Each day of an Earth Year dawns, rises, casts light on previous day’s retreating dark. And so it is with each age of a celestial Great Year.

The 1960s rock musical “Hair” was an apocalyptic proclamation, indeed a revolutionary revelation, of a new age now taking the stage. It’s an era of human consciousness that is to last 2160 years or so (and then what??) and that will usher in such values (for humans, anyway – other species may be ahead of us in that regard) as those described in the show’s theme song, “Age of Aquarius” (by Galt MacDermot, Gerome Ragni, and James Rado):

          When the moon is in the Seventh House
          And Jupiter aligns with Mars
          Then peace will guide the planets
          And love will steer the stars
          This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
          …
          Sympathy and trust abounding
          No more falsehoods or derisions
          Golden living dreams of visions
          Mystic crystal revelation
          And the mind's true liberation, Aquarius

And then the song’s call to “let the sun shine in,” shining light on the darkness, revealing the heretofore hidden. That light will nourish the blades of grass already rising out of rubble left by the collapse of the values, mindsets, and consequent institutions of the passing Piscean Age. For those of us who happen (or, as some would say, chosen) to be alive at this moment, our role is one of both exciting opportunity and solemn responsibility. And it is three-fold.

First is to accept, without resistance, that this is much more than a time of momentary transformation but of inevitable, irreversible, and lasting metamorphosis. Such acceptance is a process of surrender – not in the sense of waving the white flag, giving up in resignation, and withdrawing from the game, but rather of giving over to and joining the flow.

Think of the Piscean caterpillar voraciously eating everything within reach, without regard to planetary limits. It can’t be a pleasant process for that creature to enter the chrysalis and dissolve into goo, resisting all the way, hanging on with white knuckles (if it had any) to the tried and true. But there is no going back, and resistance only serves to increase suffering. If it only knew that it would ultimately emerge as an Aquarian butterfly, both beautiful and unbound.

(As an aside, we often cite metaphorically the metamorphosis of the caterpillar becoming the butterfly. To our human eyes, the butterfly is beautiful and, as a pollinator, contributes to planetary abundance. We do not, on the other hand, look with similar admiration upon the maggot-turning-into-fly process, which is identical.)

With acceptance, then, we can move on to our next role, which is to participate in co-creating the new world emerging. Buckminster Fuller advises we not waste time trying to salvage and patch up the Piscean old, rebuild from the rubble what was there before. Rather, he urges we work to build the Aquarian new. (See the reference to Donella Meadows’ leverage points in another The Green Pen post.)

So, how do we do that?

Albert Einstein notes that we can’t solve problems from the same way of thinking that created them in the first place. Rather, we have to think outside the box, from a different mindset. This takes imagination. Going back to the butterfly analogy, we can serve as the imago cells that drive the process of turning caterpillar into goo and goo into butterfly.

Finally, as the fresh, re-imagined mindsets and institutions emerge from the rubble, we can come together to focus the rays of the Aquarian dawn on those blades of grass for all to see, to midwife their birth, and to nourish their growth into the Aquarian garden described in the song.

As I say, this is a time of both exciting opportunity and solemn responsibility. This is our time.

Just three days ago, while recuperating from having my worn out “factory”-installed hip replaced with a shiny new aftermarket part, I experienced the following.

 All’s Swell that Ends Swell

Sitting in the springtime sun.
Just hanging, relaxing, kicking back.
Feet up – wayyy up. 
Unswelling post-surgical swelling. 

No kvetching. 
Just stretching sore sinews.
Of a sudden, 
a sign of good news soars out of the blue!

Streaking straight at me,
Hawk skirts deftly the limbs and twigs of 
grey alders greening b'yond the back fence,
then rises and passes just over my head.

Emotions upwelling, I am left kvelling. 
How swell is this time of unswelling!

I heard a riddle once. What percent of the U.S. population is aging? The answer: 100%. The following scenario occurred nearly 45 years ago – and I’m still aging!

*********************

“You have cancer. Surgery will be on Thursday.”

The doctor, after one glance and a gentle squeeze, as if testing the ripeness of an overgrown plum, issues his diagnostic directive.

Taken by surprise, in disbelief and denial, I blurt, “But I feel perfectly fine! What’re you talking about?” My wife draws a deep breath, exhales slowly, and looks at me with eyes that telegraph at once love, terror, and desperate determination about what has to be done. For my part, I try a delaying tactic. “Well,” I open the negotiation, “I’m pretty busy at work right now. Tomorrow, I’ll check my calendar and see what I can do.”

The doctor reiterates with firm resolution, “Surgery will be on Thursday!” To soften the blow, he shares that this sort of seminoma has a high recovery rate of 80%. Not too bad as odds go, but still… I shiver with foreboding that my life is about to take a new, possibly terrifying tack.

On Thursday, laid out on a gurney, prepped and naked but for a hospital gown, I am wheeled by an orderly to the spotlit center stage of an OR reeking of hospital sterility. While wife and daughter sit scared and worried in the waiting room, I feel no fear or existential threat. Though blinded and blinking in the blaze of lights, engineer that I am, I am instead drawn to observe, with curiosity, the band of white-clad bodies bustling about, busying themselves to relieve me of my larger-than-it-should-have-been “plum”.

As the anesthetist slowly seeps sleep to my veins, a specter suddenly loomed over me. It’s the surgeon, asking how I am feeling. “Pretty good, actually,” I manage to mutter. The specter raises his scalpel-grasping rubber-clad hand and reassures me, with a twinkle and an impishly menacing grin as my eyes flutter closed, “Well, we’ll take care of that.” The next thing I know, my eyes are fluttering open, and I realize he’s been true to his word. I am in agony and feel awful!

