Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Volunteer, get out the vote

https://dashboard.barackobama.com/

I'm aboard. The stakes are enormous. Anything we can do to register, recruit others, knock on doors, make calls, write letters, give a little more, get neighbors to watch the debates and talk with each other, get to the polls, vote.

Volunteers are the foundation of this campaign — people reaching out to one another, building the organization we need to win from the ground up.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, "Charted Waters"

My last day in Norway, so why on earth or sea am I posting a short essay on learning to sail off the coast of Ireland? I might say that I long ago traded my modest skills as a sailor for the joys of sea kayaking, but have not abandoned the wish to move across the water — especially the sea — under sail, possessed of the skills in which Verlyn Klinkenborg is taking such pleasure in this lovely essay about learning by practicing. I could also say, as I have elsewhere in the pages of Reckonings, that I am a longtime admirer of Verlyn Klinkenborg himself, for the grace of his prose, for his gentle essays in the Times, usually under the title, "The Rural Life." Finally, I am simply enjoying a slow day of gathering myself and my belongings to travel home, halfway around the world, after two weeks of sorrow, memory, reunion, companionship and joy among friends in a gifted community to which I shall return.

 

Verlyn Klinkenborg

Charted Waters

---

New York Times

 September 21, 2012

We troop down to the harbor at the once industrial end of town, nautical mousquetaires wearing sea boots and knit caps, salopettes and foul-weather jackets, bundled in life vests with crotch straps and tethers. We pass black boot prints tarred with waste oil and a great heap of wharfish refuse, tangles of long-discarded fishing nets, thick manila hawsers. And then we come to the jetty, a wide concrete ramp leading down to the broad water of Baltimore Harbor in the parish of Rath and the Islands, County Cork, Ireland. Two aluminum skiffs are waiting, rafted together. We climb across to the outer skiff, then we’re off to the sailboats. There is a light breeze. The boats rest on their moorings like half-depleted helium balloons.

And who are we? We are the students at Les Glénans, the venerable nonprofit sailing school founded in Brittany, France, 65 years ago by a group of former Resistance fighters. One is not merely a student at Les Glénans. We are members of a sort of sailing collective, an Internationale without dogma, a league of learners led by volunteer Argonauts. We share kitchen chores, one boat crew at a time, in the disused Baltimore railroad station. We sleep in bunk beds at the former station master’s house. This is how it has always been at Les Glénans, which prizes a sense of volunteerism and community as much as a love of sailing. The school has two bases in Ireland, three in Brittany, one in the South of France and one in Corsica. It offers dozens of courses in small groups — everything from two-day windsurfing classes to a six-week Atlantic crossing. In Baltimore, there were seven of us, divided between two boats with an instructor in each.

At Les Glénans Baltimore, the official language is English, but the off-watch talk is mostly in French, mingled with the smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes. (I am one of two native English speakers. The other, Ruth, is Irish.) When Clément or Löic or Nolwen (Bretons all) lose the English words for, say, “topping lift” or “shackle” or “outhaul,” I find myself supplying them. What they supply is an ineffable calm when the novice at the helm tries to bury the toe rail in les moutons — whitecaps the wind has kicked up in the harbor.

The difference between sailing and practicing sailing is indiscernible. To sail is to practice sailing, and to practice sailing is to be out on the water. We learn to pick up a mooring under sail by picking up a mooring under sail. Heaving-to is how we study heaving-to. We pay special attention to the effects of our maneuvers — what happens to the wind and the way the boat rides as we tack and jibe — so we’ll know what we’re noticing the next time we feel these effects. The instructor is present, really, to translate for the boat, to point out the link between what we do and what we feel. It is the boat itself — a slippery thing called a Glénans 5.7, a cabinless vessel suited for four — that teaches us. Our suspense becomes exhilaration as the week progresses. Qualms vanish like a sky full of clouds, blown out to sea.

Half the fun of learning is watching other people learn, and there is no better place to do this than a sailing course at Les Glénans. For the novices that first morning, the boat is a cat’s cradle of meaningless lines. The rudder is waiting to be pintled to the gudgeons. The sails lie bagged below, the headsail like a month’s dirty laundry, the main like a long, tubular duffel of drugged anacondas. The boom is reluctant to do anything asked of it. Tying a bowline — a knot essential to controlling the headsail — requires a fable worthy of Aesop, involving a rabbit, a hole and a tree. The moral? Tell the tale wrong and you get no knot. We are surrounded by sleeping yachts and overwatched by Dún na Séad Castle, which has been watching the harbor since 1215.

