slebaron

[slebaron]

“Bling,”

A story published in The Intima at

http://www.theintima.org/fiction

[slebaron]

News of The Other.

When a part of the immune system recognizes something as both foreign and potentially harmful, or responds as if that was true, we have what’s called a “foreign body reaction.” This reaction includes inflammation; protein adsorption; monocyte/macrophage adhesion; a fusion of macrophages to form foreign body giant cells; and overall, a coordinated attack from these macrophages/foreign body giant cells and inflammatory/wound healing cells.

An autoimmune reaction occurs when the immune system interprets the body’s own healthy tissues as foreign and attacks them. Antibodies and immune cells are developed specifically to attack those cells or tissues perceived as foreign, with the result that we mistakenly damage ourselves.

On a societal scale, perceived foreigners, people of a different race, gender, or age are often perceived as potentially threatening, because they are the other.

You’re not one of us. You’re not like me. Go back where you came from.

When we’ve been primed by our “news of the day” or by the alarm of those around us, or by the passive denial of our community, we may have too many imaginary inflammatory cells circulating among ourselves and we’re ready to reject and attack what we believe is the other. Fear is a powerful driving force: The fight or flight response, or. . . rejection.

Damage to the perceived other, thus to ourselves, is most obvious when it’s observed, volitional, the overt aggression of one group (or me) against you, that can characterize a country or a person’s entire history. But there are also other ways a body attacks the perceived other, and its own tissue: The passive rejection, a failure to protect, a loss of will, benign neglect, are all damaging too, whether intentional or not.

Unfortunately, we’ve launched a self-destructive auto-immune response, many parts against another.  Like an immune system that has been distorted by infection, we may not recognize that we’re all parts of one large body, where the welfare of each person depends ultimately on the welfare of all. 

The survivalist retreats into a bunker; the oligarch retreats into a yacht; the uncounted fearful retreat into conspiracies to explain the inexplicable, and meanwhile the self-righteous slide into silent apathy and despair. . . 

All of us, regardless of which group we find ourselves in, are vulnerable to the disease and damage caused by relentless attacks or equally pernicious, by neglect, intentional or passive, on what seems to be the other—But really, the other is ourselves, and we’re all the other.

The only way to protect myself is by protecting you.            

Let’s begin.

[slebaron]

Memory

                       Memory. Some of our news is what we remember. We tell each other this memory is so real I can see it as clearly as I can see you.  But it’s also just a wisp of something that’s here then gone so we know it’s not present or real anymore. True enough, but there’s also something that lies out of sight below the surface in the soil of our daily existence where we try to touch and nourish each other with the connections and messages that keep us in this life.

           This first memory of my own version of life is my mother changing my diaper while I lie on the table near an open window. Suddenly a swoosh and crunch of tires on gravel, I glimpse the top of a truck come to a stop, she exclaims to someone, Look, Paul’s home, the clatter of people running outside, she turns with a smile toward the window just at the moment I feel a warm stream from my below grow upwards across belly to chest, a happy warmth but she’s not pleased and makes some unhappy sounds, wraps me quickly as she rushes outside to something that was good news.

           A few days later we drive in that truck along a forest lined dirt road 20 miles south of Cardston, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, twilight so deep that the truck lights are on. Mom holds me tight and hums a comfort song. Someone says Look, a bear. I sit up now on her lap but see only shadows until its eyes reflect dark lights back to us, it stands uncertain, moves one side then another turns and disappears into the brush. It means something, a welcome, a good thing and we seem to know this is a good place to be, with bears, where the air is so clean and cool each breath bathes you.

Dad says over his shoulder, What do you think? Bryce and Bentley and Bobby shout Yes and  they squirm around to open the doors so they can run beside the truck. I look at Mother’s face. She smiles a little and hums as we drive in this almost dark past a big barn then I see a large, unlit house. Bobby asks can we move here Dad, he smiles and says let’s go inside and take a look.

