grace – The Geriatric Pilgrim: Traveling the Landscape of Faith and Grief

Leaving “the Little Lightless Caverns”

Published on May 9, 2022 by geriatric pilgrim1 Comment

“I waste too much time in the little lightless caverns of my own mind.”

—Christian Wiman

My first wife used to say to me, “Rick, you think too much.”

It pains me to say it, but she was right. I can turn anything into a problem to be solved: what I want for breakfast, what clothes I want to wear for the day (I’m retired, for godssake, who cares what I wear?), where I want to go for a morning walk, whether I want to go first to the grocery store and then to the hardware store (well, the grocery store is closer and if I get delayed there, I can always wait until tomorrow to do the hardware store) or go first to the hardware story and then to the grocery store (but because the grocery store is closer, I need to get the refrigerated items home before they spoil).

So that by lunchtime I’m tired out (and then do I want a nap or should I read?).

Minor stuff, I know, but as I look back at my life, I see that overthinking has caused me and those around me serious problems. Part of the reason I almost flunked out of college was because I waffled about not only what career path to follow, but also whether I wanted to join a fraternity, ask Ginny out or Pat, hang out with jocks or artsy types, take a year off.

In later years, I agonized over if I should get married, go to graduate school, take a college or a high school teaching job, join a church (what denomination?), join the Rotary, or tell my first wife I was unhappy in our marriage.

After my daughter died, my mind became a prison. When all my efforts to understand why a previously healthy and happy 18-year-old should suddenly die from a rare cancer—radon in our water supply, McDonald’s cutting down rain forests, accident, fate, God wanting “another angel in heaven,”(all reasons people gave me)—failed, I decided I had to be the one to blame, either because Laurie’s mother and I divorced or because we didn’t divorce soon enough. For several years, the only relief I could find was through alcohol and anger, both of which threatened not only my life but the lives of those close to me.

As I’ve written before in these blogs, I credit meditation with first helping me see the destructive nature of thoughts and to unload much of my anger and shame—give it to God, as one of my first mentors suggested.

But meditation can become its own “little lightless cavern,” as poet Christian Wiman calls his mind: a place to escape an argument or a fear or a resentment by retreating into old patterns of thinking. (What will I have for breakfast, what shall I wear today…)

So, what else has helped?

Seeing myself as the Geriatric Pilgrim has become more than a literary conceit. Looking at life as a pilgrimage has taught me to be curious, to look for surprises, to live without planning every single detail, to put myself in uncomfortable situations (even if it’s just going for a walk and having no destination or closing my eyes before grabbing a shirt to wear for the day). I’ve learned to embrace the unknown—including a Higher Power totally outside my understanding, and to look for evidence of that Higher Power—what I would call grace—all around me.

A pilgrimage always involves some type of movement, whether it’s walking Saint Cuthbert’s Way or walking downtown. Despite having grown up playing sports, I’ve never paid more attention than I do these days to movement. Yes, regular exercise has long been known to improve and maintain key aspects of cognitive function such as attention, learning, and memory, but neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert posits that our brains evolved, not to think or feel, but to produce adaptable and complex movements. He points out that it’s a lot easier to create a computer that thinks than to create a computer which can move anything like we do. (If you’d like to learn more see https://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains.)

For the last year and a half, I’ve been practicing the Feldenkrais Method of exercise therapy, learning to reorganize connections between the brain and body, which has improved both the way I move and the way I think, helping me pay less attention to my mind and more attention to my heart and my gut—my instincts.

The slogans of Al Anon, the 12-step program for families and friends of alcoholics, have become my roadmap on this pilgrimage out of the caverns of my mind. When I first started attending meetings and saw slogans set out on the floor, I thought, “God, how simplistic!” Another example of how thinking can mislead me. Try following a few of these slogans and see how simple they are. To give just one example, let’s look at “One Day at a Time.”

What’s so hard about that? Well, for someone like me—and, I find, many people who’ve grown up in alcoholic families, who continually try to anticipate and resolve every problem they think they may encounter, attempting to make decisions on information they don’t have—it’s damn hard. Instead of responding to what’s in front of me, both the challenges and the gifts that come my way, I’m obsessing about all the possibilities (most of them bad) that might befall me, even though, looking back over the almost 80 years of my life, I can say that not once did any of this preparation spare me a single moment of pain. In fact, it just lengthened my suffering.

Still, at my age, it’s hard for me not to think about—which in my case means understand, anticipant, awfulize—my death. It was helpful this week to hear a podcast in which Ariel Burger, protégé and friend of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel, talk about Wiesel’s teaching that there are no answers to life’s big questions, only responses.

So, I’m trying to respond to these questions by breaking them into small daily tasks. Instead of trying to answer the question, how can my grandchildren survive in a world that seems to be hurtling toward destruction, I focus what I can do with them today. If I’m worried about the Supreme Court or the swelling in my jaw, what can I do about either one today? Call my senator? Pop into the walk-in clinic (which I did this weekend. It’s “an obstructed parotid gland”)? Then it’s time to go for a walk, pick up a banjo, write a poem or a blog. Get out of my head.

In other words, as one of the AA’s oldest slogans puts it, “Move a muscle, change a thought.”

And leave a little lightless cavern.

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Sifting Ashes

Published on March 10, 2020 by geriatric pilgrim4 Comments

Grant that these ashes may be a sign of our mortality and penitence ….

“Ash Wednesday Liturgy,” Book of Common Prayer

I return to my pew, ashes feeling like paste on my forehead, past the smattering of people scattered throughout the church, their faces already smudged between their eyes, my mind sifting through ashy thoughts of age and mortality.

Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns ….

—Robert Southwell

When I was growing up in a small Maine town in the 1950s, the only church that observed Ash Wednesday was the Catholic Church. (Those snooty Episcopalians drove to a more affluent community.) Which confirmed for my family and many others in town that Catholics were not like (meaning not a good as) us Congregationalists and Baptists. My great-grandfather told his daughter he’d rather see her dead than marry the Catholic man she loved, and when she did marry the man, her father never spoke to her again. On Ash Wednesday, we kids looked out of the corner of our eyes at the Catholic kids with the smudges on their foreheads as if they’d somehow become lepers with signs proclaiming them “Unclean.”

There was a lot of “Us and Them” in those days. In the newspapers and on TV, I read about Red-blooded Americans versus Dirty Commies; on Saturday afternoons I saw westerns with the White Hats against the Black Hats and science-fiction flicks with titles like Them; and on Friday night at the gym, there were our Good Guys versus the neighboring towns’ Bad Guys.

Thus, I started climbing what Courage to Change, an Al-Anon daily reader, calls “The Ladder of Judgment,” where everyone is somehow either below me or above me— economically, physically, intellectually, spiritually—with God far, far away at the top. Comparing myself to others—judging them, judging myself—has become a life-long addiction, isolating me from people, from God, even at times, from myself.

A bucket of ash

and smoke

gone

into the air.

—David Budbill, “Smoke and Ash”

Still, I have a nostalgia for ashes. I don’t think I ever light our charcoal grill without remembering that one of my first jobs around the house when I was growing up was to take the trash to the back yard and burn it in an old oil drum set on top of cement blocks. After pulling the newspapers apart (because if I didn’t, they didn’t burn completely and my father had a fit), I lit the trash with a kitchen match. Then I’d usually stand for a while watching the smoke billow out of the oil drum. In winter, it was a lousy job, but most of the time, I liked being outside by the fire. I still do. There’s something primordially comforting about a fire.

