How to be not boring

A sure-fire way: engage more in conversations that explore implications.

These are conversations that make explicit the networks of implication that make locales or propositions interesting. Incidents, images, ideas, places, and items redolent of latent implications present themselves or hang in our minds; convex brings these logical associations into the light, spreads them out like an map before us, and invites us to enter. 

Bertrand Russell wrote a mathematical treatise The Theory of Implication in 1906 in which he said early on: ‘The essential property we require of implication is this: what is implied by a true proposition is true’. The word ‘true’ here grounds implication in what is reasonable and meaningful.

The process of drawing implications is not just one of inference toward proof but toward the gradual revelation of worlds: wider: This implies a world-wide conspiracy; denser: More and more people were implicated in the plot; prospective: This implies that we have at most an hour to save the planet; retrospective: His actions implied that his public statements were politically motivated; alternative: If it wasn't you, then by implication, it must have been someone else; speculative: If the earth’s gravity were less than it is, trees could be taller than they are; general: What’s good for General Motors is good for the USA; abstract: What if everyone did it; non-implied: Just because he was found standing over the body with smoking gun in his hand doesn’t prove he committed murder.   

Why do we not more often engage in exploration of implications? First of all, there’s the question of language. Some syntactical forms and intonational patterns such as  ‘let’s say’ speculation, clauses of concession, the perfect tenses, modals generally as well as negative space intonations, can open the door to exploration of implications if the willingness is there to move beyond bare, bland, unsuggestive assertions.

Secondly, not everyone is ready to engage in implication mapping as an exercise since it is a special kind of mental exertion. If recognized and practiced as important, such conversation would become less daunting.

Finally, we’re sometimes reluctant to own the implications we discover through such conversation, not trusting the process of logical exploration. Or we may be disturbed by the uncomfortable nature of the implications we discover. 

But what we lose by not is a level of interestingness that can't be replaced by drama of presentation or profusion of detail or flow of narrative. I mean a sense of ampleness of context, of plenitude of pathways, of kinds of coherence to be discovered. There's a kind of fun to be had in exploration of implications that leaves us with a glow long after the conversation is over. Let's do more of it. 

Watchers

At Downtown Crossing, a middle aged woman in a pant-suit got on the train and sat down a seat away from me. The train was full, no empty seats and tall young men and women standing and looking at their phones--when suddenly the woman broke into a wail of anguish. With her phone pressed to her ear, she held her face and leaned over: My son is dead. My son is dead.

Over the next minutes as she tried to get through to the hospital and get details, we who sat and listened learned there had been a car accident, that the boy was 14, that it was really her child who was gone.

She wept, deep, hawking sobs, her body heaving.  She pled to Jesus for some other fact to be the case. She was in an agony of anguish.

I didn't know what to do, didn't know how to respond, and said as much to the woman on the other side of me who said herself she was at a loss. And the black woman across the way, and the young man with the laptop. As it went on, station after station, the faces took on the shape of sorrow, as I felt mine had, and we wiped our eyes. My son is dead, she cried over and over.

She stood at the door, hanging from a pole. One woman put her arm around her unti the next stop. My neighbor got up and offered tissues from a little packet. Another woman who looked as if she knew something said a few words, but nothing went on except the heart-wrenching wailing  until she got out at Stony Brook.

When we got to Forest Hills, we all left the train without looking at each other, each seared by the terrible emotions, the awful event, we'd just been in the presence of.

My wife had had a hard day, angry at herself for, uncharacteristically, getting taken by a asphalt dumping scam, but she had some ideas of what I coud have done. You could have gone with her to the hospital. Yes, I suppose you're right. I didn't think of it. I had a handkerchief not tissues and an arm around the shoulder: would that be right?

Oh, ma'am, I am so sorry for this nightmare news that tore you to pieces before us. We weren't heartless, just shy in the face of so intense a grief. Still justification doesn't matter; what does is the pain in which you are going to live for the next frightful days, pain which could as well be the lot of any of us who love.

May you soon be in the arms of a comforter, ma'am, and may the presence of God-in-love be with you with more potency than shown by any of us on the train who listened, prayed and wiped our eyes. I'm baffled, somewhat ashamed, and so, so sad.

Thriller

It's like the beginning of a kind of movie we've all seen: a countdown, potential devastation looming, a rallying-around of the team--is it enough? will it be in time?--and then, improbably but through some gutsy, brilliant, on-the-money move, calamity is averted--cue the the brass fanfare--and happy-with-relief faces gaze toward a glowing post-crisis future--except this is not cinema, there are no trick shots, no stuntmen or no sleight-of-hand edits, and the knock-out punch may fall short, get deflected, or arrive with no more punch than a cotton ball.

The scenes of catastrophe that spice our thriller films and titillate us into caring about the drama of final resolution may in fact actually come to pass here, to us, inexorable over the next decade. The smart fixes, the quick decisions, the steady hands that win the day on the screen may not work here. However much we want you 150 heads of state from 195 countries, you 25,000 delegates and 50,000 participants at COP21 to agree on effective steps to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees C, no more than 2 degrees C, you may fail, and we'll bequeath to our progeny a legacy of slo-mo disruption of all that we've thought was normal.

The inertial reluctance to act is so strong, the task so large, the distractions so many, the opponents so tenacious, the time so short, in short, the odds so long...and the clock is ticking.

And yet, whenever have so many representing almost all mankind gathered to seriously address global habitability, the very ability of our planet--the whole planet!--to support our species as it stands.

This feels like a cliff-hanger, a championship final game, a fingers-crossed wait for news from the operating room. I'm in a kind of agony of apprehension. All you there: I hope there are moments when you are in some way more than yourselves, when you live up to and transcend all that mankind has learned over the millenia, and do a work that, like the resonance of certain documents, grows in significance over the generations. Give us, onlookers and well-wishers, something we can be guided by, can live up to.

Thriving

What are the essential features of any thriving human community?  What would we expect to see in any prospering communities of the future, say 100 or 200 years hence? What attitudes and behaviors are not only expressive of the health of communities but conducive of that social well-being?  

It seems to me there are three areas we want any communities of the future to be active in: the exercise of free-will, the introduction of novelty and the maintenance of peace, the first has to do the present, the second with the future and the last with the past, and each practiced commonly at the grassroots level by individuals, as well as by institutions and also by the larger community considered culturally and politically.  I don't presuppose any particular beliefs or traditions, but the idea that free-will, innovation and justice are both positive and possible represent a certain philosophical orientation. 

Each of these three areas of activity can in turn be thought of in three aspects, and here I rely much on the work of philosopher Stephen Cave regarding free-will, and economist Edmund Phelps regarding innvovation.

The first aspect has to do with ideas; thriving societies conceive of alternatives to the status quo, to standard courses of action, to the common assumption. The second aspect has to do with decision-making; prospering societies initiate enterprises, make choices between options and resolve conflicts between claims. The third aspect has to do with carry-though; healthy societies invest in change, persist in projects and consistently carry on the work of reconciliation.  

Looked at another way, innovation involves first imagining new things and new ways of doing things,  then realizing these these ideas in objects and processes, and finally supporting these things as they transform society with money or committment to adoption.

Free-will involves, in different situations, coming up with different options, then making rational choices between them, and finally exerting will-power to actually carry through decisions despite distractions and difficulties.

Peace-making involves researching and recognizing the way things actually are, then resolving disputes, and finally continuously engaging in the work of bridging differences. 