Like this, I began to build and collect personal memories that will gradually reach out toward family memories, then community and social memories so we can tell ourselves we exist.

Memories became places in the mind, a quality of being, rather than a linear sequence. Then curiosity becomes about discovery from being more than exploration. Where would that lead us? You and I would become more acutely aware of how our apparent separate individuality is such a tragic misunderstanding, because we’re so deeply linked through our roots and all the memories and messages of our ancestors that in fact we’re links of a larger, more complex organism. We’re trees in a forest, apparently apart but as connected in the canopy and the soil as if we’re fingers on the same hand.

I don’t recall, I can’t even imagine why none of my older brothers went one day into the hay fields with Dad. It was late in the evening and he had to finish. Why only me? Possibly because my older brothers had chores that I as a three year-old couldn’t yet do. 

Dad tells me to stay away from his horse drawn mower so I patrol the edge of the field, kick rocks, throw sticks and watch the horses clomp away from me to the other side of the field, pulling the mower with Dad in his bouncing, rocking seat. The loudest sound is metal chattering clacking teeth of the mover blade.

Then a louder crack from the iron case of the mower blade, Dad’s loud command Whoa and the horses stop. Dad gets off his seat and lifts the mower blade and its hundred teeth because something is broken. That’s a good break in the routine, so I wander over near where he’s propped the blade up, as tall as he is, taking something apart.

As I watch the repair, one of the horses shakes, the blade pops loose and smacks down so hard on my head I’m flat under metal can’t breathe and don’t know anything other than pain until he picks up the blade enough to pull me out stand me up and shake some howling into my lungs. This is enough for him to know I’m alive and awake. He presses his handkerchief down on my scalp until the bleeding stops, he holds me and rubs my back so I feel his fear and worry. 

Then enough because he needs to finish so he says you have to sit on your horse and go back to the house where you can call to your mama to come get you down. Me alone in the dark was more that I could think of but he sets me on my horse anyway and tells it to go home, take him home.

A crack on the head and a ride home alone in the gloom. That was big hurdle for a three year old boy, which I was on that day. 

What do memories like these mean in any lifetime of one person, and that person in a larger family and community? They all help to explain our injuries and the ways we twisted and adapted and became weaker or stronger to become who we are now.

There’s this place between death and being awake any of us may be forced to visit, always accidentally and we never know until later which side we’ll come out on.

           Memory. Trace in the snow, it’s where one or something was, holding a shape through stories, landscapes, and surroundings. As the stories fade, the neural connections and the substrate fill in, new snow in old footprints. Yet even after the snow melts there’s a memory of the memory, a place where there was a place. Every part of our earth is a place of places, holding through stories all that was once and still is there.

           There’s a footprint of my mother’s disappearance and reappearance as I grew up. The uncertainty of whether she’d get out of bed all day, or whether she’d be an empty place in the house. How that uncertainty, absence, and a child’s confusion about whose fault was it, all tell a story of how to be in this family in this world. Only after years there may be an opportunity to understand that I had come to the wrong conclusions and that the wounds were deeper than we wanted to say. 

This is how we all learn and remember, un-remember, change and invent just to ensure we’re able to carry on. And this is also how an entire country turns and twists to avoid its larger painful truths. Violence, denial, oppression, erroneously applied to make what’s real and tragic become something fictional. But only truth and reconciliation, individual and collective, will allow each of us to forgive ourselves, to understand our families, and to heal our larger communities.

Our landscapes and surroundings are footprints. Our spirit and our body are both the foot and the footprint. They hold us and the energy we gathered around us as we grew apart but still together.

All this together is the first part of the news.

[slebaron]

The news

Before I go further to describe these first hundred years of my life, someone asked me to give some news updates. What happened then and now? And what does it mean? Where are the headlines? The breaking new stories, the background and the politics?

           What’s your news for this Memorial Day? Remember who’s lost. Who remains to carry on. Are you feeling isolated, discouraged, wondering if anyone even cares what your news is? If anyone would remember you? Before we publish the news, it helps to know whether anyone cares.