By the second day, 10 hours of sailing later, the novice at the helm luffs up (turns into the wind) at Löic’s command without hesitation, though “luff” was a word unheard of the day before. We prepare to tack — change angles to the wind — and find ourselves in a linguistic tangle. I was taught to say “Helms a-lee!” at the critical moment. Coming from me, that’s about as natural as flinging an arm forward and shouting, “Wagons ho!” while swiveling John Wayne-like in the saddle. It sounds even less commanding in French. So we agree to use, in a thick French accent, a phrase one of the novices has used whenever he’s been at the helm. “Ready to tack?” he asks. “Ready!” we shout. “Weeee TACK!” The boat comes about, bearing away 90 degrees from our previous course. By the third morning, we can pull the 5.7 together in minutes, jib bent on, sheets bowlined and figure-eighted, reefing lines and outhaul rigged, rudder hung. At day’s end, I luff up, having sailed through a maze of moored yachts. We catch our buoy with a boat hook and troop home to make dinner.

One afternoon we indulge in a drill much beloved of sailing instructors. We heave an object overboard — a bucket tied to a boat fender, a tough vinyl tube — and take turns trying to retrieve it. To perform this exercise, we sail past the Lousy Rocks, midharbor; past the leeward, sheep-bearing flanks of Sherkin Island; past Loo Rock; and out into the Atlantic swell just east of Cape Clear Island. It is hard — if preposterous — not to feel somehow Odyssean sailing between the pillared cliffs of the harbor mouth, as if we were “Heroes/Sitting in the dark ship/On the foamless, long-heaving/Violet sea.” We joke about heading to America, but the Frenchmen would run out of smokes before nightfall.

We each take a turn or two catching the castaway fender in mercurial sunlight (harder than it sounds). I look back and the narrow slot of the harbor entrance, only 400 meters wide, has vanished into the rocky crust of the Irish headlands. There is no losing the harbor — a tall, bulbous monument called the Beacon, built in 1849, overlooks the entrance. But from open water there’s something eerie in the way that slender portal to safety hides itself. Wind coming over the low hills will find Baltimore Harbor, but the long-heaving swells of the Atlantic cannot, making it a port of refuge in any storm.

Lying just out of sight, some four miles west-southwest of our current position, is Fastnet Rock, one of the great navigational marks in the waters of the British Isles, often the first landfall for eastbound trans-Atlantic ships. It is also the rounding point in what is now the Rolex Fastnet Race, which takes place in early August and originates off Cowes, in the Solent, the strait between England and the Isle of Wight. In many sailors, the name Fastnet raises thoughts of the legendary storm that demolished the 1979 race, when a deep depression bore down on the fleet like a bowling ball falling on a flotilla of matchsticks. Twenty-four yachts were abandoned and 15 sailors died. As it happens, the first lifesaving boat to answer a Mayday was one launched from Baltimore.

But our day is bright and warm, and to the west, between horizon and headland, the only suggestions of the era we’re in are ourselves. Dún na Séad Castle dates from the early 13th century, while the Franciscan Friary on Sherkin Island was built in 1466. They are latecomers both, for long before them there were kingdoms within kingdoms in this corner of Ireland. The sack of Baltimore by Algerian pirates, in 1631, seems comparatively recent.

One morning, the wind is too high for us to go sailing so we hike above town to the foot of the Beacon. The wind kites hard against us. We stand edgewise into it, holding laminated nautical charts of the harbor, confirming that objects marked “conspic” on the chart are indeed conspicuous. Foam streams in linear drifts from the edge of Spanish Island, where sheep are filing downhill like a stone wall that has come apart. The water in the harbor has gone chalky, shaken by the gale. But in a protected inlet called Eastern Hole Bay, just over the edge of Beacon Point, the sea is clear and luminous if never quite violet — one moment breaking opaline, the next an aqueous sapphire.

Over the centuries, the work has largely gone out of Baltimore harbor. Only two or three commercial fishing boats remain. The harbor is a popular haven for visiting yachts, which anchor in the lee of Sherkin Island and the entrance to Church Strand Bay. On weekends the street Castle End bustles with scuba divers in thick neoprene, chatting in the unheeded rain between dives. The River Ilen, beyond Ringarogy Island, freshens each spring with sea trout and salmon that are caught by anglers well above Skibbereen, the next substantial town toward Cork.

And yet once there were barges and farm carts carrying sea sand dredged from the Ilen to be spread on the fields. It was, they said, a river of sand. The mackerel fishery once filled fish wagons that were hauled away from the Baltimore pier by the Cork, Bandon and South Coast railway. You can read the history of this district in the numbers. In 1841, the population of County Cork was 854,000. In 1961, the year the train stopped coming to Baltimore, it was 330,000, a nadir from which the county has slowly recovered.

