Talkin' retirees blues

Almost a year ago, my qigong friend Debra Doubleyou asked me if I would speak to a group of retired staff at Large State University about taiji. She had given a talk there, and they asked her to recommend someone, so I said sure, I'll do it. The nice lady at LSU emailed me, I sent her my information, and months went by. Finally, a few days before the event, I decided I'd better put something down on paper so I don't stammer aimlessly through the appointed hour, and it turned out to be an interesting challenge: what to tell people that they haven't heard before, and not put them to sleep right after lunch?

Well today was the day. The meeting room was all set up, and I even ran into a couple of my professors from graduate school in the lobby on the way in. To my surprise, I kind of enjoyed giving this little talk-and-participation on a subject that I care about, therefore, since recycling is socially responsible, I thought I would (com)post it here:

Good afternoon. I’d like to talk about taiji in three strands, or ways of approaching a practice – different strands that cross and intertwine so much that they are virtually inseparable. These strands we can call: 1) taiji as exercise, a recreational activity for general health and well-being; 2) taiji as a martial art, a training program for acquiring skills in self-defense; 3) taiji as meditation, a spiritual practice that reminds us of our connection with the earth, the elements, the universe, and each other.

First a disclaimer: I really like to talk about taiji, but I would much rather DO taiji with you all, and that presents a small problem about discourse. There is so much that could be said, and we would still be scratching the surface of a historical or philosophical or therapeutic understanding of an essentially nonverbal tradition. I’m guessing that you already know much of what I would say if I gave the conventional talk about the history, principles, and benefits of practice. Since we only have an hour, I will try to do what I CAN do with language - to initiate a conversation that can, at best, circle around the art of taiji and help us intelligently observe what we’re doing when we get around to it.

By necessity, I will leave out a lot. So I’ll cut to the chase. Taiji as exercise IS self-defense; taiji as self-defense IS meditation; taiji as meditation IS exercise. Meditation protects us from harm and restores normal physical function. Self-defense quiets the mind and tones muscles. Knowing taiji consists in practicing, not in conceptualizing and analyzing techniques and principles; practicing yields a deeper understanding of techniques and principles, which, in turn, helps to fine-tune the practice. How do I know that? I read it somewhere. [laughter…] The more I practice, the more I keep coming back to that very pragmatic notion. I’m 54, and I’ve been doing taiji a little over half my life, and I learn a little more about it every day.

That said, it might make more sense to DO a little taiji, and then come back to our discussion. So…I invite you to stand and join me in two or three Basic Movements.

[They stand up, I lead them in 'hold the ball'…'cat stance'…'horse stance', they sit down.]

Thank you for indulging with me in that. My ulterior motive is that I always feel better talking about taiji after I’ve done some movement, for reasons that will become apparent. Now, what were we just doing? One strand of the tradition might say we were conditioning the muscles, nervous system, bones, and joints to withstand attack, enhancing our ability to live to fight another day (what they used to call education of the physical). Another strand of the tradition might emphasize that we were reconstructing our movement habits in concert with the pull of gravity, and by aligning ourselves with those forces outside ourselves, we bring our skeletal-muscle and cardiovascular systems and our everyday conduct into a more harmonious balance (what they used to call education through the physical). Someone else might say that holding the ball, cat stance, and horse stance are ways of making peace with the space in and around the self by locating our center in an electro-magnetic field of energy in a relationship with other energy fields in this room, in this city, on this planet. (Something like what was once called education in the physical.)

The vocabulary changes, and the aims of individual practitioners vary greatly, but the somatic principles are the same: head up, tail down, breathe naturally, stand rooted in the legs, find your center, move the limbs from your center, observe the consequences. Where did these principles and techniques come from?

When we shift our weight from right to left, we are filling one leg and emptying the other, making one side active, energized, working, or yang, which makes the other side rest, recover, relaxed, or yin. The complementary opposites commonly called yin and yang had already been part of the discourse for centuries, when the so-called Neoconfucians, during the 11th through the 14th centuries, took the next step in developing a system that incorporated those ancient, anarchic Taoist ideas, along with more recent and potentially more dangerous, nihilistic Buddhist ideas, and packaged it as the new, improved Confucianism. Brilliant! How do you say thesis-antithesis-synthesis in Chinese? About 800 years before Hegel, the Neoconfucian response to the growing contrarian influences of Taoist self-cultivation and Buddhist contemplation was, in a word, taiji.

One of the strongest voices in the centuries-long debate among Neoconfucians was my hero, Wang Yang-ming, who coined the term “unity of knowledge and action” (chih hsing ho-i) which, I personally feel, best expresses the educational value of taiji while anticipating my other heroes, C.S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, by about 600 years. Taken as an epistemological statement about what it means to know something, this implies that there can only be real knowledge in the presence of human intention expressed in action in the world. Contemplation and abstract theorizing are not enough; social action demonstrates and validates understanding. Taken as a moral injunction about what people ought to do, it advocates testing and refining our understanding of ideas in the arena of concrete problem solving.

