Looking For The Long Ride

Smoke Screen: An action or statement used to conceal actual plans or intentions.

Proverbs 18:21 reads that: Death and life are in the power of the tongue, And those who love it will eat its fruit.

I don’t know what got me thinking this morning about the future but I found myself imagining a job in a think tank. You know those places where knowledgeable people sit around noodling about what things might be like in 5, 10 or 15 years: and get paid for it as well.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.  –T. S. Eliot

One of the reasons I have nearly abandoned blogging is an unshakable feeling that no matter how articulate or understanding I am, in reality, nothing is going to change because of what I say or do.

Another way of saying this is a gut feeling that no matter who I vote for in the upcoming election of 2012, life will go on much as it has for the past decade or so.

I am of the firm belief that no politician who tells the people the truth can be elected in the United States of America. And certainly it would be political suicide to explain to the American people what it is really going to take to get the country out of the debt it has allowed itself to get into.

We are in a world of hurt and there is no realistic plan by either the republicans or democrats to get us out of the hole that we are in. The only plan I see is to tell the people what they want to hear and then at the end of your four year term tell them you need four more years to fix what the other party kept you from doing the first term. Your hope being that gas prices are low and that unemployment figures are only single digit.

I guess what I am trying to say is that this perception of mine has left me wondering if anything I do outside of my friends and family unit has any real lasting effect.

A friend of mine has often said in conversation over the past several years that people don’t change: God changes people. This with the implication that change does not necessarily happen just by living out our daily lives but in relation to our allowing God to access the areas within us that need modification and re-creation.

We have to really desire it.

I juxtapose this with the old saying that: Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.

In my reality, the day to day and hour to hour stuff, there is more thought-life going on than I feel I have the capacity to unleash. Combine this with the lack of patience to gather these thoughts into cohesive threads and you have one frustrated cowboy.

For thirty years I attended church every Sunday with the understanding that I was a part of something bigger than myself only to be eventually wounded by the very people I thought I was a part of. Even this simple thought opens up more neural pathways that need to be explored before I (or you) can fully understand what I am really trying to say.

I still believe in the concept of the church or more appropriately the “body of Christ”. I am however wary of what people and denominations have done with this. Church buildings liberally scattered over the landscape of America that since Row vs. Wade has seen 55,519,520 (as of 7:04 pm, 10/7/2012) innocent lives lost to abortion. According to one internet data bank, in 2010, more than four in ten births (41 percent) were to unmarried women.

The truth of the gospel hasn’t changed, we have. We have lost our saltiness and our light as we build bigger and bigger buildings while the nation seems to be between a rock and a hard place spiritually, economically and politically. And thus my angst.

“Angst, often confused with anxiety, is a transcendent emotion in that it combines the unbearable anguish of life with the hopes of overcoming this seemingly impossible situation. Without the important element of hope, then the emotion is anxiety, not angst. Angst denotes the constant struggle one has with the burdens of life that weighs on the dispossessed and not knowing when the salvation will appear.” –Urban Dictionary

Gotta love the internet when it comes to finding definitions.

But we are an unusual people, humankind.

I was asked at lunch today what I was living for and after a brief pause said my wife, my family and of course my grandchildren.

My one desire is to spend my time with them and not waste whatever is left of my life on things that don’t really matter. Of course I have not yet reached perfection and am still prone to slightly disengage for the rest of the evening when the clock strikes five o’clock.

Having said that or this, my hope is that I am a little farther along the path of understanding why I feel the way I do and well on my way to my next “long ride”.

Part One:

Rarely does a writer ask for a readers indulgence at the very beginning of a story. But I feel it is imperative at this moment to to explain myself before we enter into the narrative that I have been living the past week or so.

If you took the time to ask who I am I might take a moment to ponder a loose description of what it is that defines me: knowing quite well that this may change at random down the road. I am also aware of the fact that any definition of a living human being, is by definition, going to be incomplete. Or as Alanis Morrisette sings in “You Learn“: 

You live you learn

You love you learn

You cry you learn

You lose you learn

You bleed you learn

You scream you learn

As we live we evolve in other words.

In this light, I would be obliged to tell you that I am a happily married man, a charismatic christian, 63 years old and a grandpa who tends toward introspection and self-doubt.

As a charismatic Christian I believe in a personal relationship with Jesus and the gifts of the spirit, which includes speaking in tongues, healing and God’s involvement in the creative arts. I believe each of us is unique and that one of the goals of this life is to recognize each other in this divine light.

