Underlying Conditions

It's happened again. 

While stumbling through the bleary eyed morning routine of coffee, feeding the dogs, and checking email, I hear the empty headed, blonde news babe on Channel 3 chirp that there has been another death in Maricopa County linked to the West Nile virus.  But, she babbles to her equally vacuous anchorette, the patient had underlying conditions that contributed to his demise, so there clearly is nothing to worry about.  Just use a little Off, and no green pools!  And now to sports.

I want to puke.

There really is no other way to say it.  Yeah, I know, more people die from car wrecks and bad food than from West Nile.  And you know, those underlying conditions.  If those poor slobs didn't have those underlying conditions, well now, they'd just be fine and dandy.  West Nile had nothing to do with it.  Nothing to worry about.  No panic.  Be calm, little sheep.

That is such a fail.  Yes, some people get West Nile and have nothing more than an influenza.  More people are infected and their lives are completely shattered by the devastation of the illness and the length of the recovery; and many are not able to return to work.  And some, fine one day, are bitten by a mosquito, and within a few hours are critically ill and eventually die, either from the disease roaring through an inflamed brain, or from other infections that invade the burned over wreckage that has become their body.  Like my husband.  With all his underlying conditions.

I am sure that the "underlying conditions" qualifier is to keep the public from panicking.  But the truth is West Nile virus is a killer, just like AIDS, smallpox, Ebola or any other flavor of death dealing infection.  Call the murderer by its true name:  Pestilence.  Disease.

West Nile virus is a disease.  And the dead were killed by West Nile, not by their "underlying conditions".  No amount of Health Department spin is going to change that.

The New World

I think that there is a moment in everyone's life where you are struck with a startling, shattering realization of the world beyond yourself.  For me, it came when I was about three, playing in the sand next to Lake Michigan on a late August morning.  The breeze had freshened out of the northwest as a cold front had roared through the night before with thunder, lightening and hail; with the muggy heat wave broken, there would be no more swimming in the lake that summer.  Something caught my attention, though; I distinctly remember rocking back on my heels and leveling a long look at the northwestern horizon.  The sky was a brilliant blue and Lake Michigan was a gunmetal mirror under it; there were waves, gulls, kids running around and yelling, fishermen lounging lazily on the pier.  But there was something there; something immense, silent and still, more powerful than anything in the world that I had encountered so far.  Clean, pure, full of light and dark, beyond understanding, and somehow, I was aware that I was caught up in that and would never be able to fully comprehend it.  I remember a sense of fear at first, then a growing awe at something I couldn't grasp but was fully aware of.  And because of that awakening, I would never be the same.

I was aware of it that day, and have felt it it since:  the solitude of an abandoned concert shell in November, watching the winter winds hurl snow across Lake Mendota, northern lights setting the sky on fire at Crystal Lake; the dark schist of the Estrella Mountains brooding over the empty valley below. For me, nature is the best mirror to reflect this feeling.  I have wondered if explorers had this sense of isolation and awareness as well; a conquistadore, having left everything he knew and loved behind with a full realization that he most likely would not return to that place, stepping from the shifting deck of a ship, splashing through the water and suddenly finding his feet on the sand of the shore.  Buzz Aldrin commented on the sense of "magnificent desolation" when he first stepped on to the moon: the boot in the dust, eyes raised to a close horizon and then focusing on the blackness beyond.   The New World, and all of God's gifts therein, but never what we expected.

On a sunny Saturday in October when I watched Bill die, I was overwhelmed by that same sense of being carried away by a power I could not understand. As my husband began a journey that I could not join, I remember standing on the sidewalk outside of the hospital, balancing on the balls of my feet, feeling the world rock and sway under me and seeing that same desolation in the stretch of the sidewalk, grass rolling away to the street, the vacant sky overhead.  Eliot's words circled in my mind:   

Either you had no purpose

Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured

And is altered in fulfilment.

Somehow, it all made sense:  I had been iceboating once on Keuka Lake, roaring towards Hammondsport at fifty miles an hour when we hit a patch of rotten ice--not uncommon off the Bluff, at the confluence of the two arms of the lake, where wellsprings deep underwater created whirlpools and eddies.  We didn't break through because of our speed and the iceboat balancing its runners on the thin skim of ice.  There was immense darkness under that ice, three hundred feet of cold water to the bottom of the ancient glacial lake.  I looked into that blackness with the same sense of awe that I had when I was first aware of the sun, the sky, the water of Lake Michigan and the same old, old wind that blew straight across Canada from the north pole.  At Hammondsport, we beached the iceboat, and stepping off across the crumpled ice I placed my foot on the frozen sand at Champlin Beach; this too was a new world.

