodded and begin to smile.

A youthful smile. Strange how all the silver marrows still have a golden yesterday.

Now the flutist, bowed and slender no longer marks the time to the baton's lead, but he begin to breathe a message tender through his mind and that mellow reed.

The melody came with the wisdom of the ages,
pulsing with the ebb and flow.
It was a sage's song 
from a land so long ago.

In his fading eyes was a story of sanctified days of youthful yore, and yes, tender reverence for a glorious score.

The sound strolled down the street through the flute's narrow ally, as he pressed the silver keys with loving art, deep from the silence of his heart. A melody laden with a life that was written fair. Every movement he rendered from the slender instrument echoed again where love and youth once strolled, breathing out his soul through his fingers and the flute he was caressing... a silence from the heart.

May you and the silence of your heart never part...Doc

Entry Note To Self...invisible paths

Journal Entry: 12/6/18
Invisible Paths

"You are here because you know something. You don't
 know what it is, but you can feel it. Something is wrong with the world."
— Morpheus, The Matrix

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As the age turns, millions of people are pioneering a transition from the old world to the new, are we not? It is a journey fraught with peril and hardship and breathtaking discovery, a journey irreducibly unique for each of us.

Because we are stepping out into the new, (or at least it feels that way to me), it is also profoundly uncertain and at times lonely. I cannot map out the details of my path, but I can fortify myself as I walk it and and maybe just illuminate some of its universal features.

So a few years ago I started to make Entry Notes to myself. My purpose, I suppose, was to give some voice to what I have always known (without knowing it) and always believed (without believing it).

Maybe in some grand way I was hoping that someone might stubble across my thoughts and symbols, and just for a second, breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Ah, I was right all along."

In a sense I am not describing a path at all, since there isn't one in the new territory of the new pioneer. Indeed, what I am describing is a departure from a path, the ready-made paths laid out before us, and the creation of a new one.

You know the ready-made path I'm talking about. Typified by that odious board game "Life," it begins with school, traverses the territory of marriage, kids, and career, and, if all goes well, ends in a long and comfortable retirement. This program has been crumbling for decades now. I, for one, am not planning for a retirement for my journey; the very concept feels alien to me, as does the notion that my Golden Years are to be any time other than right now.

Just a pioneer, like you...Be well, Doc

Entry Note To Self... rhythm of life

Journal Entry: 10/13/18
Sensing Beauty

My rhythm of life in recent weeks has been different. Not difficult, or taxing, but certainly not mind blowing either. Except for the crap I see on TV news entertainment. I really don't pay that much mind as I have more need of my mind for other things that capture my interest. It is one of those periods I am just not in sync.

I don't even know how to define it, because it does not require defining. Just one of those periods with a different intensity, frequency and duration of thoughts.

Duration of thoughts? What is my mind dwelling on? Different are the thoughts from others periods in my life and other rhythms? Maybe, but that is how it is this morning...

The tide ebbs and flows daily, without end.
Four times a day it will ebb and flow.
Breathing new life along the way and destorying others in it's path.
The rhythm of tides.

The Moon waxes and wanes, changing its face daily as It moves from Full to New and Full again. A wanning and waxing gibbous or crescent It becomes. The dark side of the moon becomes light again and nothing is static as it changes again and again. The rhythm it becomes.

In the morning dark, on the porch with coffee, just above the treetops, no fewer than seven squadrons of geese just flew over. They were speeding, honking like crosstown New York traffic. Migrants. This scene, this music, allows me to feel more human, like I'm connected to something larger than my own thoughts, or my own small reality. Good morning, friends.

Wishing you ease...Doc

Reflections From The World...a new day

Journal Entry:12/1/18
A new day...a new month...a new thought, perhaps.

Just being there, she was a sort of music, perhaps a garden canticle. Half-painted and never moving, she gripped her urn like a victory cup, waiting. Watching the garden forever, for the entirety of her life, the ancient South American staghorns, magnolia, jasmine, sweet olive, the iron gate, and masonry of the place were always safe. But she never went inside the garden itself. I never saw her inside. That is how it was for her, for me.

"Walked for half an hour in the garden. A fine rain was falling, and the landscape was that of autumn. The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and mists hovered about the distant green of a melancholy nature. The leaves were falling on all sides like the last illusions of youth under the tears of irremediable grief. A brood of chattering birds were chasing each other through the shrubberies, and playing games among the branches, like a knot of hiding schoolboys. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul, and whoever penetrates into both is astonished to find how much likeness there is in each detail."