This is where practice-driven theory and theory-driven practice meet in taiji praxis. Legend tells us that a wild mountain man named Chang San-feng discovered something about himself and the universe by watching birds, snakes, rocks, trees, clouds, and rain. He invented an art of movement that found its way into villages and cities. There are more documented records of the transmission of secret taiji forms within the Chen family, eventually to a dedicated servant who founded the Yang lineage and their forms, and subsequent forms developed by the Sun and Wu schools. Schools and forms have proliferated, but most trace their lineage back to those roots.

My teachers have either been students of the Yang family in China or studied with students of the Yang family. Huo Chi-kwang studied with Yang Cheng-fu, then came to Chicago and taught hundreds of people like me at the Chinese Cultural Academy in Evanston. Ch’eng Man-ching also studied with Yang Cheng-fu, came to New York and taught hundreds of people, including Ed Young, who taught Michael Robbins, who taught me at Oberlin College. Grandmaster Ch’ang also studied with the Yang family, taught his modified Yang form to Daniel Weng, who came to Columbus and taught hundreds of people like me at Ohio State. I had been an athlete, played basketball and ran track, then began exploring the broader possibilities of movement in modern dance and yoga. In taiji I found a practice that would help me heal my injuries, that I could sustain indefinitely and actually improve with age.

My practice, therefore, is like a soup or stew that has been cooking for hundreds of years, with each generation taking their cupful and adding an ingredient here and there, a pinch of this and a pinch of that. Taiji convinced me that physical education was my path, and academic teachers like Ruth Brunner and Vivian Hsu at Small Liberal Arts College became part of my developing taiji experience. Various permutations of the ideas I’ve quickly touched on here brought me to Large State, where mentors such as Sy Kleinman and Phil Smith have had huge impact on my practice and my work as an editor. Of course, I owe a lot to the many students with whom I have had the privilege of practicing. Are there any questions?

[They asked a bunch of good questions - Do you ever practice to music? (yes) Is this related to Japanese and other arts? (yes) Does this involve breathing? (yes) - allowing me to run my mouth a little more. So much for an essentially nonverbal tradition.]

Like a complete unknown

Oh. My. God. I'm so excited. The new biography of the Bard of Hibbing begins tonight, so everybody who's anybody will be watching. I mean it's on PBS, so you know it will be slightly off-center, not-for-everybody, just-a-little-bit-superior television. And it's made by legend-in-his-own-time Martin Scorsese, so it's not just TV, it's, it's, it's - ART.

Excuse me while I puke. Then repeat after me: the revolution will not be televised. While I try to keep an open mind, I would not expect great things from the same brains at PBS that deem Lyndon Johnson's fair-haired boy, Bill Moyers, to be too left-of-center for the impressionable minds of public television viewers. I'll listen to the songs, thank you very much.

Why am I (over)reacting this way to a legitimate documentary film about one of the more important songwriters of his generation? What particular buttons is it pushing in me? Enough about this Dylan guy, let's talk about ME.

Did anybody happen to see the article in the New York Times travel section a couple of weeks ago, a kind of travelogue down Highway 61 in Minnesota? It was cute. Written by an avowed fan who took great pains to explain that he is not a fanatical stalker-type who goes through his trash to be closer to his idol, it was pure NYT travel section in attitude. A Scorsese biopic can be expected to be pure Scorsese. I sound like I'm denouncing all secondary sources. Maybe I'm just skeptical of them.

By the way, did I ever tell you about my brush with fame? I was hitching through Indiana - or was it Kentucky - and I got a ride from an Army officer, a lifer - nice guy, very upright and proper - who claimed that his mother lived next-door to Mrs. Zimmerman in Hibbing. No shit. It was a special moment, you know? Only three degrees of separation, and I could have been sitting there talking to the legendary folk hero/poet himself! Dude!

Back in the heyday of the 33 1/3 RPM long-playing (LP) phonograph record, aka "album," better known in later history books as the Vinyl Age (let's see, Paleolithic, Neolithic, Iron, Papyrus, Greco-Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Reason, Industrial, Vinyl, etc.), there was a widespread attitude that real art couldn't be derivative and had to be original. A corrollary to this rule was that any schmuck who put out a greatest hits album was disqualified from being admired as a real artist, since only commercial music whores put out greatest hits albums to sell more records filled with their previously released material. How dare they stoop so low?

Then, of course, Dylan did it, then he did it again, so we had to revise our rules, because he set the standard of what originality in songwriting was all about, "the unwashed phenomenon, the original vagabond, straight into my heart," as Joan put it. My friends and I listened to those two double-albums hundreds of times, which led us to the albums they came from, where we listened to the lesser-known songs. So methinks I doth protest too much, for I was (and am) part of that mass audience that made Columbia, or whatever label it was, richer.

