Musings of a Middle Aged Man

Back in my fifties, when I lived in Pune, India, I met a Polish gentleman living in the flat below mine. We met when our landlord, the only Zoroastrian I've ever met, invited the two of us to a 'get to know you' dinner. I learned the Polish dude had lived in the building for one month, to my two. He revealed he was struggling to adapt to solo living because he missed all his friends back home with whom he interacted face to face frequently. A month or two later...

If ever there was a man before his time, a man who would bring a revolutionary idea to mankind, that man would be Aldo Leopold. He was an avid hunter and outdoorsman envisioning a hunter's paradise teeming with game animals whose numbers could be boosted by eradicating all predators except man and his long gun. His radical new idea was that nature is not a simple collection of random species separate and distinct from each other, but a singular organism with each part, each species, critical to the overall health of the living organism.

My reality begins each morning when I wake from a dreamless sleep, make a mug of Earl Grey tea sweetened with a 60% honey, 40% brown sugar combination. I carry the steaming mug with a white base decorated in black with Ancient Ancestor, geometrical patterns copied from the stone puzzle walls at Chaco Canyon, place it beside me on the altar I made from a slab of beechwood painted with turquoise, made to appear distressed with sandpaper exposing arcs of the wood's original white bones.

Humanity owes the fruit-bearing serpent a huge debt of gratitude for showing us the way to escape from a state of punishment to one of liberation. Eating the fruit was to break free of bondage, setting humanity on its way to achieving our full potential. The simple act of disobedience put the human in humanity. Eden was never a paradise. Rather, it was a prison designed for continual surveillance. The awareness of being constantly watched enforced discipline and obedience. Every action was subject to divine scrutiny with the potential for punishment for disobeying God's arbitrary rules and regulations. The prisoners are confined to the prison yard Eden with God, the wall and razor wire preventing escape by all means except eating the juicy forbidden fruit growing from the Tree of Knowledge.

write on paper, almost daily, to the tune of one and only one sheet. That amounts to 365 pages over the course of a year, accumulating to 3,650 pages in ten years. In tree terms, that is somewhere between 0.37 and 0.44 trees per decade. This does not account for the bound books I read, a number that is steadily decreasing to a few per year.

As a lover of the written word, I devour books, not as a snake swallows a single book whole rather nibbling at various books as a butterfly flits from beautiful flower to beautiful flower, sipping at their nectar, experiencing an intellectual high of many flavors. Books are as important to my spiritual life as breathing sweet air is to the health of my body. Indispensable! As such, there are books as important to me as the Bible is to believers. The greatest dichotomy, I don't claim my canon is the inerrant utterances of a mythical sky daddy whose ass I must kiss to enter, upon death, and receive the gift of an eternity of servitude.

For as long as I can remember, people have been captivated by the idea of life existing beyond Earth's boundaries. Little green men (assuming they are not hermaphroditic) visiting Earth surreptitiously to either live among us, abduct us for anal probing experiments, or plotting our demise allowing them to strip mine Earth for resources unavailable elsewhere in the multiverse.

I typically feel fear as a constricting knot in my stomach before realizing my building anxiety exists, prior to becoming fearful, and in the most extreme cases, a panic attack finding me curling fetal in my bed, wishing my demons away. Even when the symptoms start, it takes time for me to recognize my pain is psychological, not physical. Upon recognition, I move forward, rearranging the debilitating thoughts into controllable and uncontrollable riffing of the great cricket batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, to control the controllable.

It feels, for most of my life, I have been told, ordered, and cajoled to be obedient, to attend church, excel in school, graduate from university with a degree that would support me, follow the rules of the road and land, respect authority, and other such trite nonsense ostensibly to have and enjoy the good life. The implication is that being an obedient drone will lead to prosperity and happiness. Alternatively, to create waves in the societal fabric would bring disrepute down on top of my head, for which I will rightfully be punished. Succinctly, 'go along to get along' as does the majority of society.

For as long as I can remember, I have prided myself on knowing things, obscure things with little value other than making me appear smarter than I actually am. It was an adrenaline rush shouting out the correct answer before anyone else could raise their hand, earning praise and admiration for my correctness, notwithstanding the egregious relational errors in the process. But, does knowing bits and tids of oddball facts correlate to intelligence? Or simply a mind capable of memorization?

For some, rebellion against injustice comes easily. It is because some of us were born with a rebellious streak hard-wired into our DNA that drives us to confront rather than avoid inequity. A rebellious nature can be viewed as a curse because we have difficulty going along to get along. A rebellious spirit is actually a blessing because rebels are not blown about like chaff in a stiff wind generated from the masses moving in the same direction, similar to a dead fish going with the stream's flow. I readily admit that embracing one's rebellious nature is fraught with challenges...