A year ago, I was speculating on a sense of dread that I had been feeling; my father had died the year before, Bill's health had been declining, my job was on the rocks.  As the Earth turned around the sun, three hundred and sixty five days later it is a new world.  Now, as I stand on the shores of Alamo Lake, I look north towards Artillery Peak; the sky is a clear, translucent blue, the color of his eyes.  The air is still and cold, the water smooth as glass.  I am balanced on the soles of my feet, feeling the earth under me, rocking with the beat of my heart.   

The New World: every day is a new world, full of portent, potential, life, death, silence and the hope of God.  And so we step off, as we must, every day onto a foreign shore.

The Principle of Moments

My love is a-miles in the waiting
The eyes that just stare, and the glance at the clock
And the secret that burns, and the pain that grows dark
And it's you once again
Leading me on - leading me down the road
Driving beyond - driving me down the road

My love is exceedingly vivid
Red-eyed and fevered with the hum of the miles
Distance and longing, my thoughts do provide
Should I rest for a while at the side
Your love is cradled in knowing
Eyes in the mirror, still expecting they'll come
Sensing too well when the journey is done
There is no turning back . . .  Robert Plant




The past weeks have been moments lit in flashes, like the strobe of lightning; instead of dynamic memories,  I see in my mind frozen images of life, struggle, death.  Then the ambulance, the hospital, the mortuary, sitting in a stifling sales room populated with stubs of coffins, crypts and truly hideous neon cremation urns.  A fan unsteadily oscillated in the corner while I filled out death certificates, applications, writing checks, paying in coin, tears and heartreak to bring Bill home.  The stale bureaucracy of death:  obituaries, letters, emails, sympathy cards opened, and then tied up with a ribbon and put away.  A dark green gift bag is delivered to me with a plastic box; inside of that 7.6 pounds of gray sand.  My son observes as we come into the world so we go out.


I sit at his desk, and idly open drawers; there are files and projects and notes for clients, work that will never be finished, a life ended.  A lot of this has to be shredded or destroyed; I slide the drawer closed.  I can't do this today, just like I can't sort over shoes, overcoats and photos, tools, guns or telescopes.  A picture of Bill as a young man, lying on his back under huge bundles of cable,calibrating a cyclotron; another photo of a long forgotten Christmas with his children, small happy kids with gap toothed grins and hands full of toys.  Pictures of Bill with dogs long gone.   I like the fancy that they were waiting for him with wagging tails and balls to throw, but this is probably more to make me feel better.


I have never subscribed to woo-woo, but when I came home that afternoon, as  I broke down and leaned against the refrigerator, pressing my forehead into the metal door,  I felt a sense of peace, coolness, wash over me.  I had felt this before, when my Dad died.  I was flying home, and  as the plane lifted into a darkening sky and the tears were burning my eyes, suddenly there was a wave of quiet release and suddenly I felt that somehow, everything would be all right, that the world would return to order and calm. 


Tonight, I drove down Rainbow Valley Road, the Estrella Mountains crouching against the skyglow of Phoenix on my left; turned onto Riggs Road, navigated past where the blacktop explodes into rutted gravel, found the cattle grate that signals the entrance to the North Maricopa Mountain Wilderness.  This was where we took our last camping trip and where we think Bill got that fatal mosquito bite.  I stopped, got out and lay flat on the desert pavement.  The air was still and quiet; the moon had set, and the stars were wheeling overhead in an incredibly dark sky.  Are you there?  There is nothing but the night, and the silence pressing in on me.  No feeling came, other than the sense of the firm earth underneath me, the softness of the air against my skin, the dark vault of heaven arching above.  But that will have to be enough.  Somehow, everything will be, will have to be all right.

The Vanishing Point

My husband died today. My husband, partner, buddy, prep master, shooting buddy, political guru and all around best friend died when I removed the ventilator circuit from his tracheostomy and shut off the IV fluids which were keeping him alive.