How any of these activities might be carried out may be different from group to group and time to time but that they happen is, I think, essential for any human community to thrive. Every community, of course,  allows freedom, innovation and resolution sometimes to some of its members, but a society that prospers encourages and enables them bottom to top and always. 

 Each of these activities and its activities can be observed, even measured. For instance, with regard peace-making, journalistic energy as well as citizen interest in keeping informed even about unwelcome news suggest health in a community.  Likewise, law courts with settlements, legislatures with laws, and neighbors with agreements regularly settling disputes are promoting prosperity. Finally, when building codes, for instance, are respected marking the line between safety and convenience (or profit) or when strangers sit down share meals, reconciliation is happening.  It would be well for individuals and communities to monitor the signs of energy of each of these activities. 

Can any of these be taught? Why not? For instance, encouraging people to imagine multiple courses of action in different situations, to reason their way to decisions, and to not give up without good cause a course of action once decided on, will result in the empowerment and extension of their practical freedom.  

Elsewhere I've written about what I consider the key practices of hospitality, friendship and exploration, especially as they relate to encounters. Thriving individuals and communities engage in them continually. 

In fact, this prospering, this thriving, this health as exhibited on different scales may be thought of as 'livingness,' a  word I've used to speak about the openness of things to what may be or what can happen.  

If I were to fall asleep to wake up in the days of my great, great...children and discover that they, their institutions and communities were engaged in innovation, exercising real freedom, and actively promoting concord between the various conflicting interests a free and innovative and diverse community must have, then I'd say, however strange everything might seem to me, that all was well. 

Strandebeests

Strandbeests at PEM, a rainy Saturday afternoon

1. The many, many people, especially young adults and older couples, and even more at 2 and 3:30 when the contructions were scheduled to move; the big board showing the beest family tree over 40 years illustrated with sketches by the maker Theo Jansen, a tall, white-haired fellow with piercing eyes; the walls displaying sample struts and trusses, feet and wheels, cams and valves, all made of thermo-plastic pipes and ties; the scattered vertical video screen of the genius speaking of his new genus; the concept spinoffs, e.g. the walking skateboard; the make-your-own table; the people bending to closely inspect the parts or lined up to push the contraptions across the floor; the ambience of reverie that hung over the room like the smoke of a cigar den.

2. How were things attached so they rotated but remained stiff? The organism metaphor: how deep could it go? The sheer overtness and porosity of these moving skeletons. The dream of their self-sufficiency: how far could it be realized? The annual replacement by new species with new capabilites: can any have all? Why does the creator repeatedly mention the posthumous persistence of this life-like form?

3. A trdiptych of video panels: Low grey waves breaking on blonde sand under a bright blue sky. Just this, then entering right with triskelion steps,  the PVC-through-saur creaks from panel to panel, trailed by the creator as if in attendance, and exits left. Empty beach again, wave curling aslant the shore. Then, enter left, creator drags the contrivance like a balky child, now in step, now not, across the panels to exit right. 

Leg noise

A lot of 'noise' up and down my right leg as I ventured out to run for the first time in three weeks. Lifting my leg too high, stretching too far forward in my stride, for whatever reason a little knob of sensitivity had located itself at the bottom of my sitz bone, a classic upper hamstring injury.

As I set out at a fast shuffle through the door of the building into the beautiful sunny morning, I monitored the various pains as they arose.  Upper buttock, behind the knee, down the outside the thigh, but not, thank goodness, at the tendon attachment point. The little tear-like sensations that might have told me I was re-injuring it were blessedly absent. Instead warmly painful waves of what seemed like contraction, or at least resistance to stretching, moved up and down through the muscles.

Okay, I thought as I made it to the river, I can live with you, mini-cramp pains. As I warm up, you'll disappear. Then suddenly, a quick seizure just under my buttock that provoked an 'Ooof', my leg unable to extend to reach the ground, and tumbled.

Only scraped hands and knee but, come on now, my muscles, what kind of revenge are you wreaking on me? Have I not paid enough attention to your needs as I've focussed on my ischial tuberosity? Were you damaged too?

What's clear is that I can't always tell you what to do, and that if you spasm, you can topple me like a tree. Suddenly I feel vulnerable. It's time for negotiation.

If I'm so beautiful

If I'm so beautiful, why aren't I happy? I mean, I raise the aesthetic tone of the place. My face is an ornament. I see men struck, I mean struck, by my vivid hair, my eyes with their intense color, my chin, my full lips,what have you, and women scared that so many of the good looks of the world are gathered in one place and given to someone like me. I mean, I contribute.

And yes, it gives me satisfaction to pose in the mirror and know that what's there meets the standards for classic beauty, but away from looking eyes, what is that to me? Can gold as such fill an empty stomach? Can beauty as such fill an empty...? An empty what? A sense of self. It may be enough for others that I'm  Miss Wowb! but for me, so what. I like it but didn't earn it. It's superficial, and not good company. I'm not ungrateful; it is fun sometimes to be the head-turner.

When I look inside I don't see the awesomeness that others see looking at my outside, and this discrepancy has been gnawing at me. What I care about, my sense of myself, is so amorphous and yawning I feel a kind of inner vertigo so acutey uncomfortable that to offset it I start to tear my hair.

I remember the day I took my hand out of my hair and my fingers were sprinkled with fine flakes like the dust of butterfly wings, but the color was the same copper everybody remarks on. I put one finger then another in my mouth and, oh, so good as they came out clean. The desperate disquiet ceased churning and I felt sudden deep calm. My hands fell to my lap and I sat as quiet as the statue of the Quaker woman at the state house.

I don't know why but the same thing happened the next time I felt uncomfortable in my skin: my spread hands like combs into my hair coming back flecked with vibrant color, and the relief of licking it down.

Once, rubbing hard on my cheeks, my palms became rosy, and another time, pressing my hands into my eyes, the heels of my hands took on blue. Wherever the color came from,  consuming it transformed my mood, gave me a sense inside of what electrified others outside. A thrilling tranquillity, Especially at night, I couldn't get enough.

Nowadays though I notice fewer eyes turning to me. My hair seems less lustrous, less lively, my cheeks more sallow, my lips duller. I am becoming ordinary-looking.

I'd simply wanted to bolster my sense of self, but not at the expense of being beautiful. It's a unfair exchange. And what will I do when my hair is dull gray, lips loose and eyes dull. What will be left for me to take?

Ahh, I just rubbed the plump, pink cheek of a smiling baby with my knuckles, and notice flecks on my fingers. The taste--oh, so sweet.

Seventh and second

One black seed pinched between his two fingers, a fleck which might have been picked from between his greenish teeth left over from lunch. 'Be careful,' he grinned sardonically as he dropped it into my palm. I had expected, I don't know why, a seed from hell to be hot, at least warm, but this imparted to my hand a cold, moist sensation.

'Is this the only one,' I asked looking directly into his manic hazel eyes set in an orange-freckled face in order not to see the too toothy  mouth. 'Isn't one enough? No, more than enough,' he chuckled. 'And it's yours now.'

'I haven't paid you for it,' I said.

'You have it now and that's payment enough, plenty good, ah, so good.' he cackled, and turned away to go.

I'd found it on Craigslist under the heading of Suicide Seed--I mean who would be interested by that--but I didn't know what to do with it, how to care for it, anything. 'Where did you get it,' I called after him.

