The moral imperatives for making paths (bring on the pink champagne)

We had a blizzard yesterday on April Fool's Day. The picture below is proof it's so and no joke. Today I went out to take pictures of it for posterity, and most importantly shovel a path through it. This reminded me I almost didn't write that thing I thought about while I was out shoveling way back at the beginning of the winter, that shoveling snow is a noble act of charity for others and ought to be celebrated, maybe with Snow Shoveler's Day, on which everyone sends their own much appreciated snow shoveler a bottle of pink champagne--make sure it's in the Spring sometime, long after there's even the slightest chance of another blizzard, such as the one we got yesterday--see photo:



Well darn it all, I see in this blog format only half the picture shows. It may be just as well, since that can be symbolic of something which is only half appreciated. There you see the clumps of snow the shoveler has hoven out, huffing and puffing and remembering her mother's ominous comments of long ago when she told her people were always having heart attacks doing that. Long ago I learned my mother was always right, so that is why I probably have a worried furrow in my forehead while I shovel, though I know I carry the low risk genes for said heart attack and eat plenty of Omego3, you bet, anyway.

But back to the subject of shoveling paths being altruistic behavior of the most emu-la-table kind ever. If you see someone shoveling a path you ought to think about making paths for somebody yourself. It's a good thing to do. Do you know why? Because if you don't the person has to stagger through maybe one or two or three steps into deep, deep snow and then collapse in a heap and find themselves unable to move--clearly if the snow is not deep enough to do this to you, you should just forget doing it at all--this is the kind of snow a priori it is agreed it's important to shovel or else you will be in deep trouble.

Path shoveling is definitely for yourself, yes, but it's also a very nice thing to do for others who might follow after you. It is removing the dangerous obstacles from your path and from that of others who might decide to go in a similar direction for some reason. Paths are broadly generalizable too--paths made over rivers are called bridges and prevent drowning in rapid currents and deep depths, paths made through mine fields are extremely altruistically made and prevent death and dismemberment. This seems far afield from paths through the snow, but only someone who has not tried to cross a field of snow and fallen and has been unable to get up and has started to freeze to death while immobilized would think this. Paths not only provide free easy, comfortable transport through thickly imposed walls of  snow, jungle, rock, water, buried explosives, or other obstacles of the impervious  and dangerous kind, but they save lives and are made by others at considerable expense of time and energy. There--I've said it:  making a path for others and for oneself is a morally sound and admirable activity. It deserves a day of it own in recognition of its noblity on every level...Bring on the pink champagne somebody!

What happens when you get older? Surviving the tsunami of free time

Well, it depends on your circumstances, but until age 62 I was still in the traces--supporting a family, working full time, fitting in the creative stuff around that--mental capacity very good. Then, against my will (laid off by my thrifty governor) I retired. Simultaneously my youngest went off to college and I got a pension. I realized I was free to pursue all creativity in unrestricted time--to make a long story short, this emerged as a problem, not a benefit. I found having responsibility to others (job, family) had structured my life in a way that allowed creativity to flow, whereas no restrictions were baffling. I reverted to focusing on housework! (wrote a poem about that)--short-term memory goes at this age, so the need to focus is paramount. After 42 years being externally structured by responsibility I have had to re-learn how to handle free time. I would say finding really concrete projects helps, keeping connected with people who are like yourself,  keeping moving physically--to the limit really--and not languishing in the past too much is all important to keeping happy. The old body finally begins to show signs of wearing out--you just can't move as fast (I was a sprinter once), and mentally you need to do things you truly get motivated to do. When you are younger all of this happens naturally. You have to work at it when you are older. You ask the best questions!

Here is that poem about reverting to housework after the Tsunami of free time hit:

LAMENT OF HESTIA'S SLAVE

I am bound to Hestia--am her slave:
Every day she binds me to her service.
I wonder where my muse has gone.

For when I come to write, I sweep instead,
No holy words, no light and confession--
And when you come to the end of confession,
It cannot be long to the end of ends.
Venerable poets would say, wouldn't they,
The task to write a poem is holy?

But Hestia will not let me go and write.
Someone of sufficient stature must
Be made to sweep the house in endless hours:
She turns to me. I fear these twilight beings
Who walk in shades of truth and beauty here
Won't come to whisper in my ear again.

"Here-- take this" she says, and holds me out the broom.
"Prepare their rooms for them. They've traveled far
And need a night of peace and quiet now.
Perhaps their dreams will drift on down to you
While you are sleeping on the hearth--now go."

Poets long must toil, I know,
Never-ending days and nights,
Keeping house for Hestia's guests.
I am bound to Hestia, am her slave:
Every day she binds me to her service.
Oh, how I want my muse to come again! (6/4/10)

The Echo

THE ECHO

Heeding your call I try to devise

A delicious repast in a shady vale

Enduring, refractive and sung to a lyre.

Who would you be then? My images lost,

I’d call you by name, and then take your hand

Along by the ocean, down a long winding path;

Indeed like good luck, wrapped up in a caul

Of a newborn babe full of howls and yells

Left on the doorstep, the throne in crisis,

Exhumed from the oyster,  a pearl of chance.

My pencil point pen would sooth the parched throat

With floes of impending devotion,

Its sand and mud flats would banish the flagrance

From minds remiss of design and then bloom,

While flares of brilliant hues exterminate

Throughout all fields of sloth, the call

Of despondency:  the long lost jetsam

Washed ashore, deriding mortality

Resting in the sun of the breaking morn.