Just a few steps away from the Les Glénans base, a dark stone monument has been erected “In Memory Of All The Boys Who Were In Baltimore Industrial School In The Years 1930-1950.” This was the successor to the Baltimore Fisheries School, built in 1886, Ireland’s first, with funds supplied by Angela Burdett-Coutts, Dickens’s friend and one of the great philanthropists of the 19th century. The Fisheries School, as the name suggests, helped boys in an impoverished district learn the trades of fishing and boat building.

At least two noteworthy boats were built in Baltimore, both for Conor O’Brien, a gun runner and rebel to whom the words “haughty,” “prickly” and “puckish” have stuck like barnacles. Under the guidance of a local shipwright named Moynihan, the boys at the Fisheries School built O’Brien’s Saoirse — Gaelic for “freedom” — which he and a hapless, ever-changing crew sailed around the world from 1923 to 1925. It was one of the first small-boat circumnavigations after Joshua Slocum’s great solo voyage some 30 years earlier. O’Brien’s second boat, the Ilen, was a commission for the Falkland Islands Company. He delivered it in person to Port Stanley, 8,000 nautical miles from Baltimore, closing what he called the most enjoyable of all his voyages with the traditional order: “That will do, men.”

I would like to have watched from the Beacon as the Saoirse and the Ilen made sail past Loo Rock and out into the open waters of Baltimore Bay. For that matter, I would like to have watched, from the same vantage, all the boats, large and small, that have entered this harbor across time, pirates not excepted, to see their shapes change, their rigging evolve, and to glimpse their seamanship, which must have been extraordinary.

On that afternoon of catching castaway fenders, our seamanship is just good enough to get us back under the gaze of the Beacon and into the harbor. We make our way past the Lousy Rocks. Around us the village of Baltimore rises in tiers. A music comes over the water, an Irish tune, from the harbor’s terrace of pubs and restaurants, where a band is playing for the weekend crowd. Again, I get to thread the maze of yachts and sail us to our mooring. The boat comes apart quickly — sails folded and bagged, lines coiled, rudder and tiller lashed in the cockpit. And just in time, for there is Nolwen coming with the skiff. We look over the boat one last time and decide that that will do.

Mitt Romney, Class Warrior

As the presidential campaigns warm after the conventions, the Times editorial page has been candid, clear, and thoroughly on the mark in its analysis. The editorial below is no exception.

New York Times

18 September 2012

EDITORIAL

Mitt Romney, Class Warrior

It turns out that Mitt Romney was right. There is class warfare being waged in the 2012 campaign. It is Mr. Romney who is waging it, not President Obama, and he’s stood the whole idea on its head.

When you think of class warfare, you probably think of inciting anger, resentment and jealousy among the have-nots against the haves. That’s what Mr. Romney has accused Mr. Obama of doing, but those charges have always been false. The truth is that Mr. Romney has been trying to incite the anger of a small slice of the richest Americans who need no government assistance but get it anyway, against the working poor, older Americans, the disabled workers and veterans, and even a significant chunk of middle-class Americans.

That was the message of remarks that Mr. Romney made in May at a private fund-raiser held at a private equity manager’s estate in Florida, a moment when he thought he was safe from annoying reporters and cameramen, and other Americans who are not rich enough to have bought a ticket to the event.

A video made public on Monday by the magazine Mother Jones showed a Mitt Romney who felt free to speak candidly about his campaign and how he would conduct a presidency. In that safe zone, Mr. Romney spoke with a bone-chilling cynicism and a revolting smugness. If he is elected, he said, capital will come back and “we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.” That’s the state of trickle-down economics in the 21st century.

Gone was the pretense that he will be a president of all Americans. Mr. Romney rather neatly divided the country between the people who matter and the 47 percent he does not care about.

To Mr. Romney, that 47 percent consists of people who do not make enough money to be required to pay federal income tax. They are freeloaders, he said, “who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.” It is not his job, he said, as a candidate nor apparently as president if he is elected, “to worry about those people.”

By his definition, those undeserving freeloaders include workers in low-paying, menial jobs (sometimes more than one job) who don’t even earn $9,750 a year, the amount at which they would start to owe federal income tax. Also included are older Americans whose Social Security pensions are too low to be taxed, disabled veterans and people who were maimed on the job.

This group also includes some middle-income Americans who make, say, $50,000 a year but are not required to pay taxes after they take advantage of child credits, marriage penalty relief and other tax breaks, many of which are part of the Bush-era tax cuts that Mr. Romney backs with a blind ideological fervor.

But, of course, Mr. Romney was not talking about the Americans who make so much money that they are able to avoid paying any tax at all or who, like him, are able to shelter their incomes in overseas banks or tax loopholes that permit them to pretend that ordinary income comes from investment and thus pay lower taxes. Mr. Romney has been paying, by his own account, about 13 percent to 15 percent of his enormous income in federal income taxes. Just compare that with your own tax return.