In the ensuing weeks of nauseating radiation and endless what’s-it grams and who’s-it scans, I learn from one doctor’s notes that I am a “white, middle-aged male.” “What??”, I exclaim in shock and disbelief. “Is that what I am?” OK, white, I have to admit. And “male”? Well, despite the plum plucking, I guess I still sorta qualify. But “middle aged”?? I am only newly 38! Is this an alarm clock waking my awareness of time advancing me inevitably along the road to, dare I say it, old age?

And then another tidbit of troubling news. The plum biopsy comes back showing a form of seminoma with survivability odds of only 50-50. Well, that certainly doesn’t sit well with the family! For a moment, even the normally placable I shiver with foreboding, wondering where this trauma drama is headed. Especially with all that work waiting for me at the office!

Well, where it’s headed is home – and a new beginning. With my mother’s insistence to leave Michigan and get back to California, I give notice at work, and, following Horace Greeley’s dictum to “go West, young – er, middle-aged – man”, we chart a new route in our lives, toward the steadily, and suddenly clearly, setting sun.

According to Concern Worldwide, “The world produces enough food to feed all of its inhabitants. Yet an estimated 673 million people went without food for part (or all) of last year. Hunger is an issue in every country…” Even in the United States, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, Feeding America reports that “48 million people face food insecurity—experiencing daily challenges with hunger and its health and social impacts.”

Almost 30 years ago I penned this poem. Sadly, it’s timely still. The news of famine has spread to other venues, now with daily reports on children dying of starvation, combatants blockading relief supplies, desperate people scrambling for the scraps that make it through. Gaza, Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, the Congo. The list goes on.

As we sang in the sixties, “When will we ever learn? When will we ever learn?” And, now, sixty years later, when indeed?

             Hunger on April 2, 1997

My breakfast by habit is grapefruit juice.
This morning, however, I hunger for more,
so divert my commute to the donut shop:
apple fritter to go.

Dipping my hand in the crinkly white bag,
ripping pieces of crusty soft dough,
I drive freeways and byways ’cross Silicon Valley
to another day’s work.

But this Morning’s Edition on NPR News
says starvation is rampant ’cross North Korea, 
whose people are desperate, whose families are split
by another day’s war.

While some dip their rice bowls in near empty bags,
and others rip bark and leaves from the trees,
I maneuver my car and weave through the rush
to another day’s work.

Nearing my office, I munch the last morsel
as NPR News talks of baseball’s first day.
The white bag now crumpled, I hunger no longer --
sated and empty.

I attended a talk the other day by astrophysicist Alex Filippenko, professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and member of the National Academy of Sciences. He spoke on many topics, ranging from the complementarity of the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, to the nature of black holes and what we still don’t know about them, to the function of dark matter and dark energy and how much we don’t know about them – and a lot more in between.

I was struck by the number of “don’t-knows” that he referred to and remarked that it’s clear he’ll have great job security helping convert those “don’t-knows” to “knows”. Actually, I’m convinced that we can’t ever really know anything. We only think we know, until some new scientific revelation or other sort of aha moment elicits an uh-oh moment and a new “knowing”. So, we just keep searching for the truth. For some thoughts on “truth”, see my recent Green Pen post.

Anyway, I asked Filippenko which of all those “don’t-knows” is the one he would most like to delve into. His answer surprised me with respect both to the topic as well as to the passion with which he expressed his fascination about it: the possibility of extraterrestrial life in the Universe and, relatedly, the prospects of humans traveling to far-off stars and galaxies.

With respect to the former, he acknowledged that we have indeed detected distant exoplanets that show signs of some of the necessities for life as we know it. Like water, oxygen, and carbon. Though there is no confirmation yet of actual living beings out there, and while the probabilities are small, there could very well be at least a few.

But what about life as we don’t know it, I wondered? Well, he said, such may exist, but, from a scientific point of view, we wouldn’t know what to look for.

Which led to the latter: humans adventuring out to see for themselves. Highly unlikely, he said, if not impossible, for our carbon-based bodies to endure such a voyage. More likely would be super-advanced silicon-chipped AI robots making the journey for us. They would be capable of reproducing and otherwise supporting themselves. One could even speculate on such beings establishing and populating robotic colonies on suitable exoplanets – though, from the perspective of those planets, I suppose Earth would be “exo”.

Filippenko acknowledged that people these days look upon the rapid expansion of AI and robotic powers with reactions ranging from rosy optimism to existential fear that they could bring about the demise of humanity. Which leads me to wonder…

Could it be that evolutionary life forces in the Universe – call them God or whatever – see that humanity is on the verge of wiping ourselves out (via climate collapse, nuclear holocaust, etc.) and even bringing about the demise of life on this planet? If so, could it be that those forces are thus giving up on us and leading us to develop this silicon-based life form to which we could pass the evolutionary torch for exploring the vastness of the Cosmos as we take our carbon-based bows and exit the stage?

Bottom line, it wouldn’t be AI bringing about our doom. Rather, it is us bringing about our own doom and, though not aware of it, creating AI and silicon-chipped robots specifically to take over from us.

The new year’s here, ancient prophesies coming due, breaking down all we’ve held true. Our world’s a-rumble, all in a-jumble, and we stumble to discern what is fake, what is real, groping in the dark for a clue. Confused, distraught, afraid, in these topsy-turvy times we are lost. Up is Down; East, North, South, West, no telling which way’s best. The world’s a-swirl and, like Dorothy and Toto, where we’ll land a mystery. Cultural cues called into question, trusted guidelines gone into history, we ask what to do? Where to go?

The real question, though, is, what shall we be in the new world emerging? The answer lies not in outward directions but Inward, drawing, perhaps, upon ancient meanings of the moons and of the fundamental elements of nature:

• Earth – balance, embodiment, and physical connection.

• Water – fluidity, cohesion, emotion, and understanding.

• Fire – heat, energy, and transformation – both internal and external.

• Air – movement, mind, and intellect; birth and new beginnings; spiritual awakening and inspiration.

• Space – emptiness and openness; the blank canvas upon which we paint our reality.