It reminds me of the time I saw Zappa in Marquette, Michigan. (This is turning into the Grumpy Old Man, "In my day we didn't have no iPod, we had a comb and piece of paper and we made our own music!") This was post-Mothers, I guess, so Frank was touring in a lot of smaller places where the crowds were tickled just to see the great Frank Zappa and any old band. The thing is, this was not any old band. A guy named Napoleon Murphy sang, played sax, and pretty much shared the stage with Zappa, to my amazement. When I enthused about this afterward, my iconoclastic friend Dazey said, "Sven, there are talented people all over the place."

But, but, but...Frank Zappa! Is more talented than most, sure. Which is no reason to construct a simulacrum of Zappa's work, or Dylan's, and treat the simulacrum as his work, then build an image of the simulacrum of the work, then build a simulacrum of the image...ad nauseum, which is, if you'll excused me, where I puke. Are you ready for the Bob Dylan Pavilion at DisneyWorld? Have you collected the complete set of Dylan action figures yet, soon you can get them free with any Happy Meal! How about the posthumous edition of Zappa's dark-roast favorites, available exclusively at Starbucks? Would you deprive your children of the cultural awareness that comes with participation in Dylan-mania?

There's a funny, uncomfortable scene in "Don't Look Back," an earlier film about Dylan, in which he is famously uncooperative with an interviewer from TIME magazine who asks him all the usual questions, the answers to which the readers of TIME want to read in the customary way that TIME delivers what it considers to be new and important every week. Long story short, Bob wasn't playing along.

Maybe he's friends with Scorsese, so he cooperated in this project due to a certain level of mutual understanding. Maybe their relationship made it possible to reveal things about Dylan's music that can be known only by watching this documentary. Maybe everything I've heard and interpreted about Dylan's life and work are misguided and just wrong. Maybe my life will be empty if I miss it.

Of turtles and tutors

It's a Sunday evening. I happen to be sitting by myself in the living room as Gven Golly finished painting the kitchen cupboards - she's the handy one, you know - and I'm enjoying a rum and OJ with some crackers and a pretty good Muenster while watching the Steelers lose a tough one to New England. Suddenly the TV loses channel 10, nothing but fuzz and static, so I click to PBS, where there's a Nature special on turtles - sea turtles, desert turtles, you name it - with the fantastic footage we have grown to expect from Nature specials in the age of electronic citizenship. Why go outside when the photography is so much better on Nature. Those ancient-looking faces with their patient eyes and amazing long necks, the look like they could live through just about anything.

Unlike yours truly. I was tired all day, except during the free class I taught at the Factory with a roomful of would-be taiji and qigong students. Very energizing it is, to get up on Sunday morning, gulp some coffee, and mosey up the street to find a roomful of aspiring mystical bodymind workers eagerly awaiting my words and other signs of wisdom. And how exhausting to spend the rest of the day trying to find things to do after that tough act to follow. So I read the paper, drink more coffee, eat lunch, reach another paper, watch a little football on the tube, pull weeds while names like Lavernues Coles and Orpheus Roye echoed through my brain, and make the north bank of the yard facing Plum Street a little less ragged. Small victories.

On that note, I am compelled to share a couple of priceless pictures of Jessi Golly and his pal Gavi, "the kid I tutor," that I got over the wire today.





Caption: We do his homework together. Mostly, it consists of learning to write the letters of the english and hebrew alphabets and learning spatial concepts like above/below, before/after, back/middle/front. And when we finish his homework we go outside and run around in the lawn outside his apartment complex, and sometimes we work on writing numbers.

Don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

You can feel it in your fingers, you can feel it in your toes. And I can definitely feel it today. That autumnal chill, the fog blanketing the ground and changing the way sound carries. Wearing jeans instead of shorts to walk the dog at night. Sleeping under a blanket and not just a sheet.

I'm even lurching headlong into fall travel plans. My son is plotting his exit from the Big Apple and cross-country journey by Greyhound to Tucson. My sister and nephew are making plane reservations to come north from Peachtown and visit us for Thanksgiving. My wife is threatening to paint the den a pumpkin color. We are facing the music and getting serious about tile for the den floor so we can put the woodstove back together in time for frost and snow.

Fall classes are cranking up again, too. On paper, I'm scheduled to teach on Mondays and Fridays, in addition to Thursdays and Saturdays. The increase will be an adjustment, and where will the drum circle fit in? I have a free sample class to do on Sunday morning at the yoga factory and a presentation to an alumni group next Thursday, so I should prepare something a little different to avoid just sleepwalking through it. What "new truth" can I tell them that they haven't heart a thousand times before?

