Alexandersmap

    Month: October 2022

    • Hugs

      October has been a month of hugs in my circle, and I’ve made the most of every one of them. Seeing old friends and family, celebrating moments together, absorbing loss together. Hugs come in all shapes and sizes, just like people do. But there are a few that stand out:

      Hello hugs are the best, for they signal reacquaintance after time away. Sometimes that time is as brief as a walk to the other room, and sometimes it’s a return after years apart. Hello hugs are warm and welcoming and signal “We’re back together again! Let’s get on with the party, already!”. Hello hugs are always tinged with joy for the moment at hand.

      Celebration hugs are savored when our favorite team wins the big game, or when our child successfully navigates a milestone moment like graduation or completing a recital. Weddings and anniversaries are milestones too, and we huggers go a little bit crazy at them. Celebration hugs draw in even the non-hugging crowd if you catch them at just the right moment. High fives are fleeting, hugs capture forever.

      Comforting hugs are rolled out at moments of grief, shock and despair. When we lose someone, when we fail the test, when we don’t get the job or get into the school or our team loses the game it calls for consolation and comfort. Hugs do the trick. It’s a signal that we aren’t alone—we’re in this together. Nobody wants to have to give or receive these hugs, but whether we like them or not, they’re as much a part of our lives as celebration hugs.

      Perhaps the biggest hugs are goodbye hugs. The squeeze is tighter, the embrace is longer, and they radiate warmer than any other hug. On the face of it, goodbye hugs signal “Until we meet again,” but whisper, “There’s so much we’ve left unsaid”. Goodbye hugs are always bittersweet.

      There’s another hug, the reciprocal hug, used often in some circles and never in others. It’s the “You bet I’m still here for you” hug, applied liberally with family and close friends in quiet moments. These hugs are seized out of the thin air of life; captured moments of affection and commitment at any old time. Walking by at just this moment? Have a hug. Doing the dishes? Have a wet hug. Taking the dog for a walk? Let’s hug the dog together. Sadly, not everyone has access to them, but everyone should. My best advice is to seek out people who think nothing of generous, reciprocal hugs.

    • Changes, In the Wind

      Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
      where everything shines as it disappears.
      The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
      as the curve of the body as it turns away.
      What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
      Is it safer to be gray and numb?
      What turns hard becomes rigid
      and is easily shattered.
      Pour yourself out like a fountain.
      Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
      finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
      Every happiness is the child of a separation
      it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
      dares you to become the wind.
      — Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XII

      Changes come to us in our own time, but often we grow comfortable in our own sameness. For meaningful change to happen we must step away from ourselves and become something else—something different, something more. Which way to go? It hardly matters at first, for we must break the comfortable spell we find ourselves in before we might finally see what’s available to us.

      The thing is, change takes many forms. Some people emphatically sail away from it all to see the world, while for other people change takes shape in less obvious ways. The pace of change is different for each of us. But we’re changing nonetheless. Like a sailor waiting for a weather window, we don’t always control the pace of change, but we may yet arrive if we keep working towards our objective. Put another way, we must have agency over our own transformation to live a full and rewarding life, while recognizing we aren’t on this journey alone.

      Yet it remains true that we must be the arsonist to our old self. Change begins with the spark of inspiration, kindled into a flame, that grows into a signal fire. We grow into ourselves one step at a time. As Rilke says so beautifully; “Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not thing it could survive”. We are aware of the changes happening within us and around us—do we shrink into our shell at such moments or embrace it? Life in every moment is a reckoning between who we believe ourselves to be and the person we wish to become.

      Dare to be it.

    • The Enchanted Witness

      I’d contemplated kayaking out into the middle of the bay to capture the sunrise this morning. That plan blew away in the breeze as the chop and chill nixed the very thought of bobbing along waiting out the first glimpse of the new day. Visions of me paddling back to shore with my tail between my legs and my phone resting on the bottom of the bay made me a land creature instead.

      Then a glimpse of the giant October full moon sinking towards the horizon spurred me up and out the door. I cursed myself for not bringing a better camera than an iPhone, and then checked myself and swung over to gratitude for at least having an iPhone to attempt to capture the moment. We forget, sometimes, just how lucky we are to have so much technology at our fingertips. It wasn’t so long ago that sharing an image of the moon setting with the world a few minutes after taking the picture would have been completely out of reach. Modern life is miraculous when we stop to think about it.

      I never forget how lucky I am to be in a place where I can take such pictures at all. To capture the sunrise 38 minutes after witnessing the moon setting over restless water is itself a blessing. I can’t believe people choose to sleep in instead. In the span of 38 minutes the universe revealed so much of itself, and I found myself the enchanted witness.

      Thanks for your company this beautiful morning.