• Consciousness – awareness and the field from which thoughts, feelings, intuition, and creativity arise.

You can see and, if you wish, share the full calendar in the attached PDF.

Note: I neglected to include South in the calendar! Perhaps you can discern where it best fits, and, while you are at it, reassign elements and directions as well. All’s a puzzle, anyway!

Mike'scalendar2026

1.02MB ∙ PDF file

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Back in May 2025, I posted about reality and truth, how we view them, and how we war over dogma differences about those views. Here, let’s dig deeper and play some more with those concepts.

So, what is “truth”? Or, rather, what’s “The Truth”? That’s the beauty of it (or “Beauty”): no one knows or even can know. And thus our human quest to discover, or uncover, the mystery (or “Mystery”) of The Truth. As far as I know, which admittedly may not be too far, humans are the only Earthly creatures to have such a quest. Notice “Earthly”. That’s hubris enough to ascribe such a mission to us mere humans, without presuming it applies to all creatures of the entire Universe (thus granting the possibility that there are others).

Actually, the quest (or “Quest”) is two-fold. Maybe there are more folds, but let’s go with two for now. So, Fold #1 is to dis- or uncover The Mystery of The Truth. No matter how impossible a task that may be (and it is), we must still chip away at it. So Fold #2, then, is to be OK with that. To acknowledge and accept that we are embarked on an impossible Quest and to pursue it anyway. To learn to live in the Not Knowing and with the humility that even what we think we do know, pieces of The Truth that we think we’ve so far uncovered by chipping away at its shroud of Mystery – like Michelangelo revealing the godlike David hidden in a block of stone – may actually not be so after all. That it’s all merely a mirage just waiting to dissolve in the light released by new chips – be they from science or epiphanous revelation.

So, why the upper case Truth, Beauty, Mystery, Earth, Universe, Not Knowing? It’s hard to say. It’s just that writing the lower case didn’t seem to feel right. I think it’s a matter of distinguishing each of those things in their physical or even conceptual incarnations (lower case) from their core, abstract essence.

And the task may be even more impossible than we can imagine. Maybe there is no absolute, objective Truth to be un- or discovered! What if the ultimate nature of Nature, the fundamental essence of Reality, does not exist to be un- or discovered but rather only comes into existence as we relate to it? This seems to be where quantum physics is pointing. That is, we can sort of understand and accept that matter as substance may be an illusion of highly dense clusters or concentrations of energy, and thus that energy is more basic than the matter that arises from it. But even energy itself may be an illusion of an even more basic fundament of Nature, namely, Relationship and consequent patterns of Possibility and Potential.

That is, The Truth may be “nothing” more than upper cases – that is, abstract essences in the form of patterns that, like Schrodinger’s capriciously quantum cat, swim and swirl in an endless pool of potential waiting for a relationship in order to be resolved into a specific lower-case instantiation. But a relationship with what? Another swimming, swirling upper-case pattern? Or, in a chain of relationship-induced pattern resolutions, some other lower-case instantiation? And does the resolution depend on what kind of relationship it is that induces it? What kinds of such essential relationships are there? I don’t know! It’s a Mystery. And that’s the truth!

Following is an updated version of two posts to The Green Pen of April 2012. Even more relevant now thus well worth repeating!

People in the United States and around the world are experiencing a period of change of historic magnitude. It is an epochal moment, as worldviews shift from separateness, fear, and security through competitive dominance and win-lose violence to oneness, hope, and security through cooperative interdependence and win-win peace.

It is a time of breakdown and breakthrough. It is a time in which economic, social, political and other human systems created out of a culture of violence are, at last, increasingly being recognized as just not working any more. It is a time in which those systems are necessarily giving way to new systems based on a very different view of reality, a culture of peace. It is a time in which the eagle and the condor are learning to fly together once again.

Prophecy of Eagle and Condor

In his book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins writes (p. 209 in the first edition; the link is to the third edition):

“Nearly every culture I know prophesies that in the late 1990’s we entered a period of remarkable transition. At monasteries in the Himalayas, ceremonial sites in Indonesia, and indigenous reservations in North America, from the depths of the Amazon to the peaks of the Andes, and into the ancient Mayan cities of Central America, I have heard that ours is a special moment in human history, and that each of us was born at this time because we have a mission to accomplish.

“The titles and the words of the prophecies differ slightly. They tell variously of a New Age, the Third Millennium, the Age of Aquarius, the Beginning of the Fifth Sun, or the end of old calendars and the commencement of new ones. Despite the varying terminologies, however, they have a great deal in common, and “The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle” is typical. It states that back in the mists of history, human societies divided and took different paths: that of the condor (representing the heart, intuitive and mystical) and that of the eagle (representing the brain, rational and material). In the 1490’s, the prophecy said, the two paths would converge and the eagle would drive the condor to the verge of extinction. Then, five hundred years later, in the 1990’s, a new epoch would begin, one in which the condor and the eagle will have the opportunity to reunite and fly together in the same sky, along the same path. If the condor and eagle accept this opportunity, they will create a most remarkable offspring, unlike any seen before.

“‘The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle’ can be taken at many levels — the standard interpretation is that it foretells the sharing of indigenous knowledge with the technologies of science, the balancing of yin and yang, and the bridging of northern and southern cultures. However, most powerful is the message it offers about consciousness; it says that we have entered a time when we can benefit from the many diverse ways of seeing ourselves and the world, and that we can use these as a springboard to higher levels of awareness. As human beings we can truly wake up and evolve into a more conscious species.”

You can also watch a YouTube video of Perkins speaking about the prophecy. If you google on “eagle and condor prophecy”, you’ll find many more sites describing and discussing it, for example, this one and this one.

