3 October 1999 -- Time to warm myself up
The infiltrating chill of this morning's air is an undeniable sign of
winter's approach, just as the toy advertisements on television in real
life signal the inevitability of Christmas, 1999. Something about
turning the corner into October always gives me a solid impression of a
year that is as good as shot. I stop to ponder this incredible pessimism;
to write off a whole quarter of the year as useless for significant new
activity and accomplishment. Soon, I'll have excuses for my laziness
in the other 3 quarters as well. This year, of course, we need to
deal with all the Y2K hoopla and hype, with many who own real properties
like the Cabin heading off as I did yesterday to spend the night in the
settled silence.
The sun is passing higher above the ridge and illuminating the dew-laden
brush that spreads out before the front window. There is such a variety
and complexity of vegetation in the clearing, and I can imagine how cold
and itchy it might be to wade through some parts of it this morning.
That is indeed the way of the unadulterated wild, however, and I still
prefer it much of the time to the most prosperous parts of the suburban
sprawl in Northern Virginia. Still, I cannot at once discard the
solid merits of the interdependent life. People tend to be decent
enough not to present a direct affront when I make my way through the common
crowd, unlike those briers out in the clearing, which show no mercy.
It amazes me at times that I find as much civility as I do in the great
competition for what is dear, most notably housing assets, in that middle
Atlantic congestion. It seems a little less unusual when I recall
my own limited experience with the fruits of bitterness, which typically
cannot sustain a person for longer than a few moments of glorious vindication.
Anything other than good-spirited cooperation is called "inhumanity".
It is certainly not my intent to spurn the others in my own life when I
break away to be alone. Heaven forbid! I am accustomed to too
many amenities down there to think of trying to live off the land, especially
since I do not care to hunt or fish.
Realizing that it is indeed cold this morning, I get up from the sofa
by the window and start working on the fire. I will hardly have the
diversions of my interconnected city life as I live this day out alongside
the stream. It is one of my more cherished privileges to be free
of ironclad commitment on a Sunday, if only I can find activity that is
authentic, productive and enjoyable at the same time. This does not
always happen, of course. Sometimes I'm really better off putting
in some disagreeable work, if only because of how good it feels to have
it done.
The fire is under way now within the hearth, and I swing in the iron
hook with my coffee pot, since it would be a bit much to light up the stove
as well. Some of this gear really smacks of survivalist extremism,
I must admit. This is how people cooked in the Dark Ages. I
doubt the people of, say, 999 AD (or its Julian calendar equivalent) would
complain long about changing to an electric stove, though whoever conjured
it up would be in an envious position to defraud them by such magic.
Rugged life outside of the collective has its appeal, I suppose, but it
seems too connected to a tendency towards pathological defiance.
Maybe my revulsion to so much of what I'm made to do in city living is
more common than I think, only such resentment is such an inherently anti-social
sentiment that few are willing to admit it as they begrudgingly go along.
In the back of my mind, however, is the hope that I am indeed a special
case and most of the others are enjoying that life, all the way to the
core. That would explain why the world succeeds as it does, year
after year.
"Bo"
6 October 1999 -- Focused on the unchanging
With the way my real life schedule continues to present new obligations,
I try to put myself into a somewhat less constraining framework of occupation
during this visit on a cool, crisp autumn day. I need to slow down
from all those gyrating, swerving maneuvers, where I must meet some people
while I avoid running into others. Up here at the Cabin, there is
the long, gentle descent of the seasonal cycle to ride out, and it is neither
my fault nor to my credit that such particulars as the color change and
falling leaves are now under way. If the ups and downs of that other
life have similar components beyond my control, I would sure like to know
what they are. In that case, I could spend more time trying to correct
what I really can, as in the famous prayer. This is where it becomes
difficult to lack conformity with the bulk of the "normal" population,
the ones with fine-tuned control over matters that I can only beat about
in desperation.
