Month: May 2021

In my 80s

May 30, 2021 Memorial Day Weekend

When you return home

When you return home
repeat, if you can, the shriek
you heard from the prison yard.

When you return home
tell us what you saw— 
the head of a man on a stick.

When you return home
mention that you touched the tears
of a mother with her lifeless child.

When you return home
describe the taste of gunpowder,
the smell of limed corpses.

When you return home
tell your people
what a billion  dollars can destroy.

In my 80s

May 29, 2021

The highways are crowded, the airport lines long, the bars full and loud. The Indy 500 will be run, Covid concerns are ebbing, fallen soldiers are remembered. It’s Memorial Day weekend.

I’m odd one out. This weekend for me will be
… at home in casual, everyday clothes
… in the garden with the callas, sunflowers and compost pile
… by the patio chiminea watching playful flames
… on the phone with family
… in the sun room behind a book
… in the basement carving
… along Pleasant Run, looking for a photo op
… on the front porch chatting with neighbors
… in bed for a slow comfortable night.

I too pause to remember those soldiers and civilians killed in warfare, victims not only in this country but also Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Iran, Venezuela, Palestine and every other country on earth.

In my 80s

May 25, 2021

An assignment in early May to talk about my journey of faith and doubt has encouraged me to expand my spiritual inquiries. I shared a copy of my presentation with a coffee friend who suggested that I become acquainted with the work of Marjorie Suchoki, who has written extensively on process theology.

I have known from a distance the perspectives of process theology yet it has been informative to explore further. Wikipedia gives an overview, including this concise listing of process theology themes.

God is not omnipotent in the sense of being coercive. The divine has a power of persuasion rather than coercion. Process theologians interpret the classical doctrine of omnipotence as involving force, and suggest instead a forbearance in divine power. “Persuasion” in the causal sense means that God does not exert unilateral control.[8]

Reality is not made up of material substances that endure through time, but serially-ordered events, which are experiential in nature. These events have both a physical and mental aspect. All experience (male, female, atomic, and botanical) is important and contributes to the ongoing and interrelated process of reality.

The universe is characterized by process and change carried out by the agents of free will. Self-determination characterizes everything in the universe, not just human beings. God cannot totally control any series of events or any individual, but God influences the creaturely exercise of this universal free will by offering possibilities. To say it another way, God has a will in everything, but not everything that occurs is God’s will.[9]

God contains the universe but is not identical with it (panentheism, not pantheism or pandeism). Some also call this “theocosmocentrism” to emphasize that God has always been related to some world or another.

Because God interacts with the changing universe, God is changeable (that is to say, God is affected by the actions that take place in the universe) over the course of time. However, the abstract elements of God (goodness, wisdom, etc.) remain eternally solid.

Charles Hartshorne believes that people do not experience subjective (or personal) immortality, but they do have objective immortality because their experiences live on forever in God, who contains all that was. Other process theologians believe that people do have subjective experience after bodily death.[10]

Dipolar theism is the idea that God has both a changing aspect (God’s existence as a Living God) and an unchanging aspect (God’s eternal essence).[11]

Viney, Donald Wayne (August 24, 2004). “Charles Hartshorne: Dipolar Theism”. Harvard Square Library. Retrieved March 15, 2018.

This summary of themes from process theology reminds me that always, always there is more to learn about the spiritual foundation of the universe.

In my 80s

May 10, 2021

I cut a path
this week
and set a gate.
The path 
now divides 
euonymus,
the gate
breaks through
a wire fence.

I cut a path
and set a gate
for morning coffee,
chore help,
book sharing
and evenings
by the fire.

Euonymus,
a nasty
creeper,
will cover
over the path
if left to
its ways.

Gates
unused
have been known
to get locked.

I cut this path
and set this gate —
the path 
edged by rock
and covered
with pine bark;
the gate 
free and easy
for even a child
to open.

I cut a path
and set a gate,
promising 
to be
a good neighbor. 

In my 80s

May 5, 2021

Covid shut us in. No complaints here because we had a comfortable house, a garden, and friendly neighbors. But I missed the woods, the open land and rivers. Today a friend and I traveled at a leisurely pace to the western part of central Indiana. I don’t remember the names apart from Terre Haute, Clinton and Brazil; Indiana State University and Rose Human. But … and this is important, I saw parts of Indiana that the Wie Indians knew …

and the wonderful Wabash River.

In my 80’s

May 4, 2021

May 4, 2021

Roger introduced me to carving which — I assumed — consisted of these words: (1) table (2) tools and (3) wood. Roger did not tell me about an extended vocabulary used principally when carvers sit down to coffee with each other.

clamp … burr … chisel … rasp … jack plane … gouge …strop 

Roger is still quite young so he can’t fully appreciate \the challenge of a new vocabulary for a geezer in his 80’s.

The challenge consists of at least these four difficult steps

— hearing the term

— seeing the object that the term gives a name to

— remembering the term

— having the term on the tip of the tongue when talking with a carver

Up to this point I’ve enjoyed carving with Roger so long as we don’t talk about it.

In my 80s

May 3, 2021

May 3, 2001

Recently I zoomed with high school buddies. All 14 guys are more than 80 years old. Within the first ten minutes an old classmate had a “senior moment” and remarked apologetically about it. Not long after that, a classmate who has just finished writing his autobiography couldn’t come up with the title of his book.  These “events” of memory loss among friends let me know that I am not alone in word lapses.

“It is normal,” says MedLine, “to have some trouble learning new material or needing more time to remember it. But normal aging does not lead to dramatic memory loss. Such memory loss is due to other diseases.”

Thanks for the re-assurance. There is no reason to think that my own word loss is anything other than an old geezer’s com-mode of memory. 

Such calming thoughts do not, however, erase my surprise, followed by embarrassment, followed by a lame apology when I can’t say this morning at the breakfast table the name of the former school that so and so taught at.

There is something that I seek … now. I want grace rather than surprise to be close by when I word-blank.  I don’t yet know exactly how grace responds to senior moments.

In my 80s

May 2, 2021

Gretchen L. and I were talking about Annie Dillard recently.  She pointed to her shelf of Dillard books and I exclaimed “Oh Gretchen, do you have a copy of ————— BLANK.  The title of a prized book had gone AWOL.  I’ve read that particular bookseveral times, and in those readings stopped off to reread particular passages.  I even used the book in Expository Writing class. Now the very title escaped from me.

I walked to Gretchen’s shelf of Dillard books. Almost immediately I saw the title — Holy the Firm.

This event of forgetting was not my initiation into “senior moments.” It’s happened before — quite often in fact. I am just learning to pay attention what it feels like to be losing what was once a keen memory. 

Annie Dillard has offered this advice:  ”One of the few things I know about writing is this:  spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.”

That advice weirdly relates to my forgetting. What if forgetting were in and of itself something not to hide, not to hoard? Might acts of memory loss, including the embarrassed apologies and the consequences for better or worse, be material for writing?

As in “Holy the infirm!”

I am going to try.