Personal Eagle-Condor Insights from Wisdomkeepers

The prophecy is a very personal story as well as a cultural one. The eagle is the head of each of us. The condor is the heart. Flying together, they will spawn in each of us – indeed, are spawning – a new culture, a culture of peace. It is a culture that synthesizes the knowledge and wisdom of both birds – of both West and East, North and South, Modern and Indigenous, Rational and Intuitive, Analytic and Holistic– and thus synergistically transcends both.

Steve Wall and Harvey Arden, in Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American Spiritual Elders, chronicle in text and beautiful photographs their journey to “the land of the Wisdomkeepers, which lies “[j]ust off the map, beyond the Interstates, out past the power lines and the shopping malls, up that little side road without a sign on it … .”

Here are a few insightful nuggets sifted from the mother lode contained in this book that have fed the Condor in my heart learning to fly with the Eagle in my head:

“The Grandfathers and Grandmothers of tomorrow are in the children. If we educate them right, our children tomorrow will be wiser than we are today. They’re the Grandfathers and Grandmothers of tomorrow.” Eddie Benton-Banai (Ojibway)

“When we walk upon Mother Earth we always plant our feet carefully because we know the faces of our future generations are looking up at us from beneath the ground.” Oren Lyons (Onandaga)

“I myself have no power. It’s the people behind me who have the power. Real power comes only from the Creator. It’s in His hands. But if you’re asking about strength, not power, then I can say that the greatest strength is in gentleness.” Chief Leon Shenandoah (Onandaga, Tadodaho of the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy)

“The founder of Haudenosaunee government [the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy], whom we call the Peacemaker, intended that there be social justice in the world. No man was to be more privileged than any other man. All were to be accorded respect.” Clan Mother Audrey Shenandoah (Onandaga), from her keynote address at the January 1990 Global Forum on Environment and Development for Survival

“There is no word for ‘nature’ in my language. Nature, in English, seems to refer to that which is separate from human beings. It is a distinction we don’t recognize.” Clan Mother Audrey Shenandoah (Onandaga), from her keynote address at the January 1990 Global Forum on Environment and Development for Survival

“He finally learned that wisdom comes only when you stop looking for it and start truly living the life the Creator intended for you.” Leila Fisher (Hoh)

“These are our times and our responsibilities. Every human being has a sacred duty to protect the welfare of our Mother Earth, from whom all life comes. In order to do this we must recognize the enemy – the one within us. We must begin with ourselves.” Chief Leon Shenandoah (Onandaga, Tadodaho of the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy)

“Throughout our travels in search of the Wisdomkeepers we kept seeing aspects of that same sacred circle or sacred hoop – one of the fundamental symbols of the Native American culture. There’s the cycle or circle of the seasons, the circle of the ceremonies, the family circle, the circle of the community, the circle of Elders, the cycle of the generations, and the circle of all life, of which mankind is only one aspect – all things one.” Harvey Arden and Steve Wall (Journalists), in Epilogue to Wisdomkeepers

Concluding Query

To the Eagle, time is linear. To the Condor, time is cyclical. With the two flying together, time becomes a spiral, the cycles advancing inexorably toward … what? The Omega Point? God? The Tao?

You had never been in my dreams. For decades after we parted, though, I dreamt of you often.

In my dream, I am frantically from afar trying to find you, get back to you. Yet I can never quite reach you. Or so it seems. Familiar landmarks – gone from where they used to be. The boulevard – blocked. The streets do not cross as I remember. I don’t know which way to turn. “Why can’t I find you?” I cry out. Where are you? Were you ever really there? Or maybe a mere mirage of my own making?

Even after many decades wandering the world, I still remember how you sheltered me those first years of my life. A warm winter refuge – at Dad’s 40^th birthday party when I ran inside to escape an evening snowball pelt during a heretofore unheard of (to then-seven me, anyway) Burbank icy snowfall. A sunny summer playground – where I thumb-launched aggies and steelies pursuing those of Alan and Dick across your fragrant freshly mown front lawn. The radiant red and white snapdragons draping your side fence, grape-staked shortly after we’d moved it by Uncle “Mr. Fix-It” George. You saw me off to school each morning, my tummy filled with warm Wheatena; welcomed me home each afternoon with anticipatory aromas of Mom’s evening meal. Your Spanish Colonial, cocoa-colored frame hosting cozy successions of birthday parties, Thanksgiving feasts, springtime seders, Chanukkah giftwrapping, Easter egg dying.

Until that final day, my eleventh birthday.

On that day, as planned, when Sis, Gary, and I arrived from school, you stood empty, cold, closed. No longer home; just a house. Locked out, we waited out front for Mom to pick us up. As we drove away, though excited and curious about what lay ahead, I also felt a wistful longing for the only home I’d ever known. Would I ever see you again?

Over the years, my recurring dream of you grew gradually faint, less frequent, even occasional drive-by visits losing any pang of longing. Now, new colors, new flowers, a new home to new families.

More recently, in my dreams I am always away, anywhere but home, no longer desperate to get back to you. Perhaps it’s that now you are every­where…and nowhere. And that perhaps Thomas Wolfe got it right.

I’ve been sitting here 90 years – y je m’ennui! Boring!!

In all that time, absolutely contrary to my life purpose, no one has sat on me. But what am I to do, stuck here as I am in this pedestrian museum? What’s it called again? Ah, oui. Le Petit Palais de Paris. Some palace this is! I haven’t supported any royal rears since Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were dragged from Versailles and I was sentenced to life sitting servitude to one bulbous bourgeois bottom after another. Finally, Monsieur Charles gave me away to this place. Though the surroundings are somewhat sort of regal, there are no soirées, no chamber trios, no diplomatic dinners.

So I repeat: boring!

Oh, wait! I almost forgot. There was that one time, maybe half a century ago, when un petit gamin jumped the rope and climbed onto my lap! He must have been five or six years old. Mmmm. It felt so good after so long to have a soft, young rear wriggling into me. But, alas, it was only a few moments before…

“ Jean-Pierre, don’t go there!” his mother hushed sternly, trying with only moderate success to keep her voice down. “We’re not supposed to touch the pieces. Come back here!”