March 5, 2011

Stevie and Joey: A Tale of two kitties

When my old mother cat Camillia, daughter of Emily the original mother cat, gave birth to what would be two of her very last four kittens, I named them "Stevie" and "Joey." One, Stevie, was very sociable and the other, Joey, very independent. At first they were friends and played together as kittens will, but when they turned adolescent their fights became more and more intense. Joey would disappear for days; Stevie took over the yard. Then we had to go to Milwaukee and live with my daughter and son-in-law, which required neutering everybody. Stevie was around, Joey wasn't, so Stevie got neutered and Joey didn't. Joey never did turn up for our departure--he'd been gone for a week when we left for Milwaukee. I thought we would never see him again.

Over the next five months Stevie became an indoor cat. He lived in a house full of other dogs and cats and lost his shyness of strangers and became fully domesticated. When we returned March 30th, the snow still on the ground, there was Joey waiting for us! He had grown into an enormous, muscle-bound tomcat with a big head and a slowly swishing tail and yellow eyes that watched us all from a distance, ready to dart for cover. He must have lived in the empty house's cellar all winter. He looked very healthy and fit. I will not mention details of the ensuing encounters between the two brother cats and former litter-mates, only conclude Stevie became terrified of Joey, who was twice his size, and would go to any extent to avoid him, and Joey would go near nobody but me and Cheena, his dearly beloved and well remembered surrogate mother. Camillia eyed Stevie and Joey equally with the same cool eye of the eminently ordained matriarch and treated them both the same, with tolerant disdain. Cheena loved them both, but especially Joey.

Joey prowls around and lets me feed him now. He comes in through my window in the wee hours of the morning and eats the cat food I have there for him. He appears to be leading a very successful life (one can only imagine)for miles around, for he disappears for days at a time. I do celebrate his life. As for Stevie, he has the house and garden but he is always on the watch for his bigger, more muscly, more natural brother, and is cautious about where he goes at all times.

CHIMNEY-SWEEP

I forgot to tell you the chimney-sweep is coming.
He'll scrape the inside where the stuff accumulates,
And warn us not to burn a fire too slow and cold
When the weather's such and such,
And how every now and then we'd best to let it roar
And burn out chunks of stuff we'd best not have in there.
Let it be hot as hell now and then, he'll repeat
For it's the best thing of all he knows,
How the stuff builds up and ignites when you're least looking,
And there goes your chimney.
I called him up and he's coming over.
I'll let him put back the pipe I've had apart this year.

WELCOME MAT

I

There the limbs are spread to welcome in the light
But I'll not spread my arms for you, or wait
A single extra second for your face
To turn and look for one lost lingering trace
Of love on mine. Instead you'll find there hate
And loathing for a heart so cold and tight
And hard it never once would let me in;
But let my virtue languish into sin
Where courage, faith, forgiveness and their kin
Were locked inside the box beside my bed
To keep as souvenirs until I'm dead
And all the trees with light on them turn red.
You can keep your love, if you call it that,
This endless treading on my welcome mat.

I am a man more sinned against than sinning

"A King is supposed to have all that he needs without having to worry about anything in his late years. Yet King Lear, in Act 3, Scene 2, cried out pitifully: "I am a man / More sinned against than sinning." Although Lear has made a huge mistake in the first scene of the play in dividing up his kingdom and banishing his two dearest people, the sins his two other ungrateful daughters have done him is far greater than the extent of Lear's wrongs."

I don't know who wrote this, but I give full credit to the person on directessays.com who did because they put it well, King Lear's dilemma, which I have often related to my own. I once, or maybe twice, and possibly thrice have felt more sinned against than sinning. It is not the reason I picked this play as the one I love the best, but I do too have daughters, and though it was originally The Fool I identified with in this play (and he disappears in Act Three), there have been times I have identified with many more of the characters--Cordelia, Kent, even Goneril and Regan--especially when my aged, alienated and alienating father came to live with me--even the messengers. A mother is often the messenger.

Anyway, it is Lear himself I seemed to be echoing this morning as I explained to one daughter in reference to another, that there was a time when I too definitely felt "more sinned against than sinning." In my family the Stoic way, swallowing the drama of the emotional traumas that beset us all--see William Irvine's A Guide to the Good Life: the ancient art of stoic joy, rather than "working it through," is often how we deal with disillusionment and hurt, and loss of innocence, rather than picking the scab of painful memory and keeping it current. Yes, surely I too did once feel much more the victim, the one more sinned against than sinning.

What is required of one who would move on, when one has been more sinned against than sinning, is to think of it as being beyond the realm of what one has control of, and not letting it concern you ("God grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.") As the author of the above book cited, William Irvine, wrote me recently in a letter exchange, the AAA prayer is basically based on Stoic principles, accepting rather than continually regurgitating the fact that "I have been a man more sinned against than sinning." We are all victims in this life of that which we cannot control, and deciding those things which we cannot control (past, present, future trauma) are simply not of our concern may be our best way of all of viewing them. "Spun of pain and sorrow bought/Death is but an ugly thought" I wrote once in a poem when I was sixteen, trying to deal with the death of my grandmother. So too, perhaps, are the thoughts that we have been more sinned against than sinning--just thoughts that need not be beleaguered.