Looking out the back window this afternoon, I can see the first few
leaves drifting into the ravine from trees that still have a goodly amount
of green. I try to trace the "careers" of individual leaves as they
come into view, only to disappear behind the dense lower foliage and eventually
become lost along the bank of the stream. This, of course, is not the mode
of concentration I was seeking when I came out here today. I'm trying
to ignore such rapid transients, putting my attention instead on factors
that change so slowly that they are relatively still. I soon begin to realize
what
a difficult exercise in patience this is.
It is a form of restraint all to itself, when I force my mind away from
the urban content outlets and plug it instead into the low-bandwidth channels
of the woods and the hollow. I feel my conscious thought process
continually reaching out and attempting to connect back to those high-speed,
switchable electronic stimuli. I have to remind myself of how empty
those can also be; many is the time when there was 75 channels of nothing
on TV and a whole World Wide Web with nowhere I cared to be on it.
It has been my repeated experience after intentional "deprivation" of
this sort to find inspiration and renewal when I view the entire tangled
mess of my real life from a less-involved perspective. This vision
never arrives as I would expect it, however--it is always a by-product
that enters from a portal I accidentally leave open when I am looking somewhere
else. This is what makes my kind of life hard. Those with proper
powers of concentration, it would seem, can go straight for what they want
and have it in sight all the time. My procedure, on the other hand,
involves self-deception and self-denial, with the payoff coming when I'm
ill prepared for receiving it.
I am reminded of the Sermon on the Mount discourse on seeking the Kingdom
first, after which the things of the world will be thrown in without expressly
pursuing them. The others may just be practing good Kingdom-awareness
and are properly disposed when the paymaster comes around. I'd be
the first to admit that I lack full sincerity when I try to work my way
through a day's meanderings at the office. The richness of experience
I forgo on a daily basis strikes me as a tragic loss until I remember how
little use I am currently able to make of it.
Why does it have to hurt to do what is right and good? Maybe I'm
not as far from the "knee" in the effort-to-reward curve as I picture myself.
This is my ongoing hope; that happiness is just around the corner, and
not a careening, out-of-control truck. One day I'll know how unlikely
some of those outcomes really are, and on that day, I'll be able to count
on their stability and predictability the way I can look at a tree today
and know it will be bare branches in two months, then green again in seven.
"Bo"
11 October 1999 -- Taking in the colors
If I were writing the definitive tour guide for these parts, I would
report that the fall colors are at their peak right now. Of course,
I'm the only tourist to see them, unless I count the folks who pass overhead
in the ever-present jetliners, considering these woods in an immense aggregate
if they even bother to open the cover on the window during the movie to
look down.
As I sit on the front porch this late afternoon, the sun behind me is
now igniting the colors of the ridge slope to their fullest visual effect.
There is of course the remnant green that waits its turn, followed spectrally
by a yellow-orange golden stage, a whole-heartedly orange stage reminiscent
of highway work signs, a red-orange that is similar to the vermilion stain
of the Cabin, and a darker crimson-red. These rough categories have
their way of sorting out the trees and emphasizing their status as individuals.
Of course, it is erroneous to compare such distinction to the diversity
of human populations, since the trees are different species. There
is a partial parallel, perhaps, to the differences in location and biological
surroundings of two trees of the same kind. Even then, however, two
persons do not need to stay where they are "planted"--they just have more
or less predisposition to move up (or down) along the various scales of
achievement.
No, these are trees and I am human. We are even farther apart
than apples and oranges. If I am to write metaphors and parables,
they should have the ring of truth, something I've admitted poverty in
discerning. The ones who seem to be "on" to authenticity are the
kind who tend to live a lot closer to the surface than I do. Theirs
is a tenuous interface of high surface area with the outside society and
media. While I might possess a given overall sum of perception equal
to theirs, I tend to reserve a greater amount of it for the purpose of
internal reflection--or pointless mulling-over and regret. The small portion
of life's external totality that I see is then incomplete, and I should
not wonder why it all looks so pointless.
I'm beginning to note how my thought has drifted from what I see before
me, the population of various trees of various types in various places.