           Let’s give it a try. Where to begin. . .

[slebaron]

Rhubarb

When you sent the six-month ultrasound image, there he was clearly: A head, the body curled, arms with hand and fingers, two feet. Swimming, sleeping and burping. Stretching. Your first baby.

There was a little penis too, so now we could think about the names you considered for him.

We thought of names too. We weren’t invited to submit them for review, which was fine with us. Choosing a name can be a personal, private process. So we kept the names we thought of to ourselves.

I carried the ultrasound boy inside everywhere I went, especially when I went to sleep. I asked him to grow. I asked him to show me his face. I saw his face then, more or less the same face I see now when you send his six-month laughing, playing, and sleeping photos. Memory can be tricky, but I think I saw him at that moment just as I do now, the difference being that his pictures were all in my mind, black and white; now nine months later, they’re in  color on my iPhone.

He “said” to me (I mean I imagined or felt or heard him viscerally) that his voice was “rhubarb.” Maybe it was my voice. Anyway, that was the name that I believed fit him the best. Not that it should appear on his birth certificate. It was a “soul name” or a “spirit name,” because it had significance, for me at least, and maybe someday for him, as an adult, if he accepted and took on the intention of that name.

This was how the name “rhubarb” linked us together, you in your first months of life, me in the last few of my grandfatherly life.

The significance of this name comes from how I worked so hard to do the “right things.” So hard that I felt attracted now and then toward delinquency, as if becoming a bad boy would provide a balance for those high expectations and unyielding discipline.  In my pocket, there was a notebook of life. Every page began with the words “Do well,” and ended with, “You did well.”

           Words of encouragement are often a mistake, because they can distract from what’s needed to live more fully: For me, there was another secret need that should have been acknowledged more frequently: To lie in the garden next to the rhubarb.

           All of our ancestors and our history are there in the earth, most accessible when our body lies against the yielding, fertile dirt of the garden where the broad triangles of rhubarb leaves offer a little shade. Close to my feet on one side, carrots, and ranged on the other side a row of peas climbing up a trellis and reaching out to grasp my fingers if I were to lie here still and long enough.

            Rhubarb leaves are toxic. The root and rhizomes are used in traditional Chinese and European medicine for complaints including gastrointestinal and menstrual complaints. In my experience, rhubarb stems, especially the tender red ones, are best consumed when sitting in the garden. The crunch of the first bite releases sour juice into my mouth that makes me squint and gasp, then the sweetness makes me want more. The stems of all sizes are delicious stewed, in jam, a pie, or a crumble, especially when mixed with other fruit. There’s the balance that surrounds us and infuses us with a dynamic tension that’s the basis for all life energy and metabolism.

           That’s a lot for you, Rhubarb. Bring your sister, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and all your ancestors with you. Sit in the garden to weigh your life accomplishments balanced with your life nourishment. Be mindful of toxic, sweet, sour, and how to delegate each to its place in your life. Help us remember.

[slebaron]

HEART SOUNDS

My first knowledge of a heartbeat came from my mother when I was three years old.

It happened in a moment when I was filled with grief. I had lost something. I felt such regret and frustration that I couldn’t contain myself. I cried both for the loss, and also for the terrible recognition of my limited ability to control the world. I believed that I should be able to find and fix and have anything. To discover I was wrong became an additional source of pain in its own right.

Mother was no doubt exhausted by the struggle of her own life with its losses and demands, especially by the burden of mothering four boys (and maybe by the thought that there were still more to come). She stopped her work in the kitchen and sat down in her rocking chair. She told me to come to her.

She pulled me onto her lap and held me against her while she sang quietly and rocked back and forth. When I settled, one ear pressed close to her chest, I noticed sounds I had never heard before. Her breath was like the sighing of a breeze through the treetops outside. And there was a deeper, more regular rhythm like a muffled drum.

I sat up and pressed one hand against her chest. I could feel by touch what I had heard, muffled to my ears, soft but firm beneath my hand.

