Tag Archives: Growth

Grounded

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“I don’t know who designed that complex, but if I ever meet the guy I want to ask him why he’d put that hospital wing parallel with the airstrip. You know, it’s one thing to be grounded, but to lay there day after day and watch those guys climb into the burning blue, not knowing if they’ll come back…not being able to go with them…”
Bob stopped abruptly, mid-sentence, and sort of gritted his teeth a little and he held his breath in and his face began to flush. He picked up a teaspoon and banged it around the inside of his mug even though he drank his coffee black. He cleared his throat several times, then quietly growled, “In fact, if I ever meet that [expletive deleted] I’m not gonna ask him anything…not gonna say a word. I’m just gonna punch him once, square on the nose, and not feel bad about it.”

– Captain “Hopping Bob” Shannon
(excerpted from “Hopping Bob: memoirs of an unlikely, unwilling and unstoppable hero”)

To be grounded can mean many different things. Some good, some bad.
As kids, being grounded was like going to jail. Same is true for a pilot.
If you’re in a boat, being grounded is considered an emergency.
If you are an electrician, not being grounded is an emergency.

As I fumble my way forward in my new life as a widower, I realize the great extent to which my philosophies and life view are grounded in reality. They are built on timeless foundations. The Moon and stars, Mother Earth. Clouds and birds, sun and rain. I have likened myself to a chip off a grain of sand in an unimaginably immeasurable cosmos.

Evening Flight

Change can be difficult. It is by definition unsettling. Even when we encounter change that was not entirely unexpected, we seek out and cleave to those things that are not changing. As I have navigated the changes of this year, I am deeply grateful that my spirit is built on things that remain constant, and things that persevere beyond the grave.

Sunrises and sunsets. Clouds that dance across the sky. The whistle of wingtips as birds course over me. The smell of rain and taste of the wind. Sun on my skin, the buzz of the hummingbird. The rumble of thunder as a summer storm reminds me how small I am, and how large the world. The white butterfly, wandering gleefully along a meandering course, reminding me how large I am in the scheme of tiny things. Reminding me how delicate is the balance in a world that has bone-jarring thunder and gentle butterflies at the same time.

Change always sounds scary. Like everything we know is ending, and we shall be adrift in the great sea of this world. Sometimes the changes are big from one perspective. Sometimes, if we can zoom out, see our lives and worlds in their entirety, we see that change is simply a part of it. Like shifting sandbars, the ebb and flow of the tides, the passing seasons, the phases of the moon. Changes come when their time comes.

Sometimes we find these are times that help to forge us. To be put to tests, to weather storms. To find strengths we were hitherto unaware of. Truths we have been blind to, sometimes all of our lives. The real and lasting value of that which we hold and have held, the joys of recollections, the sweet sting of awakening’s tears.

And if we’re lucky, we find our second winds, our inner lights, our driving cores, and charge through the change, holding to the ever-present, the long-standing and the firmly-rooted.
Holding tightly on to one another.
Securely grounded in those things that will carry us through to the very end.

Seek peace,

Paz

Circles

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In some ways I’ve been directionless this year. Unmoored. I’ve carried on the day-to-day business of the Ark, and administered as Executor to my father’s estate. The dog is fed and walked and loved, the cat is fed and stroked and loved. The Ark herself has not done without special attentions in several areas. A few rearranged bits of furniture, a little more light and air in her rooms.
Increasingly, I find myself spending time with an old love. We met when I was about 13, and fell in love when I was about fifteen. We’ve had a long relationship, sometimes taking a back burner, and other times brazenly public.
Since the loss of my wife last December, I’ve spent a lot of time with an old, old friend. One who has shared many laughs and high times, and has always been there when things were down. This lifelong mistress is the magic of music. In some of my worst times, I would be known to “shut yourself up in your room all summer singing ‘boo-hoo’.”

It started, this time, with a little poem my dog Chuy had written over on his blog, chowdogzen.com. It was called Wish, and spoke of the most precious things in our lives, from a dog’s perspective. It’s no leap for a human to imagine oneself cleaving to these admonitions, as things like beauty and home and love are universal.