“But, Maman, it’s so comfy!” Jean-Pierre whined. “Can’t I just stay a few minutes? I’m tired. Can’t we go home yet? This place is so boring.”

See, what did I tell you? Boring!

“I don’t care. Get off that chair this instant!” she insisted, and added enticingly, “We’re almost through; then we’ll go for a crêpe, with jam in it, if you like.”

“Really, Maman? A crêpe? Yummm!”, the boy squealed excitedly as he hopped off me and back over the rope. Clearly, Jean-Pierre liked crêpes.

And so he left, leaving me empty once again. And no one else has dared jump the rope since.

Ah, but before! All those bodies, from Marie Antoinette’s derriere all the way to M. Charles’, taking their ease on me. From royal and noble silk and satin to bourgeois wool and cotton, each skirt, each pant, each gown, each petticoat, each smock, though subtracting a bit of clarity, a soupçon of color, from my fading tapestry, all warm and all helping me fulfill my raison d’être.

But all that was before this palais of today. And since? Boring!

It doesn’t seem fair. I was made to be of service helping people rest their weary bones. It was Claude who dreamt me up. Louis XVI had asked Claude to craft a chair for his new, beloved Austrian wife. Actually, though I’m Claude’s design, it was his son Jean-Marc who did the most to put me together.

The chaise longue being assembled next to me in the atelier told me the story as I, a few months her junior, was taking form.

“Claude is getting older,” she observed. “Over 60, I’ve heard.”

“Yes, I can see it,” I answered. “I can feel his hands shake when he tries to sculpt the fine filigrees of my arms. I’m often afraid he’ll gouge me so much I’d be discarded so they could start over on someone else!”

“Also, look there,” my neighbor pointed out to me. “How tightly he squints his eyes in order to see what he is doing.”

“You’re right!” I said. “I guess that’s why Jean-Marc is in training, to take over the family’s royal furniture-making business.”

“Exactly!” my fine friend affirmed.

And Jean-Marc did indeed prove to be a fine craftsman. Under his father’s tutelage, he commissioned, for the queen’s sensory pleasure, the finest woven tapestries from the most talented tapissiers in Beauvais to cover my seat and back, and hardy beechwood from nearby forests to fill my frame, which he then ever so gracefully gilded.

I was so proud! And Marie Antoinette loved me so. But it was only a few years later that the monarchs were forced from Versailles, the furnishings (including me!) sold off, and the palace opened to the public. Then, over a hundred years passing from one bourgeois behind to another, mostly left to sit on the side for show and only occasionally sat in by someone sitting, again, just for show.

Until M. Charles bought me at auction. Though a wealthy businessman, he was of noble stock and actually used me in his sitting room. Oh, the soirées he hosted and the fesses I enfolded! But then…the Great Depression. Thank God, though, that, as much as M. Charles could have used the money, he couldn’t bear to sell me at auction. He instead donated me to this presumptuous palace of a museum.

So, now, I spend my days on display, stared at instead of sat in, and longing for the day another little scamp tires of the museum tour and jumps the rope to squirm in my lap.

In the meantime, boring!

I don’t know what to say. Feel like crying. Tears well as I write. And I didn’t even ask his name.

It’s October 29. The year is 2012. It is said that there are no coincidences, and I believe it. It is said that we can never know the chain of cause-and-effect consequences of any action we take or fail to take, big or small. And I believe it. It is even said that there is no such thing as cause and effect, anyway, for that would imply time, and time is but an illusion, that there is only relationship. And I can believe that, too.

It is also said that we encounter angels in our lives every day if we would but pay attention and notice them. And I for sure believe that, as well. For today I met one.

I’m sitting at a table on the patio outside Starbucks in Big Bear Lake, California. I nurse a vente medium roast coffee while reading friend Sharon’s just published book. A couple of young men sit nearby, chatting. A homeless man walks up and stands to the side, muttering like he wants to start a conversation. And most likely panhandle, I figure. The other two young men, eying him, get up and drift away. My first reaction is to focus on my book and pretend I don’t hear or see him, hoping he’ll give up and wander off, as well, to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Then I remember a book, a novel, recently published by another friend, Ken. One of its main characters, Linda, has tumbled from a successful nursing career to surviving, homeless, panhandling on the streets of San Francisco, and grabbing bites when she can at the local Carl’s Jr.

So, I look up into the eyes of a fellow human being and ask him how he came to be homeless. He’s in his late 30s or early 40s, slender, about 5’9” or 5’10”. His face is unshaven, his hair close-cropped and thinning, his complexion ruddy. He’s clearly been in the sun. He lost his job in Indio, doing something with cinder blocks, he says. Then he lost his home. Then wandered, on foot, west and north, up into the mountains, landing in Big Bear Lake. Sleeps in a sleeping bag somewhere “over there,” he points vaguely in the direction of the lake.

“What do you do with the money people give you?” I ask.

“I buy foot-longs at Subway,” he explains hesitantly. “One of those can last me several meals.”

Since he’s smoking a cigarette, I observe that it must be a pretty expensive habit, what with how heavily they’re taxed nowadays. He admits that he’s bummed this one off of someone, that there’s no way he could afford to buy them.

“It gets so cold at night,” he mutters, eyes downcast. A hint of shiver shakes his body at the very thought of it. “Smoking helps me get to sleep.”

Has he spent a winter in the mountains yet? No, not yet.

“You’d best get back down to the valley,” I advise. “Snows will be coming down up here in a few weeks.”

I am really touched by him and his story and offer to give him a couple of dollars towards a sandwich. In my wallet, though, there are no singles; nothing less than a ten. So, I give a what-the-hell shrug, mutter something about not having change, and, not wanting to ask him if he does, hand him the ten.

Wishing him well on his journey, I turn attention back to my book. He asks what it’s about. Not wanting to engage in a much longer conversation, I describe briefly what it’s about. He glances quickly at the book, I return to reading, he turns and shuffles into Starbucks.