Reflections From The World...Christopher Bryson

The Christopher Bryson Series

Abraham Lincoln carried a harmonica in his pocket, and harmonicas were played by soldiers on both sides of the American Civil War. Frontiersmen Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid played. In the mid-1920s DeFord Bailey made mouth harp recordings, and duo recordings with guitarists Hammie Nixon, Walter Horton, and Sonny Terry. In 1925 there were 50 harmonicas on the White House Christmas tree.

These tears fall from my eyes,
as the rain falls from the sky.

I walk through the rain,
so you can't see me cry.

But only when the rain drops fall from the sky,
so you can't see the things that I hide.

Robert Louis DiTullio, Jr.
Harmonica Player
Faubourg Tremé
New Orleans, Louisiana

Entry Note To Self...dollar weeds

Journal Entry: 12/06/18

Life At Windrush Lake

You know it seems as I get a little older...let me rephrase that...as I get a little older, I just don’t give a damn about a lot of things. 

Some are important, but I still don’t give a damn. Like this morning...I walk out on my front porch and see my garden needs tending. I stood there for a while trying to not give a damn and then I realized that my neighbors would be walking by and from the sight of my garden would say “the old man who lives there must not give a damn”. 

So...as I sit on my five gallon bucket, the fine art of pulling Burmuda grass comes rushing back in. Nothing to it. Just pull it out, for about four hours, and move on to the Dollar Weed, which is easy to pull but they find themselves everywhere. I mean everywhere. Even under rocks. 

I have an ole Scally Wag for a neighbor and he always makes a point to tell me he has some good spray to iradicate the demons. I prefer just pulling by hand. 

Guess I give a damn...Well about some things...enjoy your day...Doc

Reflections From The World...Christopher Bryson Series

Journal Entry: 11/15/18
Red sky by morning...

I am often asked; “What you been up to?
"Oh not much. Just trying to be present.”

Sometimes, in the sweet spot where day meets night, you catch cloud formations drifting in off the gulf. I have seen thousands of them and they are all intriguing and unique in their own way. They remind me that we are constantly traveling in a much larger space, on this spaceship called Earth.

Sometimes, probably depending on my state of mind, or state of being, I see an unusual formation that makes me stop, contemplate. In my mind, it may be a succubus, a giant squid, a stray nebula, a wraith seeking shelter before the full light arrives. Or, it could be a civet, gently pawing a dangling bergamot as a parade passes on the Champs-Élysées in the 8th arrondissement—with the aroma of baking bread, street crepes, and cigarettes.

Much like any new day, clouds can be anything we want them to be. If we use our imaginations, and ignore the noise, we can begin to shape our own reality. We are free to do this. It is part of what makes us human.

If your day is cloudy, I hope you find a way to enjoy it. Be a trapeze artist, a shoemaker with a puppet, or just sing something, even if only you can hear it...

From Inside The Sane Asylum...standing on one leg

Your guess is good as mine...

They say, or at least some say, that development of neural patters in our outer layer of the brain, has allowed for better processing of vision and auditory patterns. It’s that spacial awareness, for example, we use on our morning walks, remembering the songs of birds, and sensing any pattern of uneasiness that something may be going array. All these patterns reside there, just to increase our chances of survival.

The most basic approach to human pattern recognition. is a theory that assumes that everything we see is stored as a “template” into some long-term crevice in our brain. Then, all this incoming stuff we receive is compared to these templates to find an exact match, and if not, something similar in pattern. It seems to do this little number just to scare the carp out of us at times. Funny as it seems, that’s what the brain does. It regulates our inner stuff to match the incoming stuff.

In other words, all the stuff we see is compared to multiple template cartoons in our brain so we can form one single conceptual picture of what the hell is going on. Our own little movie, in a sense.

Now if this theory is true, it assumes that everything we see, we understand only through past exposure, which then informs our future perception of the external world. Would it not?... Now, how screwed up is that? And we call ourselves Sane...:)

On a more positive note...our wisdom is derived from these patterns of recognition called...knowledge templates. The more you “knowledge” from your experiences, the more at ease you will be with Living life. You have wisdom stored like temples in the form of background information. It answers the question of Happiness from a different perspective. We should explore happiness not as a pleasurable feeling but as a way of being that gives you the resources to deal with the ups and downs of life. And that encompasses many emotional states, including sadness.

So it appears your brain always begins with your previous knowledge, and makes predictions due to this already acquired knowledge. It is estimated however, that about 90% of the information is lost between the time it takes to go from the eye to brain and that is why the brain must guess what the person sees based on past experiences.