Every few weeks, my father would shovel the ashes into a large pail and either take them to the town dump, or save them for winter, when he’d spread them on the icy driveway. I also remember Dad, who moon-lighted as sexton at our church, in his topcoat and fedora methodically dipping his coal shovel into a bucket of ashes from the furnace on Sunday mornings and spreading the cinders across the icy sidewalk so that no one would fall going into the service.

… I marle what pleasure or felicity they have in taking their roguish tobacco. It is good for nothing but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke and embers.

—Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour

I grew up surrounded by ashtrays. I recall square ashtrays and round ashtrays, glass ashtrays, wooden ashtrays, metal ashtrays. I remember a bumpy white ashtray in the dining room, and a small clear glass ashtray on the toilet tank in our bathroom and a matching one beside the bathtub. In the living room stood a metal stand holding a large glass brown ashtray beside Dad’s chair, where, on Friday nights, he sat and drank Blue Ribbon and ate Spanish peanuts and smoked his Camels, watching The Gillette Friday Night Fights on our black and white Philco. One memory I have of my mother is of her standing in the kitchen, ironing, with a cup of black coffee and a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray, singing along with Bing Crosby’s voice on our old record player: “Where the blue of the night meets the gold of the day …”

My senior year in high school, the day after my last varsity basketball game, I filched a pack of Dad’s Camels from the carton he always had in his bedroom closet. I spent one afternoon learning to inhale and the next forty years trying to quit, something I remember every time I pant and gasp and puff walking up a hill.

Through [cremation] … the body is reduced to its basic elements, which are referred to as the “cremated body” or “cremated remains.”… Depending upon the size of the body, there are normally three to nine pounds of fragments resulting.

— cremationinfo.com

The purpose of Ash Wednesday, which marks the beginning of Lent, is to remind us of our mortality—Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. At my age, coming off heart surgery, watching friends die, I don’t need much reminding.

This year, I find myself wondering what will remain of me after my death. I don’t mean how many pounds of “cremains,” but what will I leave behind for others? A few published stories, a novel, hopefully another book or two. Far too many photograph albums. But I think it was Maya Angelou (it was; I just Googled it) who said, “At the end of the day people won’t remember what you said or did, they will remember how you made them feel.” And in this season of penitence, I realize that it’s not so much what I’ve done wrong in my life that I regret, it’s what I haven’t done to make people feel better that gnaws at me.

[Ashes form because]…almost everything in nature is what chemists call “heterogeneous”—that is, its composition is not uniform. For this reason, not every part is “pure” substance and will not burn.

—Caveman Chemistry

But I’m realizing in my “golden years” that to be human is to be, as us Protestant kids used to see the Catholic kids, “unclean,” in the sense of being impure, of being “what chemists call ‘heterogeneous.’” Looking back over the pilgrimage of my life, I see that it has been a mix of good and bad, joy and sorrow, celebration and penitence, things done and things left undone. Moments such as watching smoke waft into the sky that still comfort me; moments such as inhaling smoke that have scarred me for life.

And maybe what I want to leave behind for my grandchildren from what time I have left before I become three to nine pounds of ashes, is an example of living as if there is no Us and Them, only Us.

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Walking at Sunset

Published on December 20, 2019December 20, 2019 by geriatric pilgrim5 Comments

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After a wonderful but hectic Thanksgiving, Mary Lee and I spent a weekend on retreat at the Episcopal monastery of Society of Saint John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a place we’ve been coming to for twenty-five years in search of silence and slow time. On Saturday afternoon, because the sun sets in this part of the world around 4:00 p.m., I decided to catch the last daylight and take a walk before Evening Prayer.

As I left the monastery, the sun was buttering tiers of purple clouds over the Boston skyline. I jay-walked across Memorial Drive, turned right, and joined the joggers, walkers, and cyclists on the path along the Charles River—a mix of races I don’t see in Maine, some talking into microphones and headsets, others conversing with one another, possibly in Chinese.

After about a quarter of a mile, I passed the Riverside Boat Club. I turned left to cross the Eliot Bridge, pulling up the collar of my coat against a raw wind coming down the river. The late afternoon sun and clouds reflected in the rippling waters of the Charles, the lengthening shadows of the sycamores, and the dank, November wind all churned up memories of another wind coming down another river thirty years earlier. I saw myself walking back from the Eastern Maine Medical Center to the Ronald McDonald House after spending the day watching my eighteen-year-old daughter die a little more from the cancer ravaging her body. I recalled the Christmas tree sellers in their vans and pick-up trucks in Cascade Park at the bottom of the hill across from the Penobscot River and how Christmas seemed at the time like some horrible joke played on the human race by a sadistic god promising peace on earth, good will to all, and then inflicting more war, poverty, disease, and death on us suffering buggers.

Now, however, I realized as I turned left after the bridge and started walking along Storrow Drive, that although I could still vividly picture details from my walk back from the hospital—the seagulls circling over the river, the mansard roofs on the houses—I could no longer feel the anger, confusion, and shame that once consumed me. Thanks to prayer and meditation and spiritual direction—much of which happened at the SSJE monastery—I’ve had joy as well as pain since Laurie’s death. Last summer I had heart surgery which has given me renewed hope that I may be around to watch my grandchildren grow up.

The sun dropped, gilding the tops of buildings on my right. The clouds became red and gray. Just outside a patch of skim ice near the shore of the river, a dozen geese floated tranquilly, while on the other side of me, rush hour traffic hurdled by. Horns honked.

The geese reminded me of my father-in-law, George, who used to urge his employees to work like ducks on the water: calm and serene on the surface, paddling like hell underneath. He was the one who introduced me to this walk around the Charles; he made it almost every day. One of the most gracious men I’ve ever known, he and his wife Elaine retired to Cambridge to an apartment just three doors down from the monastery, which made it that much easier for Mary Lee and me to become part of the SSJE community.

Hearing the whooshing traffic, I recalled that George used to carry a plastic bag with him when he walked here, collecting what he called “street glass,” bits of broken head and tail lights from the innumerable accidents caused by Massachusetts drivers along Memorial and Storrow Drives. By the time Elaine died and George left 985 Memorial Drive for a retirement community in Lexington, he’d collected enough colored glass and plastic to fill I don’t know how many glass jars, which reposed on bookcases and windowsills all over the apartment.

Looking across the river back at Memorial Drive, I imagined Elaine, standing in front of her window, holding her glass of gin, watching the sunset behind me before heading back to the kitchen to finish preparing another of her gourmet dinners. She used to rate sunsets; I thought she might give this one a “7” or an “8.” So I made it a “7.5.”

When she died, her service was held in the monastery, and I remembered the Brothers’ chanting, and the reception back at the apartment, monks mingling with the family of academics, doctors, and journalists I married into. When George remarried, four years later, it was in the monastery, as was his funeral ten years after that.

fullsizeoutput_1755 — The SSJE Monastery from across the Charles River

Crossing the Weeks Foot Bridge in front of Harvard’s Leverett and Dunster Houses, I realized what an important part the monastery and the Brothers have played in my life for the last twenty-five years. I walked back Memorial Drive, past Winthrop and Eliot Houses, through John F. Kennedy Park, recalling my spiritual directors who guided me along the rocky road of grief—showed me that I couldn’t keep thinking of Laurie as some photograph in an old album, that if I actually believed in this thing called resurrection, I needed to father an ongoing relationship with her, think of her as being somehow present, here and now. And indeed, the first time after her death when I felt her touch was as I sat at a desk in one of the guest rooms of the monastery.