Everything about Mr. Romney’s characterization of this mythical slice of lazy, shiftless Americans was wrong. A vast majority of Americans pay federal taxes, either income tax or payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare — or both — as well as other federal fees. They also pay state and local taxes and sales taxes.

The government’s revenue problem does not start with the poor but with the richest people, through the Bush tax cuts and other changes. The tax cuts for the richest people should expire now, and the middle-class cuts should do so eventually. But that will not happen as long as people like Mr. Romney protect the rich by turning the working poor and middle class into the enemy.

Mr. Romney may have been talking about electoral tactics: those people are going to vote for Mr. Obama, so let’s concentrate on our kind of people. It’s also possible that he was mouthing the words of the extreme right without really believing them. But all the possible explanations say terrible things about Mr. Romney’s character.

The right wing has long been whining about people who don’t pay taxes and who, therefore, don’t deserve a say in government. They have it backward. The shame is not that those people don’t pay income taxes. The shame is how many poor people there are when the top 1 percent can amass uncountable fortunes fed by tax breaks and can donate tens of millions of dollars to political candidates to keep it that way.

 

The 47 Percent Solution

David Brooks is back in his more stable role as foil for Gail Collins's splendid humor, and loses even that role in his concluding foolishness, but they (or some clever Times writer of headlines) have chosen such a good title for today's conversation (see footnote below),* and since I still see Gail Collins as successor to Molly Ivins, I can't resist offering their exchange:

THE CONVERSATION September 19, 2012, 1:20 PM

The 47 Percent Solution

By David Brooks and Gail Collins

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Tags:

BARACK OBAMA,FUNDRAISING DINNER COMMENTS, MITT ROMNEY,THE 47%

 

David Brooks: Gail, greetings from Dulles International Airport. I’m in a little clutch of travelers huddling around the electrical chargers like Napoleon’s soldiers around the fire on the retreat from Moscow.

Gail Collins: David, airports are meant to make people crazy. I can understand why they might not be able to make the flights leave on time, but if they weren’t plotting to torture us, they would at least put more outlets in the walls.

David: Meanwhile there’s some jerk barking business orders into his cellphone at about 85 decibels, drowning out the 747s outside. Can I make the point that just because it is legal to use your phone in crowded places does not mean that it is moral?

Gail: Oh Lord, I do sympathize. We need a phone app that would allow everybody in the vicinity of one of those yellers to vote on whether or not they think their conversation sounds interesting. The results would be displayed on the loud person’s cell in bright red letters.

David: Speaking of things that got under my skin, there were Mitt Romney’s fund-raiser comments, as you may have heard. My official reaction was in my column this week, but underneath I couldn’t help thinking about the visits I’ve made to community colleges around the country. These schools are attended by people whose families are often on food stamps and public assistance. When they get out, many of them won’t be making enough money to pay income tax. Yet if you look at how they live — long bus rides, endless studying, full or part-time jobs on the side, complicated family issues — do we really want to call them society’s freeloaders? It’s just offensive and detached from reality.

Gail: Is this going to go down as the week the Romney campaign officially lost you?  On Monday, it sounded as if they were listening to your brave – albeit hopeless — calls for them to be specific about their policy positions. They were going to give details! They didn’t, but there was at least one brief shining moment when they seemed to feel guilty. And then of course the loser-moocher 47 percent video surfaced.

David: Putting the substance aside, what do you make of the politics of it? Frankly, I’m not sure how much it hurts. Did Obama’s “clinging” comments have a big effect four years ago or his “you didn’t build that” remark? Voters are so cynical about politicians, nothing surprises them.  What do you think?

Gail: You never can tell what’s really going to resonate. A wise man told me recently that Paul Ryan’s policy fibs at the convention didn’t matter but the one about running a sub-three-hour marathon was devastating. It probably depends on whether seniors on Social Security realize he was talking about them.

David: I guess what’s been most depressing for me is the long string of mistakes the Romney campaign has made. They didn’t define their candidate over the summer, while Obama pounded away. They pick Ryan and then don’t make the case for the Ryan proposals. They waste the convention by offering nothing. Then when they say they are going to get more specific, they mostly end up just going small. As a growth agenda, they suggest they are going to crack down on Chinese trade. That’s triviality on stilts.

Gail: David, it does make me sad to hear you so disheartened. Although not in a way that would make me wish Romney was doing any better.

David:  I didn’t expect romance from the Romney campaign, but I did expect some sort of smooth professionalism.

Gail: I did like it when they said they were going to respond to voters’ desire for more details with an exciting new ad campaign, and then unveiled a 30-second TV spot that said: Mitt Romney is in favor of education and small business!

David: Having done all this kvetching, I still think Romney has a decent shot at winning. The country is heading in the wrong direction. The Democrats are much more liberal than the median voter, especially on role-of-government issues. Obama is intellectually exhausted and the country wants a change.