      Moonlight surfing on waves as the moon set over Buzzards Bay
      Moon setting, 9 October 2022 (forgive the blurry iPhone picture)
      Sunrise, 9 October 2022

    • Here Today

      Why do we treat the day
      With so much needless fear and sorrow
      It’s not in its nature to stay:
      Today is always gone tomorrow.
      — Wislawa Szymborska      , Nothing Twice

      The autumn days are now impressionist paintings, one after another, until some day, not very long from now, the show will end. Knowing that one of these days that fall color, like the smell of tomato vines in the hot summer sun, like the dance of daffodils in spring, like that walk in freshly fallen morning snow, one of these days will be the last day we’ll experience it. This isn’t a sad thing—it’s a savoring thing. We must celebrate that which is fleeting in the moment we have with it.

      I think this often while swimming. Living in New England, we think about such things as first and last swims of the season. Which swim in Buzzards Bay will be the last before the air and water temperatures dictate prudence? Which swim in the pool in New Hampshire will be the last dip before the cover inevitably goes on and we call it a season? Which flailing leap into Big Island Pond? Since we rarely know for sure where our lives will take us, we ought to immerse ourselves in the waters of the moment.

      And what of old friends? What do we say to someone today when we never know with certainty that we’ll see them again? We sometimes linger with people at the very end, when we have the gift of knowing it will be our last moment together. We know it’s a gift because life is too often more abrupt than that. So shouldn’t we hold that gaze a beat longer? Hug just a little tighter in our time together? Surely we must savor these moments. For today is always gone tomorrow, friend.

    • To Become Writing

      “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.“ — Annie Ernaux

      Annie Ernaux, the Nobel Prize winner in this, her 82nd year on the planet, touches upon something every avid reader and writer feels: we transcend ourselves through words, merging into the lives of others. Sometimes those other lives are sitting across the table from us, where stolen glances search for progress and acceptance. But mostly, written words travel through time and space far better than we humans do, reaching people we’ll never meet, just as we’ll never meet those whose words merge into us. This is where the magic begins.

      To become our writing is a deliberate act of transcendence, drafted one word at a time. It’s a bold act of betraying our previous identity, left on the shelf for others to discover or completely ignore, for as long as there are books and shelves to put them on. As a reader, don’t we delight in this quiet invitation into someone’s soul?

      I write this knowing there’s a stack of books within arms reach just sitting there, marking time, waiting for me to return to them. We’re torn between two lovers, reading and writing, and must make time for each to reach our potential with either. We must live to take these words and make them our own, if only for a little while before we release them to merge with another. For existence is both transactional and transcendent. Words record, and carry on without us through others.

    • Mastering Our Moments of Truth

      “Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn’t matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.” ― Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

      We might never achieve the mastery of a Rodin in our art, but surely it’s something to aspire to. We might also aspire to it in this bold act of living. For living with and for others is itself an art, mastered by some, clumsily attempted by most. Everyone wants to be seen and heard and appreciated in the moment they encounter another person. How many disappoint in that moment of truth?

      I aspire to craft a sentence like Heinlein’s in each post. Maybe I will attain that level of craftsmanship on the next one, or the one after that. Time will inform the reader of such things, but making a go of it day-after-day is what matters most on our journey to becoming. Art isn’t the same as aging, for aging subtracts some vitality from the physical self, while days are accretive in art.

      At a party recently, I was reminiscing with a woman about her mother, who passed away a couple of years ago, shattering my belief that she would live forever. When she was alive she and I had a thing for each other, she being 40 years my senior, but young at heart. From the day I first met her I treated her as the vibrant woman I saw in her eyes, and she treated me as her would-be suitor, doomed to fail but welcome to try. This performance went on for almost three decades before she passed, and still makes me smile today.

      We may not become a Rodin or Heinlein in our art. But living offers other opportunities for mastery. Life is about the connections we make with people along the way, one after the other, in our time here. To master that is truly a gift.

    • The Enchantment in Brevity

      It is the season of migrants
      flying at night feeling the turning earth
      beneath them
      — W. S. Merwin, Echoing Light

      You feel it all happening quickly in October. The relentless, accelerating momentum of autumn. Change is quite literally in the air: Harvests and migrations, foliage and crispy air, all point to the shrinking daylight and collectively announcing that things are different now in this part of the world.

      As it happens, you grasp at bits of it to attempt to lock them into your memories. It’s a lot like the last few conversations you’ll have with a loved one who doesn’t have much time left to live—each little gesture, each sentence uttered, are amplified in meaning. It’s now or never, you think. But it’s always now or never, isn’t it?