There was no hope. He had been fighting West Nile encephalitis since March and had contracted almost all of the conceivable hospital borne infections. Now, because of all the antibiotics and the resultant c. difficile opportunistic invasion, he was hemorrhaging at both ends. And despite the best of intentions, big medical brains, intensive nursing care, and all the work I could do, there was nothing left to be done. Through a series of decisions with increasingly minimized options, the final choice was to end suffering and bring release. The sad reality and irony was that for the past six years I had been manically following H5N1--and what took Bill down was a avian virus delivered via the mosquito vector. The assassin's mace; you never know quite where to look for the next threat. And then, suddenly, here it was.

Bill accepted Christ into his life in his last days (something which I never expected to happen, but then, there are no atheists in foxholes!). And when the end came, he accepted it with a dark grace. His eyes had a cold, blue, distant gaze, fixed into some middle distance where we could not see. Then, as his heart slowed, blood pressure dropped and breathing ceased, his grasp around my hand weakened and dropped away.

I know that life will go on, that I will get up and go to work, pay the bills, feed the dogs, cut the grass. But somehow, I feel like a deep, critical part of me has been cut away, and that wound will bleed for the rest of my life--blood looking, in its bright, slow and sinuous way, to heal the missing heart.

Vaya con Dios, Bill. Go with God, sweetheart.

The Event Horizon

We had been four wheeling out in the desert all day long, following the sinuous Agua Caliente Road.  A quick lunch at the abandoned Sundad site, then with cold beers in hand we turned north to pick up the railroad service track at Hyder. It was a warm April day and when I got out of the truck the rail tracks vanished to a distant point, shimmering in a mix of heat and mirage.

It wasn't too far from where I stood that a passenger train had hurtled off the tracks twenty years past, the victim of some pseudo militia sabotage.  Dozens of people were injured in that wreck, and one person was killed--I had been working at the hospital that day and had seen the steady parade of helicopters ferrying bloodied and terrified travelers in from the wreck site.  It was an image that I had trouble settling in my mind--darkness, fear, the ripping and grinding sounds, screams,  cartwheeling train cars, a horrible conclusion of plans, events, speed and time.    I mused now on the interesting illusion of converging parallel lines, brilliant and silver in the desert light; what seems sure and certain and continuous slowly merges together and disappears into a western afternoon so far from the chaos of that wreck.

The image returned to me as I stood in Bill's ICU room, surrounded by batteries of equipment that were keeping him alive.  How had I let it all come to this?  Over and over I heard "He wouldn't want to live like this.  How could you have done this to him?"  I always consdiered myself sophisticated and advanced in the matters of health care; we both had living wills which we thought spelled out exactly our desires to live and die.  But suddenly, here we were; Bill's illness and horrible decline had necessitated a series of decisions in the face of decreasing options; it was like descending into a funnel, straight into hell.  Now there were no choices left, no options, no white magic to pull him back from the edge.  Hospice, remove life support; friends came in tears to make their farewells to an unresponsive, unmoving, unknowing body in a bed.  Make your decisions.   How could you have let this happen?  For the first time in my life I truly knew what it was to feel a heart breaking, being torn in half by grief.

The nurses studiously avoided me; the social worker was supercilious and condescending.  "He lived a good life.  How long have you been married?  Well, you should have expected this, given your age differences."  The fever raged, the white cells climbed, I consulted mortuaries, obtained quotes, retrieved life insurance documentation, wrote emails to friends.

A quiet young doctor approached me.  "There is one last thing I would like to try."  He had never given up on Bill, and I had to honor his request for a new treatment.  The fever broke overnight, but the white cells continued to climb.  Bill's hand was limp in mine; the bones seemed to float separate of their joints, the skin cool and damp.  His nurse circled around his bed like a small blue satellite and numbly I watched her.  "What are you giving him? "" Morphine".  Something burned in my mind like a small comet, a shooting star.  Pay attention.  Pay attention.  "How much morphine?" "Three milligrams every three hours".  Since Bill got sick, all sedatives knock him cold.  "Can we try a non narcotic for his pain?"  "Well, dear, we don't want him to be in pain, now do we?"

I resisted an overwhelming urge to belt this woman into the middle of next week.  "He has a standing order for tramadol.  Can we hold the morphine for a few hours?"  After much arguing and consulting with the doctor, the nurse finally agreed.  I watched, carefully and quietly, my husband's ashen face, as I have for the days, minutes and hours since he became ill.  The sun was setting, illuminating the room with a golden glow reflecting off the concrete walls of the hospital in through the strange and large oval windows that Good Sam is known for.