I observe these little ones on my morning walk...not sure why, but that behavior of standing on one leg seems to be a pattern, as I see it often...enjoy your day, my virtual friends...Doc

Entry Note To Self...what shall I wear?

Journal Entry: 10/08/18

A few years back I received a very special invite to attend a Bris. The invite was from a good friend of mine. He is a converted Jew from Yazoo City, Mississippi. Though the years we have laughed at that combination, what he was converted from, and about my first Bris... 

What Shall I wear?

I opened my closet doors, thumbed through some shirts and wondered, “what do you wear to a circumcision?”Having never been to a Bris, I hadn’t ever considered this particular wardrobe dilemma.

I tossed a stack of sweaters on the bed. Gazed for a moment. Then put them back on the shelf, deciding that turtlenecks were definitely out. After a few more minutes of debate, I decided to play it safe with funeral type attire.

This, as it turns out, was the wrong attire for a bris. Apparently circumcisions are strictly business casual.

A Bris, for all you goyim out there, is a ceremony where newborn Jewish boys are circumcised in public. This is followed by cringing, vomiting, crying and bagels.

The circumcision is performed by a Mohel (pronounced Moy-ul). A Mohel is a professional baby circumciser. Let me repeat that. He is a professional at circumcising babies. That’s his job.

Also keep in mind that, somewhere out there, there’s a graphic designer who was asked to create a business card for the Mohel. With a logo. A professional circumcision logo. I’m just saying.

After a few minutes of milling around and making the most awkward small talk you can possibly imagine, it was time for the bris ceremony to begin.

I will only say that the bris itself was uncomfortable for me. And I shall never directly speak of it again.

After the Bris, we filed into the adjoining room to find a lush post-circumcision spread of bagels, cream cheese, lox and, of course, thinly sliced cucumber.

There was also smoked whitefish. Which, ironically, still had their heads fully intact.

I filled my plate with a bagel and thinly sliced cucumber and tried to muster an appetite.

As I took a bite of bagel, the Mohel poured himself a diet coke. I watched in horror as people approached him to shake his hand. Weren’t you paying attention?!?!!?!?

Swallowing my bagel, I wished for something much stronger than Diet Coke.

To those unaccustomed with the origins of the brit milah, this may seem like a strange tradition. And indeed it is but it’s dictated in the book of Genesis, that every Jewish boy shall undergo this ceremony as a mark of the covenant between God and man.

According to the verse (17:1-14) “When Abraham was 99 years old, God appeared before him and offered a covenant… _"I will make you the father to many nations. And I will give unto you and your descendents the land of Canaan._" In return, God wanted just one small thing:

"This is my covenant between me, and between you and your offspring: 

You must circumcise every male. They shall be circumcised through the flesh of their foreskin. For it is only by stripping the bark from the love log, that this covenant will be fulfilled. You shall wait until they have reached eight days of age and then you shall whittle their wankers. Not seven or nine days. For these are the incorrect number of days to peel the mini carrot. Nor shall you abridge the volume on day ten. Eight is the correct number of days. And the eighth shall be the day that you dock the dude piston.

This shall be the mark of our covenant between me and between you and your descendants throughout their generations, an eternal covenant: you shall tidy the ankle spanker.

And I shall bestow unto you land and I shall increase your property values very, very much.

To fulfill this, our covenant, you shall follow these rules that I bestow upon you, as this is why you shall smite the salami. 

You will gather your friends and your family to bear witness to this trimming and they shall be reminded of their own sacrifices. By which, I refer to their wobblies. Which they hath curtailed in the name of the lord.

Thou shalt not try this at home. Instead, it is by my word that you shall bring forth a professional circumcisor to tailor the hoodie. He shall have many references. And this man shall be called a “Mohel.”

Thou shalt not pronounce the letter H. The letter H shall instead be pronounced as the letter Y. This is the covenant between me and you and your offspring that you must keep.

You shall give your son ceremoniously, on the eighth day, unto the Mohel so that he may unwrap the baloney pony. He shall recite the blessing over the beef bayonet and then he shall go south and rezone the panhandle. And your son shall cry. And the men shall cringe. And they shall look away. And they shall try to find a happy place.

This will be the ceremony in which you will peel the zipper shrimp.

Then, after you hath taken the lettuce off the Whopper, you shall go forth and eat bagels and discuss the Mets.

This is the covenant between me and between you that you must keep.”

Abraham agreed to this because, at 99 years old, his hearing was poor.

So, just as on the eight day a Jewish boy learns that all begins and ends with the Mohel. And so it is that on this eight day of October, my day begins and ends in a smile.

Amem