A few minutes later, he’s back! Oh, no, I shudder. What now? He holds out to me his baseball cap, white with a blue and red corporate insignia. I did something for him, he says, and it’s only right for him to do something for me. And offering me his cap is all he can do. He apologizes that there are some smudges of dirt on it.

“No,” I protest, “I can’t take it! You’re going to need to keep your head warm on these cold nights!”

“It’s really OK,” he insists quietly. “I have my beanie, see?”, which he proceeds to pull out of his pocket to show me.

I see that this act of gratitude on his part means a lot to him, to offer something in exchange, so I hold the cap over my heart and thank him softly, feeling deeply grateful myself for the blessings and meaning this gift carries with it.

“Go with God,” I whisper, as he wanders off again. Then I notice that the brim and one side of the cap are damp and smell of Starbucks restroom soap.

I wipe a tear, put down the book, and pick up my pen.

At the crack of the bat, my head pops up, and I fly line drive…to the ’50s of my formation.

The 1950s were, at least on the surface, a special, innocent, almost idyllic, time in American middle class life. Dwight Eisenhower was president, we lived on a cul-de-sac in suburban Los Angeles, there was a swimming pool in the backyard, and the family’s Dodge sedan and Ford station wagon were parked in the driveway because the garage was home to all manner of household stuff: bicycles, roller skates, scooters, garden tools, baseball bats and mitts, suitcases, and a chest freezer. Our house faced the street with used brick and light green lap siding; sides and back were stucco, the roof shake-shingled.

Dad had a professional career as a deposition reporter and worked from home much of the time. Mom also worked at home: the quintessential homemaker, she cooked, cleaned, shopped, did laundry, and hustled us kids off to school. To top it off, almost every evening all of us of could be found having dinner at the round, metal table tucked into the dinette end of the kitchen.

Pretty much an Ozzie and Harriet kind of life. It was a life we shared with the Nelsons via the bulky block of blond furniture in our rumpus room called a Packard Bell TV. Seamier sides of the ‘50s – Jim Crow, the Korean War, McCarthyism, and downtown L.A.’s skid row, for example – were barely in range of the antenna adorning the house over our heads.

Dad, contrary to his desk job, was quite athletic. He played baseball shortstop and basketball forward in high school and college and earned many a trophy in B’nai B’rith bowling leagues. When he wasn’t otherwise occupied pulling weeds or tending his beloved rose garden or backyard barbecue, Dad would often invite brother Gary and me to play catch with him in the street after school. Though also invited, sister Jean declined lest a wayward baseball hit her bespectacled face.

When we first moved to Studio City from Burbank, there was no local Little League team in those early days of the suburbanizing San Fernando Valley. So, Dad took the initiative, organized other dads together, and created one. I felt so proud all suited up, clickety-clacking cleated shoes across the kitchen linoleum, and trying my hand and glove at first base or on the pitcher’s mound. Dad, as team coach, quickly recognized my blossoming baseball abilities and aptly assigned me mostly to the bench position.

When I aged out of Little League, Dad once again went into community organizing action. Now, Pony League Coach Dad once in a while asked me to fetch fly balls in right field. Again, my playing prowess, though, appropriately consigned me to the sidelines as the team’s official scorekeeper. Truth be told, though uniformed, cleated, and ready to play, it was actually a relief to be on the bench instead of in the field. I felt such satisfaction and sense of fulfillment recording on the score sheet the story of each pitch of the ball, each swing of the bat, and each run crossing the plate. Whether Coach Dad was aware of it or not, it turns out that role tapped into an innate talent of mine that foretold my later career in math and statistics. Thanks, Dad!

That ability-appropriate bench playing also launched in me a lifelong love of baseball as a fan in the stands. This love was fanned whenever Dad would drive Gary and me over the hill to L.A.’s Fairfax district to watch the Hollywood Stars at Gilmore Field.

In those distant days, the almost-major minor league Pacific Coast League was the only source of pro baseball this far out in the Wild West hinterlands (as East Coasters likely thought of us). There were two PCL teams in Los Angeles, the inevitable archrival Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels. To this day, I relive with relish the amalgamated aromas of hot dogs with mustard, smoke swirled from cigars, bulging bags of buttered popcorn, pink clouds of cotton candy, and the leathered gloves we’d wear in hopes of snagging a passing pop foul as it flew over the screen on the first base side of home plate. I felt a special thrill one day as I scrambled over rows of seats to just below the broadcast booth, from where I watched Mark Scott, whom I normally listened to adoringly from home, calling the play-by-play for the poor souls glued to their radios. And, oh, the scrumptious sounds of the game! Especially satisfying was the smack of a successfully swung bat, of ash crashing into horsehide, sending the cheering crowd as one to its feet as the ball soared out of sight over the left field fence and into who knew what adventures awaited it beyond.

But, alas, each of those flashback moments was no static still but merely one frame of a motion picture that, inevitably, had to roll its reel. The very much major league Dodgers came to town, the Hollywood Stars faded into Wikipedian history, Mark Scott made way for Vin Scully, and Gilmore Field was razed to make way for CBS Television City and its parking lot for the cars of other stars. And I made my way through high school, college, and life.

And then, decades later and hundreds of miles away, while out for a walk…

Whack!!

At the crack of the bat, my head pops up, and I know what it is.

Sure enough, the ball comes sailing over the schoolyard fence to my right, bounces along the street, comes to rest at my feet. Of course I pick it up. How could I not? It’s that Gilmore homer come home at last.

The ball, smudged, scraped, and scarred as it is, now sits on my desk. Often, I pick it up, stroke its rough, sinuous seams, grasp it firmly in my fingers as if to pitch to a batter or throw a runner out. Each smudge, scrape, and scar, I imagine, each yard of yarn wound tightly round the rubber cork core tells a story in the life of the ball, a story waiting to roll from the movie reel.