A black hole is where a sun has collapsed under its own mass, and where the gravity is so intense that even light cannot escape.  But Stephen Hawking proposes that in the strange world of quantum mechanics that a dim light flickers at the boundary of the black hole:  Hawking radiation on the event horizon.  Maybe that is what I was sensing, what was tearing me apart in the face of pulling the plug.  Maybe I was sensing life dancing on the edge of darkness.  There was a flicker of an eyelash, then suddenly Bill was looking at me.  Truly looking at me, for the first time in three months.  We had gone through the black hole, the point of convergence and had come out the other side.

The Red Queen

I had read that the concept of the Red Queen as a biological murderer was lifted from Lewis Carroll.  At first it was a metaphorical figure for sexual dominance in a hierarchy, but then also (more appropriately) a figure for the victory of the battle in life over life.  Step by step, life over arches and consumes life.  Bacteria, viruses, animals, humans: the small usually fall to the large, but then also the most minute fragments of life can devastate the most complex organism.  Even in our polished and high tech, high touch, twenty first century world, healing cannot hold, wrongs cannot be righted, the sick cannot be made well.  Death comes for us all.

The doctor's eyes were hidden and pained.  "We have done everything we can.  Your husband is on every antibiotic, and yet his white cell count continues to rise."  The nurse slides morphine into Bill's veins and does not tell me; he murmurs to my friends.  "She is emotional; his son will set her straight".  When I hear that, I laugh, since the son is as variable and inconstant as the breeze; I have somehow been managing to hold things together since the Red Queen came roaring in and toppled the walls of my husband's mind.

He put up a hell of a fight; the struggle was mighty.  Behind bags of cipro, zyvox and daptomycin, primaxin, flagyl and rifampin, cellular death and warfare roared.  In the end, the host was overrun, the castle burned to the ground, beaten back by fever, incomprehensible pain and fatigue.

Tonight, it is clear the end is near.  His eyes roam restlessly under his eyelids, sometimes staring deeply into my gaze, sometimes fixed in the corner of the room where the dark man waits, but always as blue and as transluscent as the northern sky.  My tears fall down on his face and he flinches from the pain.  I love you so much.  You are my best friend, my companion, my buddy, the warm hand I touch in the night, the guitar string that resonated to my restless energy.  I did my best, but in the end, my best was not good enough to keep you here. 

Vaya con Dios, Bill.  Go with God.

Fire

There are few things that please me more than a good fire.  We would build a modest campfire after dinner in the camper, and settle down with bellies full of steak and salad, bourbon and a splash in our mugs.  The chairs would be arranged just so to allow for careful placement of moccasined feet on the fire ring and to allow room for snoring Labradors to twitch and grumble underneath.  Sometimes, being poised on the still point of the turning world involves finding the perfect balance between the love, light and heat suffusing the campfire and the cold darkness pressing against our backs as a starry Arizona sky wheels overhead.

It is easy to spin out the metaphor of fire; light from the sun captured in growing mesquite and pinon, released into ephemeral flickers and dark smoke carried out over the canyon.  Fire from the sun, fire from the stars, from the blinding light and flash of the first moments of being; all of this created the moment, the "now" of being, the uncomfortable awareness of moving through  the universe and the even more uncomfortable awareness that someday the light flickers out.  The fire of creation is also the fire of destruction; existence is intense, bright and short.

Fire is also fever.  Fever is the body's last defense against infection, the struggle to maintain life at the cellular level.  A virus invades, perverts cells into mutations; the body responds with a cascade of white blood cells and the elevated termperture.  I have had fevers in my life; illnesses like the flu which lit me up with heat and  ache.  The sensation of fever is bizarre; in my case, lower fevers caused malaise and fatigue while higher temperatures seemed to scorch to fog out of my head and allow me to see the world with a strange illumination; fire behind every atom of matter, a halo of light.

But I had never seen fever like this.  Bill's fever was lethal, the shirt of Nessus determined to extinguish his life.  First fevers from the virus, scorching his brain; then fever from the inevitable bacterial infection roaring through his body.  In an hour his temperature soared to one hundred and five degrees.  His eyes were fixed into an upward glare, unable to blink; his muscles racked, locking and unlocking in tremors that vibrated the hospital bed away from the wall.  The ICU nurse was focused in, using all her "mad skillz", pumping tylenol after ibuprofen after demerol after morphine through the IV.  I ran and fetched ice bags, wet towels, soaked sheets; coaxed and cajoled a floor fan from a sweating security guard:  I mopped and fanned, damped and iced.  I prayed.  I tried, with my thoughts to reach out through that red darkness to find my husband's mind and hold on.