      The earth is turning beneath us, moving us away from the sun. There’s something bewitching in the air, disguised in reds and oranges and yellows, and in the determined cacophony of migration above. There is enchantment in this brevity. Our days grow shorter every morning, yet it’s never felt so good to be alive.

    • The World as It Is

      We see the world as it is, and as we wish it to be. The pendulum swings between chaos and order, and for the most part we manage to keep from annihilating ourselves. But it remains deep in the back of our minds that things could go badly at any moment. Such is humanity that we can’t just enjoy the moment together, we carry on and get in existential bar fights with people we perceive as different from us. We live in a world where identity and the stories we tell ourselves dictate civility, or the lack thereof.

      There’s talk of a self-fulfilling prophecy when the economy slows down a bit. There’s a shared belief that things are going well, or not going well, and it makes people behave a certain way. And yet, aside from a few notable places in the world, things are overall better than they could be. So why don’t we take the long view and appreciate our place in history? Because we live in the moment, and we tend to dwell on the aches and pains of living. Such is the way.

      There ought to be more situational awareness in our lives. Most of the things we carry on about are related to the election cycle and the war in Ukraine and the lingering effects of the pandemic and the supply chain issues it triggered. Maybe sprinkle in some unbalanced would-be autocrats in our worldview to over-season the recipe. Perspective and insight are beautiful things, often pushed aside in favor of the flavor of the day. But life isn’t a pop music chart, we must go deeper.

      Ultimately, the more time we spend outside our own head, and outside the artificial electronic opinion machine spewing white noise at us, the more we might hear our own quiet heartbeat reminding us to take this moment for the miracle it is. If we’re all walking miracles, we ought to have cause for celebration. We just need to clean things up before the party. Does that sound frivolous? Aren’t most of these things we dwell on just so? We are the stories we tell ourselves, for that’s the way of the world. But shouldn’t we craft a better story?

    • Mechanics and Magicians

      Let wise men piece the world together with wisdom
      Or poets with holy magic.
      Hey-di-ho.
      — Wallace Stevens, Hieroglyphica       (via Rhys Tranter)

      I’ll admit to this: I need a bit of magic to begin some of my Mondays. Magic that goes beyond the second cuppa, beyond the brace of cold water on the skin, but something that acts upon me as caffeine works to clear early morning fog or cold water shocks the extremities to action. Poetry or great prose will do in such circumstances.

      Seeing the first two lines of the Stevens poem on a social media feed, I received the desired jolt, but if we learn anything from social media, it’s to confirm the source before repeating (if only the world took such care!). These particular lines seem evasive, quoted either with or without the Hey-di-ho bit, but largely found as the simple nugget of bright insight you see above. What to do with it? Hold for another day or perpetuate the magic in the quote? I choose to perpetuate. Blame it on Monday, if you will.

      Most of us are skeptical of magic. When confronted with it we search for an answer. But should we wonder how the magician pulls off their sleight of hand or simply wonder in the act? No doubt, progress lies in wisdom, and it’s a very fine thing. There’s a time for knowing the mechanics happening just behind the curtain. For process is progress, quite necessary for us to make productive use of our lifetime of Mondays. The car isn’t going to fix itself, you know.

      But, conceding that, isn’t there also a time for leaving magic just so now and then, that we may sprinkle it over moments otherwise mundane?

    • When There Is Impulse and Time

      What gentle echoes,
      half heard sounds
      there are around here.
      .
      You place yourself in
      such relation you hear
      everything that’s said.

      Take it or leave it.
      Return it to a particular
      condition.

      Think
      slowly. See
      the things around you,

      taking place.
      .
      I began wanting a sense
      of melody, e.g., following
      the tune, became somehow
      an image, then several,
      and I was watching those things
      becoming in front of me.
      .
      The you imagine locates
      the response. Like turning
      a tv dial. The message,
      as one says, is information,
      a form of energy. The wisdom
      of the ages is “electrical” impulse.
      .
      Lap of water
      to the hand, lifting
      up, slaps
      the side of the dock –

      Darkening air, heavy
      feeling in the air.

      A Plan
      On some summer day
      when we are far away
      and there is impulse and time,
      we will talk about this.
      — Robert Creeley, Massachusetts

      Why do we wait for someday, when today will do? We dream of places far away, when we have far less on our to-do lists, when we might finally slow down enough to catch up with each other. When we might catch up with ourselves. Life moves quickly—too quickly for such things as pondering and poetry. So they say.

      The beauty of poetry is in how the reader interprets a jumble of words just so, transforming them into something powerful or mundane, emotive or passionless, joyful or melancholy. Robert Creeley set these words free and, like life itself, we make of his poetry what we will.

      Maybe, it serves as a reminder to think slowly. To see the things around us taking place. To use this time more impulsively. To be present for those who are here, now.