Part Two:

The other night I was in my man cave flipping through the TV channels when I saw that Alanis Morrisette was going to be featured in a Guitar Center special event. I am not a huge fan of hers but I often listen to the 1995 “Jagged Little Pill” album and think it is a fantastic endeavor. What I was not prepared for was the fact that during her interview and performance I would be literally blown apart emotionally. I was undone/unhooked and overwhelmed by a feeling of loss to such a degree that I would end up with tears running down my cheeks.

The thoughts that ran through my mind during this time are not unique to me.

As I listened to her powerful lyrics and saw her “controlled freedom” on stage, I became aware of my many concessions to normalcy over the past fifty-plus-years and was, in some dimension, face to face with the man I was perhaps meant to become but haven’t arrived at yet.

Collectively, over the years, ever since our youth, we have changed and modified our behavior and in turn ourselves, at the whim of who we thought our parents/friends/relatives wanted us to be. Don’t get me wrong, some of this modification is needed in a social sense in order that we might become a part of the greater good. We don’t want to be so individualistic as to become a permanent pain in societies ass. And at the same time we don’t want to give up the parts of us that are unique and desirable and march to the beat of a different drummer type stuff. We certainly don’t want to be “cookie-cutter” anything. But at the same time most of us don’t have the God-given self esteem to lead a creative life where we don’t need Jack and Jill’s approval in order to make it through the day.

What I thought I saw in Alanis as she paced the stage, back and forth, in step with the music, was an artist who had spent the past 17 years learning to be herself, to feel great in her own skin and still yet had not arrived at the big you-have-finally-made-it graduation.

In charismatic Christian terms, we have a word for not being yourself: it is called being a “man-pleaser”. A man pleaser pays too much attention to what others think and in so doing modifies his or her behavior to fit what it is we think they want us to be in order to be accepted. And of course, if the truth be known, those others don’t really have a great idea about it either; we just think they do.

The emotional feeling that I had while watching Alanis was one of feeling that I have compromised to the point of not being me anymore: that I have lost or thrown away the real me for the one that I feel you will like— or— that I have lost the sense of living in the moment for the sake of some random idea of what I think you will find acceptable.

Perhaps having just read Vicktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” had some bearing on my reactions to Alanis finding herself on the Guitar Center’s stage.

What I know is that complacency is our enemy. I do not what to go gentle into that good night, but neither do I want to rage against the light. I do however what to grab what is in front of me and not let it go until I have given it my all. I will not be lightly intimidated into not being me though I will at the same time not let reckless behavior rule my actions.

I hope I have shed a little light into my long ride. It is not over yet and I am committed to enjoying the rest.

I recollect I’ve seen this scene in the movies a dozen times over the past 20 years: girl friend/wife/lover walking alongside the road at night while husband/boyfriend/lover slowly drives beside her, window open, head bent, pleading with her to get back in the car. There’s been an argument/disagreement/blowup and in her mind walking away was the only option she had left. It really doesn’t matter who started what: the scene is all that matters.

Many people have this sort of drama in their everyday lives—more so I guess when young. I myself have had my share of “unsettled times”. Although at this point in my life one would be hard-pressed to find much turmoil between my wife and I—this while Sandi and I are having a glass of wine in our outdoor living room or enjoying an early evening cup of coffee and conversation. However, the other night, the lyrics to a Tom Waits song Please Call Me Baby came to mind—they had been literally rolling around in my head all day since I woke up with them repeating themselves in my just-before-waking dreams.

On  my way to work that morning, I found the song on my iPod and played it several times:

Please call me baby wherever you are
It’s too cold to be walking in the streets
We do crazy things when we’re wounded
Everyone’s a bit insane
I don’t want you catching your death of cold
Out walking in the rain.

The song is a jazzy piano type ballad and coupled with Wait’s gravelly voice, is a poem/picture story of the type often used in movies as the on-screen action leads you through the drama being acted out.

I guess what really intrigued me about this song, at this point in my life, is the juxtaposition between what I am living and what I know to be reality for many people—past and present.

In case you are wondering, I have actually had this happen to me. In the late sixties I dated a girl named Lindy who I had been friendly with since high school. I’d quit school and traveled the states and Europe and when I’d returned, against my better judgement, re-kindled a relationship with her. Her goal was to be a hair stylist and settle down and have the white picket fence and kids, etc. I’d graduated from night school, gone on to junior college and had a whole new world open up to me. This is not to say that either one of us was right or wrong—just that I was changing a lot faster than she was. My world seemed to be opening up and hers seemed to be getting smaller.