Unlike in the US, where we hide our elderly in semi-permeable prisons with others of their kind visiting them as time in busy schedules permits, indigenous peoples who tended to venerate the aged kept their mature family members living with them. They were fully aware their ancient ones had earned a lifetime of wisdom from which they offered apples of knowledge for the asking, a tradeoff far outweighing any burden of caring for them as they lost motor and mind functions before succumbing...

I read the news today. Oh boy! About an unlucky people about to lose 250 million acres of public lands to the wealthy, helping them stockpile more money than they can realistically spend in a lifetime, while they cheat their employees out of decent wages. The news was rather sad. Well, I just had to cry. I would like to blame wannabe king TACO, but he is little more than a pawn

Growing up, as I did, indoctrinated in a parochial school system and regularly attending church from birth until I figured a way, in my late teens, to pretend I was going to church while, instead, trying to help the mother ship fight off the invaders from space at the local arcade, the concept of kindness was etched into my psyche as the proper way to conduct oneself in the world. The classic text is the biblical story of The Good Samaritan.

The first Law of Thermodynamics states the cosmic reality that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. In the simplest form, sunlight energy is converted into plant form energy that becomes animal form energy before morphing into microbial energy. Unlike the Laws of the Game for Soccer with its common sense clause that bestows upon the referee the power to ignore the law for the good of the game, the Conservation of Energy Law is an absolute from which deviation is impossible.

There is a progressive conceptual framework when attempting to achieve personal development mastery called SHU-HA-RI. SHU, the initial or beginner stage, is geared toward understanding and mastering the fundamental techniques by meticulously following the prescribed rules without deviation. The neophyte, in Kung Fu terms, the Grasshopper, repeats the fundamentals until they can be executed perfectly without needing to think about their execution.

The surest sign that organized religion is a sham is the assignment of gender to the singular, omnipotent deity, who is and has been orchestrating the universe since pre-time. The deity conjured human life by creating a graven image from the dust on the ground, then breathing into its nostrils. Mary, the proclaimed Mother of God, conceived the second member of the Trinity, not through intercourse with a human or deity, but by a miraculous, non-penetrative act of a transcendent god, elevating virginity to some mystical state, ignoring that the sacred act of intercourse for procreation was designed by their God. This is unlike Greek Mythology, where a physical union between a God and a mortal was necessary to produce offspring.

One of my success factors when leading global software development teams was understanding the way national culture influences values, behaviors, and social interactions. If you were not aware of the differences, there hangs the assumption that everyone is more or less thinks and acts with similar motivations to our own. Understanding that not everyone thinks like me or embraces the norms dominant in my country of origin helped me adapt my thinking and behaviors for optimal collaboration without compromising my integrity.

There was once a dream that was America. In that dream, the founders envisaged a perfect Union based on justice, domestic tranquility, general welfare, and the blessings of liberty on them and our posterity. It was a wild dream, a vivid dream, a dream not readily available in Europe riddled as it was with despots, kings, and an unhealthy political affiliation with the Catholic Church itself flailing on the whims of a corrupted hierarchy up to and including the Popes eager to fill their coffers with gold allowing them to live a life of luxury while the suffering peasants were expected to tithe their meager portions.

In the technology world, there is a generally accepted axiom to skip the initial release of a product and await the second iteration before making a purchase. It is well known, time to market is of utmost importance, more important than the quality of the product, to a degree. The first version, although inspired by a flash of genius, is rushed to market for exposure while knowing it is not feature-rich and will have inherent flaws...hopefully nothing too malignant that people will disparage the product on social media and tank potential sales.

The sordid history of the West is rife with tales of people who view nature as a beast to be tamed, a bird whose wings must be clipped to remove the gift of flight, then confined to a cage where it perches looking longingly at the free skies where it once danced starting with a few flaps of elegantly clothed wings. This abominable act so a human may keep beauty chained in their isolationist home while keeping the natural world long ago abandoned by the naked ape at many arms' length. They fail to realize, the captured bird is suffering the ignominy of prison life, is but a shell, a husk, the chaff of a once free and independent soul.

My soul has been abuzz with spiritual angst for as long as I can remember. It is a queasiness similar to that felt in a churning stomach when suffering through love unrequited. There is a longing for connectedness that hovers just outside my grasp, resulting in deepening susto, soul sickness, and the sense that I am at odds with the beauty, harmony, peace, and balance of the universe. I've stumbled into temporary reprieves, anesthetics not cures.