'From where no one's hand has ever been before,' he said, 'while alive: Minos' pocket.'

He was  almost gone. 'Where do I plant it?' I called out. 'In the belly of a black squirrel.'

That was that. The seed, not much larger  than a broken pepper corn, was clammy in my palm.

I suddenly didn't it sliming my hand and flicked it away, but it wouldn't go. I brushed it. No change. I tried to pick it up with my index finger and thumb but, like a tomato seed, it clung.

As I walked back through the woods, an animal plunged though the foliage above me, and then, right in front of me, hurtled down to thump on the ground. A squirrel lay feebly squirming, and not the normal grey tree rodent of the area, nor even a red one, black.

As I picked it up, its pink mouth yawned open, its eyes went glassy and its tiny body became stiff.

I dropped the carcass in disgust in a crevice between the roots of an oak tree, and didn't notice until I was on the bus that the seed was gone.

Perhaps I'd expected something like a pill which would, here's the idea, suddenly stop me dead, the way it happens in stories. Being dead was something I was feeling more and more comfortable with but dying...   I remembering wiping down the bathroom after my cousin, and my brother in law took so very long. Not for me.

Fall afternoons, with time to kill, I wandered along in melancholy languor, mocking the chrome and crimson of the leaves, soon to be brown, sodden mush. The oak's green had turned purple and russet but I foresaw the crisp crackle of winter's hanger-on leaves.

As I ducked beneath the canopy, a branch whipped my head. In sudden wrath, I snapped it off.  A black sap seem to bead up on the stump; I thought I heard coming from it a susurration like speech, almost a sizzle. On a whim, I put the broken end in my mouth like a pistol, and drank.

The whine of the tree's words matched the dirge of my own mood. I understood a history of betrayals and disappointments, a gradual collapse of promises and aspirations, a growing grey numbness, a world-weariness, and the ironic glamour of the achievement of...quietus. I sensed lank hair, sparse blotchy beard, bleary eyes, my face sometimes, my voice always.

That town, those people, the life I was condemned to act out: I nursed on that tree often that fall, as the days grew darker and colder. Finally--to hell with quick and clean--I got a rope, put it on, climbed up to a branch open below and jumped.

My head must have hit the trunk because I don't remember strangling, or my neck snapping. In any case, when they found me, my body was limp and draggled, smelling of shit: my take on existence.

It was my brother who found me and cut me down. After he washed his hands clean, there was a certain black clingy seed on his finger he couldn't wipe away. Overhead, squirrels jumped from branch to branch.

In a hurry

This week's Metropolitan Diary in the Times was a cornucopia of encounters. The coffee-counting barista, the phone booth romance, the one wanting neither to be 'wanted nor watched over', the wild haircut offer: I recognize them all. The one that I've been turning over in my  mind, however, is that of the man and the old woman. I was reminded of the meeting of the rich young man with Jesus. Asked to give up his money and become a disciple, the young man similarly turned away in sadness. I ask myself if I would have given my phone number. The risk of uninvited contact! The danger of demands! The trash-picker seems to see through the narrator, as does the narrator himself. The whole story is a sharp little parable that points its finger at me as much as any.  

Presencing

In the movie, Julianne Moore as Alice, a teacher suffering from premature dementia, leaves a message for her soon to be even more disabled self: simple instructions for committing suicide. The still capable speaking to the incapable; so I felt when I came across an old (3 or 4 years ago?) pamphlet I'd written titled Practicing Presencing. 

Almost as if I were reading another's thoughts, I re-encountered my own. I recognize the themes and the pamphlet format, but some of ideas seem as fresh to me as if someone else had thought them first, which, given the way my explorations evolve might well be true, the once scurriers like mice, are then flyers like bats, and now arm-stilt runners like vampire bats; genetic continuity doesn't mean identity. 

Finding this artifact opens up new opportunities for this blog. My posts can be encounters with addressible others, or thought projects, especially stories, or simple exploration of the plenitude, this thing or that made present. A door opens up. (Why always this metaphor?) Can I exploit this opportunity as I did the 2nd person encounters in post after post for a year?

Presences in Our Lives

Presences are all around us.  Consider some:

 

  the other person in the elevator

  the portrait tracking us with its eyes

  the person on the other end of the phone

  the sense of the city all around to someone walking at night

the recognizable voice of a favorite author
rage

  the brilliant idea hovering at the edge of our consciousness

  the TV set incessantly playing in the waiting room

  the submerged rock under the smooth water in the rapids

  the heat of the cup on the table left by a person just departed

A presence is something that manifests itself; we’re aware of it and are confronted by that awareness. A presence is an Other: not me, not mine, not for me, assertive of its own existence, an energy field, exerting influence by provoking response.

A presence can be internalized like a resident foreigner expressing itself within us in the form of voice or image derived from and referring back to the original external presence.

Our sensitivity to the existence of presences is because they, explicitly or implicitly, indicate agents and powers of agency in the world with which we must engage. They serve as the nexus of relevant real world references which facilitate the classification and retrieval of information. Internalized presences serve as mediators between our inner Other and outer Others.

Presences heighten for us our sense of our own presence. We deploy our mental presence in the form of attention in order to operate in the world. Not least, the mutual acknowledgment of presence is the basis of full, free conversation of exploration.

Too many presences and too active, or too few and not active enough, and our mental life suffers. I propose here that we manage the presences in our lives by deliberately furnishing our minds with productive presences of our choice. I call this process ‘presencing’. 

How to Practice Presencing

Our mental wealth can be conceived in terms of the number of active internalized presences within us which provide commentary on the objects of our attention, stimulate us to reflection and reverie, and refer us continually back to the world. 

This inner wealth sent out to rendezvous with particular objects, places, processes or incidents as presences is an expression of our mental affluence so that, while we may not be familiar with, much less expert in, what we encounter, we do see what the observant might see; have thoughts that the intelligent might have and respond as the sensitive might.

A rendezvous is a period of time devoted to the consideration of some particular thing, perhaps 15, 30 or 90 minutes deliberately set aside. It is here that presences are internalized and presencing occurs. The practice of presencing involves the regular scheduling of such rendezvous so as to confirm and deepen presences already internalized or to add new ones.

Every rendezvous has three elements: readiness, reception and response. In the first we get everything set up for the encounter. In the second we take in everything we can.  In the third we ‘seal the deal’ on the internalization by responding in some way to the fact that we’ve been in the presence of the object. In the course of a single rendezvous, we may move from apprehension to acknowledgement, that is, taking in and giving out, several times. 

The whole business is that simple: it’s all a matter of taking some time to look at, think about and link up with some particular thing.  It’s an exercise in active attention like listening to a concerto and whistling it afterwards, or watching a movie and recommending it to a friend, or reading a poem and memorizing it, or seeing an interesting face and trying to sketch it.  These and many more are examples of a kind of investment in our minds that adds to our mental wealth over time as presences interact with each other and the breadth and depth of our appreciation increases.

Tips on How to Practice Presencing

Readiness: Impromptu presencing often happens but just as often our time is fully booked, our attention is so harried by distractions that it starts and flinches at the least excuse. To actually regularly immerse oneself in the presence of something, the help of a datebook may be crucial. Start with a short span of time.  

The object, place, process or incident (hereafter referred to as the object) should be particular, graspable as a whole (though maybe part of something larger, with realistic and ingenuous details, observed directly or as reported on in writing, pictures, recordings….