This is an updated and extended version of a July 2019 post to The Green Pen. In view of the events of the past six years, one has to wonder if it indeed might be too late for such a national healing. If so, what’s next? Where is the hope?

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The United States of America is bereft. Bereft of our humanity. Bereft of a sense of community. Bereft of a motivating meaning and purpose. Bereft of our very soul.

Moles of Malaise

In a post to The Green Pen in February 2018 following a mass school shooting, I noted that such incidents of violence (and there have been many more of them since, and not just in schools) are but symptoms, along with drug and other addictions, teen suicides, domestic violence, and such, of a more profound malady, an unhappiness in a society founded on the “pursuit of happiness.” And yet our responses have been limited to politically compromised and whitewashed policy tweaks narrowly focused on only one or another of those symptoms – and, of course, to sending thoughts and prayers to grieving victims and families.

For example, what does it say about us, about our culture, to have had a president who, as a palliative for our national trauma, grief, and disorientation following 9/11, could only advise us to go shopping?

It’s like a game of whack-a-mole. Unless we get at where all those moles are popping up from, we will be whacking them down here and there and everywhere for all time.

And we can’t just point our collective finger and blame mental illness, for signs of mental illness can often be considered moles, as well.

So, what is feeding them? What’s keeping them alive and energizing them to multiply?

The moles feed on fodder buried deep within our cultural norms and values, and it will only be through some serious national soul-searching and self-reflection that we will be able to root them out. Cultures are supposed to be the mediums for growing things, for nurturing life. Ours clearly is falling short.

Here is one prescription for getting started on a process of national healing:

First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans…

Sound familiar? President Jimmy Carter uttered these words in an address to the nation 46 years ago, on July 15, 1979. In his famous (or, to some, infamous) “malaise” speech (in which he never actually used the word “malaise”), President Carter went on to say:

…But after listening to the American people I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America…

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities…too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose…

Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide…

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.”

These words sound equally apt, perhaps even more so, in today’s national climate, almost half a century later. My wife, daughter, and I watched the speech together on television, as a family. My then-10-year-old daughter Unmi totally got it and was so moved and inspired by his words that she wrote the president a letter, attempting to cheer him up after the press and the pundits raked him over the coals for such a downer of a speech. Still in denial now, and despite the punditry, we could certainly use a good talking to like that today.

It is time to heal. Way past time.

President Carter’s words prescribe a way forward to healing and the choice facing us again (or still) today. Yes, the first step in a national process of healing – literally, “making whole again” – is to “face the truth.” Not for purposes of shame or blame or guilt tripping, or even for the currently popular political passion for accountability, for such would just be perpetuating more of the same “us vs. them” dynamic and thus be inimical to “making whole.” Rather, the aim would be an open, frank, and honest acknowledgement of who we are as a nation, where we’ve come from, and how we’ve gotten to where we are today, with all the grace we’ve enjoyed and the grief we’ve suffered along the way. In a restorative justice sense, such a healing process would be characterized by community caring, listening, taking responsibility, and, where necessary, making appropriate restitution.

Facing the truth of our history – both the grace and the grief – is essential for healing the wounds that have come with it so that we may then follow what President Carter called for: a “path of common purpose and the restoration of American values…that…leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves.”

A Time of Evolutionary Change

We are in a time of profound change at all levels, from the personal to the national to the global. Not just incremental change or tremors, tweaks, and twiddling at the margins but rather epochal, systemic transformations in human consciousness and, as a result, metamorphosis of cultural, social, economic, and political values and structures. It’s as if we are in a chrysalis – and indeed living in interesting times!

The challenge before us is to stay centered in the eye of whatever storm swirls around us, focused on the larger perspective of the evolutionary transformation we are undergoing, and proactively doing our part, in community, to nurture the consciousness of wholeness that is aborning.

Buckminster Fuller famously said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

Thus, we must look beyond merely resisting or protesting or even calling for and supporting this or that policy, presidential decree, judicial nominee, or congressional action. Yes, those actions are important and even essential in the immediate micro situation. In the much more profound macro situation, though, it’s even more important and will have much longer lasting and far-reaching consequences to be projecting, building, and demonstrating the new, more just and life-affirming behaviors and systems that will replace those that are dissolving. As an example, The Next System Project is doing just that, coming up with holistic, systemic, ideas for how we might evolve our human-created systems to be more in alignment with Earth, with Life.

What are the structures that are dissolving in this country? They include attributes of our nation that many if not most Americans have always thought of as bedrocks of what defines the United States of America but are now crumbling – things such as White majority and dominance; Christian majority and dominance; male dominance; the dominance of money, materialism, capitalism, and the nation-state; and the dominance of humanity over other life and Earth as a whole. Actually, also dissolving is the acceptance and use of dominance itself as a form of relationship. For example, “power over” is morphing into “power with” as a preferred way of relating in families, workplaces, communities, and government.

Of course, exercising power-with requires that we trust in one another and in processes that unfold organically and nonlinearly. And that’s very scary to many people. Hence the necessity, throughout the breakdown/breakthrough healing process, of practicing compassion, understanding, non-judgement, and love. A difficult, possibly unimaginable task when looking through the micro lens, but perhaps it makes more sense and is more doable from the macro, evolutionary point of view.

Thus, from that perspective, answering the question posed at the start of the post, we can say that it is not too late. Every ending is a new beginning. There is the hope.

An earlier version of this post first appeared in The Green Pen on July 17, 2017.

Without rules, what’s a rebel to do?? Rules of grammar, in this case (but the question could apply in any context).

I love words. I get a kick out of playing with and on words. Yet, I’ve always felt strapped by my self-imposed compulsion to stick to and enforce the rules. It served me well in school, after all, where my English teachers always rewarded my good behavior with A’s. And in my technical career, where I expressed gratitude to the sharp-eyed editors when they’d call me to task on this slip or that.