Back when I was a callow youth, we used to call this "football weather," but I haven't been to a football game in so long, I'll have to call it something else. Leaf-raking weather, mold and decomposition weather, the gloaming. Corduroy and flannel weather. If you watched the moon rise last night, you probably saw a bright orange disk just above the horizon over toward the northeast, just past full. It's time pull out the wool socks and hat.

Like I can control any of this stuff. It's going to happen the way it's going to happen, and I'll just have to pick up on the rhythm and get through it.

It's all fiber art

If this was obvious to you long ago, pardon my obtuseness. It dawned on me while lying on my back after a routine (slow) three-mile run. I put on a record, drank some water, and lay down on the floor to stretch. Isabel the cat slithered by and curled up on the middle of my chest. David Grisman and friends played their own "Dawg" fusion of jazz and bluegrass on the stereo. The sun slowly set on another day in Methodistville.

As my spine extends snake-like on the reed mat, hips tilt open to the sides and shoulders rotate in circles, my eyes gaze up toward the cedar ceiling. Breathe in, breathe out, absorb, release. I notice my attention moving from trapezius muscles to the fiddle solo to the grain of the wood to the piriformis muscle to the mandolin to Isabel purring and the pull of gravity on my sacrum, knees, shoulder blades, and head. I do a few stretches with my legs, which changes the tension in the abs; the guitar and bass do their thing; eyes move from board to board across the ceiling, taking in the color and texture of the wood; Isabel saunters off to continue her nap elsewhere.

All this analysis and description is after the fact, of course. At the time, it's one continuous stream of sensory input coming in on multiple channels, weaving or spinning or flowing together, and I get the feeling that my fibers are vibrating with the other string instruments and the unpainted wood ceiling.

Fugue for muscle, nerve, bone, gut, steel, nylon, and cellulose.

Update: Glass half-full

There's no explaining it. I didn't accomplish anything significant over the weekend, and didn't even complete the projects I planned. Okay, so I transplanted a few perennials and hauled in a load of horse manure from the College stables up on Old 3C. In fact, I probably overdid it just a bit, and the old hip joint is complaining today. But I slept like a rock; that probably accounts for my unwarranted positive outlook.

It sure wasn't the artistic content. Sunday night I stubbornly sat through "Death in Venice," the DVD of a movie that really ought to be seen on the big screen to appreciate Luchino Visconti's visual palette, Dirk Bogarde's sad deterioration as Aschenbach. Saturday night Gven and I endured "Dinner with Friends," a kind of third-rate updating of "Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf" as filtered through Andi McDowell, Dennis Quaid, Greg Kinnear, and Toni Collette. Friday night was "Dead Man," a strange and sometimes funny Jim Jarmusch parody of old western movies with Johnny Depp in the title role. Nothing special.

Maybe it was the bike ride from Johnstown to Newark and back on the old railroad line turned into bicycle trail. Funny how it was flat on the way east and all uphill on the return trip west. It's a very nice trail, and lots of people were out there enjoying it on a pretty late-summer day. Mostly older folks and young families with kids, not the serious cyclists in their jazzy jerseys. Yeah, maybe it was the bike ride, or the ibuprofen afterward, that accounts for my improved attitude. Hope springs eternal.

On monoculture

Another in a series of posts dwelling on the negative.

Define 'weed'.

In the vegetable garden, grass and coneflowers are weeds. In the lawn, dandelions and thistle are weeds. In the hosta beds, volunteer tomatoes and wild strawberries are weeds. My boss Russell (ABAC, '82) at Family Nursery Chain in Atlanta, said that in horticulture "a weed is a plant that's out of place." So it depends on the gardener and what (s)he wants where. If I'm the gardener, I decide what's a weed and what deserves to live - godlike authority over my microcosmic domain. My garden, my intelligent design, my unnatural selection.

If you looked at my backyard (notice all the possessive pronouns, like anybody really owns any of it), you might notice the neatly laid-out little neighborhoods where different kinds of plants get to live. There's a friendly iris ghetto next to a new but growing salvia ghetto. Some ajuga groundcover have been allowed to creep in between the salvia. Yonder there's a solid, established hosta-ville, and nearby is a crowded patch where lemon balm and perennial geranium compete for space with another unnamed groundcover. In the far corner, three kinds of tomatoes each have their own corner of a triangular bed, and five kinds of peppers are segregated into corners of a circumscribed Pepper Pike. I'm a freaking Nazi of the plant kingdom! My obsession with order has created apartheid in the garden.

My friend Judy's garden is completely different. She has beautiful beds curving around her yard so full of varied color and texture and height that you would think it's out of control. Maybe it is, but it doesn't seem to concern her. Look more closely and you see clusters of echinacia, rudbeckia, columbine, those cool "blue spikey" things, and dozens of other varieties doing just fine rubbing up against each other. No straight rows, no cordoned-off sections, just abundantly buzzing and blooming profusion. Judy has been at it longer than I have, and her garden shows it. Maybe my garden and I will develop and mature into a more pluralistic culture, but I doubt it. Have you seen my paperclip drawer? My sock drawer?