It’s easy to forget the response phase of presencing so prepare for it by having tools for response on hand: paper, pencil…

Reception: The most important thing is to start attending. However, paying attention for long times can be hard. The session can be divided into two cycles of alternating reception and response (called twicing). Something to do with the hands (doodling for me) can enhance listening as tapping can enhance looking. Stop and look away, then look back when attention fatigues. Allow reverie, provided it is stays tethered to the object.

Make use of some tool for attention. One tactic is to systematically examine the object section by section. Another is to use the Convex Query System, especially Focusing, for question prompts. 

Response: The list is endless of possible ways to acknowledge the rendezvous: descriptions, drawings, maps, models, poems, arguments, analyses, songs, metaphors, tracings of cycles and systems, lists,  diagrams, time lines, genetic trees, before and after comparisons, plans, diary entries, memorizations, speaking aloud, revisiting—the possibilities are endless. 

The richer the response, the more profound the internalization of the presence, but even a ‘tip of the hat’ confirms the encounter.

How Presences Work In Us

An internalized presence may be missing many of the details, even obvious structural components of the original but it will have a characteristic mode of expression we may call its ‘voice’,  

The voice may rather be an image or some other representation and it may be as-if or virtual if the object is not an artifact. A voice is an Other we welcome and host, not wholly strange but not fully assimilated either. It retains its identity by regular referral to its original for revitalization, calibration and news of new developments.

A voice is recognizable by its stance (its take on the world), its style (its strategies of expression) and its sensitivities (its interests). A voice thus performs some of the functions of a mind engaged in critical, creative and conjectural thinking. The voice, still itself, actively contributes to our experience in several ways. 

For instance, by resonating with things around us which partake of its sensitivities, a voice points out new classes of objects worthy of our attention; its stance provides another opinion on what we see. As we seek to express ourselves, the style of the voice provides a standard of comparison and suggests ways to expand our repertoire. 

An internalized presence, a voice may be an attractor around which our thoughts begin to organize, a stimulus for dreams and speculations, a catalyst for internal reconfigurations just waiting to happen, a memorable nucleus with which impressions, facts and knowledge, our ‘owned’ information, are associated.

This active Otherness with its energy, potentiality and power encourages that internal conversation of exploration which is a prime joy of entertaining presences and one of the key features of a healthy mind in vibrant engagement with the world and itself.

Because presences sometimes fade, we need to regularly practice presencing to keep our mental hostel full of interesting guests. 

Mutuality

The world is It and I am I, except when presencing.

When we acknowledge ourselves in the presence of something, we are together with it in certain significant ways. We share with it overlapping vicinities; we are close to each other. We share a portion of history; we keep company with one another in this moment, this now, this immediate present. Not least, through the bestowal of attention, there is a bestowal of dignity, that is, a recognition of each other’s existence as worthy, estimable, honorable. 

Presencing is a ceremony of mutual regard. The relationship changes from one of 1^st vis-à-vis 3^rd person to a 2^nd person, I and you, reciprocity. 

Granted the Other, after its first move of manifestation, may not have ears to listen to us, but we do attend to it and even as we do, we and its increasingly internalized presence engage in a give and take conversation that is true to the Other as we know it. And, it must be noted, often there is public interaction between us, and not just when the Other is animate: a molecule may respond to the manipulations of the chemist.

The internalized presence then serves as a mediator between world and us. It continually makes reference back to its original and to the world in which it resides and so presenting itself to us internally as an interpreter, an ambassador, a reminder. At the same time, the voice is committed to conversation, offering its opinion, responding to ours, bringing up fresh points and being modified by what we offer.  Over time, voices can assimilate and become indistinguishable from ours.

With Others which no longer have subjective experience, written books for instance, we interact objectively; our esteem, for instance, may be part of the public history of an Other’s presence.  In this way, presences mirror and entangle with and participate with others.

Adventure

Why continually engage in presencing? In part for the adventure of it. 

Adventure is a vital nutrient for our mental health, luring us out of complacent routine and into new territory, out of the known which is good fo the possibly better. Presences invite us to explore novel differences in order to perhaps discover the beauty of integrated contrast.

This analysis (after Whitehead) is as follows.  We seek intensity of experience, which comes from sharp contrast between particulars.  Such disharmony, such un-integrated otherness, like the sensation of cold winter wind on our sensitive faces (oh, the Gilmore bridge), brings our existence to the forefront of our awareness.  We know we are alive because…ow! This direct experience of contrast is the zest, the thrill, of life, and we crave it, not just for the moment but also for the relevant future--as broadly as choose to conceive that.

That contrasting presences are within me simultaneously is a step toward a continuing reconciliation of continually contrasting (not contradictory) experiences. Reconciling certain presences within the context of larger presences is the experience of beauty which gives value to actual occasions of experience. 

Intensity fades, however, and so we seek to renew it with new contrasts or to capture it in new presences of wider scope and subtler grain that express more complex contrasts while retaining the intensity of the contrasts between them. 

For this reason, we regularly make ourselves present to new Others. We want to feel the intensity that rouses us to life itself.  There is no end to this process. The creation or discovery or determination of presences that contrast and reconcile contrasts is an endless adventure in which the present is satisfying and the prospect is enticing, on and on. 

Attention

Presences extend and deepen our experience of ‘now.’ When we are engaged with even internalized presences, we have the sense of immediacy that comes from attention not just delivered but drawn. The ‘this, here’ rendezvous becomes a timeless world of giving and taking; we are absorbed, engrossed, rapt.   

Attention is a finite resource meted out moment-by-moment and used up immediately. It involves energy perhaps because much of its work is the suppression of distractions. Finally it always has an (at least primary) object of focus even if only the All or the Nothing. When, through our acknowledged awareness of them, objects become presences, they seem able to ‘hook’ and play our interest so that we experience extended periods of full, free, frictionless attentiveness. 

Even internalized presences can have this prolongation effect when we are engaged in conversation with them. Afterwards, when our attention has turned to other things, information is more readily noticed and retrieved if ‘owned’ by a presence (it itself, its, for it).

Attention is sometimes bottom up, forced upon us by our surroundings and sometimes top-down, that is, intentional. Different mind missions practice their own kinds of attentiveness: maintaining a status quo involves monitoring and vigilance; persistent improvement involves closer and closer attention to finer and finer details; reaching targets and goals involves keeping the eye on the prize, tracking its movements. 

The kind of attentiveness that presencing fosters is exploratory, discursive, interrogative. As a presence, an object is interesting for itself and what it suggests, not first and foremost for what it can do for us. Consequently we can characterize the attentiveness associated with presencing as purposeful and persistent in its listening, its querying, its speculating, its experimentation, its leisureliness, its spontaneity, its excitement.

Education

Education basically means investing attention in oneself, according to Georg Franck, that is, making sure that we don’t pay attention without some sort of down-the-road profit. If, as we live we learn, then education is a life-long enterprise, not just the ‘work’ of the young, and it can be thought of in the broadest terms as a form of presencing.  

There are three linked tasks in education: (1.) expanding our repertoire of skills, or gaining masteries; (2.) extending and linking together the information we own, our knowledge, of the world inside and outside or constructing maps; and (3.) discovering and developing our personal themata or finding missions for our minds and other energies

Gaining any mastery requires long and close study of processes external and internal, repetitions, experiments, analysis of outcomes and so on.  Masteries build on one other, each adding to our ability to operate and express our perceptions in the world and impress intentions on it. Reading leads to writing which leads to the composition of, say, scientific papers. Mastery means power, which can be associated with the response phase of presencing which involves our acknowledgment of the rendezvous. 