So critical to the successful survival of the human race is the Secular Humanist drive to compassion, it has become a core tenet of the major religious cults dominating society, claiming it as their own rather than borrowed from nonbelievers. In Buddhism, it is called karunā and is considered one of the highest virtues for a human. The central path of the Bodhisattva is to help others attain enlightenment before they avail themselves of the elevated consciousness. Jainism extends the circle of compassion to include all beings.

I first heard this quote in the incredible movie, The Dead Poets Society, featuring Robin Williams. It was a role that earned him significant nominations from the Motion Picture industry, but, through an oversight born of myopia, he did not win. The Germans, however, did bestow an award for Best International Actor. Gracias, Deutschland for doing what the Academy, with their heads up their asses, refused to do...honor greatness.

Intimacy is a many splendid thing, until it isn't leaving at least one, maybe both parties, in a state of excruciating pain, confusion, and a fear to ever be vulnerable again. I am not referring to sexual intimacy, which tends to be a mixed bag of emotional and physical connectedness. Sexual congress can also arise devoid of intimacy because one or both parties craves sexual release, a common quality with men since the dawn of time, and becoming more common with women in modern times.

One of the greatest challenges for the continuation of the human species is that we view ourselves as separate from, rather than an integral part of, the natural world. From this perspective, that places us on a perch with the other gods and goddesses, we believe it is our right to hurt, maim, kill, and obliterate our fellow travelers, be they animal, bacteria, mineral, or plant.

Depending upon perspective, the monkey regularly hijacking my mind, swinging from idea to idea without exploring the savory thoughts ripening on the branch, is either a curse or a blessing. The term monkey mind is derived from a Chinese word meaning heart-mind monkey. It is an idea foundational across Buddhist traditions to describe how thoughts jump capriciously from one focus to another, no matter how tenuous the interstitial connection or non-connections between leaps. It is often paired with the phrase "idea horse," further emphasizing the mind's restless and wandering nature.

Given my druthers, I would prefer to drive the three thousand miles necessary to cross the country than take a plane covering the same distance in a fraction of the time. Not because I don't value my time, but rather because I tend to be diligent in investing my time for maximum return. Life is a collection of loosely connected experiences. Those experiences can be direct through participatory action, vicarious hearing of others' activities, or imagined as in a daydream, a night dream, or a vision. Who amongst us has not woken from a dream or emerged from a vision so lost we forget where we are, while our heart beats out of our chest trying to get our bearings?

I have an affinity for Ravens, which is odd for a person growing up in an area of the country where they don't typically venture. I have a particular, perhaps peculiar, fondness for a Raven with sun-yellow eyes named Mortimer, whom I have encountered on unique occasions while visiting my beloved southwest United States. It is just now that I am putting two and two together and realize the connection is possibly, dare I say likely, we are generational compadres, displaced countrymen far from our Norse roots.

Raised, as I was, in a Western, Judeo-Christian society, I was indoctrinated not only with the concept of a capricious, vindictive god but also with the associated philosophy that time is linear, a limited resource, a one-way progression with a beginning and end bookending me in the present, a unique sequence of non-repeating events moving forward with an ultimate deadline.

I have heard the human condition is as a body harboring the spirit, and, alternatively, a human is a spirit inhabiting a body. The subtle difference in language when equating body and spirit has an impact well beyond the juxtaposition of the two words, body and spirit. The former arrangement implies the body is the primary home that releases the soul upon death. The latter designates the soul as the foundation with the body, but a temporary housing for a soul to exist in the physical realm before death, whose ultimate home is the spirit realm. It all boils down to the key question, which is primary, body or soul?

Back when my father could still heave a musky lure into Canadian waters where the loons serenaded from dawn until dusk, we took an annual fishing trip into the great Canadian Wilderness where we dropped lines in the massive Minnitaki Lake on our quest for monster pike and fleshy walleye bound for the skillet and a shore lunch in pristine surroundings. As with any fishing trip, the fish must be found and hungry before they are caught. If the holes from the last trip are unproductive, underwater structures and weed patterns are surveyed in an attempt to locate fish, turning fishing into catching.