I thought about how my retreats and pilgrimages intertwine, like the design on the Celtic cross tattooed on my forearm. Yes, I go to the monastery on retreat to withdraw from what Jesus and St. Paul call “the world,” but I’m also making a pilgrimage to answer a call, draw near the sacred, find a source of healing, and pay homage to those I think of as the saints in my life: Laurie, George, Elaine, the Brothers who have died, like Brother Eldridge, who helped me see that like the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, I can wait in continual hope for my child, sending out my love in the confidence that she’ll receive it, or Brother John, my first spiritual director, who told me, “No, I can’t help you cut down on your drinking, but if you decide you want to quit, I’ll do everything I can to help you.” Or those Brothers who continue to buoy me, like Brother Curtis, the first monk I ever talked to here, and Brother James, whom I’ve watched lose hair, put on thirty pounds, and become Brother Superior at SSJE.

By the time I opened the gate and entered the monastery courtyard, the sun had disappeared; inky layers of clouds, however, were still striated with gold. Streetlights glowed and lambent windows in the apartments along Memorial Drive looked warm and urbane. The illuminated cross in front of the door to the guest house welcomed me home. Although I’d been gone less than an hour and had walked maybe two miles, it felt like a much longer journey.

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Of Luck and Grace

Published on November 25, 2019 by geriatric pilgrim2 Comments

The_First_Thanksgiving_cph.3g04961 — The First Thanksgiving, 1621—J.L.G. Ferris/The Foundation Press, Inc./Library of Congress

The first time I ever heard about “pilgrims” was as a kid learning about some people by that name who sailed to America to have Thanksgiving dinner. Later, I learned it was a little more complicated than that—that these people were actually “Separatists” who had broken from the Church of England and come to this country by way of Holland in search of religious freedom. But they thought of themselves as pilgrims (the first child born in the Plymouth Colony was named “Peregrine,” which means pilgrim), travelers on a journey to find a home where they could worship the God of their understanding. The name stuck.

My sister tells me that she, my brother, and I are the descendants of John and Priscilla Alden and George and Mary Soule, couples who came over on the Mayflower, which may account for why I think of myself as a pilgrim and why Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It’s a day to be with family and to give thanks.

This year, however, besides counting blessings, I’ve also been thinking a lot about luck.

Last spring, when I happened to mention to my family doctor during a routine follow-up to an earlier procedure that I was getting more and more out of breath, he told me to get a stress test and get it soon. Which I did and which led to an arterial catheterization which led to by-pass surgery. Now, I feel great. I have more energy than I’ve had in years.

I want to thank God for my good fortune, feel that I’ve been blessed. Except: as anyone who’s read this blog knows, the pivotal point in my life was the death of my eighteen-year-old daughter in 1988. Laurie didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t even eat meat. Still, she was the victim of Primitive Neuroectodermal Tumor, a rare and virulent cancer that when it strikes, usually attacks much younger children.

So how can I thank God for my life, while letting God off the hook for Laurie’s death?

Since my surgery in July, two men whom I’d known fairly well dropped dead from the same type of blocked left main artery that I had. Both men were active; both seemed healthy; neither was overweight; both died while exercising. Why am I still alive and they’re not?

I’m reminded of the evening of September 11, 2001, when our church held a meeting for all those who wanted to respond to the bombings of the twin towers and of the pentagon. At one point, a woman—let’s call her Agnes—rose and said that her son had been working that day in the South Tower, but that he was safe. “I want to take this opportunity to thank God for protecting my son four times.” Agnes said. “God showed him the way down the stairs. He moved him out of the way of fallen debris twice. He provided my boy with a private boat to offer him a ride across the river to Hoboken. I’m so grateful!”

I was happy for the woman. I was sure her son was a great guy. But I asked myself then and I ask myself now: why did God save him and let 7,000 other people die?

So although I want to thank God for my being able to be sitting here tapping out this blog instead of moldering in an urn under the snow in our family’s cemetery plot, I have to think that I was lucky, just as my daughter was unlucky enough to carry the wrong combination of inherited DNA to make her susceptible to the cancer than killed her.

Does this mean I’m not grateful this Thanksgiving? That I don’t think my Higher Power affects my life? That I’m not blessed?

Absolutely not.

As I think about how “unlucky” I was when Laurie died, and how “lucky” I am now, I find a common thread. In both instances I’ve seen, as I usually don’t, just how precious, how holy life is. I’ve never enjoyed the autumn foliage as much as I have this year. I don’t even mind (much) standing in line at the grocery checkout line.

I’m also aware, even though it’s hard to articulate, of a growing sense that this life is always being renewed, even reborn. That what I, as a Christian, call resurrection didn’t just happen once to one person, but happens to all of us many times. Someone said to me the other day that I looked like a new man. Well, in some ways, I am. I have a new heart.

Getting that new heart was at times painful; still, it was nothing like thirty years ago, when Laurie’s death broke me open. But although that hurt in ways I hope I’ll never have to feel again, her death also opened me to receive love and joy that I’d never experienced before in my closed off, child-of-alcoholic, New England male life. And it’s this experience that I’m guessing we’ve all had sometime in our lives—where from somewhere we get the strength not only to carry on but also to laugh and sing when by rights we ought to give up and die—that I give thanks for.

Which I think is the difference between luck and Grace. Luck depends on circumstances. Grace, on the other hand, is there for everyone all the time.

So I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving. This, despite sorrowful memories of my father, one of my grandmothers, and my mother-in-law all dying during the week of Thanksgiving, and a painful recollection of a Thanksgiving at the Ronald McDonald House after which Laurie’s two stepbrothers saw her for the last time. Or maybe those deaths actually help make the celebration more joyous. That when Mary Lee’s children and their families and her sister and sometimes her family come, we are surrounded by what St. Paul calls “Clouds of Witness.”

That these loved ones died, that my daughter-in-law is about to undergo surgery for cancer, and that one of my grandchildren is emotionally scarred from having been abused by her pre-school teacher is probably a matter of bad luck. That for the most part our families have the health and the means to come to our house for Thanksgiving and that Mary Lee and I feel well enough and are financially secure enough to host them is probably a matter of good luck. But that we are able to celebrate, to laugh, to cry, to love together is, I believe, a matter of Grace.

When I was finishing this blog, Mary Lee sent me a daily reading for November 22, 2019 (the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, appropriately enough) from a website called gratefulness.org.

Grief and gratitude are kindred souls, each pointing to the beauty of what is transient and given to us by grace.—Patricia Campbell Carlson

Yup. Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.

Another Thanksgiving, a few years later…

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Cruising Through Heart Surgery

Published on August 19, 2019August 25, 2019 by geriatric pilgrim9 Comments

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“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”

—Woody Allen

In trying to clean up a bit after what’s been an interesting, to say the least, month, I found the guide for the cruise Mary Lee and I had booked for this summer. Turns out I wound up with a different itinerary.

Thursday, July 18, 2019: Transfer from Oslo, Norway Airport to Hotel Bristol, Oslo. Oslo is … a medieval and Renaissance gem….