I looked at her and pointed to the same spot. I asked, “What is that?”

She smiled and said, “My heart.” Then she pulled me tight against her chest again and resumed her song. I listened to her song, breath, and heartbeat all together. I felt a great calm, and a sensation that only years later I learned to call “well-being,” and “oneness.”

The fact that “oneness” has been hijacked by various cults and religions is of little interest to me, in the face of the actual experience that first occurred on my mother’s lap, and still is accessible every day, directly, through the mother earth.

You and I, each with our own mothers, also share the same mother of the earth. When she pulls us close to her, you and I can hear the sounds of waves, wind, and birds, and if we’re quiet and undistracted, we share again the same gift of well-being and oneness.

[slebaron]

The First Hundred Years...

A reluctant ghost.

Isn’t there a beginning and an end to every story? A string or a stick has one end and another, although it’s arbitrary and without meaning to assert that one end is the “beginning” and the other is the “end.” Tie the two ends of the string together. The “beginning” is arbitrarily  wherever you look and touch the string. But really, the idea of beginning and end in this circle is without relevance.

We’ve not had much, if any, practice to learn how our life is actually a circle, a space, and a transfer of energy as dramatic as a fire. Imagine a strange world in which everyone has eyes but few have learned how to see. We’ve missed so much in our education! It’s a matter of life and death.

Until I was five years old, I knew we were a flow of energy that became focused with birth, diffuse with death, but that remained always in the experience of days and nights as the earth and sky birthed us again and again in various forms. I knew this was so, although I didn’t have words for it. When I began to attend school, all the new words and ways of thinking I learned cast doubt on what I had known, and the awareness became a reluctant ghost that followed me in hiding.

[slebaron]

The First Hundred Years of my Life

The beginning of a circle, 

the beginning of space, is where you are, now. A chronologic progression through that space and time begins with here and goes everywhere. Yes, but how did it all begin? Just like this. That’s what makes now the eternal.

“Suchness,” was how it was translated in the introduction to Buddhism I struggled to read when I was 16. Don’t make it so difficult, I complained silently to the author. Just explain it in ordinary terms—stop this enigmatic stuff. The book never replied, and I never quite understood until, still 16,  I lay face down in a field somewhere in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where Canada and the United States get lost in each other. The dried grass, the damp earth, the breeze and sun dissolved all thought until they dripped from me and I disappeared into something that I had no words for. Now, 60 years later, I recognize it was suchness.

[slebaron]

COVID-19 and Cancer: My bags are packed

With the COVID-19 virus lurking in the streets, I feel paradoxically alert, but calm. I’m blessed to have already accepted the possibility of imminent death that comes from my recent diagnosis with Stage 4 lung cancer. Although I’m not especially pleased to be in such a high-risk group, I am glad that I’m no longer filled with dread.

I hope I can say this without appearing smug, but I’ve found a patience and equanimity that would have eluded me if it wasn’t for cancer. Without equanimity, I would have otherwise tried to run and hide, filled with the fear that death was coming for me before my time.

Thanks to cancer, I’ve had time already to try out denial, anger, fear and bargaining. But when I arrived at acceptance, I found a freedom to relax into each moment, to laugh, to love and be loved, no matter whether for a day or for years. New priorities had suddenly, without effort, taken over my life.

I’ve become selfish both for myself and for you. I want us to focus on activities and conversations that are interesting, helpful, and most important, meaningful. Wasted time has become—a waste. To sit in quiet contemplation, to enjoy a funny story with my wife, to share thoughts with a friend, to bake some bread, or to throw my heart into any work I can do, have all become so much more important than before. Whatever isn’t worth doing, I’ve stopped doing.

Lucky for all of us, we don’t need to be diagnosed with cancer to rediscover meaning and richness in our lives. Here’s how I begin: First, pay attention. Second, I remind myself, when you notice something that’s true and important, stay with it.