Constructing any map involves putting together findings and surmises regarding any topic in coherent configurations and then joining configurations together laterally or hierarchically in ways that include more and more of our common experience intelligibly. So we learn history as stories, timelines, puzzles and generalizations. Mappings mean potentiality because they highlight what is possible in the actual, which can be associated with the reception phase.

Finding missions involves knowing what persistently fascinates us, what our priorities are among our interests and why, what questions we regularly ask and what projects we do undertake.  Missions mean energy, associated with the original initiative to attend or be ready.

The Payoff

To practice presencing regularly enhances our lives. Devoting time to the extended consideration of some object, place, process or incident is, in fact, healthy for our minds and spirits. There are several ways that it does this. 

Presencing enriches us by adding to and refreshing the number and variety of our internalized presences. Their multiplicity and vivid immediacy keep our minds active and interesting to us.

The more we presence, the more ready we are to engage with every aspect of the world. Instead of finding that our minds have no or little ‘traction’ on some of the things we encounter, the mind amply furnished with ‘voices’ is more likely to already find within itself something with which it can build the initial bridge. Presencing is a door to self-expression, making us more interesting to ourselves, our responses to rendezvous being themselves worthy of presencing.

Cultivate, don’t curb, your enthusiasm. 
Presencing keeps our minds eager and exuberant, pursuing adventures of exploration characterized by wonder and wondering, free, various, intense and often beautiful

Time spent presencing feels well-spent. We walk away from the painting with the painting. We can manage the fear of wasting time without rushing around and frittering it away even more thoroughly. We have something to show for the moments of attention which have so irrevocably passed: a internalized presence.  

Because presences are readily communicable, they make us more interesting to each other in conversation; indeed presencing is the perfect basis of conversations of explorations between friends and colleagues.

Finally, deliberately presencing can give us practice in managing the storm of items seeking to become presences in our lives. 

The Big Picture

The concept of presence as discussed here suggests a number of intriguing possibilities regarding science, peace and God.

The concept of presence can be a bridge between the subjective perspective of individuals and the objective stance of science.    There are as many first-person points of view as there are people, whereas the third-person scientific enterprise is to arrive at a single coherent account of the world independent of any individual ‘s view.

Presencing is essentially second-person in that it is between one and an Other, each distinct and yet mutually acknowledging one another.   The 1^st person view acknowledges the presence as an Other and the 3^rd person view seeks the presence as an object. 

An internalized presence as a mediator speaks of the outer Other to the inner, a subjective experience, and is queried by the inner about the outer, an objective investigation.   

The I-You rendezvous of presencing can serve as a model for interactions between people. It involves listening and expression and is predicated on finding the common voice that is big enough to include all the elements of disharmony as well as concord exist between people. 

As a joint practice engaging with a common Other, presencing may be a way for people to understand and engage with each other through the different ways they confront the Other. We can listen together and report on what we hear; respond together and share what we feel.

Practicing presencing is like prayer in its mindfulness.  Can it be that prayer is like practicing the presence of God? Does God practice our presence?  Might the internalized ‘voice’ that speaks of hospitality, friendship and exploration be that of God? 

These questions related to presencing, and many more, are worth exploring.  

Succor

Between Canso and Halifax on the Atlantic coast road of Nova Scotia there's a ferry over the Country Harbor River. Memories of this summer's trip to Canada and of that fraught day and the people I encountered have been coming back to me.

I'd spent the night at a campsite high on a bluff like a boat prow jutting into the river. High above, stars innumerable, but downriver a bright yellow light like a city in flames flicking just over the horizon.

In the brilliant morning following, driving down the steep road to the ferry I wondered if I had the right cash to pay. I made a U turn to go back to a store but changed my  mind and in the process scraped my oil pan hard on the ridge in the middle of the road--an awful sound.

On the ferry, I met a self-sufficient American woman with an SUV returning to Florida after a summer in a yoga retreat on Cape Breton (which, alas, I was not able to reach this trip). I learned something about the politics of the different yoga schools as the ferry pulled itself across the wide smooth water. The dropgate down, we vroomed up the hiill and onto a upland road of low trees and bushes. Ahead the brilliant blue sea was visible. The Florida woman passed me as I noticed peripherally a flash on my instrument panel.

Nothing, I thought, but nothing is nothing. Soon the oil pressure light was coming on when I went downhill or around corners. Maybe I was leaking oil; why, oh why, had I made that sudden U-turn. Suddenly the uninhabitation of the landscape seemed other than picturesque. What was I going to do if my engine lost all its lubrication and froze? My eye spent as much time on my dash as on the scenery. No houses anywhere. If' I stop, the last of my oil will drip away. Who'll be able to help me then? No, I have to keep going to where help can be found.

The road turned inland up the St Mary's river to Sherbrooke. Ah, I thought, a town. Surely there I'll find a garage to look at my car, a general store selling oil. The ride up the river was beautiful, winding road through dark conifers beside a bright river--I would had loved to love it but my plight required my premium attention.

Yes there was another road which led off into the interior--I saw the Florida woman head up there--but the main drag was all eateries and souvenir shops. If they had what I needed, it must surely be ahead of me down the coast road since it absolutely was not behind. Keep moving, I thought. The Florida woman raced by.

At the little town of Marie Joseph, a huge abandoned fishing ship was pulled up on the shore and loomed over the road. The Florida woman had pulled over to take a picture. I only noted the big wall of rusty metal before I left the useless town behind.

Down on the coast with the shore, I passed signs welcoming me to the community of Ecum Secum, but it was solely residential, useless. Pretty houses looking out on the water but no good for me, I barreled through. A few desolate miles beyond, Necum Teuch. Intriguing names. I wished I could have stopped but the oil light was blinking like a police car flasher. Maybe I'm being stupid, I thought; maybe someone nice in one of these nice houses could tell me how much farther down the road there was a store, if any.

Surely in Sheet Harbor; what about in West Sheet Harbor; Spry Harbor? Aaagh! Was there nothing before Halifax still many miles down the road.

Finally in Popes Harbor, hurrah (if it's not too late) a store at last. Just I turned off, the Florida woman shot by.This is where my desperation disappeared and the day became beautiful again.

Inside a the standard odd collection of rental videos, boxes of cereal and a cooler full of beer, and yes, motor oil. Several men in the store, one promising to pay for something a  little later. No problem, said the friendly, open-faced woman happy to be of service. Two quarts of oil please, and do you take USD?  No problem, maybe my husband here can look at your car.

He led me out and went to a shed next door and came out with a funnel. Let's look, he said, and popped the hood, and took out the dipstick. Yep, you need oil, he acknowledged. Another guy came up, very voluble, very friendly, and took a look himself.  No, nothing there.

The first guy looked underneath. No drips. No, I don't see any drops on the ground, said the second fellow. There oil glugged into the thirsty engine which smelled of smoky burnt oil. You've got a leaking head gasket, he told me. That may be where the oil has gone. Lots of discussion around this between the two as I nodded and wondered why my mechanic back home hadn't picked this up when I took the vehicle to him for a pre-trip checkup.

What you need, the mechanic said, is this special thick sealant oil, yes just the thing, and do I? yes I do have some. Then each of the two told me stories of oil disasters averted by this miracle material. I remember, said the second guy, putting a quart and a half of this in a tractor one day and then, when I lost my oil, still able to work all day and the engine as good as new.

