The cadence of a disconnected world.
Posted in Culture, Psycho-Bubbles, Reflections on the everyday, The work week | Tagged Technology | Leave a Comment »
Late afternoon January sun slants in my office window.
It is Friday, TGIF to the working world.
Not wishing away time, the work week is its own experience. The day looking at computer screens, and happily spent in skin that can feel the winter sun.
It is enough.
Posted in The work week, time | Tagged Friday, TGIF | Leave a Comment »
Though sunny, the cold temperatures keep most inside.
A neighborhood swathed in snow, bounded only by rounded snowbanks.
Though the sky is clear, wind plays precociously with porch chimes and decorative bells, ringing down the street where I am walking.
Somewhere unseen, the silver belled bough of the ancient Celts sings. Calling to the quest those able to hear its irresistible music.
Young, old, wise, despicable—can you hear it? It is time for away.
Posted in Celtic, Nature, Seasons | Tagged Celtic, consciousness, The Quest, the silver bough, time, winter | Leave a Comment »
Winter hangs on still green leaves. The autumn lingered this year, and the winter, though timely, blew in on the unsuspecting.
Fluffed flakes swirl from snow bands pushing through overhead. Autumn has fled.
Winter holds the deep past and the future. Those plants holding leaves are slowly freezing.
It is me that was unsuspecting.
Posted in Seasons, The Garden | Tagged time, Winter garden | Leave a Comment »
It is windy tonight, trick-or-treaters come and go.
The sun has just set and the wind is high – sending flocks of leaves flying like birds from fiery colored trees.
Gradually the form, the bones, of the trees become visible, no longer lost in summer finery. Trunks and branches more flexible against the wind than one might think.
Samhain is gate and a gateway to the Celtic New Year. Tonight, the magnificence of the collaboration between wind and tree is sweeping, and the years run together in the faces of the children who crowd the porch for treats—so like my own children years ago.
And the years, like the leaves, fall and blow away, gone for another season, a lifetime.
Darkness now, the streets are quiet. Trees swaying, dark silhouettes turning against a fully night sky. The ambiguity of eternity. Things we have known, things we forget, and things we hope to forget. Happy New Year.
Posted in Celtic, Celtic festivals, Uncategorized | Tagged autumn, autumn colour, memory, Samhain, time | Leave a Comment »
In a home office is an old window blind, the kind with pull strings not as commonly sold these days.
In the pull strings of the blind is a knot, or rather, a complex of knots so unsalvageable and large that it has been left for years and used as the pull for the blind itself. I cannot recall how the knot started, but it must have involved strings roughened with time and out of place, perhaps pulled too tight, that crossed themselves, and the condition compounded from there.
One definition of the word “knot” in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary reads, “an intertwining of rope, string, or flexible fabric to form a secure fastening or an obstruction when drawn tight.” There are many kinds of purposeful knots that keep things together. And there are accidental knots that do the same thing. It is a matter of perspective whether a knot has a purpose or is an obstruction. Sometimes obstructing knots, like traffic jams, an unhappy marriage, or circuitous solutions applied against formidable problems, can be seen as purposeful with enough distance. And, sometimes not.
Tangles
With time, knots can slowly compound, binding tension, flesh, emotion, and spirit.
Many knots are limiting, constraining grief, sorrow, memory, and joy just as a poorly placed dam contorts and defers the natural path of a life-giving river. Never named, the depth and entrenched tangle of these knots discourages exploration and exposure. Like the knot in the strings of my window blind, they are weakly useful, sometimes mistaken for a misbegotten character trait, full of fate and empty of feeling. The knot becomes a facade, claiming the life of the strings, leaving them mute and immobile.
Years in the making, these knots are often hidden until the greater life story has passed. If the impasse of the knot is ever realized, by design, it is too late to be of any outer-worldly consequence. Like the greatest of riddles, tricks, and turns, the unbinding of these knots beckons to a path of magnificent interiority. The type that calls out the fraud of concretized self-knowledge while presenting a challenge that is easy for most to ignore, but impossible for others to set aside.
For those few, it is tedious to work the knot, carefully, slowly, separating threads in a pure act of patience without promise of immediate—or any—reward. Observe how the strings twisted when held in place so long, lost flexibility, utility, and admitted to being unable to do what it was they were here to do.
When finally free, the strings hold the form of their capture. It is unclear if their deformity will ever truly hang out. They bear their time captured in the knot soulfully, even as they regain the ability to work to their own task once again. The patience required to release the knot is only realized when the task is complete.
At inception, sometimes decades ago, there was no time or patience to separate the threads, or smooth the strings from tangling and becoming trapped. A knot takes on the job of holding neglected things, in its obstructive way, carrying the energy of a tangle that cannot be touched until the right time.
The meaning is in the doing, the plodding revisiting of squinting perspective, of endlessly working a hopelessly tight juncture, and then, like opening into the center of a labyrinth, pulling a string which begins the unbinding. As each chronically twisted ligature is straightened, less energy is bound, the journey speeds, and tempered freedom is gained.
The strings of the blind now pull and release, almost as well as they did before. Ordinary, to say the least.
