Blueberry ledges, photo by John R. Boettiger (2001)
Reckonings is a journal focused on human and cultural change, and justice in its range of interactive dimension - personal, social, political, economic, environmental, poetic.
Attention to such themes is often expository and analytic. But true reckonings include imagery and story, drama, dance, poetry and song, the world of our dreams, shadow as well as light. Wall off or ignore any of these and our exploration of lives and their character risks desiccation and superficiality.
The pages of Reckonings, accumulated over about 18 years now, are diverse but not scattershot. The consciousness that informs them is still relatively coherent, still built upon the twin aspirations of integrity and love. A useful reader's or browser's guide might be the archives and categories listed on the right side of this first page, and the search box in the same location.
Now in 2019 and in northern California, Reckonings is about as old as the century in which it abides. I started writing and editing when I was living deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Figuratively and literally I was exploring, breaking and mending wilderness trails. That remains my calling. My crafts or practices are still words and images, poetry and story, fiction, memoir, biography and photography, in addition to shovel, hoe and mattock. (I confess the last three are now more memory than current activity, but in the last seven years I'm grateful to have added meditation.)
My formal training is that of a psychologist, but I've never found a way to practice that discipline straightforwardly. I'm always down a ravine or up a mountain or wandering in a marsh, hyphenated. I've been fortunate in my diverse teachers, sources of inspiration, grace and clarity, sometimes taxing, always enriching. Martin Buber, my mentors Erik and Joan Erikson, my grandparents Eleanor Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt, my poet friend Richard O. Moore, Stanley Kunitz, Joanna Macy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Alan Jones, Gil Bailie, Notto Thelle, my wise age-mate Parker Palmer, William Stafford, Jane Kenyon, David Whyte, Wendell Berry, my sister Ellie and brother Curtis, my parents Anna Roosevelt and John Boettiger, my children Adam, Sara, Joshua and Paul, my eight grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.
The more the years, the more I feel blessed.
Justice, hope and history: so inevitably issues of
meaning and value,
good and evil,
sacred and profane,
body, mind, heart and soul as one integrated, systemic whole,
the evolution of human consciousness through a lifetime and from one generation to another, to the seventh generation,
the character and health of our relationships with each other, our roots in family, community and place,
our membership in the natural world of which we are an interactive part, and for which we bear unique responsibility.
The word reckonings is rich in implication, suggesting the most careful regard, seeking true direction, and (as in "day of reckoning") the consequences of our lives and the mysteries of forgiveness. Our tools and the ways of our work are those common to writer and artist: attention, contemplation, patience, persistence, imagination, conversation, crafting one's learning with as much clarity, truth and grace as may be found or given.
The subtitle and theme of Reckonings are drawn from poet Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, a version of Sophocles' play Philoctetes. It has become an obscure play, but Heaney's version, while little performed, has rescued it for continued reflection, and I've written about it here. (See the post "Wounding and Cure.")
The pages of Reckonings change frequently, more in keeping with kairos (the right time, the opportune time) than chronos (chronological or sequential time).* Another useful word, sometimes fortuitously applicable, is the Greek hôrâ, similar to kairos, the seasonal time, the beautiful time, when everything comes together. The pages of Reckonings are linear or chronological in the sense that one follows another from day to day, but it may just as well be said that they are circular or elliptical or spiral. Subjects appear, metamorphose, fade, reappear in response to discovery, learning and revision; and in response to that which most needs attention -- the love and wisdom, the neglect and cruelty of those who bear responsibility for the lives of others, ways the first can be nourished, the second transformed and redeemed.
Comments, conversation, sharing, subscription:I welcome communication with anyone who feels a kinship with one or more of the themes of Reckonings. Offer comments on individual posts, or write me directly,
john@reckonings.net
Click on "Comments" at the end of any post to leave a comment; I'll try to understand and respond. Click on "ShareThis" to share a post with friends via email or networking sites. Subscribe to Reckonings by clicking one of the subscription options in the column on the right. (Your email address will never be shared with anyone.)