Since I have yet to avail myself fully of the marvellous sensory opportunities
up here in the hollow, my thinking still has reserve capacity to bemoan
the currently-prevailing facts of my city life. The real nature
seeker, I have often thought, could get totally swept into this scene,
leaving the other life behind without problem because of an overflow condition
in his mind. This person, however, would not so often wish to be
alone. He would have forthright and permanent convictions as to the
good I can only witness on brief occasion and as distorted, distant imagery,
like Paul's description to the Corinthians of the life he currently sees
as in a bad mirror. It is no wonder, then, that Paul walked by faith
and not by sight.
It is frustrating today; I cannot "force myself" to turn over my senses
to the calm up here. The only sources that seem to do that are the
ones in the heart of big crowds, or in front of one of the two tubes that
keep promising to converge. I continue to dodge the ultimate accountability
I have for the outcomes of my various and half-hearted exploits in making
my own peace within. I know it is not very fruitful to turn over
the control of my mind to the ones who would be all too happy to think
for me and make me feel, so as to profit by my slow, fitful demise.
Maybe my senses will improve if I keep at the urban routine, but not cowering
from seeing more of what there is to see in the simple beauty of another
human face. Indeed, in a rising tide of beauty's appreciation, both
times alone and times with others will rise together in their splendor.
"Bo"
15 October 1999 -- Weighing the evidence
I find myself heading for bed this evening with an interest in unloading
some of the frivolous ritual that typically marks a weekend evening in
my real city life. The arrival of nightfall at that small enclosure
within the vast metropolitan throng is my signal to find escape, most notably
in television--the Web still makes me work too hard for satisfying stimulation.
I always crave that positive stimulation for which I need not struggle;
the kind that simply "happens", even though everyone knows that effortless
accomplishment is supposed to feel empty.
Sitting on the sofa under the warm glow of the kerosene lamp in the
living room, I sigh on account of this thought, one of the many I have
that leads down a bottomless funnel towards total despair. I still
do not understand why it is that my evaluation of most patterns of fact
always ends up at the same sad conclusion. Nowhere is it written
(or even "unspoken") that this is a "law", yet I keep following the same
tired old tracks.
As I step outside and across the dooryard and driveway to use the outhouse,
I realize that this is a night where I would want to stay inside if I were
back at my real home. The cold has finally arrived for the season,
and with it a clear night sky. At the edge of the dirt surface near
the truck, I stand for a moment to behold those stars whose brilliance
I merely notice in passing as I scurry to or from the front door in my
city routine. I get my orientation, find Polaris, and start scouting
out the constellations, trying to restore the patterns I have known since
I was a kid. Soon, however, I begin dismissing even the obvious connectivity
of Ursa Major and Cassiopeia, trying to imagine seeing all of this for
the first time.
I yearn this evening to have the capacity to view each new situation
on its own merits, and not according to stale precedent with implicit presumptions
that may no longer apply. Since my nerves never seem to find lasting
and reliable relief through any practice of leisure I've yet devised, I
should assume by similar reasoning that the sources of my ongoing irritation
and dismay are also untrustworthy.
Returning to the living room, I remind myself of how little I'm really
missing by not playing the role of a well-planted couch potato, even as
I stretch myself out onto the muslin slipcover of the overstuffed sofa.
The lamp flame flickers some from the circulating cold air I let in when
I opened and closed the door. I find myself going over some of the
times that I actually got bored up here before leaving, knowing
that I'm fair game for that condition at any time. What is worse,
I have no diversions into household affairs or the media to pull me from
the hole. It is a most unstable point I've reached, and it will not
take much to knock me out of it. It is as if I were sitting on a
sharp peak with nowhere to go but down. The others, who have stable
joy instead, have walls of human support and encouragement on either side.
They sit at the bottom of something resembling a trough.
Perhaps my own "trough"; that place where things can only get better,
is artificially low at the moment. Maybe if I spent more time there,
some of the sides would cave in and lift me up closer to where the others
are. That image is a frightening one, though--it looks as if I'll
be buried alive when I find myself down there, wallowing near the muddy
bottom. I try my best, in the small area I have in these large woods,
to become better fixed at the higher point of positive outlook and even-tempered
judgment, since so many others live this way without trying. I am
so tired of fighting for every scrap of joy that ever comes my way, especially
when I realize that the best effect of this valiant struggle is to tire
me out and make me receptive, not defensive. Only at that time do
I find the elusive peace I somehow believed I could earn by the sweat of
my brow. As I start towards falling asleep on this frost-worthy night,
I tell myself to avoid prejudicial feelings and stick to that which is
fact. This alone should be the basis of my opinion of what life has
given me.