When I tried to break it off, there were many arguments and calls in the middle of the night to come pick her up from some out-of-the-way place because she didn’t have a ride home or whatever. She had mentioned doing harm to herself if I didn’t stick around and I guess I was more than a little confused at that point in my early twenties. Suffice it to say that I realized that the situation was beyond my control and one night I didn’t respond to her urgent call.

I don’t believe that I ever saw her again after that night. She ended up marrying a friend of mine who bought a lot in the country and keep her hidden behind the white picket fence.

Now remember, these are memories and sometimes I even wonder about how much is real and how much has been altered to fit my picture of what I wanted it to be.

All of these thoughts only led me to more thoughts about what is normal and why we aspire to that state of being. Normal (read: not a lot of drama) these days seems to have really wide parameters. Is normal taking a walk with your wife on Sunday morning or finding time to make art or work in your garden after a forty hour week. I guess I celebrate the beat of a different drummer until it begins to affect my space.

All of these thoughts then led me to thinking about Christianity and the church and how all of these people, those with hurts and extreme drama and those leading “normal” lives fit into the scheme of things. Does God love the one’s who have it more or less figured out more than those who seem to go from one situation to another bad choice. Does “knowing God” or being “Christian” keep us from the drama—help us through it—or is God so much bigger than we give Him credit for being and the reality is, we can’t begin to understand the subtleties of this life we find ourselves a part of.

After processing these pictures, I went out to mow the lawn on a Sunday afternoon—something I would have never done 10 years ago. As I mowed, I thought about Adam and Eve and wondered, knowing what I know now, whether I would have eaten the fruit Eve picked from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. At first I thought I would never have tasted it—then I mowed some more. On second go around I wondered what Eve must have looked like. Knowing a little bit about the creativity of God, my imagination says she was a most beautiful creation—not the anorexic swim suit model type but somewhere between a Titan model and a Degas Ballerina.

On second thought, knowing this, I probably would have eaten the apple, realized I was naked and taken a good hard look at Eve before gathering together a few leaves to hide the pertinent parts from view before the Garden cooled down and it was walk time.

It is just another day in the life of a “long rider”. Enjoy yours.

Ecclesiastes is one of my favorite books in the Bible. I guess part of what I like is the poetic nature of the writing. Some the the images that are formed when I read this book are as truthfully profound as anything I have ever read.

As pertains to the title of this post, Ecclesiastes 1:9 informs us:

That which has been is that which will be,

And that which has been done is that which will be done.

So there is nothing new under the sun.

Bear in mind that this was written a long time before any of us were glimmers in our mothers or daddies eyes. It is apparent to me that in a time-line perspective there was a lot that went on before this was written and a lot that has happened since. And I don’t think the writer was talking about technological advances as much as making a declarative statement about the very human condition we find ourselves a part of today. In other words I don’t get the sense that there were people riding around on their donkeys surfing the web on their cell phones or I Pads.

I jest, but only slightly. 

During the past several years that I have participated in this blog, “looking for the long ride” I have mostly told stories and shared my observations on life as I have lived and experienced it. I have purposefully steered away from politics and religious doctrine and have tried to find a middle ground within which I could have a voice.

I fully realize that most of what I have shared during these past several years is not something new and/or profound in a philosophical sense. There are most likely books written that better describe the revelations that I have stumbled upon which at the time I thought were unique and earth shaking. Not to cast dispersions at these varied and sundry thoughts.

Having said that I will now say this: I believe that we are living in very perilous times.

Take the recent marriage amendment vote in North Carolina as a case in point. For some reason the people that run the state’s political machine thought it prudent to accentuate what was already a law banning same sex marriages. And forgive me if I grew up watching to much TV but I have always thought that “marriage” meant a male husband and a female wife. This concept was built into my consciousness even before I was of bible reading age. It’s like in my DNA or something.

Now it seems there is a group of people that want to change what this word means so that they can have the legal benefits that marriage seems to afford. And not that I disagree with this point. Marriage is one thing and basic human rights are another. But to change the meaning of a word that has centuries of historical precedence is not he best way to accomplish this goal.