Thursday, July 18, 2019: Drive into Portland as the moon sets over Maine Medical Center. Check in, get a body shave, talk with my anesthesiologist, and then lose consciousness until I feel my esophagus being ripped out. Mary Lee, who’s been waiting for me to come to, tells me the breathing tube has just been removed.

Friday, July 19 & Saturday, July 20: See gargantuan snowcapped mountains, magnificent fjords, and one of Europe’s largest glaciers, as you travel to picturesque Bergen, an ancient city with deep Viking roots.

Friday, July 19: ICU, Maine’s gargantuan Medical Center. Awake and panicky. Having trouble breathing. To prevent pneumonia, my nurse gets me up at 3:00 a.m. to sit in a chair until 5:30, when I go back to bed. Visit from P. from my 12-step program who works here. After someone tears drainage tubes out of my gut, I move from ICU to picturesque Room 104. Find the classical channel on TV and leave it on all night.

Saturday, July 20: Never could sleep on my back, just some drug induced Never-Never Land. Wake around 3:00 with a medicinal smell in my nose and a clattering of trumpets from the TV that sounds like a party of drunken horses. Spend the day getting to know my nurse as she escorts me between bed, chair, and bathroom. Decide to write a country & western song, “Lasix and Me.” Apparently, I’ve added ten pounds of fluid in my legs. Using a walker, I head down the hall with the nurse beside me and Mary Lee behind me with a wheelchair, which is good because I have to sit down after about 60 feet. Get my own incentive spirometer. Can barely bring it to 500 mg.

Sunday, July 21: Bergan, Norway. Enjoy a relaxing tour by deluxe motor coach as you tour the main sites… Hear interesting stories about Bergen’s colorful past…

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Sunday, July 21: Nice visit from my colorful rector, who’s supposed to be on vacation, and B. from Men’s Group, who’s full of interesting stories. Walk without a walker further down the hall and back, but still have to rest in the wheelchair half-way through. Spirometer up to 750 mg. Down two pounds of fluid.

Monday, July 22: Cruise to Geirangerfjor … Seven Sisters Waterfall…the Suitor waterfall…Eagles Bend towers…

Monday, July 22: Cruise down the hall to 111A, where I now share a room with J. When he orders a lobster roll and French fries for lunch, I almost throw up. Since Thursday, I’ve choked down a bowl of cereal, a fruit cup, and a container of yogurt. No waterfalls, but I do have my first shower. Make it around the nurses’ station without walker or wheelchair, and get the spirometer up to 1000 mg. Nice visits from friends and clergy. My nurse tells me I should go home tomorrow.

Tuesday, July 23: At Sea: Relax, Renew, Recharge at The Spa. … peruse our Library…

Tuesday, July 23: Maine Med. & Home. Still not sleeping, so I’m awake when they come to give me a chest x-ray at 5:15 a.m. Get word I have a “slightly collapsed” left lung, so go for another x-ray at noon, then wait 20 minutes in what feels like a refrigerated meat locker for transport back to my room. Take another shower to warm up. Finally get word that the second x-ray shows no change and that my surgeon isn’t worried. I can go home. Which means another two hours of paperwork plus getting rid of all the rest of the IV portals and wires. See myself. I look like a zippered pincushion.

Home! Feel as if I’ve gone 15 rounds with a black rhino.

Wednesday, July 24: Travel among the majestic mountains and fishing villages of the beautiful Lofoten Islands…

Wednesday, July 24: Two hours with R. from home health care. Two concerns: my back, which looks like I might be developing sores that can lead to infection, and my lungs, neither of which seems to be operating at anywhere near capacity. Try to do three ten-minute walks around majestic Willow Grove.

On a nice note (pun intended), receive more personal mail today than I’ve had in the last six years.

Thursday, July 25: Tromso, Norway. Meet your local guide and drive through the city known as the “Gateway to the Arctic”…

Thursday, July 25: Don’t quite make a mile around Willow Grove, but following the advice of Dr. R.’s nurse to put a pillow under my arm, am able to sleep on my side and as a result, get the best night’s sleep I’ve had in over a week. Feeling more improvement. After watching me climb stairs, get in and out of bed and get up and down from the toilet, PT person from home health services says I don’t need her.

Friday, July 26: Honningsvag, Norway. Take in …one of Europe’s most stunning natural sights…. The cliffs of Nordkapp rise more than 1,000 feet from the sea waters and are topped by a large, flat plateau…

Friday, July 26: So much for stunning self-confidence: Today’s nurse, J., is concerned about possible infection in the incisions made in my legs to get the vein for part of the by-pass, so I’m blaming myself for not paying more attention to these incisions and for wearing the same pair of pants for three days. Now, these incisions seem to burn, and my face feels hot. Convinced I have a fever.

Saturday, July 27 & Sunday, July 28: At sea. Designed in the spirit of the boutiques along the world’s finest boulevards, we are proud to feature our onboard shops…clothing and handicrafts … jewelry and …cosmetics and skincare products.

Saturday, July 27: a night of catastrophizing. When I went to bed, my feet felt hot and tingly, and within fifteen minutes I’d developed kidney failure, started dialysis, and died. Tried Thich Nhat Hahn breathing exercises, prayers, psalms, replaying the 1961 Class L State Basketball championship game. This morning after two phone calls, one to home health, one to the surgeon’s office, I’m told my options are to ride it out or go to the emergency room. Decide to ride it out. Walk up to the community garden (Mary Lee gives me a ride back.) Something cheerful about gardens.

Sunday, July 28: Best night’s sleep so far. Increase my walking to 15 minutes each time. Feet feel fine, but because I have to have something to fret about, I’m concerned about my faster heart rate.

Monday, July 29: Shetland Islands… Farmland and dreamy meadows unfold toward seal-dotted beaches. Columnar sea stacks and rocky cliffs… Medieval castles… Shetland ponies…

Monday, July 29: I’ve had three major operations and The Lord of the Rings has pulled me through each time. More aware this reading of the beauty of the language and the underlying sadness that runs through the entire trilogy. Even if the Ring-Bearer is successful against Evil, the world the characters know will fade away. Realize that despite priding myself on my ability to keep growing, keep changing, my life as I know it is slipping away—culturally, politically, physically—and today I want to cry.

Tuesday, July 30: Orkney Islands. …embark on a scenic drive to the Ring of Brodgar, the finest known circular stone ring from the early Bronze Age…follow the coastline of Scapa Flow…

Tuesday, July 30: My sister brings over lobster rolls for lunch, as well as the obituary for my great-grandfather Bennett.

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Ever since I got the diagnosis of a blocked artery, I’ve been asking: why me? My cholesterol levels have been low, as has blood pressure, and heart rate. I’ve always been a walker and watch my weight and what I eat. Turns out, you can’t fight your DNA. Grampy Bennett’s obit reads like an autopsy: “at 6:00 p.m. last Saturday night, Clifford Bennett, age 63, died suddenly in his kitchen of acute indigestion. He’d been in good health prior.” Googling “acute indigestion,” I find that up until the 1920’s that was the term for what we now know were heart attacks, often brought on by the same blocked main artery that I had.

Wednesday, July 31. Edinburgh, United Kingdom. See highlights of Scotland’s capital city…from gracious architecture to a storied castle…

Wednesday, July 31. Our gracious friends J & D bring over supper for tonight: a shrimp and rice casserole with coleslaw. J’s had a stroke, a by-pass, and a valve replacement, and has just taken up rollerblading again. While I’m inspired enough to try walking without either my hiking poles or a walking stick, I’m not about to get on any damned roller skates, thank you very much.