These happy evangelists sold me a quart of the gunk, which worked, waved aside any payment, told me that they'd like to see Boston one day, that I didn't have anything to worry about now, and to have a good time with my uncle an hour and a half away in the big town of Halifax.

Canada, gorgeous scenery, yes, but I remember your unguarded friendliness of your people just as much.

Dire

"Turn down your thermostats? Buy a smaller car? Conserve? I spent quite a bit of time in Russia and China, and that's the first stage. You go from having your own car to carpooling to riding the bus to mass transit. You eventually get to where you're walking.  You go from your own apartment and bathroom to sharing kitchens with four families. That what socialism and the elimination of capitalism and free enterprise is all about."  The Wit of Don Blankenship.

"A lot of people look at mountaintop removal as a negative, but I see it as a positive. We don't want to defend mountain removal, but I want us to promote mountaintop removal because we need flat land. We can't have economic expansion without places to do things and part of mountaintop removal is for places like hospitals, airports and different types of merchants." The Wisdom of Daniel Mongiordo

After a long, clambering hike, I reached the top and gazed out over forest, valley and other peaks I looked forward to climbing.

Servant girls

Very still, their eyes on the middle distance, long hair twisted and tied in back, high-waisted chemises covering modest bosoms, these young women populate the cemetery.Visitors wander the paths, point out to each other monuments and structures, say the names of families, individuals, dates, admire sculpture and landscape and foliage,and then leave. Not so these jeune fille who stand, hot under the sun, wet under the rain, cold under the snow, sun and moon climbing up and down from horizon to horizon over and over, and like good servants, still ponder the mysteries that occasioned their creation.

I imagine unfocussed eyes tightening up as night frees them from surveillance, and whispers traveling, not on sightlines which never intersect, but along the currents of the darkness, not the angels who are sent to watch, nor those resolutely grasping books or anchors, or pointing confidently upward, but rather those adolsecents snatched in some reverie, frozen into stone and made to gently wonder forever on behalf of the grief and grievers long gone.

It's so good to be awake, they say to each other as their spirits pivot from contemplation of loss to the presence of the place, the cool dampness of its air, the rustle of its trees. In the distance, the hospital's lights blink on an off through wind rocked branches. Drag racers score the night with their unmuffled roar. These girls stretch and whisper out into the darkness, not along the sightlines which never intersect. They answer back, and start to chat and make plans. Can they get away long enough to listen in to the happy talk at the coffee shop at the train station down the road? Can they even  get to the dance club, and move to the music.

But it'll take time to extricate, time to hitch rides on passersby, and perhaps everything will be closed by the time they get there and perhaps the pores of the stone will be closed by the time they get back. Not melancholic but frustrated tears now, and not soft words but sharp. Still, undressed and unshod, shaking their hair loose, at whatever cost, they set off to find whatever life they can.

Eggs

Once upon a time, three eggs found themselves in a small hollow lined with leaves near a forest road.  You might think they were together because laid by a single mother, bird, snake or turtle, but in fact they had had very different adventures to reach the place where they lay shell to shell on the soft cup scooped in the duff.

The one with the brown shell was called Hardy. "This place is like the nest where my hen laid me. I remember how warm it was under her big, feathered bottom. However that time didn't last long. A hand with very quick fingers reached into the dark place where I was resting quietly, grasped me quickly and pulled me out. My hen gave a short squawk and let me go. I was balanced on top of a lot of other eggs just like myself.

The tiny blue egg called Cheep asķed, "Were they your brothers or sisters?"

Hardy said, no, they perhaps were distant cousins but they didn't have time to find out the connection because soon they were all put one by one on spoons and deposited in a pot of boiling water.

"What is that like?" asked Cheep in a small voice as if guessing it wasn't good.

"You can't imagine. We knocked around in the pot as the water pushed us around. After the first shock, I became solid inside. If there was anything alive in me...well, now I'm like a stone.

"We were cooled down in a bath of cool running water, then bundled together in a cloth and put into a basket carried by a stout girl walking briskly down the forest path. She tripped and I was thrown out, and rolled here next to you, Glory.

The third egg, the one with many colors, red, yellow and green in swirly patterns all over it, spoke up in a formal voice. "What happened to me was different. The lot of us collected one morning were put on a table where we rolled in small circles, though one disappeared suddenly and we heard a smash. I was picked up an a needle punched through one end of me, then again through the other end. It went right through me, All my parts were punctured. Then lips were put to one end and my innards were deposited in a bowl. I was blown empty as outer space."

"How did you get to be so pretty," asked Cheep shyly.

"It was a long and complicated process. I drawn on with crayons, dipped in cups  of hot colored sour-tasting water, heated and dabbed, and drawn on again over and over. The fnal step was a shower of this glittery stuff that catched the light.

Then, after all that work, I was carefully placed here, I don't know why, and...well, nothing after that. I don't understand it at all. What about you, little Cheep?"

"My place is above us. I was just minding my business along with the other eggs in the nest when one of them, a bit bigger than the others, hatched first and out of it came a big, ugly, blind with wings like sweeps. It backed into me and pushed me up and over the lip of the nest. As I fell I brushed against leaves and landed on a soft spot and rolled here. I'd like to go back but I don't know how. Meanwhile, what's been moving in me is becoming still. I feel I could have been something, I don't know what, but the window's closing."

So the three quietly talked, each touching each other, as the night cooled down, dew fell, and the sun rose.

"What is this," they heard a boy say. "A very strange clutch. What kind of fowl made its nest here?"

A girl's voice said, "It must be a magic bird that has different eggs according to its dreams. This one," she said picking up Hardy, "must have been a dream of the earth, see, it has heft, and this one," picking up Cheep, "must have come from a dream of a sky, like this above us this morning."

"What about the decorated one," asked the boy, as he spoke sharply to a dog to stay back.

"I imagine the bird dreamed all that's beautiful, intricate and colorful under the sky and a bit of heaven thrown in. It must have been a gorgeous dream."

"You're silly," said the boy, "but take it and see if you dream anything like.  The blue egg'll be good in the collection I'm making of local bird eggs and feathers."

"What about the brown egg," asked the girl. She knocked Hardy on a stone, peeled him and smelled the white flesh. "Here, Hugo," she said to the dog who was only to ready to wolf it down.

Their voices receded in the distance, and the rising sun found the little impromptu nest of improbabilities vacant again. 

Visit

Such a relief to encounter you again. For days now I've been growing more and more lonely. It's not that I'm not with people, nor that we haven't sometimes had enjoyable conversations, but an absence has been gnawing at me, and this morning on the train, I found out what it was.

Having wrestled with the issue of creativity recently, I'd turned to LeGuin's Steering the Craft to try to activate my writing. She's a good writer, and I'm prepared to do anything. The first assignment titled Being Gorgeous told me to write some narrative employing sound effects like onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect, but not rhyme or meter, and meant to be read aloud.

Okay, I said to myself last night, here goes, and filled a few notebook pages with dead, directionless nonsense. I read it and groaned. It was late; I went to bed.

In the shower at 6:15 the next morning however, energized by the hot water, I started to think of something better than the dull make-work of the previous night. What about a set of illustrations from an alien creature how-to lovemaking guide. A narrative could be the series of captions elucidating the details of the pictures.