"Bo"
19 October 1999 -- Life in the cold
It is another cold one up here tonight, and with a certain amount of
howling wind that might make this a good night to visit a small-town haunted
house. The living sounds of the warm season, most notably the crickets,
frogs and cicadas, are rapidly fading into memory. I stand for a
brief moment listening from the back porch, where the wind, the rustle,
groan and crack of the tall trees, and the cold current of the river below
assert their own identities as accessories to life, but not life itself.
It is too cold to stay out long tonight, so I soon retreat to hearthside,
to let myself become soaked through with the radiant and convective heat
from my optimally-sized fire. I watch the slow, orange-yellow flames,
finding it hard not to classify them as "alive". This is the point
of internal conversation where I'd ask myself, "and you'd call what you
do every day 'living'?" I suppose there are others doing worse than
I am on many scores, and this is where I am to find solace. Yes,
because I stand above 1st percentile on any measure, then I've lost my
right to complain. But just let someone actually try to use that
justification--then he is accused of promoting himself as superior to another
human being, and we all know that we are all the same. Yes, equality
is the rule, or death is the result.
It seems to me that this pattern has been designed, consciously or not,
to shut people up who would otherwise sit around "belly-aching", as the
old expression went. I feel some more of the heat on my tired shape,
collapsed as it is in the cherrywood rocker. This body, without a
doubt, is one of the more "human" and "living" sources of vexation I know
from day to day. Its humbling, fleshly limitations come around every
so often and knock me a good one, so that my mind leaves the vacuous clouds
and I say, "thanks, I needed that".
It is tempting to see such suffering as sanctification, but who really
prays for it? It is a rather comical game, now that I think of it:
I run with mortal fear, lest hard times get the better of me, but once
they've set up shop, I begin to sit self-righteously in the crucible until
the heavenly metallurgy has run its course and I'm poured onto the ground,
shapeless and scattered. At this point in the imagery, I'm aware
of how hot that fire really is, so I move back a couple feet. Yes,
I'm full of sensation, still, ready for whatever comes next.
I give thanks that I have been able to come out to the woods this evening
and not be tied to some social gathering or vital, preemptive task.
Not everyone gets such an "easy" life. I think of the ones with commitments
at every turn and how they call my simple, "sitting around" life an enviable
way to be. Just think, I could be one of them. Yet I
had a choice; the grand gamesmaster left me an out.
I see myself moving along the track of time, which no man can avoid,
to my next encounter with pain. It is so silly, the way I
usually suffer. If I have to do it, I should be scoring some points
or getting a penalty called against evil. What profit is there in
demonstrating my ability to prevail--or to fall--in a vain struggle for
which even ESPN would not want airing rights? The trees out there
may be losing leaves and struggling against the wind, but they'll be there
next year. The various creatures find their hiding places for the
bitter months that are to come, so their kind might carry on. Though
I grow tired and agitated, what else can I do but hold out? Life
is short, after all.
"Bo"
23 October 1999 -- That ever-present voice
Here in the middle of the woods on a cold and clouded-over autumn day,
I have come to this place where expectations of me are at a minimum, since
there is only myself to do the expecting. Since it has been my repeated
observation that much of what I believe others want of me is really the
product of my own self-imposed standards, I stand on guard for that voice
of my ever-vigilant yet frequently misguided conscience. There isn't
much I can do to defend myself against such a personal attack of internal
words, so I am really wasting my efforts. But do I want to be one
of those people who carries on despite what his inner "wisdom" finds it
proper to tell him? No, I have to listen to everything and do my
best to tell when something is really wrong, just like I always
have to drop everything and run into the street when the fire alarm goes
off in the office building at work.