Gail: I am way too paranoid to argue that Obama’s pulling ahead, although deep down I do sort of feel that way.

And when you’re talking about people who are intellectually exhausted, I give you the Republican presidential herd. McCain? Romney? I know you think Paul Ryan is a great idea guy, but the campaign has come to realize that once the public gets a good look at his great ideas, they run the other way.

David: No matter how much Romney screws up, I get the sense that the country is asking permission to switch leaders. Romney is making it hard, but they just keep asking. I see, for example, that the Gallup daily tracking poll has Obama up by 1 percentage point. The convention bounce is gone. The fundamental gravitational forces of the election still apply.

Gail: I don’t agree, David. Any Republican campaign that leaves you this depressed is in big trouble.

David:  Of course as I sit here, surrounded by loud-talkers who are in danger of having a laptop shoved down their throats, I don’t know what the public reaction to freeloadergate will be. Memo to conservatives: Don’t hate America. Don’t hate even 47 percent of America. It’s unattractive and it’s always wrong.

 

 

* From Wikipedia: "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. is a 1974 novel by American writer Nicholas Meyer. It is written as a pastiche of a Sherlock Holmes adventure, and was made into a film of the same name in 1976. Published as a "lost manuscript" of the late Dr. John H. Watson, the book recounts Holmes' recovery from cocaine addiction (with the help of Sigmund Freud) and his subsequent prevention of a European war through the unravelling of a sinister kidnapping plot." 

Utøya Island, Norway, 22 July 2011

A friend and I drove to Oslo today. On the way back northwest to Modum Bad we stopped to see Utøya Island in Tyrifjorden. I was struck by how close it was to the shore of the mainland, perhaps a quarter-mile, swimming distance if one is not wounded.

The water was calm, as it was that day, 22 July 2011, now burned into the consciousness of Norwegians, the largest tragic loss of life in Norway since World War II. In mid-afternoon Anders Behring Breivik, a 32-year-old Norwegian, self-styled Islamophobe and "cultural Marxist," bombed government buildings in Oslo, the Norwegian capital city, creating havoc and killing eight people. Later that afternoon he was able to drive to the small ferry linking the mainland to Utøya Island.

Representing himself to the ferry man as a policeman, he was ferried to the island where he systematically, carefully and single-handedly carried out a mass shooting at a camp of the Workers' Youth League (AUF) of the Labour Party on the island of Utøya, killing 69 people, mostly teenagers. Many of the survivors were able to swim from the island to the mainland. An armed police SWAT unit arrived from Oslo. Breivik surrendered without resistence, admitted what he had done, saying when questioned that the purpose of his attack was to save Norway and Western Europe from a Muslim takeover, and that the Labour Party had to "pay the price" for "letting down Norway and the Norwegian people." 

After two conflicting psychiatric evaluations and an extended trial in which he was allowed to speak for himself and granted defense counsel, on 24 August 2012 Breivik was judged sane and sentenced to "containment"—a prison sentence that can be extended indefinitely—with a time frame of 21 years and a minimum time of 10 years, the maximum penalty in Norway. He is imprisoned in Oslo, has a computer to use but no access to the Internet. I've followed his fate in the Norwegian judicial system, which I've long known as more humane than our own.

 

Utøya Island in Tyrifjorden

 

 The ferry boat from the Norwegian mainland to Utøya Island

In Norway with old friends and colleagues, remembering my wife Leigh

Such a deeply meaningful time, returning after two years to Modum Bad, where my wife Leigh McCullough and I last lived together, before her final illness. Modum Bad was for us both challenge and fulfillment, the finest community devoted to the nourishment of life that either of us had ever known. We looked forward to much learning and some teaching, living through the last stages of our working lives. It felt at once an adventure and a return to a deep source. Modum Bad's motto, En kilde til liv, a source of life. Seeds of relationship were sown that continue to bear fruit. I have written elsewhere an essay (published by Modum Bad and available here in Reckonings) gathering some strands of Modum Bad's story. Here I want to share the words of a dear Norwegian friend, Notto Thelle, who offered them on Friday, September 14, in memory of Leigh.

 

 

Memorial service for Leigh McCullough

Friday 14 September 2012

Olavskirken, Modum Bad, Vikersund, Norway

Notto R. Thelle

Dear friends and colleagues of Leigh; dear John and Kelly.

We have listened to the words of wisdom from Ecclesiastes; that to every thing there is a season: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. Many of us remember Leigh as a woman of all seasons, and somehow this is an occasion when several seasons come together. We are gathered here at St Olav’s Chapel to bid farewell to a beloved woman, to create a space for our grief and sadness, but also to remember and honor, and to celebrate and express our gratitude for a long and meaningful life. Leigh McCullough was born on June 5, 1945 and died on June 7, 2012.