I began to think of all kinds of creatures practicing different kinds of amorous moves. My imagination went beyond the limits of human anatomy: why only two arms? why only five senses?

Later on the train, notebook in lap, I got down to the good work of actually imagining specific tableaux of entanglement involving particular organs and acts--and here's the thing--you, my creative playmate, showed up, guiding my story forward, whipping out weird nomenclature with a jovial facility that suggests the well is deep.

The confident creativity that characterizes you could have gone on much further--I sensed I was in the zone--but the train arrived at Community College.  How delighted I was to sense your presence, magisterial and impish at the same time. How I'd missed your ability to surprise me with myself.

Not running this week because of a hamstring injury has made me a bit moody, so your showing up lightened the day remarkable. I caught myself feeling even exuberant. Don't wait so long to turn up again, or I'll have to come after you.
  

Peopling

You won the bet, hands down. From early morning we'd known this was the day our granddaughter would be born. The word had gone out the night before, and girlfriends who'd promised to assist had arisen in the wee hours to drive and arrive in time to take our daughter to the hospital. Miss O was coming.

News bulletins: departure for the hospital, dilation, administration of anaesthetic, water broken, clearly an exit strategy in place for the internal resident planet, then...blackout, hour after hour going by. News? None.

So, you asked me, do you want to wager when she will come, within a half-hour. I shrugged and guessed five-thirty or six o'clock. No, three--thirty, you said with confidence, everything will go quickly.

I was just thinking of stories I'd heard, but you, I realized, had an altogether deeper kind of knowledge, gathered from other women as you had waited for your (our) children, lore annotated by your own experience actually having babies, and all augmented by what you know of our daughter and second births generally. You were not plucking random guesses out of the air as I was, but making a shrewd estimate based on your acquaintance with the signs and the odds.

Delight at the new of the smooth delivery of a healthy Miss O, big and beautiful, was supplemented by respect for your powers of prediction. I was reminded of how much an insider you are, and how much an outsider I, to the circle of initiates in the mystery of producing people.

Why create?

What a strange journey thinking takes us on. I began by asking myself how I could write, draw, compose, that is, create more than I do, or to put it the other way, how I could capture in communicable form, that is art, more of what I see and how I respond to the facets of this scintillating world, so intriguing, so impressive. I end by addressing the question of why we, including God-in-love, create at all.

On the way I've changed my mind about the meaning of old tools, generated and discarded new analogies, used my trust with triads to posit new categories, had insights while showering and bright ideas just before going to sleep, gotten lost regarding my intentions and targets, regularly reviewed my notebooks, and ended up with what seem to me interesting notions about the 'why' question as it applies to artists and others. 

Who am I to speak about any of these things, I wonder. Here goes, anyway.

What if we think the impulse for creating, for encountering creations, for encountering generally as proceeding from three self-reinforcing desires: to discover and describe the livingnesses of things (whatever, wherever, whenever) so as enjoy the resonance in our own livingness; to be intimate, that is closely acquainted, very familiar, with an other or others so as to be known as we know; and to be delighted by the very activity of creating.  Livingness, intimacy and delight: what makes these good candidates for answers to the 'why' question is their self-reinforcing, hence self-justifying operation. We create, indeed we encounter, because we like doing it, because part of the payoff of the outcome is enjoyed in the process. 

Livingness I've discussed elsewhere as the openness of things to what is and can be, describable in terms of potentiality, energy and power. Its presence (or absence) evoke response in ours. How often when we read a story or poem, or see a performance, or listen to a song, or see an image are we moved in our sense of where we are and what we are ready (or not) to receive or do. 

Intimacy, a word that leapt of the page of Egon Friedell's Cultural History at me, not a new word but one that seemed all of a sudden like a key, speaks about the space between the participants in an encounter, a space filling up with strands like hyphae penetrating, suffusing, reading each.  The artist looking at the model, the writer contemplating the world under creation, the songwriter trying to capture some poignant but evanescent original feeling get to know what it is they seek to present with a thoroughness and depth commensurate with their own need to be known, to be recognized, understood, welcomed. 

A resource for intimacy may be what I have called the 'freedom fields' or 'relevant perimeter' on other posts in this blog. I realize now that while the categories are meaningful, my understanding of their significance was not; they are not so much presentations of what is actual versus possible as what is obvious vs what can be inferred, what is definite vs what is indefinite:

    what something (or somebody) is vs what it can be, can have, can do; 

    what is evident about sth (or sb) vs what is hidden, invisible, suggested; 

    what is present of sth (or sb) vs what is absent, missing, empty; 

    what sth (or sb) is as an individual vs the form, the many, the whole; 

    what sth (or sb) is now vs the past, the persistent and the coming to pass; 

    what sth (or sb) is for itself (I or as if I) vs an other, you, myself.

In any case, these considerations show the way to deeper familiarity. 

There's direct pleasure in where we are finding ourselves, what we doing, what we having contact with in the course of our creatings. The simple activities of looking, of moving, of handling are often their own reward. Thinking about these I've come up with three categories of such delights: settings, kinetics, contacts.

Gardens (after Julie Moir Messervy) are designed to represent in some way sea, cave, harbor, promontory, island, mountain, sky. They are archetypical places that speak to some of our most evocative childhood experiences. To occupy any of these (in the making or made) and look out from them is simply intrinsically satisfying.    

The movements of creating (or appreciating) include dancing, flying, climbing, extricating, walking, riding, and burrowing--dancing for its rhythm; flying for its grace; climbing for its exertion; extricating for its conquest of obstacles; walking for its steady progress; riding for its sense of control, burrowing for its dark passage. 

Touch, as of hand on body, lover with lover, for instance, or parent with child, is also one of the delights of creating. Drumming, stroking, kneading, scratching, tracing, twirling, probing, and the many moves that fall into these general categories, are ways we handle the stuff of creation: words, paints, sounds, movements, what have you. The pleasure is in contact made, or received, the mutuality of maker and material.  

These fundamental archetypical delights--settings, movements, contacts--simply start to happen when we start creating, as do the rewards when we begin to portray livingnesses or explore intimacies. This may be why we create. 

I put this forward not so much a proposition to be proved as a possibly useful perspective for people such as myself who want to stimulate themselves into making art. It may be that I just need to discipline myself to set aside time for creating. There's more that I need however than just time and maybe these reflections indicate what that is.  Perhaps the merest glimpse of something's potentiality, energy or power, the simplest acquaintance with a non-obvious aspect of something, the first touch with raw stuff will be enough to get me going. Let's see.

Luna

A bloody head reeled out of the city smoldering on the eastern horizon, then an klieg-lit mask, splotched with irregular birthmark patches, hoisted on high, all nearby stars suppressed as if by your lordship of lights, you own the night.

A faint penumbral cast crosses your visage like the flicker of prophecy, and then a black woolly strip like an eyebrow (maybe one of mine) attaches to your eastern rim, and like the outworking of a doom, propagates across the surface of your disc. Gradually, the silver-white burning magnesium sheen cornered, pushed over the western edge, extinguished, you become...

Ruddy and flaky-looking like the top of pastry, a two-dimensional object turned globular, just a sub-planet, just! Stripped by our shadow of your glamour, you become a textbook astronomical object, one of the moons, and as it happens, ours; theater becomes lecture hall.

Is there a larger drama here? The slowing speed, the spiralling-inward orbit, fissures appearing and growing on your surface: all presage your eventual obliteration due to the baleful effects of this earth whereon we stand as, gazing up at you, a white blade appearing now over the rim of your eastern edge, you don again your mask, tattooed as a harpooner's face, and, oracular, glare at us with dire import.