It seems strange today that I can enjoy such a grey scene across the
clearing and so little activity around the Cabin--maybe I've been working
myself too hard down there in city life. So long as I can continue
the practice of not actively "looking for trouble" where there is none
in my life, the sameness of this one place has for me a soothing presence,
something like that of a splint that immobilizes a broken limb. At times
it grows hard to dream up new narrative of this living room or the rock-strewn
clearing visible from the window, since it seems I've said it all before.
There is certainly nothing wrong with repetition in life, since some things
are best if they do repeat. One would hope for breathing and a heartbeat
that
continues as it should, and it is good when jobs continue for those who
wish to work them and thus keep the bills paid.
It is so very still today, and the hours stretch before me in
a pattern where I can actually see them approach before they're gone in
the intricacies of activity upon activity. I feel the continual and
tempting pull towards trying to figure out my upcoming plans and run through
them in my mind; to retreat to the truck and get my Day-Timer book, which
accompanies me everywhere. "No," I tell myself, "there'll be plenty
of time for those things later." By doing this, however, I am left
to face that internal voice. I must defend the time I spend now,
crashed on the living room sofa in a style I can usually approximate while
I'm sitting next to the phones and the TV in my real home.
This voice I describe is hardly anything as fake and extraordinary as
a hallucination. No, this secondary part of me is none other than
me, even if the content of its monotone is biased or untrue. There
is no hiding from such inner urging; it will have its way. I wonder
sometimes if this aspect of myself is able to tune the channels of spirituality
the way I can control the cable box at home as a flesh-and-blood being.
Maybe it has a bad habit of watching the wrong content and subscribing
to various powers that I continue to reject in conscious remembrance of
my baptismal vows.
It is tempting at times to blame the harshness of my second self upon
the workings of that same physical brain that I use for those processes
of thought over which I have better control. If it's all just "wetware"
difficulties, than I can place hope in the world. But experience
suggests that there is another interface somewhere in there, to a realm
whose effects are better mediated through proper contemplation and prayer.
It seems I need my share of time alone for this effect on my internal well-being
to reach its best balance, so here I am, looking upon a spread of woodland
that continues along in the pattern of seasons I've seen now twice before.
"Bo"
27 October 1999 -- Cutting my losses
There is good sun today, and since it has not been so cold lately, I
decide to spend some time in the open while I can. I pull the porch
chair into the clearing, as I might have done on the numerous occasions
over the summer when I burned a personal campfire in the stone ring, and
I take a seat. I look towards the northern portion of the ridge,
and let my eyes begin coasting to a rest. The tree-carpeted hollow
has little to hold my attention for long in any one place.
The hardest part of my visits to the Cabin is dealing with the knowledge
that I do not have to be fixing my mind on something, so as to be
prepared for imagined adversaries. I am frequently made to spend
long periods amid petty irritations, and it is hard to stand down in the
silence here. As I consider the various color-contours ascending
from the tree line, I try not to compare my situation with the ones I call
"normal", encamped as they are near the mean of strength for dealing with
stress. They are the practitioners of the positive-sum game, a strange
sport indeed--whoever heard of two "winners"? I change the subject
of my thoughts at this point, since I know what a dead end that particular
resentment can be.
With the hard frosts that have come through here, the signs of life
have receded. This scene has in it the foreboding signs of the dark
and harsh winter soon to follow, when I shall truly know what isolation
is like. This set-up, as I have said, reminds me of the sort of outpost
I might have established as a "fort"-loving 10-year-old. At that
age, I seemed to be a "loser" in the zero-sum game quite a bit of the time.
The enlightened ones from the "normal" group, particularly the elders,
told me to keep getting back in there to try again. How could they
know how futile it is to force a feeling upon someone, using various blunt
combinations of persuasion and strong-arm tactics? It was always
so much more fun to be out there in that hiding place, even if it was cold
and snowy.
But maybe there is something in the act of running off all the time
that keeps the ball of bitterness rolling, since it usually takes quite
some effort to evade the others and this requires internal justification.
"Surely you don't want to be back there" runs the dialogue, whenever
I start to face the reality of unconstrained time. I continue to
sit, slightly slumped in the steel chair and wearing my spring-weight jacket.