Meaningfulness is an important test. My days don’t need to be a hurried cup of coffee on the way to something else. Instead, every one of our remaining days—however many they may be—can be an opportunity to really savor that coffee—and the moment.

If activities or discussion veer off into trivial, I stop and ask, ‘What do I really need?’ Every pain and every secret becomes worthy of respect and care; each moment of quiet and calm is of value, if I pay attention. These are all opportunities for humor, intimacy, or healing before it’s too late.

Thanks to cancer, I’ve taken time to refocus on meaning. For some, religious or spiritual icons help focus the mind on a calm acceptance of death. For me, I treasure most of all a return to the intimacy with nature I had as a child. As an adult, I’ve found that reconnection with nature is a refuge for the same dancing atoms that created the soil, grass, earthworms, trees, streams, frogs, and you and me—all cut from the same cloth. All these atoms were thrown together in a cosmic cake to create our earth and sky: our mother and father from where we all came. I’m happy to rejoin them any time.

Having made peace with all this because of cancer, my bags were already packed and ready by the door when COVID showed up, scaring some of us almost to death. Just as cancer and I have agreed on enough prudence and caution to care for my health and for my fellow humans and for the environment; and to accept the quite unpleasant but helpful chemotherapy treatments, I also exercise great prudence in preventing possible exposure to COVID-19. That’s like checking to make sure your seatbelt is fastened as the aircraft bounces through a scary storm. But it doesn’t prevent me from continuing on the grand journey of whatever life I have. My bags are packed and ready to go.

If COVID finds me, I may have precious little time to say goodbye to anyone, let along tie my shoelaces. Then I’ll be gone. So I took care of the thank you’s and good-bye’s already. Meanwhile, it makes sense to be careful, and to be careful that what I do and say is meaningful and true for me and others. It can be tough, but there’s great joy to be found in living one meaningful moment after another, whether it’s only a few or many.

[slebaron]

“The rests are as important as the notes...”

...A comment by the Nova Scotia architect Brian MacKay-Lyons in an interview.

Having studied and played piano for years, I can appreciate that. It’s self evident. But it hadn’t occurred to me that this applied to my life also, until I had to think about cancer, my own cancer, and the “music”-- made in large part by the rests and the notes-- that would be me for the remainder of a likely  attenuated life.

Work, move, plan, repeat, then rest. In those rests are enjoyment or recovery from what came before. In the midst of doing, there’s a space for being. The architect was bringing to our attention that a the structure of a building needs empty spaces, unfilled spaces as much as it needs structure.

Now and then, I do nothing, think nothing, if even for five seconds.

[slebaron]

Cancer...

...was the last thing I expected. So when my primary doctor called me that evening January 6th, and said, “Sam, I’m sorry to tell you this, but from your chest Xray it looks like you have lung cancer,” I knew he was talking about me; but I felt like he was talking about one of my patients.

       Three seconds passed. He was talking to me, about me. There must be a mistake, but I knew there wasn’t. My shortness of breath, weight loss, fatigue, and cough all pointed in that direction. The mistake, I thought, wasn’t in the Xray; it was that I had accidentally stumbled into an alternate life script. That must be the mistake.

       That was how my mind, spinning quickly, zoomed in minutes through denial, anger, and bargaining. “That’s interesting, I thought. Just like in the text books, but a lot quicker.” What’s next? According to those who have studied stages of grieving, my next stage, if I follow the typical pattern, will be depression. After that, acceptance. I thought about this overnight, but only after I told my wife and other family and friends.

       By the next morning, it seemed to me that the depression stage would be too damn depressing, so why not skip it? Besides, it’s a waste of precious time. Let’s get these stages finished and on with whatever can be done next. I think I’ll enjoy more just moving ahead right away into acceptance. Like moving to a new apartment, I settled in, brought my family with me, and we began to explore the neighborhood of “acceptance.” 

       I was right--it’s a pleasant neighborhood. One day I ran into Mr. Rogers there, and we went for a walk together.