Who was Leigh? I cannot speak for all, I primarily know her as a good friend and as John’s companion for the last few years here at Modum.

There are others who may speak with more authority about her professional merits. Let me just mention that for many people she was the psychotherapy researcher famed for her contributions to the exploration of affect in psychotherapy. She received her PhD in clinical psychology from Boston College in 1982, was Associate Clinical Professor at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Psychotherapy Research Program at Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a visiting professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Trondheim, Norway), as well as the Research Director here at Modum Bad Psychiatric Center.

She is the author of several books, including Changing Character and Treating Affect Phobia. Her last ambition before she died, heavily struck with ALS, I have heard, was to complete her book Forbidden Feelings, where she wanted to integrate her knowledge helping people to get in touch with their inner resources and restore their dignity. As it was written in on the web page of the Norwegian Association for Intensive Dynamic Short-term Therapy, “Her focus of research and theoretical innovations will remain as independent contributions and as an inspiration within the professional community.”  

But Leigh was much more than the professional therapist and researcher. Her work was seasoned with so many unique qualities. She was a person who got involved in other people’s lives. Somehow she left her traces in our minds, in our emotions, in our relationships.

I challenged a few of her friends and colleagues to mention one or two characteristic features. It was easy to find, but difficult to limit, because there were so many aspects of her personality. If you say one thing, you have to add a number of others to balance. Here are a few characteristics, and every one of them have multiple meanings: energetic, helpful, inspiring, enthusiastic, intense, iron will, eager, ambitious, hardworking, present, curious, caring, persistent, demanding, encouraging, supportive. You may add other words to the list, but most of us would nod and say yes, she had all these qualities and more.

As a prepared this speech I discovered that a missed few words, which were not mentioned, but which stand very clear in my mind:

Leigh was such a beautiful woman, tall and slender with a natural bodily / physical presence and confidence. And she had such a sense for beauty: her taste for details when she created her home here at Modum, the way she dressed, food and the table she prepared for guests, the way she spoke about things. And not the least: Leigh was very romantic. At least the Leigh I got to know. The reason is not only that I met her with John and observed all the romantic expressions in that relationship. She was so romantic about Modum Bad as well, this beautiful little psychiatric village in the woods of Norway where all people were so kind, where anyone could come at have dinner together at Café Thaulow without any barriers between professional positions. Well, in some ways it was true, and we appreciated what she said, but we knew very well that it was somewhat rosy. I also remember her fascination one time we were invited to dinner together, and I arrived skiing across the fields. She found it so romantic and often talked about it - it seemed to her almost incredible that such a life was possible.  

On the other hand, she could cut through our romantic enthusiasm when she did not agree. I remember clearly the first meeting in our English Literature Group. We started exactly four years ago, with Obama’s autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, as our first book. The entire group was thrilled with romantic dreams about change. Leigh was skeptical. She liked what he said, but sensed that there was too much eloquence and too little substance in his words. She would prefer Hillary Clinton, not only because she was a woman, but because she sensed that she had the political experience and willpower to realize things  

It is a terrible shock and surprise when a person who is so much alive and so indispensable, is suddenly struck with the worst possible disease, ALS. Why? Leigh had still so many things to accomplish, so many initiatives to take, so much to complete.

We don’t have the answers. There are so many riddles in life we don’t understand. But I would conclude my talk with a few reflections about things that we don’t understand: is human life part of a cosmic order where every person has a destiny and meaning? Or do we merely seek comfort in philosophy and religion in order to create a clarity that does not exist?

I could quote the Bible and argue that faith is a universe of meaning that opens up for a deep confidence that we and all things are part of a divine plan, that nothing can separate us from the love of God, and that an expression of this confidence is also the freedom to protest, to question and doubt, or even accuse God of forgetting his promises. Somehow this is where many of us stand.

But I feel that Leigh might have preferred another way to come to terms with these riddles of life. Poetry perhaps. John told me that poetry played an important part in their correspondence when they began to investigate their relationship. One of those poems was Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” which John has shared with us today. It is a fascinating poem with many potential interpretations, I think. Some people would say that it is not suitable for a Christian church. “You don’t have to be good.” “You do not have to walk on your knees / for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.” Isn’t goodness and repentance what Christianity is about?

Well, it could be read in another way, perhaps as a confession or proclamation from a person who is so keen on success, so ambitious, so focused on doing her or his best, but realizing at the same time that life itself is full of grace, that our real humanity is held up by something which is greater than our ambitions and accomplishments.