Posted in Lived meaning, Reflections on the everyday | Tagged knots, survival, things-that-are-stuck, window-blind-strings | Leave a Comment »
I had the good fortune to attend a Springsteen concert in Boston last year.
The tour represented the first time since 2017 that Mr. Springsteen toured with the legendary E-Street Band.
The 19-piece band barnstormed through the US and Europe until August of last year, when remaining tour dates were postponed due to an ailing Mr. Springsteen. New 2024 tour dates have been announced.
As a Springsteen concert neophyte, I hoped to hear some familiar tunes from way back. What I did not understand was that Springsteen concerts are a rite, a forum at once ancient and contemporary for those gathered to partake.
“Religare” is a Latin word, sometimes, and sometimes not, pinned as a predecessor to the word “religion.” Etymologically, religare references “again” and “bind,” we might simply say “reconnect.” As the concert kicked off, it was viscerally clear that the sold-out crowd of 17,000-plus people under that roof were there to remember, return, and most of all, reconnect.
Scholars of early Greek ritual describe shared emotion, deification by projection, and, of course, participation mystique as experiences of those who attended performances of archaic Greek theatre. Erudite observers of Mr. Springsteen have surely described the same.
It was largely an over-50 crowd, looking forward, I think, to a good show and something more. These concerts are a touchstone experience for true believers. Mr. Springsteen is a kindred soul who can lift others out of their time, while living the pathos of years and youth gone by with them. The unmistakable undercurrent of the concert was the challenge of facing down time, memory, and loss.
As an opener, the anthem, “No Surrender” left no question the goods would be delivered. It was followed by a reverie of rowdy favorites and a raft of songs that recognized the joy of good times with good friends even as the years pass by.
Mr. Springsteen and his band displayed daunting musical capability. Throughout, he deftly plied the crowd with call and response. Except for the odd interlude when the man ripped off his shirt, the band shifted between tent-revival bacchanal and the personal reflections of Mr. Springsteen, perhaps honed during his successful solo show, Springsteen on Broadway.
In return, the audience remained on their feet, in their seats, or in the aisles, drunk, stoned, or straight, giving it up on every song. As the evening wore on the participatory spirit never dropped back. The audience backed “Bruuuuce” at every turn.
The set list was built on old favorites, E-Street classics, and in a tip of the hat to the Boston venue, a cover of the Standells hit “Dirty Water.”
In the middle of the playlist, the band cruised through a cover of the Commodores “Night Shift” into a cover of “Trapped” by Jimmy Cliff:
“And it seems like the game I played has made you strong
And when the game is over, I won’t walk out a loser
And I know that I’ll walk out of here again
But right now I’m trapped…”
Words do not describe the fervor Mr. Springsteen conjured in this show and in this song. Each concert-goer had their reasons for attending and moments like this song were surely one of them.
On the chorus line, “right now I’m trapped,” the vehement collective exhale of thousands of people transformed a cover song into a ritual discharge of pent-up emotion, pain, futility, and fury.
For anyone there who understood how it feels to be stuck in a dead relationship, job, or life situation, it became a moment to yell personal pain into the communal voice and feel the tide carry it away, gaining the chance to leave it in that space, that night, courtesy of Mr. Springsteen, high-priest, poet, or seasoned showman, whatever you want to call him.
Ritual, reconnection, remembering. The encore was extensive. Mr. Springsteen ended out the night in a quiet solo reverie, the perfect book-end to his opening number. Deification dropped, he took the stage, a 74-year-old man with more years behind than ahead, like much of his audience. In “See You in My Dreams,” Mr. Springsteen writes:
“I’ll see you in my dreams when all our summers have come to an end
I’ll see you in my dreams
Yeah, up around the river bend
For death is not the end
And I’ll see you in my dreams.”
Mortality haunts Mr. Springsteen, and he is not afraid to sing about it.
You shoulda been there.
Posted in Festivals | Tagged Bruce Springsteen 2023 tour, E-Street band, music, rock and roll | Leave a Comment »
Tony Bennett croons “My Favorite Things.”
The big box grocery store is crowded. Holiday sales abound. Shopping carts fill quickly.
And no one smiles.
People shop alone, in pairs, or as families. Bored, frustrated, distracted, blank eyes, or staring at a phone.
Throughout the store and banks of check-out lanes—utility, function, process—no laughter or interaction among strangers.
But not me.
I smile not for my circumstances, but for being. Because we are all here now, turning the corner on the breakfast aisle, digging for a coupon, or waiting for self-check-out. My smile is often met with a surprised look—then a half-smile, as if wondering if reacting is okay.
It is a shame no one smiles. But I do.
Posted in Reflections on the everyday, Seasons | Tagged Holiday shopping | Leave a Comment »
A sunrise no words can match or quench.
Burning apricot flung across fading shade of night.
Rain from a cloudless, effortless sky deepens color on the eastern horizon.
Washing out the past and blazing the trail for the only thing we really have—this day.
Posted in Eternal moments, Lived meaning, Reflections on the everyday | Tagged sunrise, time | Leave a Comment »
Shouldn't...but Do 