Thursday, August 1: At Sea. We invite you to browse our selections of cutting-edge activewear at our onboard shop.

Thursday, August 1: Nice evening walk to water the garden, but then noticed before going to bed that my left ankle was swollen again. Spent the night browsing my Catalogue of Really Ugly, Horrible, Awful Things that Might Happen. Finally took Tylenol and slept until almost 8:00 a.m. Called my twelve-step sponsor and feel better.

Friday, August 2 & Saturday, August 3: London. Discover Greenwich’s maritime and royal history by foot… Shakespeare’s Globe Theater… West End musicals…Tower Bridge… the London Eye. Return home.

Friday, August 2: Mary Lee is off with one of the grandchildren, so I get up, meditate, go for a walk, fix and eat breakfast by myself—a first! Home health nurse says I’m doing well. Still some “crackling” in my lung and some swelling in my ankle, but I’m walking faster and standing straighter. Can keep the spirometer’s button in the smiley face area for over 5 seconds each time.

Saturday, August 3: the day we should have been flying home, ending our original cruise. For this cruise through heart surgery, I’ve still got at least another month. I don’t know what I’d have learned from those majestic mountains and castles and villages, but I have definitely learned at least two things on this trip I’m on now. First, I’m not in control. Three months ago, I had no idea I had anything wrong with my heart. Now, I don’t seem to have any command over how I’m doing each day, either physically or emotionally; all I can do is surrender my life to the God-of-my-not-Understanding.

Second, I live primarily through Grace, in this case, the compassionate professionalism of my doctors and nurses, the cards and visits and emails from friends, and the unwavering love and support of my family, especially Mary Lee.

Not to mention the Grace to have accepted my surgeon’s advice and not put all this off until next week.

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False Evidence Appearing Real

Published on July 8, 2019 by geriatric pilgrim3 Comments

fullsizeoutput_168c — “The crowd of people around us suddenly became menacing.”

I was reminiscing with myself the other day about various pilgrimages I’ve been on and got to thinking about the only one during which I was afraid. It was in 1997, when Mary Lee and I were in Israel. We’d taken a sherut, a minivan-style taxi, from Jerusalem to visit the Church of the Nativity, the supposed site of Jesus’s birth, in Bethlehem. Because Bethlehem was under the administration of the Palestinian National Authority, when we reached the outskirts of the city, the Israeli sherut stopped at a bus stop to let people out for the Palestinian bus into town. On the way, however, we’d been talking with a Palestinian couple—teachers in Europe, I forget where. Their car was in the parking lot, so they gave us a ride up to the Church. Mary Lee and I did our sight-seeing, saw the cave where Jesus was supposed to be born. (Ever since then, I’ve wondered why all mangers at Christmas time look like tropical huts), went to the gift store where we bought an olive wood creche, and then walked out into the square to find the bus.

Only to realize that I had no idea what the bus looked like or where it was. My stomach suddenly knotted. For the first time since we’d been in Israel, I became aware that Mary Lee and I were traveling alone in a strange, war-torn country. The crowd of people around us suddenly became menacing. Then, I heard a voice off to the side: “Hey! You want bus? Over here!”

The voice came from inside a beat-up blue bus hiding behind the corner of a building. The speaker was an unshaven young man of at most twenty years of age. We walked over and tentatively started to board. Before we were even settled, the guy stepped on the gas, his momentum knocking us into our seats. That was when I saw four or five teenage boys in tee-shirts and jeans behind us, their mouths curled with James Dean sneers around their cigarettes.

A cold hand grabbed my heart and squeezed. I envisioned our being kidnapped, forced in front of TV cameras to denounce the United States, and then beheaded or shot. Only when the bus squealed to a stop and an elderly woman got on did I begin to breathe more normally.

It was a good lesson in fear—what I’ve since learned is often an acronym for “False Evidence Appearing Real.” The divided country, the beat-up bus, the scruffy teenagers and their cigarettes (remember when cigarettes were sophisticated?), the speed with which we left the square were all in hindsight false evidence that these were terrorists intent on holding two middle-aged high school English teachers as political prisoners.

Throughout my life, most of my fears have been mental: fear of abandonment, fear of not being seen (while I’ve struggled with alcohol over the years, my real drug of choice has been the approval of others), fear of ridicule, or just plain anxiety about… well, I don’t usually know what about. To use a twelve-step word, I tend to “awfulize” when anything new happens, creating worse-case scenarios in my head.

What’s helped over the years is recalling my Bethlehem experience, and that, as then, my fears are almost always false evidence appearing real. And the less I know about something, the more my mind will supply the false evidence. Even when I have had something concrete to worry about—my deteriorating first marriage, my daughter’s cancer—being afraid has never helped me change the outcome.

Life has taught me a few ways to deal with my fears and anxieties. One way is to stay in the moment. The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn has a number of breathing exercises that I’ve found helpful over the years, one of which is breathing in and out, saying “Breathing in, I calm my body, breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is a wonderful moment.”

Another way is journaling. I once took a day-long workshop in journaling, and one of our exercises was to draw a picture of one of our fears. I drew a huge finger pointing at me and laughing in ridicule. Next, we were directed to give our fear a name (mine was Freddy). Then, we wrote a conversation with our fear. (“Me: Don’t you shake your finger at me, Asshole. I’m not as afraid of you as I used to be. Freddy: That’s what you think, Buddy Boy …”)

A third way, and probably the most effective when I can do it, is to turn my fear over to the God of My Not Understanding. “Courage,” as my twelve-step program says, “is fear that has said its prayers.”

That I’ve been thinking about our trip to Bethlehem and my various fears is no surprise: I’m starting another pilgrimage. No, not the cruise Mary Lee and I are planning to make next week, but open-heart surgery.

This journey began about a month ago, when during a routine follow-up with my primary care doctor, I mentioned to him that I was having more and more shortness of breath, and that my daily walks—for years a source of joy and relaxation—now felt like climbing Mount Washington with a fifty-pound backpack. “I think we’d better schedule you for a stress test,” he said.

A few days later, after getting wired up and pounding a treadmill for six or seven minutes, I listened to a diagnosis of an “abnormality” in my heart rate. That led to first one and then two arterial catherizations, which revealed that my left main coronary artery is just over the line between “moderately” and “severely” narrowed. Since I have no shortness of breath doing normal activity, doctors have given me the okay (as well as a bottle of nitroglycerine tablets) for the cruise. Then I will have by-pass surgery when I return.

So I’m practicing my Thich Nhat Hahn, journaling (not to mention writing this blog), and spending a lot of time with my Higher Power, trying to hand over my various fears and anxieties about dying, of not seeing my grandchildren grow, of becoming a burden to Mary Lee, yadda, ad nauseum. I’m also trying to let go of my tendency to blame myself—which I realize has always been my go-to way to avoid anxiety by swapping it for guilt—feeling that my narrowed artery is because I didn’t exercise more, eat better, lose the ten pounds I’ve been thinking I should lose for the last fifteen years.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, which, as I’ve written about now for almost four years, is one of the characteristics of pilgrimage, along with hearing the call and responding, crossing the threshold where the old has fallen away and the new hasn’t yet emerged, being uncomfortable, beginning again, embracing the unknown, and coming home (wherever home may be.)

The trick, I’m finding, as with all pilgrimages, is to prepare for the future without living in it, and ignore all the false evidence appearing real.