Sometimes I think I am actually a ghost wandering the halls of my small home undetectable by human senses, catching the begrudging attention of the dog and cat, both of whom live in an extra-sensory world where they can smell the unseen and hear the invisible touch. Then, I think, ghosts exist devoid of bodily functions, negate the need for beverages and food stuffs. I have a cuppa with me almost constantly and, in my bid to ease the burden on my heart, am constantly desiring food to fill the nagging voice in my stomach. So, not ghost. What then? I

The pondering that kicks off whenever I go camping tends to focus my monkey mind while I am out and about in the wild spaces. My focus lingers for diminishing days until the monkey resumes control. Or, more accurately, the monkey resumes the lack of control, scattering thoughts, making it difficult to write a coherent sentence, let alone an enticing essay or a seductive story worth reading. Camping brings me close to the source, the fount of energy oozing from every cell in every plant, animal, rock, and microbe, intimate with their natural surroundings. It is an enclave of mystical miasma existing in a harmonious balance that befuddled the modern human mind, stuck, as it is, in the cluttered city with so much noise, rational thought becomes a challenge, and human-on-human violence the unfortunate byproduct.

I can't say I've always felt like an outcast, but it was a prevailing burden in my psyche's coming of age and has become a dominant theme by which I navigate emotional existence. Truth be told, living on the periphery is a house with its own charm and challenges...mostly charm...still some challenges, but not enough challenges to permanently evacuate my charming house.

Possibly, the greatest US delusion, running just ahead of the Christian Nation fallacy, is we are the only country with freedoms or that we are the freest nation on the planet. Some idiots go so far as to refer to imperial measurements as freedom units and US currency as freedom money. However, when it comes to freedoms as measured by guaranteed rights, guaranteed liberties, and guaranteed freedoms, the Global Human Freedom Index, a non-governmental entity, the US clocks in at a respectable number 20

I have spent most of my life in a state of rebellion, locking horns with authority figures and not always in constructive ways. I believe this operating mode is innate, the alignment of my DNA against the prevailing geomagnetic lines such that I am genetically predisposed to meet them orthogonally. It is not like I have a choice in the matter. If I did, my life would have flowed from point A to B like the glassy calm Everglades rather than the stage six river raging from extreme turbulence to downright unrunnable. An imminent threat to limb and life.

I am finally at the age I have cursed because my joints are stiffening, my back is less stable, my mind is slipping, and my available years are diminishing. It is also an age I have looked forward to because I am financially stable, with the workaday world dominating my life since 1985, fades in the rearview mirror, while the 40-year dreams await on the horizon to be realized. It came a couple of years earlier than anticipated, but who am I to look the gift universe in the mouth?

It is said, rightly so, humanity is a gregarious offshoot of prehistoric ancestors, evolved and spreading to the eight corners of this spherical earth because we gravitate toward community with others of our ilk. Further evidence of our NEED to associate is the adoption of the feathered, furred, and scaled people as surrogate family members who are often treated better than human members of the family.

American education tends to fixate on producing the "correct" answers to standardized tests, even if by rote, as its measure of success. It is not until the Master's level at University that the curriculum switches to one requiring the student to do their own research and to think critically about data on their way to data-centric conclusions that can withstand scrutiny.

At a recent concert, an iconic American musician hit out at the tRump administration as "corrupt, incompetent, and treasonous," and declared that the America that was "a beacon of hope and freedom for 250 years" is now under the thumb of a corrupt regime rotting the America that was from the head down. To be clear, the "beacon of hope" is not without significant blemishes, including, but not limited to, slavery and Jim Crow, the systematic annihilation of the aboriginal inhabitants, the horrific Mai Lai Massacre during the ill-fated American war in Vietnam, and countless imperialist incursions and military interventions against soverign nations in their own lands.

Humanity's earliest hominid upright walking ancestors were arboreal, tree dwellers, descending from the safety of trees to forage diverse, patchy environments with wetlands, forests, palm groves, and grass-rich areas, offering a range of resources from arboreal, terrestrial, and aquatic habitats. This ecological diversity likely supported an opportunistic lifestyle, requiring adaptability to both ground and tree-based living. The systematic hunting of large animals arose with the advent of group cooperation along with the forging of sticks and stones into weapons capable of felling prey much bigger, stronger, and quicker than their individual selves. When these proto-human ancestors were under threat themselves, they scurried back to the safety of the trees, their sanctuary from predation.

Zafón, easily my favorite author hailing from Barcelona, Spain, possibly my favorite writer in all of Europe, wrote books that read like poetry while telling compelling stories anchored in Spain's tumultuous history. He easily holds a place in my top authors along with Edward the Prophet Abbey, Eduardo Galeano, Haruki Murakami, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Pablo Neruda, and Terry Tempest Williams, all, whose books I've pretty much exhausted aside from obscure works I can't find. Four on the list composed their blood and tears in Spanish. So compelling were their English works, I am saddened I'm not able to experience the Spanish language versions with the nuances that escape translations or non-native speakers. Such is the curse of being monolingual in a world blessed with legions of fascinating languages, including words that are not translatable into my natal tongue.