I accept a persons right to say what they want, choose a life style that is different than mine and even to have an abortion since it is currently lawful in the United States. But I believe that abortion is murder and that homosexuality is still a sin as outlined in the Bible. If we were indeed created to procreate and have dominion over the earth (read Genesis), homosexuality is not a natural way to fulfill this end. I know that it is easy to say love the sinner and hate the sin and that the church in America has not done a great job in living out simple biblical design. Statistics would tell us that there are just as many divorces, out of wedlock births and various other maladies in the church as there is in the general population.

The church or the Ecclesia as we are properly called has in large part failed to love the world into a relationship with a living God called Jesus. We are not as much the light on a hill or a sweet smelling savor to those who are persishing as we are a part of the world system.

I was born out of wedlock and only found this out when I stumbled upon my parents marriage certificate when I was in the 9th grade. I told my mother that there had been a mistake made since the certificate had the date of their marriage some time after the date of my birth. Talk about shock. However, as a grown man I had the occasion to thank my mother for making what was no doubt a difficult choice in choosing to keep me in the late forties when things were not as relaxed as they seem to be today.

In many respects I am not an analytical thinker and have trouble stringing together complex ideas and thoughts into sentences and paragraphs that lead you, the reader, into an epiphanous state. I don’t cover my bases as much as I suggest to you where they might lie in the fields of our lives.

I guess what I am trying to say in all this verbiage is we can expect more of the same. It is like Orwell’s “Newspeak”. The basic idea behind Newspeak was to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple expressions (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, goodthink and crimethink) which reinforce the total dominance of the State.

I know that I have more questions than answers at this point. If I didn’t believe that there is a ray of hope I guess I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

Or as Bob Dylan said it: You are right from your side, And I am right from mine. We are both just too many mornings, And a thousand miles behind.

Keep riding.

I don’t listen to a whole lot of music these days except when I am driving around town, off to a bike ride or on my way to work. It’s not like the old days when it seemed that music was a way of life—and by the number of CD’s I still have at work and by my computer at home, you would know that I am telling the truth.

Much of what I listen to these days is archived on my old Ipod. Most of the time I leave it on shuffle and never know what I will be listening to. If I don’t like the song I just press the button and the next song begins. This way I hear a lot of music that I would probably never run across if I was still hauling CD’s around with me.

So, it came as a surprise to me the other day when a cut from the Forest Gump soundtrack started playing—a cut I hadn’t heard in a long time. It’s a song we all know from one era or another. What surprised me the most is the fact that I had never listened to it and identified it as a “Christian” song. But when you really take a look at the lyrics, you would be hard pressed not to see the scriptural basis for it.

Anyway, I thought I would pass this along and hope you have a great ride today!

Get Together

Love is but the song we sing,

And fear’s the way we die

You can make the mountains ring

Or make the angels cry

Know the dove is on the wing

And you need not know why.

C’mon people now,

Smile on your brother

Ev’rybody get together

Try and love one another right now

Some will come and some will go

We shall surely pass

When the one that left us here

Returns for us at last

We are but a moments sunlight

Fading in the grass

C’mon people now,

Smile on your brother

Ev’rybody get together

Try and love one another right now

If you hear the song I sing,

You must understand

You hold the key to love and fear

All in your trembling hand

Just one key unlocks them both

It’s there at your command

C’mon people now,

Smile on your brother

Ev’rybody get together

Try and love one another right now

At this stage in my life that could be called “the late stage” I have more or less concluded that most of what we say we agree on is really just a matter of perspective. The picture you have in your mind when I recall a moment walking along a South Carolina beach is different than the place I see—yet we both nod our heads in unison and remember it as being a very nice walk.

As I have grown older and lived through many winters, springs, summers and falls in the mountains of North Carolina, I have come to the conclusion that it is easier to drink a glass of wine of an evening than it is to creatively blog/ponder life in my somewhat stream of consciousness syntax.

When I think about dreams—the kind we experience during sleep—I am often perplexed by their seeming “realness”. I am a big fan of actually sleeping through the night and not even having a sense of remembering what my mind did during those bedtime hours. However, as I have grown older, sleeping through the night is only a fifty/fifty chance. What I have found is that upon waking in the middle of the night, I am still connected to whatever it is I have been “dreaming”. My first impression is that my sub-conscious thoughts and pictures seem so very real in those first moments of consciousness. I am also aware of how complex and intricate these subterranean wanderings can be.