Now, at last, an authoritative source has set me free! So, let freedom wring all the creativity it can muster out of those words!

But, why should my liberation depend on an authoritative source to begin with, you might ask? Well, that’s a whole nother story. Or maybe even two nother stories.

According to Kory Stamper, a lexicographer (of all things) at Merriam-Webster, there’s no logical basis for a law that says it’s wrong to wantonly split an infinitive. Even more startling, I can even pick any preposition I like to end a sentence with! And, as if that weren’t enough, its historically and grammatically consistent to drop the apostrophe from the “it-is” contraction and to put one in it’s possessive.

I first heard of Ms. Stamper and her book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries in 2017, when she was interviewed by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. She closes one chapter of the book with the following, which, in my mind, pretty much sums up her thesis:

“We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child…. Sometimes English goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.” p. 51

Just another sign that the world of order and certainty is crumbling into chaos. Definitely a good time to practice living in the not knowing.

Memories began etching themselves into my brain when I was, oh, maybe three-ish. Some of the earliest etchers were of passages. Doors and windows, trails and roads, archways and hallways, pathways and stairways. Whether open and free, or closed and blocked, maybe even more so the latter, passages have always evoked in me a feeling of wonder, wanderlust, and a driving passion to uncover the mystery of what lies around that bend, over that horizon, through that gate, beyond that door.

When I was born, we lived in a court at 616¼ San Benito Street in the East Los Angeles neighborhood Boyle Heights. I remember nothing of my first two years in Boyle Heights, before our move to Burbank. I do have memories, though – some faint, some vivid – of returning several times over the next three or four years for visits with Grandma and Grandpa and with Aunt Sarah, Uncle Charlie, and cousins Diane and Peggy.

My Dad’s parents, aka Grandma and Grandpa, lived above the general store they ran at 2443½ Brooklyn Avenue (in 1994 renamed César Chávez Avenue), the main drag of downtown Boyle Heights. They’d lived in that apartment for maybe 20 years by the time I came along. Grandma, slim and slight, ran the store downstairs while Grandpa, tanned and husky, delivered ice and peddled fruits, vegetables, and second-hand “junk” throughout Boyle Heights in a horse-drawn wagon. Dad and his brother, Uncle Irv, grew up there.

What I remember about their home is the arch at the front of the narrow walkway that ran along the left side of the store and up the back stairs to their apartment. There was something about that stucco arch that always intrigued the little-boy me whenever we’d come to visit. It was a gateway marking a sudden transition from a broad busy boulevard to a quiet, confined, concrete path that could only lead, at least in my young imagination, to wonder and adventure.

Mom’s sister and brother-in-law, aka Aunt Sarah and Uncle Charlie, meanwhile, lived with their daughters Diane and Peggy a few blocks away, on San Benito Street. If you were walk north on San Benito Street towards its end at State Street Park (where we kids would occasionally play during our visits), you’d see two courts extend up a hill on the right. First was the one we had lived in before our move to Burbank, then Sarah and Charlie’s. There were four units in each court, two on each side. Sarah and Charlie had the back unit on the right in their court. For me, coming to visit, climbing the stairs off the street up to the level of the court was like ascending a canyon only to emerge on a plain that sloped up to the ground-level basement and then further up to the still-ground-level front door to their apartment.

That alone was always an amazement to me, how the front entrance and the basement below it could both be at ground level. On top of that, this is my first memory of a basement. In my little imagination, it was a hidden place both underground and open to the outside, a storage space for mysteries just beneath the upper world of daily life – of eating, sleeping, washing dishes, doing homework. On a few occasions, I’d tag along with big and buxom Aunt Sarah or mustachioed, cigar-chomping, round-bellied Uncle Charlie, out the front door and down to the basement, and then watch, heart pounding with excitement and anticipation, as they would open the padlock and swing wide the gate-like door to shed light on all that was hidden inside.

These features – Aunt Sarah’s and Uncle Charlie’s basement door and the arched walkway leading to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s over-the-store apartment – looked to me like boundaries separating worlds and transitions from one world to the next. What lies hidden deep within that basement? What’s life like beyond the end of that arched passageway? Ditto for paths, trails, and roads – where do they lead? If I follow this trail around just one more bend or over just one more crest, what will I see, where will it take me?

It wasn’t until seventy years or so after toddlerhood that I was finally able to put words to another yearning that had been hidden and repressed within me from the very beginning. During a desert retreat in Joshua Tree, California, I came upon the scene I have described in another recent post, Freedom Road, and its “aha” message to me.

“Freedom Road”? Why did I give it that name? There’s definitely an archway and a road. But why “freedom”? And what does that have to do with passages?

Well, in a very real sense, as I learned on a later visit to Joshua Tree, passages are bardos. According to Lion’s Roar:

“Bardo is the Tibetan term for the intermediate state or gap we experience between death and our next rebirth. … More generally, the word bardo refers to the gap or space we experience between any two states. The lesser-known bardos described in the traditional texts include the bardo of dreaming, the bardo of meditating, and even the bardo of this life—which is, after all, the intermediate state between birth and death. … We actually experience bardos throughout our day. When you finish reading this article and look up, there will be a moment of bardo, a tiny gap following the end of one activity and preceding the start of another. If you notice them, these bardos of everyday life are places of potential transformation. … Bardos are spaces of potential creativity and innovation, because they create breaks in our familiar routines and patterns. In that momentary space of freedom, the fresh perception of something new and awake may suddenly arise.”

Yes, that’s it! A “space of freedom,” a “transformation”, a passage from one place or state to another. What adventures might await, what might I discover, if I were free to go through one of those doorways, follow one of those trails, peer through one of those windows – cross fearlessly into and through one of those bardos? What’s been holding me back? What have I been afraid of?

Well, I’ve spent a lifetime trying to answer that question, and I’m not there yet. Stay tuned.