This song took a curious and circuitous path from concept to creation. At first it had a tempo and chorus that dragged a beautiful thing down nearly to a dirge. Then something happened, something from that magical ethereal realm of the musical mind, and an entirely different chorus composed itself. Phrases that were polar opposites of the sadness and indignant resignation of the prior iteration. It lifted me, this magical mistress of mine, and threw open the shutters, rang in the light. I have been locked in her embraces long and often, and this I offer as way of explanation for my absences.

Then Circles happened. There was a poem that, to me, was scraping the bock from the barrel of despair, so low was it. It was written in the summer of 2020, when the world had gone mad, and my wife and father were ailing. A long slow death in ordinary days. A reader interpreted it differently, and saw it as words of encouragement, to carry on, as Churchill would say.
Again, from the magic place our thoughts are forged, another chorus wrote itself. I suppose it’s no coincidence that these graces have been visited upon me at just the time I needed them. At just the time I had determined to seek them out.
Circles have been a part of my philosophy always. The cosmos itself is designed in physical circles, and life as we know it is described as a circle. I view my life as a series of concentric and overlapping rings, like raindrops falling on a pond. Each drop joins in concert with many and they sing their splashy song, and in a moment, the ring is gone.

And the Circle goes. The Circle goes.

And the circles grow, the circles grow.

And The Circle knows. The Circle knows.

A circle closes.

This is what we call a “scratchpad” version, not a polished and mastered recording. It’s a few ideas jotted down to conceptualize the song, so imagine it’s the quality of your cousin’s band playing in the garage. I’m on a manic productive binge for now, so the polish will have to wait. (This version even has the “tail” at the end where it should fade!)

Circles

I rise, unsure just why,
But here am I, awake and alive.
Breathe and step. Step again.
To where? Ahead. Beyond where I have been.

Look and see. What is there and what is not?
A past, the future. A time forgot.
Moving still. A back to break.
An iron will. Dreams to forsake.

And The Circle goes.

Sun and rain. Clouds to love.
Floods below, storms above.
Feed the machine, because we must.
Over and again until I am dust.

A sparrow lights to share my bread.
What’s mine is yours until I am dead.
A fleeting glimpse? A parting glance?
For who knows how long we shall dance?

And The circles grow.

Sun is setting. Darkness falls.
Yet light persists in hallowed halls.
Rest and sleep. To dreams awake.
A dream of dreaming for its own sake.

The new day dawns, wipe sleep from eyes.
Once again,
And who knows why,
I rise.

And The Circle knows.
A circle must close.

We’re gathering every Wednesday for Tuesday Night Music Club. (It’s a traditional name and day, but Carl plays billiards on Tuesdays). I leave you with a quote forged and written by another poet graced with the love of music, whose song Closing Time we are learning in the ensemble.

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.”

Take care. And I mean that.

Paz

Solo

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“You can train for all kinds of emergencies as a pilot. Like losing an engine, for example.
Now, it’s one thing if you stall one of your huge Rolls-Royces or Merlins if you have four of them hanging off your flying fortress or your Lancaster. You could be loaded with fuel, ordinance and dignitaries (i.e. useless added weight) and still make a big sweeping turn back to the field on three and stick the landing. It’s a little different story in a single-engine two-seater.
You can land without wheels if your gear gets jammed. You can ditch in the water. You can train how to know when it’s time to take a wild-ass guess at what to do next when all other options have failed. You can bail out.
You don’t exactly train for your co-pilot getting killed while you’re flying.”
Bob got real quiet right after he said that, and looked out the window of the café and up into the clouds for what seemed like a full minute before taking a sip of coffee and continuing.
“But you do train how to pilot a two-seater solo.“

–Captain “Hopping Bob” Shannon

I didn’t train for this.
We train for a lot of things in our lives. Basic training before deployment. We train to be a refrigeration mechanic or a teacher or a nurse. We are trained to ride a bicycle, trained to drive a car. We are trained how to train.
We plan for a lot of things in our lives. We plan vacation trips. We plan weddings. We plan for a baby. (Sometimes we plan to have a baby, and sometimes we plan how to take care of the baby we just found out about.)
We plan for kids’ college if fortunate enough to do so. We plan for retirement.
We even plan our own funerals and pay for them in advance.
I might do that, and also write my own obituary so they don’t miss anything.
I didn’t plan for this.