I don’t know exactly what ”the soft animal of your body” is, but I read it as something which is deeply ingrained in our deepest humanity, in body and mind, almost like the instinctive drive that makes the wild geese follow their journeys year after year, leaving and coming. The world goes on ever-changing without end, with despairs and hopes. But in the depth of things there is a calling, a message about meaning and direction. In the poem the call comes from the wild geese who are returning home, insistently “announcing your place / in the family of things.” To be a true human person is commit oneself to one’s place in the family of things, to accept the limitations of life, and to live fully according to the calling one has heard. 

I will conclude by adding a related metaphor from a Norwegian poet, Olav H. Hauge, who has a similar type of wisdom in his description of small children playing with pieces of broken pots and cups of porcelain,. He describes a time when children had to create their own toys, from pine cones, sticks and stones, and whatever they found. In their play the broken piece of a pot seems to give more joy than the whole pot gave its original owner: 

 A piece with blue roses, 

a tiny shining shard

becomes in their eyes something 

more than they were. 

On the fragment of my broken life 

I found a soft line, 

but what the potter intended 

I shall never find out.

The poet does not claim to have answer to the riddles of life, or to see the whole pattern. He knows the biblical metaphor of the creator who makes human life from clay, like a great potter forming his pots and drawing his images with beautiful lines. The poet sees the soft lines on a piece of the broken pot, and realizes that even a broken life is part of a greater design.

We thank God for Leigh McCullough’s life. We miss her so much. We don’t understand why she had to die so prematurely. But each of us has seen some of the soft lines in her life, enough to envision the greater design. We will keep her in our memories, grateful that we got to know her. May she rest in peace. 

The Habit of Starting

There are three things now, in my current life, I want to do every day. They overlap with one another, two or all three blending into one time, or at the end of a day I may remember them as distinct.

The more interesting (and humbling) fact is, I don't do them every day. More often than not, I don't do at least one of them.

My consciousness drifts, other occupations become preoccupations, feel more seductive or compelling. That hasn't often felt like a bad thing, but I feel the challenge of developing the habit of doing all three each and every day. I can't easily explain, but there seems some special gift — for me certainly and I hope for others as well — in nourishing the habit of doing all three. 

So it was with a sense of promise and serendipity that today I came across Leo Babauta's reflections and guidance in a short essay he calls "The Habit of Starting." Babauta has a blog to which I subscribe — introduced by my son Adam — that he calls "Zen Habits," and lots of his thoughts have been provocative and useful. But Babauta's thoughts today on the habit of starting speak to me with a special resonance, a fine instance of synchronicity, hearing the right words at the right time.

Anyone who knows how hard it is to get a good habit going is likely to find utility in exploring Babauta's words at more length, but here's the essence of what he suggests:

"the key to forming a habit is not how much you do of the habit each day (exercise for 30 minutes, write 1,000 words, etc.), but whether you do it at all. So the key is just getting started. 

 "Let me emphasize that: the key to forming a habit is starting each day...

"Make it as easy as possible to start, and hard to not start... Focus on the smallest thing — just getting started. You don’t have to do even 5 minutes — just start. What do I mean by starting? If you want to form the habit of meditation, just get your butt on the cushion each day. If you want to form the habit of running, just lace up your shoes and get out the door. If you want to form the habit of writing, just sit down, close everything else on your computer, and start typing. Form the habit of starting, and you’ll get good at forming habits."

Babauta has a lot of more specific how-to suggestions well worth review and experiment, even including a four-week self-study "habit course" that one can pursue online. But that's his basic point. 

What are my own three goals for developing daily habits? Simply put,

1. Walking or bicycling outdoors. I live, thankfully, in an area rich in natural beauty — marshland, hills and valleys, rivers and streams and the sea close by, and blessed with a varied but temperate year-round climate. 

2. Do something wholeheartedly with my full consciousness. As Jon Kabat-Zinn says, "Life is surpassingly interesting, revealing and awe-provoking when we show up for it wholeheartedly and pay attention to the particulars." Ordinary things — here are some examples suggested by two of my Zen teachers: as I first touch the floor after waking, the first sip of coffee or tea, before answering the phone or opening my computer, washing the first dish, turning the knob of the front door, being in the shower, and I think my current favorite, flossing.

3. Practicing loving-kindness and compassion toward a person or another sentient being, an animal, a tree, a flower, a bee.

As I say and write these three habits I want to develop, I imagine more vividly how they can interact with and nourish each other. The spirit of wholeheartedness and paying attention to particulars is essential to the practice of loving-kindness and compassion, and the landscape while walking or bicycling invites expression of that same spirit. All three are ways of affirming and growing life.

 

How clarity can let us see all the way to the heart

Ted Kooser is our current U.S. Poet Laureate. He regularly introduces a poem of a contemporary American poet in a free subscription series called "American Life in Poetry." I am particularly grateful for his introduction today of a poem by a fellow Californian, David St. John, a poem called "From a Bridge."