*The Road goes ever on and on*
*Down from the door where it began.*
*Now far ahead the Road has gone,*
And I must follow, if I can… (from The Lord of the Rings)

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Ebb and Flow

Published on June 17, 2019June 17, 2019 by geriatric pilgrim1 Comment

Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies. —Wallace Stegner

I think one of the reasons I like to travel is because I’ve lived almost my entire life in one small part of the country: the Maine coast. Like the seamen who used to live here, I want to see the world but then return home—a kind of going out and coming back mirrored in the rising and falling of the tides I’ve grown up with. The ebb and flow of the ocean has embedded itself in my imagination, shaping the way I understand my life.

For example, when I was growing up in Yarmouth, Maine, I used to play—despite my mother’s warnings and wallops with her hairbrush—in what was called “The Black Ash,” acres of black soot and gravel created some twenty years earlier when the town’s paper company, at the turn of the twentieth century one of the largest in the world, burned to the ground, leaving a cavernous wasteland of toxic ash. In college, when I had dreams of becoming the next Ernest Hemingway, I used the Black Ash in my creative writing class as a symbol of how a once prosperous town had died. Today, however, the land is grass-covered and home to a post office, a number of businesses, doctors’ offices, and a large assisted-living facility. Ebb and flow.

What I don’t think I’ve ever realized before now is that for most of my life, I’ve tended to think of ebb as something negative or low, and flow as positive or high: low as in mud flats, empty, weak, enervated, poor; high as in more spiritual, more beautiful, full, at your peak, prosperous.

The thing is, I have great memories of the Black Ash. There were ash-gray canyons peopled with—depending on what movie I’d last seen at Carlton’s movie theater—Indians, space aliens, or Nazis. I’m sure the reason my mother didn’t want me playing there was because the landscape was punctuated with dangerously deep brick wells, but as far as I was concerned, the wells led down to a land of dinosaurs and curvaceous women in leopard-skin bikinis. In the 1950s, when I played in the Black Ash, the town was small and the people friendly. It was a great place to grow up.

When I moved back to Yarmouth as an adult, I took my two step-sons to the Black Ash a year or so before the town began to clean it up and got a chance to relive my childhood.

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But, to be honest, one of the reasons I’ve since moved away again is because I never felt I belonged in the designer coffee shops, chiropractors’ and psychiatrists’ offices located where the Black Ash used to be.

Is high tide better than low tide? If you’re a swimmer, perhaps, but not for if you dig clams for a living. And while I may feel that the current political situation shows this country to be at its lowest ebb, I have conservative friends who feel we are at our highest point in history.

Ebb and flow, then, are relative, not only to each person, but, I find, to all of life. Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Max Planck’s work in quantum physics has shown how everything is dependent upon everything else. You can’t have an “in” without an “out,” you can’t have an “up” without a “down,” and you can’t have an “ebb” without a “flow.” Everything is relative; everything is connected. Something the Buddhists have been telling us all along.

My daughter’s death was certainly the lowest point in my life, a time when I felt all my hope, contentment, and well-being had ebbed away. And yet, it is only in the years following her death, that I have felt joy, felt overflowing with happiness. Before Laurie’s death, my emotional life was limited by my New England upbringing compounded by being raised in an alcoholic family. Laurie’s death broke me open. Only by going to the depths was I able to realize the heights, feel the joy of music, grandchildren, and, most important, the physical, emotional, and spiritual love I share with my wife.

A couple of years ago, Mary Lee and I drove through Nova Scotia and spent several hours walking Minas Basin, the site of the world’s highest tidal ranges, where twice a day, the Bay of Fundy ebbs and flows through the Minas Channel between Cape Split and Cape Sharp, completely emptying and filling the Basin. At high tide, the ocean seems vast, while at low tide we walked through a landscape of red sandstone and volcanic rocks, cliffs, and sea stacks. Now you can see ocean vistas like Minas Basin at high tide up and down the Northeastern coast, and you can see sandstone and volcanic rock all over this planet. It’s the relationship between the two landscapes —the tidal range of what can be as much as 50 feet—that makes them both unique and one and the same. Much the same way Laurie’s death has emptied me with grief and let joy into my life.

As I travel further along this pilgrimage through life, I’m more aware of how its ebbs and flows run like water-colors, painting a single picture, one I can only see by looking back, but which gives me hope for what lies ahead.

And I find myself more and more intrigued by the question: Who is the artist painting this picture?

fullsizeoutput_1662 — Watercolor by Laurie Wile

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For more on Nova Scotia, you might be interested in my blogs: https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2017/10/16/here-comes-the-judge/ https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2017/10/02/rooting-around/)

The Stay at Home Pilgrimage

Published on April 9, 2019April 9, 2019 by geriatric pilgrim2 Comments

Recently, a former (a word I prefer these days to “old”) high school classmate sent me a podcast of Krista Tippett’s Becoming Wise, in which Tippett talks with Paulo Coelho, author of such popular books as The Alchemist, and The Pilgrimage. In talking about his own “pilgrimage of who am I?” Coelho said that since pilgrimage involves leaving our homes and discovering something new—meeting new people, paying attention to the elements, being open to life—we are on a pilgrimage from the moment we are born to the moment we die.

Of course, I loved hearing this since for over three years the idea of this blog has been to talk about the similarities between the pilgrimages and retreats I’ve been on and the everyday trips I’ve made to basketball gymnasiums, a Ronald McDonald House, 12-step meetings, weekly old-time music jam sessions, high school reunions, and family burial grounds. But Coelho has me wondering if I’m paying enough attention to the pilgrimages I make even when I don’t leave the house.

I have one of these thingies on my smartphone that tells me how many steps I make in a day, and I’m proud as hell when I get over 20,000 steps. But lately, I’ve been focusing on just 12 steps. My daily readings, my phone conversations with my sponsor, are journeys of discovery. Not all of these explorations are pleasant. Just as on a hike I can twist an ankle tripping over an unseen rock, or scrap a knee, or, in the case of a recent hike in Arizona, come back punctured with cactus stickers, I can stumble over a repressed childhood memory, scrape my defenses, puncture my ego. Yet all of these wounds have helped me learn to let go of the perfectionism that has tarred and feathered me with shame and resentment for over seventy years.

As Coelho and other writers on pilgrimage have said, it’s the letting go that makes any journey—interior or exterior—a pilgrimage. And it’s those survival tools I learned growing up at home, such as perfectionism, judgmentalism, codependence, solipsism, and the like, that I’m learning to leave behind.

On my various travels, I’ve met new people, some of whom I’ve written about in these blogs. At home, through my 12-step programs and the writing of this blog, I have also met new folks. And I’ve come to see people I’ve known before in new ways. Yes, I knew Brynna, who sent me the Krista Tippett’s podcast, in high school, but not well. Only in the last few years have I come to see what a delightful person she is. While in Arizona, I took an afternoon away from my retreat to have coffee with Richard, with whom I’d grown up, but had had almost no contact with from grade school to about a year ago. Both he and his wife Alexandra are two of the friendliest and most intriguing people I’ve come to know.