Monoculture, as I understand it, is the tendency to reduce the number of species in a habitat to the bare minimum for a narrow purpose - nothing but tomatoes in the back corner, nothing but black-eyed susans next to the front porch, nothing but high-yield soybeans in the beanfield. It's the standard of efficiency in modern agriculture and perfectly consistent with monopolistic economic objectives in general. By eliminating competitors, not just competing with them, it's easier to dominate markets - or grow more tomatoes. There is nothing new in that practice, and companies like Walmart and Microsoft have come close to perfecting it, as Rockefeller showed them with Standard Oil, vertical integration and all that.

This brand of capitalism - or gardening - distorts the meaning of 'competition' (to strive together). What if Mr. Steinbrenner competed with the rest of the American League in this way, doing everything he could to drive the other teams out of business? Game over. Clearly there are more ways than zero-sum competition, where one side's winnings can only be measured by the other side's losses.

Governments, as we know, have also made bold and innovative attempts to eliminate problem populations, and the cleansing of weed-like ethnic groups from national boundaries has ample precedent. Genocide, insecticide, herbicide all serve the ends of monoculture. Your state and national legislators could very well be working toward similar ends in crafting laws that "protect" a certain kind of marriage, a certain standard of educational competence, a certain code of public morality. For the ambitious Frists and DeLays and Santorums among us, it isn't enough for the community of the faithful to honor and observe said standards, the aim is to exclude or expunge any who deviate from the dominant form, in short to weed out differences. Utopian communities have always attempted this kind of consensus voluntarily, but totalitarian states try to achieve monoculture by force. Instead of thinking globally and acting locally, they think locally and act globally.

This is what I think about as the blood rushes to my head while I bend over to pull another weed.

Pave Paradise

Gven and I seem to have a history of putting ourselves in the path of bulldozers. First there was our own little acre of Strawberry Mountain Farm in Walker County, Georgia. In exchange for a year's labor, the deal was that we would receive room and board plus one of the 170 wooded acres. Sweat equity, not bad. It was a beautiful spot in the West Armuchee Valley (that's ar-MUR-chee, Yankee) of northwestern Georgia, roughly halfway between Atlanta and Chattanooga, the site of many good times and learning experiences back when we were new.

I was the resident gardener and she was the resident yogi. We took turns milking the cow in the morning, ran on the trails every day, and earned out keep. We chose a back corner of the property farthest from the road and the main house and adjacent to the Chattahoochee National Forest. Big mistake - one of many in our two years at the farm, and one of those aforementioned learning experiences. We built a tent, the original Om Shanty, on a tiny peninsula at the confluence of two creeks fed by the mountain, just off a hiking trail we cleared where a two-rut road had served pulpwood cutters decades earlier. I wonder what it looks like now, decades later.

What we didn't realize was that the U.S. Forest Service considers national forests to be a resource for the logging industry, and private lumber companies make a living by harvesting those trees from public land, a sweet deal for them. We naively thought "national forest" had something to do with conservation, preservation, wildlife, and all that! Hah. As the head ranger of another national forest told me years later, "If I don't see log trucks rolling in and out of here, I'm not doing my job."

So one morning we awoke to the sound of bulldozers build a road right across the creekbed, maybe twenty yards from our campsite. It looked like an invasion of the Military-Industrial Complex intent on wiping out our remote little retreat. And it worked. Check out Derrick Jensen's Strangely Like War for a well-researched account of the uber-profitable technological assault on forests worldwide. We didn't take it personally, but we were rudely awakened.

Years passed, and we relocated a number of times for a number of reasons, and we managed to stay away from direct confrontations with bulldozers until recently. The reason for leaving Clintonville was the purchase of the house and land we rented by a church (our church!) that turned around and made a windfall profit by selling house and land to Chic Chain Bakery Inc. on the condition that a world-class parking lot replace our house, garden, and wooded acre. Another benevolent nonprofit institution with high-minded principles sees a material advantage and makes a million-dollar deal. We pack up our Grapes of Wrath for leafy Methodistville, and within weeks there's no red brick house, no garden, and not a tree left standing. Those "developers" run a very efficient operation.

I'm having a flashback from 2003 to 1977! Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Granted the commercial development of North High Street is not exactly the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Golly family is not a displaced community of Palestinians. But I can romanticize anything, especially the house and yard Jessi and Helga grew up in.