There are times the notion of Cabin life seems so correct, and I
can imagine myself unburdened in front of the fire or in my bunk, with
the daily struggle at a temporary end. Today, however, I feel myself
trying to push-start my thought processes, in the hopes that I might find
one of those elusive roads of effortless, solitary peace. True peace
is such a rare event in my life--most of the time I'm still on the emotional
battlefield, straining to hear what I can during a truce of unknown duration.
It occurs to me, as I close my eyes and listen to the subtle breeze
and the sound of the river behind me, that I could be fully within my rights
to spend as much time alone as I do. I take my share of the others
during working hours and other socially-oriented times. I'm keeping
up on my basics and anything more is gravy, as the saying goes. I
can visualize the brutality of how I've been trying to manipulate who I
am and how I feel. I seem to be trying to match a perceived model,
constructed from second-hand experience, of how a "normal" person lives
and behaves. The ones I seek to emulate don't want that caricature;
if anything, it is an insult to their own prowess in such matters.
It is time to stop pushing myself around; time to abandon goals that are
not mine to achieve. There is enough worth doing that is within my
grasp to occupy me for many years to come, and without the sting of defeat
that keeps chasing me out of town and up into these hills. I can
"win" as well.
"Bo"
31 October 1999 -- Enclosed in the night
With little in the way of the "community spirit" I knew as a kid, I
abandon my real life home this evening to the somewhat vulgar world of
the trick-or-treaters. I suspect that if I had children of my own,
I'd recognize more merit in this peculiar institution of panhandling than
I do now. In the late afternoon before nightfall, I'm in the
truck, headed out to the exit onto Route 735, the two-lane state highway
that works its way into the hills. By the time I begin the final
descent into the river valley where I turn off, it is fully dark.
The moon does not rise until nearly midnight tonight, so the world around
me is pretty much what I can see illuminated by the headlights and by the
outdoor lights of the scattered houses built on the cleared river bottom
land. With the concentration of lights in the village ahead on the
other side of the culvert bridge, I make the well-practiced left turn onto
the dirt road. After clearing the steel swing-gate and locking it
back in place, I'm down to just the headlights and the cool green of the
instrument panel.
Though I am aware of the extent of woods and overall topography that
extend upward from this two-track road along the stream, my world tonight
feels limited to the various trees and underbrush that fall within the
area of illumination. This resembles my fears in living, I suppose,
where I am only allowed to "see" a small portion at a time and the rest
is cloaked in uncertainty and unknowability. This is not to say that
I can ever see very far in the woods along the river, even during
the day, since the trees are so dense that it is rare to have a clear view
for more than a few hundred yards. At night, however, the curtain
is drawn right up beside me, as though the dark was a solid, opaque substance
through which I were tunnelling with my headlights.
I finally complete the 4-mile passage, and the beams find more distant
targets as I enter the clearing. I turn to the right and see the
Cabin and outbuildings, until I cut the lights and let the shadows extend
inward to enclose my person. I get the small AA-cell Mag-Lite that
I carry in the truck and start finding my way to the front door.
The chill tonight is a bracing one, up here at this altitude, and I am
glad to get the lamps lit up and something of a fire underway for the evening.
I am also grateful that I have the points of reference I do in these woods
at night, for they are so vast that getting lost would be a simple matter.
I am still left, however, with the occasionally-stifling sense of enclosure
by the darkness outside of what I am able to see, even when I'm sitting
inside the Cabin.
I can understand now the general preference for "community" among the
others that I have left behind. To them, what lies outside of their
immediate perception is not regarded first as a threat. Their immersion
is in a substance that tends to draw them outwards, and they go willingly
beyond the boundaries they once knew. I have been trying lately to
accept that I am pretty much a "private" sort of person, except for such
matters as publishing these web-pages. It looks like I shall have
my fill of such privacy tonight, with all that dark road effectively sealing
off the way behind me. Some might have a fear of unknown creatures
or "spirits" entering this scene from the perimeter of the light, but I'll
take it over the world where I see in detail who's coming my way, since
I still don't know what could be lurking within their hearts. One
day, light will be cast upon the shadows I see in the social world, and
then, perhaps, I'll feel the outward call as well.
"Bo"
Ahead to November 1999