Reading new writers has always been part of any of my pilgrimages or retreats, whether in Arizona, Scotland, or here in Brunswick, Maine. Lately I’ve been reading Martin Laird, whose three books on silence have become the foundation for what I euphemistically call my spiritual life; Beldan Lane, who writes of nature in a way that resonates with and through me; the mystery writer Jo Nesbo; and David Mitchell, author of Atlas Shrugged, The Bone Clocks, and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. I’m also reading new works by authors I think of as old friends—Patricia Hampl, Pam Houston—and rereading works like The Aeneid and the novels of Wallace Stegner with new eyes.

The grandchildren are now almost seven, four, and three, and are new people every visit. And so, if I pay attention, is my wife.

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Mary Lee, my companion on all my travels, is on her own personal pilgrimage, and at dinner we sit and talk about our new discoveries that day. My 12-step work on codependency has shown me that If she and I are to keep growing, we need to give each other the space to do so. Especially since our retirements (at least from paying jobs), it’s important for me to see my wife through new eyes, both mine and hers.

It was after my eighteen-year-old daughter’s death from cancer that I began to find solace in traveling. Then, as I began to see parallels between my journeys to other lands and my journey through the landscape of grief and grace, these trips became pilgrimages. Laurie has been dead now for over thirty years, and each year, she becomes less of a memory and more of a daily presence in my life, no matter where I am. There’s part of me that feels guilty for saying this, but I struggle to recall what my daughter looked like. Seeing her picture on the table in the hall with all the rest of my family usually shocks me a bit. The other day, when I was talking with a student from forty-five years ago, now a dentist working on a novel in which an eighteen-year-old girl is dying, I realized as I was telling Chris about how the girl’s father might feel, that I can talk of Laurie’s suffering and death with detachment. Usually, in November and December, the anniversary of the final two months of my daughter’s life, I’m both physically and emotionally fragile. Last year, however, these months were, for the most part, joyous occasions for friends and family visits. Laurie’s suffering and death, her compassion and joy, our walks together, our disagreements, our shared laughter and tears, have all become one breath, inhaling and exhaling, keeping me alive, while making me less fearful of my own dying. Laurie is not in some far-off land, waiting for me to join her at some future time, but here, now, as I’m coming to believe are all our loved ones.

So, does looking at my life as a series of daily pilgrimages make any difference in the larger scope of things? Well, it’s probably not going to solve the immigration crisis or eliminate global warming, but it is helpful for my serenity to look back and see my life as full of mystery and paradox: wounds that heal; forty, sixty, seventy-year relationships that have become new; togetherness built on separation; physical absence and spiritual presence. And it’s this looking back that makes me less afraid of the future, both of my own and of the world’s.

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Mud Season

Published on March 21, 2019 by geriatric pilgrim3 Comments

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“Poor March. It is the homeliest month of the year. Most of it is mud, every imaginable form of mud, and what isn’t mud in March is ugly late-season snow falling onto ground in filthy mud heaps that look like dirty laundry.” —Vivian Swift, When Wanderers Cease to Roam: a Traveler’s Journal of Staying.

Mud is the most poetic thing in the world. —R. H. Blyth.

I’ve just returned from what is becoming an annual retreat at the Desert House of Prayer, outside of Tucson, Arizona. But if you want to read about the desert, you should read a couple of my earlier blogs— https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2016/03/07/dont-ask-why-just-ask-for-help/ and https://geriatricpilgrim.com/2018/03/19/return-to-the-desert/. I’m going to write about mud.

Which was the first thing I thought of when I woke up the morning after returning from my retreat and looked at a brown, wet, New England landscape choked with trees that looked like sticks, the houses dirty and sad, muddy cars sloshing through puddles, splashing up brown water. Later, I walked to our development’s compost pile through a morass of muck that coated my shoes and tracked into the house, the gunky footprints welcoming me to what we call mud season. Which here in Maine can last longer than springtime.

Let’s face it, mud can be depressing on any number of levels. Our language is full of negative responses to mud: we are “bogged down” in work, “swamped” by debts, “mired” in triviality. We don’t want to “muddy the waters,” and we accuse politicians of “slinging mud.” The Psalmist writes, “… the Lord drew me…out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock.”

Speaking of bogs, one of our current President’s campaign pledges was to “drain the swamp in Washington.” Whether or not he’s succeeding or sinking us deeper into “the miry bog” in debatable, but generally speaking, our civilization has tried to move out of swamps, draining them of mud, replacing them with concrete. (Not always successfully. I once owned a house built on old swamp land, and for the twelve years I lived there, the swamp kept inviting itself back, flooding the cellar, leaving a rug of mud on the cement floor.)

Mud is a place of ambiguity. It’s indefinite, uncertain, and we are a culture that values a distinct, separate self, even if it means putting up walls to keep things and people from seeping through. My Puritan ancestors hated swamps, I suspect, because, in a spiritual sense, there’s nothing to hold on to. Everything is fluid, murky. Like the swamp my house was built on, nature is always about to leak through the tight barriers of morality and hard work.

And yet, while on retreat, I spent time going back into my early childhood, doing some twelve-step work, and realizing that my earliest memory is of playing in the mud. Most children, in fact, are drawn to mud; making mud pies apparently gratifies our first creative instincts. And it’s actually good for us. According to a neuroscience journal, dirt and mud are natural anti-depressants, because the bacteria found in them trigger the release of serotonin in our brains.

Mud rejuvenates. When Mary Lee and I were in Israel, we went to the Dead Sea and covered ourselves in mud—something about the slight buoyancy of mud together with traces of pumice scouring off our dead skin cells. I just thought we looked cool.

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And also sort of sexy. Which makes sense because life on this planet may have been conceived in the mud. Adam, we read in one version of creation, was made from mud. In many Native American creation stories, our continent began with mud. Several recent scientific theories—and one not so recent by Charles Darwin— suggest that the early building blocks of life may have been created in a mud puddle of volcanic ash and warm water some 3.8 billion years ago.

Every year mud season brings new life: daffodils poke from the ground and buds swell on the trees. So, we need the mud for what grows from it. At the same time, when you realize that mud is made up of decayed vegetation and rocks that have been pounded for millions and millions of years into silt, every mud season is also a kind of death. More of that messy ambiguity again.

My trouble is not so much where mud season is taking me, but what I have to go through to get there. I’ve certainly gone through my own personal mud seasons: depression, divorce, the death of a child, illness, addictions, crises of faith. I expect you have, too. Times when nothing is clear, when you have no firm foundation, when you seem to sink deeper and deeper into the mire. And yet, out of these times, you find new life, find yourself growing in ways you never expected.

When I returned to school to get an MFA, one of my mentors was Barbara Hurd, who wrote a wonderful book called Stirring the Mud. In mud, she writes, “the boundary between physical and spiritual melts and we see that one is always infused with the other.” She points out that all of us are more than ninety percent water—“liquid mosaics of mutable and transient urges, and we give ourselves headaches when we pretend otherwise, when we stiffen ourselves into permanent and separate identities.”

Maybe I’m supposed to get dirty. Maybe I’m not supposed to be clear about the fluidity of self. Last week on retreat, during our daily meditation sessions, I saw how elusive, insubstantial, and fleeting my thoughts are. Looking back over my life, I can count at least ten different “identities” I’ve assumed over my almost seventy-six years. I used to call these identities “false selves.” Now, I’m not so sure but that these selves simply leaked back and forth through my life, and what made them “false” was that I clung to them instead of letting them flow.

I have not only returned from Arizona to mud season, I have also returned to the Christian season of Lent, which, as I think about it, is its own kind of mud season, a time of ambiguity, of waiting for new life, while watching where I put my feet. As Philip Simmons puts it in his book, Learning to Fall, “The path to resurrection lies through the mud.”