Flash forward to this summer as the bulldozers advanced on the schoolyard behind the new incarnation of Om Shanty. Where there were mature maple and oak trees beside a grassy expanse used for recess and soccer practice, we can listen every day to the sounds of advanced equipment building another impressive, state-of-the-art parking lot. I'm sure they have their reasons: traffic flow, long-term growth, infrastructure, blah blah blah. I would dearly love to see a tree planted somewhere for every square meter of land, public or private, paved or otherwise leveled.

This just in: Glass half-empty

They call it Ingathering. It was traditionally the first Sunday of the church year in the old Unitarian congregations, dating back to the days when ministers took the summer off. The congregation would return in September for their Ingathering service and bring with them tales - and water - from their summer travels. Somehow the ritual of pouring many separate vials of water into a common bowl became a part of this annual event. Now a lot of churches that don't take the summer off still celebrate the start of fall programs by bringing real or imaginary water back from Lake Erie, the Bosporus, or wherever they went.

So why did the gravitational pull of all that great symbolism just bring me down? Prabably just my own bad attitude. Was it nice to see all their tanned faces? Yes, mostly. Was it cool to hear about their travels? Sure, whatever. Was it uplifting to hear the choir sing traditional nineteenth-century hymns about Common Ground and Standing Together? Not terribly. Did the old coot in the expensive suit have to hog the pulpit for a nine-minute account of his own special summer sojourn, and did that put a damper on the whole process? Yes and yes. Was it worthwhile to hear the minister explore the multivalent meanings of water? Of course. So why the chip on my shoulder?

Upside first. I love the symbolism of water, and Rev. Susan addressed it thoughtfully. Rain for the crops, a drink for the thirsty, wellsprings of life, devastation from hurricanes and floods, Noah, etc. Every person who poured a thimbleful of water into the big bowl IS a walking, talking container of water who creates waves in the world according to how they stir and circulate themselves. Very taiji. I drive home thinking of building a life-size Mrs. Butterworth bottle in the backyard to use as a rain barrel - a monument to the microcosmic human water cycle.

Then the downside. About half of the the summer anecdotes were of the self-aggrandizing, self-promotional, "let's talk about me" character. Neither the musical selections nor the quality of performance made me yearn to take part or hear more. I went home and put on a side of Brubeck while I made a batch of bread, a crock of soup, a batch of salsa, and a small jar (not a peck) of pickled peppers. Not at all transcendent, completely mundane, but more satisfying than sitting in the pew repeating responsive readings in unison. Since they're Universalists, they won't consign me to hell, but I've effectively consigned myself to outsider status.

Determined to finish the day strong, I took a quick bike ride out College Ave. to Hoover Reservoir, across the dam, and back while the bread was rising and the sun went down. More good water allusions if I'm receptive. (Note to self: Take a frisbee next time, and try out the Brent Hambrick championship disc golf course on the east side of the dam!) No major problems or revelations to report, just emotional flatness as water seeks its own level. I should be glad that there IS a bike and a trail and a reservoir I can get to. The bread and soup came out alright; I haven't tried the salsa yet.

No doubt I'm overreacting to minor bumps in the road, making tsunamis out of ripples, as it were, something in my internal psychobiological tides making me recoil from the external stuff around me. Hence a mismatch between my aspirations and my stepping up to make things happen. It's a familiar symptom of the Groucho Marx Syndrome that Woody Allen made famous: "I wouldn't want to be part of any club that would have me as a member." That would also explain why I'm considering taking up smoking cigars. No doubt this too shall pass.

"Broken Flowers"

It's the new Jim Jarmusch-Bill Murray movie you may have seen or read about. Gven and I had been meaning to go for a couple of weeks, but for one reason or another, even with Drexel Dollars in my wallet, we hadn't gotten it together to drive across town to the historic Grandview Theater. By some miracle it was still there Labor Day weekend, so Friday night we tore ourselves away from our respective projects - building a new compost heap, painting the kitchen green - to tear across town in Gven's car Olive and by some miracle found a parking place just steps from the theater.

What can I say? It's a funny, thoughtful movie with a fine cast; it held my interest for two hours. It plays teasingly with images of houses, neighborhoods, and countryside while scrupulously avoiding any references to specific places. It unfolds a few characters' past and present relationships in little cat-and-mouse games that bounce all kinds of crazy emotional debris off the deadpan countenance of Bill Murray, whose character, Don (as in Quixote) remains as evenly neutral as some enlightened but inactive yogi or monk through it all.

Besides all that, it gave Gven and me plenty to talk about while we walked up and down Grandview Ave. while I worked out the kinks in my legs. I even spotted a cool, cheap Indonesian drum in Wild Birds Unlimited, across from the post office. We ended up at the sheeshee wine shop next door to Spagio, where we found a table next to a smiling, posturing state auditor and smart-money favorite in the next race for governor. While a fresh-faced young woman and her increasingly drunk friends noisily descended through the last hour of a bachelorette party, we drank Czech lager and picked at the disappointing cheese plate. (Note to self: Don't order the $11.00 cheese plate at Spagio's wine shop.)