"David St. John is a California poet whose meticulous care with every word has always impressed me. This poem is a fine example of how clarity can let us see all the way to the heart."



From a Bridge 

I saw my mother standing there below me

On the narrow bank just looking out over the river

Looking at something just beyond the taut middle rope

Of the braided swirling currents

Then she looked up quite suddenly to the far bank

Where the densely twined limbs of the cypress

Twisted violently toward the storm-struck sky

There are some things we know before we know

Also some things we wish we would not ever know

Even if as children we already knew &so

Standing above her on that bridge that shuddered

Each time the river ripped at its wooden pilings

I knew I could never even fate willing ever

Get to her in time

                    

"David St. John was born in Fresno, California. He received his bachelor’s degree at California State in Fresno and went to the University of Iowa for an M.F.A. His works of poetry include Hush (1976), Terraces of Rain (1991) and The Red Leaves of Night (1999). Most recently he wrote The Face: A Novella in Verse (2004). He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, the James D. Phelan Award, the Academy Award in Literature, and various grants and fellowships. St. John has taught at Oberlin College, John Hopkins University, and currently teaches at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles."

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. 

 

                                    — Billy Collins

Richard Wilbur's "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World"

Richard Wilbur's poem, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," reflects upon the experience of waking from sleep, and in a larger sense the experience of awakening into a larger and clearer consciousness (or not). Outside the waking sleeper's window hangs a line of laundry. As Wilbur says, the scene is outside the upper-story window of an apartment building, in front of which, on a clothesline, "the first laundry of the day is being yanked across the sky." 

"The things of this world" is a phrase taken from St. Augustine's Confessions, as in these lines from Book X:   "I have learnt to love you late, Beauty at once so ancient and new! I have learnt to love you late! You were within me, and I was in the world outside myself. I searched for you outside myself and, disfigured as I was, I fell upon the lovely things of your creation. You were with me, but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you and yet, if they had not been in you, they would have no being at all."

"Plato, St. Teresa, and the rest of us in our degree," says Wilbur, "have known that it is painful to return to the cave, to the earth, to the quotidian; Augustine says it is love that brings us back." That is the poem's central theme, the variations and complexities, the imbalance and balance, of returning to the earth, the quotidian, the things of this world. Awakening.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded
soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and
simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with
angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are
in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there
they are.
Now they are rising together in calm
swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they
wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal
breathing;

Now they are flying in place,
conveying
The terrible speed of their
omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now
of a sudden
They swoon down in so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every
blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on
earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising
steam
And clear dances done in the sight of
heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks
and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter
love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns
and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy
gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs
of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be
undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure
floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult
balance."

 — Richard Wilbur

Here is Richard Wilbur commenting upon and reading "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjeLdTk7lPU

And here is another short video portrait of Wilbur, reflecting upon his mother and father, their families and their impact upon his life and work as a poet:

http://www.webofstories.com/play/14719

 

Brown rice is just right

From Suzuki Roshi:

How do you like zazen?* I think it may be better to ask, how do you like brown rice? Zazen is too big a topic. Brown rice is just right. Actually, there is not much difference. When you eat brown rice, you have to chew it, and unless you chew it, it is difficult to swallow. When you chew it very well, your mouth becomes part of the kitchen, and actually the brown rice becomes more and more tasty. When we eat white rice, we don't chew so much, but that little bit of chewing feels so good that naturally the rice goes right down our throats.

When we digest food completely, what will become of it? It will be transformed, changing its chemical nature, and will permeate our whole body. In the process it dies within our body. To eat and digest food is natural to us, as we are always changing. This organic process is called "emptiness." The reason we call it emptiness is that it has no special form. It has some form, but that form is not permanent. While it is changing, it carries our life energy.

We know that we are empty, and also that this earth is empty. The forms are not permanent. You may wonder, "what is this universe?" But this universe has no limit. Emptiness is not something you can understand through a space trip. Emptiness can be understood when you are perfectly involved in chewing rice. This is actual emptiness.

The most important point is to establish yourself in a true sense, without establishing yourself on delusion. And yet we cannot live or practice without delusion. Delusion is necessary, but delusion is not soething on which you can establish yourself. It is like a stepladder. Without it you cannot climb up, but you don't stay on the stepladder. With this confidence you can continue to study our way This is why I say, "Don't run away. Stick with me." I do not mean, "Stick to me." I mean stick with yourself, not with delusion. Sometimes I may be a delusion. You may overestimate me: "He is a good teacher!" That is already a kind of delusion. I am your friend. I am just practicing with you as your friend who has many stepladders.

We must continue to practice zazen and continue to chew brown rice. Eventually, we will accomplish something.

 

* Zazen is the Zen Buddhist practice of sitting in meditation.