Honestly, my late wife and I were quite comfortable with and accustomed to, planning on, actually, the typical odds for men and women. That I would go before she did. The wills were made. All the important things were in line on the property deed and the retirement fund to make it easier for her and the kids when I went. We didn’t plan any funerals although we talked in a broad sense about our preference for cremation. We did talk about the fact that she would not want to stay on at the Ark alone. It’s a big house and you need to be a family or a recluse monk artist to live here.
Also it’s 115 years old, and hasn’t been updated in, oh, 115 years or so. So it has ancient single-pane windows and a hand-laid stone bulkhead and missing bits of mortar and a pellet stove and gas pilots and a whole rasher of things that make it a dream for a tinkerer but a nightmare for a widow.

We are easily lulled into the sense that tomorrow will be like today. If summer, we expect summer. In winter, winter. And tomorrow will follow on to the day after, and in its most generalized sense, life will just keep going.
That’s what we built our lives on for the last decade or more. The empty-nesters with the paid mortgage and a home and property to do as they please. We talked of how we loved so many things about this place. The big windows in particular. Bright, airy rooms. We vowed, each of us, to stay here “for as long as we can.”.
Somehow I imagined that being until the time I was too old to haul wood pellets and plow the driveway and shovel snow off the roof and mow and trim a 3-acre lawn. We’d move on to “Roland Arms”, as we called the neat, handicapped-accessible senior apartments down on Roland Way.
Or, perhaps, that time would be when my wife found herself alone, and would sell the home we had shared for forty years. Probably move in with a daughter, as her mother had done before her. Mary lived with us for about ten years before she died. We were certainly fortunate, having space in our home for her.

“Man plans. God laughs.”
The proverb hung on my mother’s wall.
“Such fools these mortals be.”

Having really made no plan to be sixty-two and flying solo, I’m making it up as I go along, I guess. Some things are easy and obvious. His & hers towels, for example.
Some things were just oddities that sprang from who woulda thought it. The kitchen, for instance, which had been primarily her domain for 35 years, equipped and stocked to her liking. I need to use the kitchen myself now, and don’t need to accommodate sharing. Some things were just too much for a single man. Pots and pans and utensils.
Other things are just not my cup of tea. An air fryer, a pressure cooker. Other things I was wanting for. Did she not have a set of measuring spoons somewhere?

And so a period ensued when I envisioned this new future in the Ark, just the three of us including the dog and cat. I started to move some furniture around. Open the space up a little. I needed space. Quiet space. And light. A few changes in window dressings.
At first I suffered from a certain survivor’s guilt, I suppose. It felt like an insult to her memory to remove the recliner in which she sat, to take down the blackout shades on the east-facing window in the bedroom.
The things of the household are pretty well settled for now. At least on the first story.

Time, however, is totally out of control.
Like so many riding the slowing currents into and through the delta on our river of life, sleep patterns began to change over the last couple of years. After the 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week, month-and-a-half odyssey that was the deathbed vigil I sat for my wife, I seem to have suffered a bit of post-traumatic stress and battle fatigue. Like shifting from night shift to day shift, it took quite a while to get back to a normal sleep cycle. It’s still not right, and combines with a certain hyperactivity and a propensity to “get in the zone” (or maybe more like “zone out”) while burying my nose in some industrious but detailed activity such as cleaning all the balusters of the banister. Next thing I know it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and I need to rise for work in a few hours. Thankfully, work has been only 3 days a week since my return from family leave, and my job is not difficult.
On the plus side, it has made for a lot of clean things besides the banister.

Of course there’s a lot more to these things than one would frame up in a blog post.
I’m not the first person that has gone through this. It’s what we do.
It is, however, the first time it has happened to me.
It’s coming back quickly, but it has been a long time since I’ve flown solo.
I hadn’t planned for this.

Take care and keep in touch,

Paz