It wasn't until Monday night, over a candlelight supper of brots and pasta on the patio, that I cast all caution and good sense to the wind and brought up my self-referential response to the movie, which I'm guessing is shared by at least half of the male audience of this film (the half that's over 40): What names would be on your short list in a "Broken Flowers" scenario?

If you've seen it, you know the premise. Don receives a pink note from an anonymous ex-girlfriend claiming that her 19-year-old son (by Don) has left home in search of his never-seen biological father. Don is mystified, not knowing who sent it or even that he had a son. His Sancho Panza-like friend is as animated by the potential adventure as Don is woeful, and the next day he hands Don a stack of airplane tickets, rental car reservations, and MapQuest itineraries to help him find the mystery mom with the pink stationery.

The four Dulcineas he reluctantly tracks down form the middle third of the movie, and it would be fun to deconstruct that series of trips, but not here. For some perverse reason, I was intrigued by the what-if possibilities, and my dear wife was a good sport and played along, even though it's really a guy thing, the whole "no kids that I know about" schtick. I now invite my readers to join the fun and choose a short list of your own exes for a hypothetical Broken Flowers investigation.

For the record, Gven named Kenny the musician, whom she knew in Atlanta just before she met me; John from high school, whose girlfriend was really hostile toward Gven, apparently for a good reason; and James from Georgia Tech, a friend of a friend's brother and first serious love. Fair enough, how about me? I would want to look up Sue from the U.P., whom I awkwardly left to move to Georgia and (though it didn't know it at the time) meet Gven; Margi from Purdue, a sweet, wild, fun-loving elementary teacher who, to my chagrin at the time, married someone else; and Nancy from Ann Arbor, whose arty sophistication and left-wing politics both infatuated and intimidated my young self.

Not that I'll ever undertake a Don-like journey to investigate the present state of past loves. It would likely be as disastrous as Don's unbidden quest, but who knows? Meanwhile, I'm interested in other people's reactions to the movie, as well as their lists of suspects for investigation, at any stage of your own journey.

Back in the saddle again

Just like a clockwork universe envisioned by Voltaire, Jefferson, or Anthony Burgess, after Labor Day the mornings are cool enough to bike to work. It's a great time of year, possibly my "favorite" if I have one. There is still enough light in the evening to do somethings outdoors after work, and the temperature extremes have given way to warm days and cool nights that make Gven and me think about taking our act to San Diego or Melbourne, where it's ALWAYS like this. Is that possible? Or desirable?

Summertime is great, of course, but mornings were too warm to cycle even the four miles from Om Shanty in the leafy suburb to the big glass, concrete, and steel office building by the interstate. If I were serious, disciplined, and had all the Boy Scout virtues I'm supposed to have, early to bed and early to rise blah blah blah, I could have left the house at the crack of dawn when it was still cool and biked in to work all summer.

But I'm not, and I didn't, so fall is the ticket. Now I can ride in a tee-shirt, get a 20-minute workout, and sit down in my cube already caffeinated and oxygenated for a day of sedentary work. Then go home all pumped and aerobicized for whatever the indulgent, pleasure-seeking evening activities happen to be.

Yesterday was the first such ride of fall, and I could tell coming up the hill from Alumni Creek on County Line Road that I wasn't yet conditioned for it. The thighs were slack and the abdominals were abominable. But it already felt better this morning, so it won't be long before I'm in biking shape - if I stay with it.

That's the thing. Heart, lungs, and muscle fibers are unforgiving, as any athlete can tell you. Once or twice a week is not enough, and desire doesn't make it either, when you're halfway through mile five and you've trained for four. They call that "oxygen debt" for good reaon, and when you've exhausted your resources, you're done.

My friend Gorm is running a marathon later this month at a beautiful location up in northern Swing State. I've got to respect anyone my age (actually he's about a month younger) who still chooses to pay his dues all year to be able to keep delivering ATP to muscles for four hours of running. When was the last time I did anything physically demanding for FOUR HOURS? Shudder.

Go Gorm!

King Harvest

It's a good old song by Robbie Robertson, the last track on side 2 of The Band, circa 1972-ish, and it seems appropriate for Labor Day.

I work for the union cause she so good to me,
And I'm bound to come out on top because that's where she says I should be...

Born in the fields, listen to the rice when the wind blows cross the water
King Harvest has surely come.

There's a small basket of tomatoes and peppers on the kitchen table. I've been picking them for a few weeks and leaving them on a sawhorse out by the garden. Pick a few, let the sun and rain ripen and wash them off, and occasionally cut up a pepper to put in the bean soup. But as time passes, ripeness turns to rot, so I decided on a glorious clear Friday morning before Labor Day to take action.