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* The contrast of chronos and kairos has been well described by my friend Gil Bailie: "In contrast to the word chronos – which means an interval of time, time as chronology, a sequence of identical units of time – kairos refers to a qualitative, not quantitative, experience of time. It implies a moment pregnant with consequences and demanding a decision, and, more importantly, the present moment, 'the present time.'"
I don’t think, for all my occasional respect for David Brooks of The New York Times, I would nominate him to define the changes needed in our mental health policy. (See his column of January 10, “The Politicized Mind,” primarily addressed to our press punditry’s failure to account for the likely schizophrenia of Jared Loughner, the accused Arizona assassin.)
But when Brooks makes reference, at the end, to a need to understand “a deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror,” it’s a shame he doesn’t point his readers beyond the potential violence of some schizophrenics.
Loughner’s isolation and prevailing thought patterns were extreme; he does probably, from the evidence Brooks offers, suffer from an unusually violent form of schizophrenia. But we would be seriously remiss to relegate that deeper realm of disorder, cruelty and horror to a relatively unusual form of mental illness.
It lives as an undercurrent, however unattended or sublimated, in most of our lives, and we are often drawn to its depiction in the media with a fascination born of identification.
Confronting and dealing with—I will say befriending, because we are in the realm of powerful transformation—such shadow presence in our own psyches is an essential dimension of redeeming and realizing our capacity for humane order, for love, affection and empathic response to others, for the grace and gift of the light of the world.
While these comments, from an old friend who is probably the world's greatest student of George Santayana, are not addressed to my previous post, nonetheless they speak to it. When he speaks of Santayana's skepticism, he is digging into in the earth of our cultural fragmentation and violence — and of the spirit of empathic dialogue and mutual nurture that is its antithisis.
As I write this, memorial services are bring held around the nation for the Tucson victims. Our one nation indivisible has proved tragically, perhaps fatally, divisible. We seem now to have, as Dos Passos would say, two Americas. My mentor-in-chief, Santayana, wrote of the Zeitgeist in our country which he thought crucial for the unity, the success of the U.S. He traced it to our inheritance and practice of "English liberty"--a readiness to join together, to cooperate, to compromise. It's apparent now that any idea of a "loyal opposition" is unknown to the Republicans.
What bound our nation together, GS thought, was a dedication to "unity in work"--a shared belief in our commercial/industrial enterprises and their rewards as the guarantors of progress and U.S. ascendency in the world. He hoped that our faith in machines, in gadgets, in science would bring not only prosperity but happiness to its faithful. Yet he was deeply ambivalent here. Did the engines of capitalism reward the spirit? the life of mind? Or would the workers, off the job, sigh Thank God It's Friday, resorting then to trivial self-indulgent distractions in the off hours? (And here I think Twitter and FaceBook and text messaging as harbingers of a gathering ignorance, the loss of coherence in both language and life.)
Were GS alive now he would find his early scepticism warranted. Our economy is now crucially dependent on the military/industrial complex, which requires the indefinite continuance of our wars on the Middle East. That dependency will wreck the budget (as military costs rise to 2 trillion), thus in time, ironically, wrecking the nation's economy.
And as Santayana knew well, the wreckage ultimately has to do with the human soul, with our integrity, our intelligence, and our capacity to love one another.
In his most recent columns in The New York Times, Paul Krugman has been examining the dynamics of the growing evidence of violence in the US. He is on the mark, and what he has to say deserves our attention and reflection. It's worth digging deeper. Krugman doesn't address all—and particularly the more deeply—underlying causes of the increasing evidence of a "culture of violence."
I think there is a major cultural breakdown occurring in the US, and it has to do with the erosion of connectedness and empathy, the rise of isolation, fear and anger. "Virtual" connectedness is too often—not always, it should be obvious to say, but see The Times' recent series—a mask for disconnection, like—again, with obvious exceptions—watching TV or playing video games.