I’m hoping that during this Lent and this mud season, I will be granted the grace to let the mud teach me to be ambiguous, paradoxical, non-dualistic, non-hierarchical, and receptive—that I may learn to play in the primordial soup of possibility.

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Climbing (Part of) Mount Kilimanjaro

Published on February 9, 2019 by geriatric pilgrim4 Comments

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The first morning of my recent trip to Tanzania, I went out on our cabin porch and the first thing I saw was Mount Kilimanjaro, its snow-capped peak rising over a blue jacaranda tree into cotton clouds and a blue sky. It was breathtaking … for a minute or two.

Then my demons woke up. Ever since Mary Lee and I had reviewed our itinerary back in the spring, I’d had apprehensions about the second day of our trip: a hike up part of Kilimanjaro. It wasn’t much a climb, if you were a climber or if you were fifty-five instead of seventy-five, but the idea of trekking eight kilometers (about five miles) up the mountain and then the same distance back at an altitude that began at 1879 meters (or 6165 feet, higher than any mountain on the East Coast of the United States) filled me with not a little trepidation.

Compounded by the fact that I felt I had to do it or I would somehow be a failure, less of a man. All my life I have measured my worth by what I’ve done. Probably because I grew up in an alcoholic family, shame has been the driving force in my life, and the approval of others my drug of choice, far more addictive than booze or caffeine.

That first day, while Mary Lee and I rested from our 18-hour trip by touring a coffee plantation, I kept glancing up at Kilimanjaro—or where I knew the mountain was; most of the day, it was hidden by clouds—wondering, Can I do this? What will people think of me if I can’t make it?

The next day, Rashid, our guide came to our cabin to pick us up. Short and wiry in his mesh REI baseball cap, sweatshirt, and jeans, he looked about eighteen (although I found out later, he was in his late thirties). During the hour drive to Kilimanjaro National Park, as he talked to our driver in Swahili, I wondered if they were talking about us—okay, talking about me—my pot belly, my hunched back. Climbing a long flight of stairs from the parking lot to the Kinapa Headquarters, my lungs burned and my heart raced. There’s no way in hell I can do this!

While we were taking pictures at the Marangu Gate Entrance, I told Rashid, “Look, my wife and I do a lot of walking, but not much climbing. I’m not sure we can make it to the Mandara Huts and back.”

Rashid grinned. “No problem,” he said. “We’re here to enjoy the mountain. Poli Poli. Slowly, slowly.”

When I start walking, my tendency is to begin at brisk pace and then slow down when I get out of breath, speed up, slow down…. Rashid set out on about the same pace I use when I’m going from the TV set to the bathroom. I took it personally. What kind of whimp does he think I am? I wanted to speed up. Maybe we could do the whole hike after all.

But Rashid seemed to be enjoying himself. He walked ahead of me, hands behind his back, looking around, a smile on his face. I found I had the breath to ask him questions about his life as a guide. He said he started as a porter. As a guide for the last fifteen years, he’d climbed all eight routes to the summit. When I said it must be dull walking with two old people like us, he replied, “No, I always find something beautiful to see. Kilimanjaro is my office.”

On the plane ride from the States, I’d read that Kilimanjaro has five ecological zones. We were hiking through the second zone of dense rain forest. Huge tree ferns surrounded us. Rashid pointed out sycamore trees, junipers, and some incredible moss called “old man’s beard” hanging from their branches. He showed us red gladiolas, a lily with yellow and red spikes, a yellow hibiscus, and “impatiens Kilimanjaro,” which only grows on this mountain and whose blossoms look like pink seahorses with yellow tails.

“Jambo.” A young woman in a red and brown striped skirt and a bright tourquoise bandanna around her head passed us as if we were standing still. She carried a large knife.

“Jambo.” Rashid returned the traditional Swahili greeting. It seemed to me they winked at one another. As she disappeared around a bend ahead, he told us that she was a member of the Chagga tribe, who use the forest for firewood, farming, beekeeping, and logging. I was envious of her youth, her grace, her speed.

Still, when we came to a steep rise, I was grateful for Rashid’s slow pace. Zig-zagging up rocks and roots, I noticed my lungs seemed to have adjusted to the altitude. Rashid began pointing out birds: boubous, hoopoes, hornbills, and my favorite, a turaco, sporting what looked like a purple mohawk haircut on a green head.

Just before noon, we reached a rest area, which Rashid said was about half-way to the Mandara Huts. Now, I knew for certain there was no way we were going to do all of our scheduled hike. My nemesis Shame pointed his finger at me and laughed.

Six German hikers— beginning, they told us, their ascent to the summit—were finishing their lunch. Rashid and their guide talked in Swahili, while Mary Lee and I ate our sandwiches. As this guide was leaving, he smiled at Mary Lee, “Good-bye, Bibi.” He turned to me, “Good-bye, Babu.”

Rashid smiled. “That means “Grandmother and Grandfather.”

My spirits sank. Shame snickered. What, you think he thought you were Robert Redford in Out of Africa?

I don’t know if my disappointment showed or not, but Rashid added, “In Africa, that is a term of respect.”

I thought, Well, Grandfather is what you are, aren’t you? And aren’t you happy to be one? Then I realized that not only was I a grandfather to four kids under seven, but I could be the grandfather of any of the six German climbers. Our guide Rashid was ten years younger than my daughter would have been if she’d lived.

I had a brief vision of eighteen-year-old Laurie lying on her hospital bed, her labored breathing: “Ash…es, ash…es.” I saw my classmate Scott, one of the best athletes I’ve ever played with, struggling to get out of bed a month or so before he died.

Hell, you’re lucky to be anywhere on this mountain.

Shame was silent.

We continued upward. The terrain grew steeper, the vegetation less dense. Suddenly Rashid stopped. “Over to your left. Blue monkey. You don’t see them on the ground much.”

Through the trees, I saw a bluish-black monkey ambling up some rocks. Male, probably 15 pounds, maybe two feet long, with another two feet of tail that looked like a piece of rope.

Would I have seen him, I wondered, if I’d been clamoring up the mountain intent only on getting to the Huts?

An hour or so later, we hit the steepest rise of our hike. Rashid said that at the top we’d see a waterfall. Mary Lee and I looked at each other, and I said what I’d never thought I’d hear myself say: “No, I think we’ve gone as far as we need to. We’re ready to go back.”

I don’t think we’d taken more than a few steps down the path before our guide pointed up. “Colobus monkeys!” Through an overhead canopy of leaves, I saw two large monkeys, black with white trim and magnificent white tails, peacefully munching away.

If we’d kept on climbing, I’d have missed them.

The descent was faster and easier, not only because my lungs weren’t working as hard, but because it felt as if a weight had been removed from my shoulders. As we passed through the forest of variegated flowers, feathery ferns, and lichen-bearded trees, I wondered if what hadn’t lifted was the weight of responsibility to those self-images I keep creating. How often, I thought, have I been a slave to how I want people to see me: the varsity athlete, the Kerouac hipster, the wise, knowing teacher, the grieving parent raging against God, the great writer… always reacting; seldom receiving.

As we made our way down the last slope just before the entrance to Kilimanjaro, Rashid cautioned us, “Poli poli.”

“Yes, slowly slowly. Thank you,” I said, grateful not only for his concern, but also for the gift of the day.

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