Peach

A mass of scimitar-curved leaves, and, like lightbulbs shining the darkness, orange-yellow-pink fruit glowing in the afternoon sunlight: my neighbor's peach tree. Planted when the Haitian family moved into the house about 20 years ago, you have grown into a thick-trunked, full-crowned tree thick nearly 25 feet tall and bending with fruit.

Up on my tall stepladder, my head among your branches, I search for clusters of peaches or singletons hidden behind the scooping leaves. There's one to pluck and drop in the bag I carry under my arm, its strap over my shoulder. Oh, a little cluster, there, and two more...if I stretch...whoops...ah, gottem. I pull your flexible branches down, down, and strip them of their globular gold, presaging the night's blood moon. Tippy-top, too high on you for me to reach safely, some drops of peach sweetness still hang, inaccessible to all but the sun that birthed them.    

Such fruit! Your peaches are a little narrow, thick of skin and rather fuzzy, sometimes mottled, sometimes weepy with syrupy juice, no supermarket beauties these, in fact so irregular and ugly that I'm surprised repeatedly at how sweet and flavorful they are. The flesh is firm, a little stringy, but so rich in special peach flavor that I keep eating one more. Will this next one disappoint? No, no, it doesn't. My beard is dripping.

My generous neighbor shares the wealth that I love to climb for. There's abundance for all. Tucked between two houses and generally ignored, you've off-handedly laden us with bountiful blessing. I find it, in a way, hard to grasp how so much comes from a life planted two decades ago and left to grow as it would. You shame the poor-mouth talk that so fills the world. 

Rock talk

My friend Flossie writes: So you were traveling. Thanks for telling us. Anything to share? Isn't the best part of a journey reviewing the adventures? Bears? Earthquakes? Crippling diarrhea? These kinds of stories told in a bar over a pitcher of, say, Sam Adams are more fun than actually travelling. By the way, who in their right mind goes on vacation and thinks about fusty old Thomism? You're right: yours truly.

I've not been able to get away, what with my new job, but I did spend a weekend with an old friend from my college writing program. She lives with her husband in a huge house on the very edge of the ocean in Cape Ann. What a view of the vastness of the sea!

She told me as she showed me around that it had been in her husband's family for years and that every summer each of the branches of the family had rights to take a turn staying there for the swimming off the rocks, the boating, the tide pool dabbling, or the sunset cocktail sipping on the veranda.

The morning after I got there, two of her nieces arrived each with a friend. There was lots of bustle as they settled into something like a bunkroom in the back, then hustled down to try the water at the tiny beach at the foot of the garden. It was clear the attractions of the place had been oversold. The water was cold, we geezers were boring, and the nearest night life was half an hour away. The stories the family kids told of what they had loved about the place didn't cut any ice. The bumptious youngsters headed out that evening to mix with their own kind at a bar.  It was Saturday night after all.

My friend and I sat on the granite ledge looking out over surf breaking over the rocks, and swirling in the guts and fissures between and watching the moon rise over the heaving water. We spoke with some amazement about the fact we were there, she marrying into this extensive Yankee family late in life and me just escaped from my most recent romantic incarceration. Isn't it wonderfully strange when we stop and ask, how did I get here? If we had thought as young girls what we would have to do to end up on those rocks as we were, a little sad but happy, it would have been a tightrope we'd have had to walk. But, unthinking, we made the right and left turns that had brought us there.

Do you know what I wish? To have been able to somehow paint or otherwise preserve the image of that rising moon and the two of us old women looking out at it. Oh, to be a Winslow Homer. Wouldn't that be more than all the philosophy you and I have steeped ourselves in.

Perfection

Driving back from Nova Scotia listening to lectures on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, I thought about the doctrine of your perfection, God, and about how uncomfortable I am with it. Over and over, Aquinas' argument is that if there were something you had to learn, or do, or become, you wouldn't be complete, wouldn't be perfect, wouldn't be the God the philosophers and the theologians posit as the final local reference point, the absolute.

Where does that leave you, I wonder, God, but trapped in a situation with no possibility of risk, nor of discovery, since you are all-knowing and all-powerful. For you, the future is already. You can never be surprised. There's a cool, crystalline rigidity to Aquinas' portrait of you that conflicts with the dynamism that characterizes world as I see it. Some of the most powerful responses we have to our world include curiosity and awe, but while you may be the object of these, you are never to feel these powerful drives which so often motivate us.

We live in time and you outside it. Through contemplation insight, some may experience trans-temporality, and even come to feel it more real than the perpetual change we endure or enjoy, how can it be that that which is so fundamental a factor in our experience cannot be a part of yours, and we to make common cause?

Contemplating the Thomist position is like having a grand piano fall on one's head, playing majestic chords all the while. It was an experience which took me some days to recover from. T. makes lots of interesting distinctions--actuality and potentiality, form and matter, essence and existence, substance--and they all work together to make an edifice which feels like it must be taken whole or not at all. That he assumes your existence before he argues for you isn't the problem; the cogency of one's arguments that matters in philosophy since nobody comes to the work without background or bias. No, it's the implacability of his logic herding me into the divine absolutism he attributes to you that made me uneasy, until I remembered the importance of novelty and discovery, and the need for an open future, for our sense of humanity.

Today's nihilisms and materialisms dismiss you, of course, but still have the power to trap us in an inescapable webs of propositions that leave us no future or reason for wanting one, and only the old stoicisms and epicureanisms to inspire us, duty or delectation and all the time dupes of our biology.

Perhaps with a more mystical bent, I might see you otherwise, but I prefer thinking of you as God-in-love, inviting me to share your hot-blooded striving to summon into fulfillment your Beloved other, certainly not frozen in the complacency of perfection.

With whom?

Who am I with when I'm alone? Driving around Atlantic Canada a week ago, I wondered about the experience of camping beside a river, on a bluff overlooking the sea, in an abandoned gravel quarry: I wasn't sending pictures and so in 'conversation' with people at home, but even so, I didn't feel lonely but rather intensely engaged with wherever I was.

My uncle, 95 now, suggested I was actually companioned by the traces of my life so far, the layers of my past being. So the Other was my former self or selves--who I had been up till that moment, each occasion then being the culmination of what had undergone to date.

It seemed to me that, rather than memory being my companion, I was instead accompanied by expressions of my perennial desires--the love of flowing water, for instance, in the form of river, or surf.

Was I with anyone, anything, at all? Was there in fact no companionship? Maybe I didn't feel lonely because I had no sense of exclusion or abandonment, and absent these conditions, I simply 'was', in a flow of consciousness that was busy with its own flow, as the the Machias river had been when I bathed in it my first day out.

I don't know why the question occurred to me except that sometimes I was aware of being where I was and alone, and that fact addressed in some way to someone, whom I never could tell.

Yet I remember my last evening out, alone in an old excavated site within earshot of the Airline, Rte 9, but completely out of sight of it, building a small fire out of the abundance of dry wood nearby, steaming 5 lbs of mussels in a stockpot I'd bought in Calais for the occasion, then eating the contents of shell after shell (and quaffing hard cider at the same time) as I sat in the evening sun on stool on top of a small hill looking down on my car, thinking 'This is a splendid moment and I know it even as I enjoy it,' and, from today's perspective, I was right.