If you had told me the seminal book 1984 by George Orwell, I read decades ago, was a prognosticator rather than a theoretical dissertation based on historical realities, I would have laughed in your face while keeping my fingers crossed that we as a society, learned enough from experience with the totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Mao, Mussolini, and others to never slide down that vile rabbit hole again. Still, I was not overly surprised when tRump beat one of the most despised women in the country to become the 45th US president. Disappointed in the American people, but not overly surprised at their lack of compassion for the less fortunate, exacerbated by a dearth of critical thinking skills.

I enjoy learning about things, amassing knowledge about stuff, having the answer ready should some obscure, vexing question arise. This innate drive was expressed, as I recall, with a fascination of many things in the scientific realm. Not so in-depth with biological sciences. The dynamics of human bodily functions confuses and, I must admit, sometimes gags me with a spoon. Unless they were more about admiring the external beauty as expressed in the colorful shells boasted by lizards, snakes, and the living dinosaurs we currently identify as birds (no matter if birds are or are not real). Give me rocks, tree leaves, or components in the physical sciences, and I was in wholeheartedly building upon the growing catalogue of useless facts I could unleash in an instant when prompted.

An aspect of bird life I greatly admire, besides the ability to take wing and view Earth from on high, is that they are free to explore wherever their hearts desire, bounded only by the food they prefer to ingest. If a bird chooses to expand their palette, they can dwell virtually unbounded. Some, like the Arctic Tern, use their freedom to round-trip close to 60 thousand miles every year, while the diminutive Bee Hummingbird, a native of Cuba, lives and dies in an area less than 150 square yards.

It may be obvious, but I will say it anyway. Though writing is a solitary activity, it can not be done in isolation. All experiences, knowledge, genetics, and imagination contribute to the creation. Even the environment in which I write has an influence. It is as if the environment breathes ideas into my head, ideas seemingly lifted from the environment, from the thought energy emanating from animals, plants, minerals, and microbes. Each energy type has a unique signature, be it the mountains, beach, mixed forest, tundra, etc.

It wasn't until years later that I learned Vulcans did have emotions. The intensity of their emotions resulted in irrational action, so the society, guided by elders, opted to subjugate their emotions to pure logic. Just knowing a being like Mr. Spock could exist gave me hope that a rational existence could be the hallmark of a superior humanity and a kinder, gentler society. Can you say, return to paradise?

Like the inward turning Buddhists, I was raised in a large metropolis. Unlike the Buddhists who grew up in what was pretty much a monoculture, the area I was raised was populated with people of all colors, shapes, and sizes. I am currently living in a densely packed city with multi-story homes built so close together, it is pert near possible to run from roof to roof...if the roofs were not pitched at a severe angle, one misplaced footstep from splitting on the concrete sidewalks. The opportunities to carve out a parcel of outdoor space for relaxing meditation are hampered by the weather and people occupying every cranny and nook in a multi-mile radius.

As much as I appreciate the laws of physics and relish in precise mathematical concepts and believe society should adhere to generalized guidelines, I am a huge fan of breaking rules, especially when they are capricious, arbitrary, and not uniformly applied. I am saying this as a former soccer referee assigned the authority to judge and mete out punishment, up to and including execution, upon breakers of the sacred Laws as handed down from on high by IFAB, the sole arbiter of the soccer holy book. Thankfully, the high priests of soccer Laws of the Game include an overarching premise that the laws are to be applied with common sense, allowing the referee to ignore infractions if doing so is for the good of the game, including the enjoyment of participants both playing the game and watching the game being played.

One of the greatest evils foisted upon growing children is the Christian fixation on the mythical Satan used to terrorize the tender-aged with the teaching that they will spend eternity in the Lake of Fire for not kowtowing to the tenets laid out in the Bible. Childhood, in the modern day, is supposed to be a carefree time of growth through exploration, not a season to suffer night terrors because they may make an unknown, unforgivable mistake, condemning them to an eternity being tormented. Ostensibly, the fairy tale, worse than any Grimm conjured, is used to enlighten immature minds to the way of the one true religion out of near-endless possibilities, growing them into mature and moral righteousness. We will, conveniently, forget for a moment that adults are unable to avoid 'sinful' behavior, even opting to ignore or rationalize away those that interfere with them living their lives according to the beat of their peculiar drum.