I enjoy the visual spectacle of watching things decay as much as the next person. Apples wrinkle up like old people; potatoes collapse inward and sprout eyes; beans dry out into papery pods containing next year's seeds; cayenne peppers curl up in raucous contorsions under their little green hats. But I don't have much use for the fruit flies hovering around the overripe tomatoes and jalapenos that are starting to go soft, so I'd better do something with this stuff.

This morning more spots of bright red appeared in the back corner of the yard, announcing their readiness as I sipped my coffee in the Adirondack chair. I guess the rain Katrina blew our way last week perked things up after a short dry spell. So in spite of a perfect day to be outside, I resolve to spend the time indoors tha's needed to turn some of that bounty into salsa before it goes bad. Some of it will anyway, or already has, and it becomes compost. I like that - throwing nothing away.

First I wash what's been picked and put the cheerful little devils on the kitchen table to dry. Small red chilis, plump green jalapenos, long red cayennes, shiny dark purple sweet peppers, bright orange habaneros, and three kinds of tomatoes - some smooth and round, some wide and deeply creased like tiny pumpkins. It starts to look like some horticultural mosaic by Bosch or Breughel as I artfully arrange them in little groups on the octagonal table.

But one thing leads to another, and after I emptied the compost bucket to make room for more, I found myself dismantling the old heap by the garden, a year's worth of kitchen discards, layered with newspaper and weeds from the yard. So I spent some time forking out big clumps of decomposed stuff into an extended raised bed in the sunny back corner, doubling the size of the part of the garden where the bugs ate all the pole beans - better luck next year. The wooden timbers that held the compost together will make solid edges of those beds, and the bottom of the old heap is now nice, crumbly organic soil ready to sit for six or eight months before something else gets planted in it. Thus goes the semiannual ritual conversion of old into new, destruction and creation, amen, the second day of the ninth month has come to pass, and it was good.

While I was out there creating and destroying like some sunburnt suburban brahma-vishnu-shiva wannabe, I got the urge to put up new sides for the new compost, and the lumber was right there, 2x3s leftover from fence materials , so I cut a couple to make an isoceles equilateral triangle, and 12 triangles later it stacked up pretty well. By that time it was too late to make salsa.

So it wasn't until the next day, Saturday, that I got around to frying onions and peppers in an iron skillet, adding cut-up tomatoes, turn off the heat, and let it sit. One batch to eat, one to freeze for later. The next batch might be those little red chilis that don't dry so well, or maybe I should learn how to pickle.

dreaming, flying, planting, planning

A quick dream report while I still remember pieces of it:

Enter Burb, stage-left. It's a place I don't recognize from life as we know it, but I seem to be at-home there. He's there to pick up a plant we had talked about, and I'm out in the back yard digging it up. The yard is a wide but not deep space behind a wide but not deep two-story house set on a slope with trees around it. Burb and I get to talking about horticulture, what will grow well where, then stray from the topic and realize that time is passing so we'd better get back on-task. He has to go somewhere and will be back later for the plant.

Enter my dad, stage-right. We stand around outside talking about this and that, the plants growing in the yard, Burb's visit, the weather. Eventually Burb returns by helicopter or balloon or personal hovercraft or something, and instead of digging up the plant in question, we take a ride in his vehicle to get a birds-eye view of the property and the flora and fauna on it. That's all I remember.

Unrelated (but we know better than to believe that anything is unrelated to anything else, don't we) or maybe synchronistic daydream: A friend I only see occasionally, a former member of my Wednesday night men's group, has been planning for a couple of years to move to Seattle, and his departure is rapidly approaching, so there's a need to get together. The group got to talking about the Pacific Northwest/Washington state area at our meeting last night, so I took a look at an interesting publication this morning called, ironically, The Stranger. Check it out. And a sample of the humor:



On to another unrelated (or not) daydream, I've been listening to Bob Dylan's 1993 release "World Gone Wrong" a lot lately, like once or twice every night for a week or two; I do that sometimes, get on a jag with one CD and keep listening to it over and over because I keep finding different things in it, and during the day when I'm doing other things I hear certain songs (Blood in My Eyes, Delia) in my head while I'm doing other things; everybody does that, right? It's a different kind of Dylan album, just his voice and acoustic guitar doing an homage to delta blues, all traditional songs or covers. And stream of consciousness, political liner notes: "...against cultural policy...monstrous pompous superficial pageantry parading down lonely streets on limited access highways. strange stuff indeed."

Then, in the dream-space of museum and gallery travel for academic credit, Helga Golly called from Wassamatta U. to say that IF she can't go on the London-Paris study tour between fall and spring semesters, she could go on the New York study tour during October instead. Life should be full of such dilemmas! But it's complicated, dontchaknow, by a possible conflict with a friend's wedding, time away during a very busy class schedule, money, the usual real-life factors that keep it interesting. We'll see what develops further along in dreamtime.