Bill came back; within an hour and a half he was asking for coffee and wanting to order us a pizza.  But the fevers returned again and again and again, until in frustration a doctor sent my husband back to a regular room, since "his fevers are persistent and untreatable".  After another crash and return to ICU, I found Bill unable to breath and scorching hot.  I held his hand, begging him to come back to me, even if for just a moment so I could say goodbye.  He stared through me and began shaking violently, in incomprehensible terror.  "There is a man.  He has a gun. He is here for me.  Don't you see him?"  The corner he was looking into was empty.

I stood between him and the corner. "If he is coming for you, he's got to go through me first."  The respiratory therapist administered a treatment; an oxygen mask was placed; I draped a cool washcloth over his eyes.  Slowly the tremors decreased, the breathing slowed, the hand relaxed and sleep came, and healing.  A new drug, a new protocol, and Bill began to surface, breathing damply, thickly,  like a drowned swimmer.  Every fever strips away a little more strength, a little more consciousness, a little more time.

A fever, the sun, a thermonuclear blast, campfires, heat, friction, liberation, destruction.  Fire consumes and creates.  It is too soon to know what the fire has left behind, destroyed or annealed.  I have been too close now not to know that death will come eventually; but Bill's will to live is an amazing thing to see.  He has always proclaimed agnosticism, but I point out to him that there are no atheists in foxholes. He gives a  small, wary smile, admitting to feeling that when he was drifting away there was an immense sense of peace in going home and that he was no longer afraid.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope or else despair
  Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre--
  To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment?  Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
  We only life, only suspire
  Consumed by either fire or fire.
--T. S. Eliot  Little Gidding

Threads

A virus is one of the most microscopic bits of existence; not really alive, but life like, small, threatening, powerful.  This is what the doctors think brought my husband's life almost to a standstill then into a mind bending tailspin.  A mosquito's proboscis, infected with some minute fragment of an unknown virus, digging into the deltoid muscle.  Then a strange rash as the virus marched up protopathic and epicritic pathways, invading hypothalumus, hippocampus, amygdala, cortex, overthrowing the seat of reason and setting his mind on fire.  A headache, malaise, fever, delirium, coma, ?death? .  The slow, deliberate clawing back on shore, somehow coming back to daylight.

I feel like a demented Penelope,  trying to spin the threads of Bill's memory back into some recognizable record of life as he drifts from memory to hallucination to awareness only to be swept away again into some dark closet full of terror.  He is pinned in a corner of his hospital room, raging at his inability to manipulate his wheelchair.  Reorient, reposition, remind; the breathing slows, the wide eyes narrow and the voice becomes calm.  Victories come in small steps.  He knows now why he is in the hospital; he demonstrates to the speech therapist complex calculus and how to compute the declination of the orbit of a spy satellite. The physical therapist is trying to get a road bike at cost.  My husband tells me of the nightmare of being drowned in blood as he remembers pulmonary hemorrhage and the rescue of intubation and I listen calmly, while screaming inside. He bitches about the hospital food (which is hideous) and refuses to eat. 

The neurologist assures me that there will be a complete recovery, and I believe him, but this virus burned through my husband's brain and extinguished almost all of the lights.  Now, thoughts blink like fireflies and find connections, slowly, tenaciously, with persistence, pulling the threads together.  It is an odyssey that I never in my wildest dreams expected to be on, but here we are, trying to figure it out and stumble through.  One foot in front of the other.  One word at a time.  

Sunrise

Arizona is a wonderful place to stare at the sky.  A night full of stars, the pastel colors of twilight and dawn, the long slanted light of February or the dagger sun of July; the light changes, fills and illuminates.  On a Tuesday morning, the nurse reached over and shut off the Propafol dripping into my husband's veins.  The ventilator sighed in the corner, the breaths moving steadily in and out of his lungs.  I spoke his name over and over, trying desperately to keep my voice calm and steady, hide the tears that had filled my head for the past week.  Slowly, the lids lifted, and that white Arizona light filled his eyes, firing them to a radioactive blue.

We would camp in the desert; in the lavender dawn and over a cup of coffee, Bill would look over the quiet world and quote Kipling:  The sun comes up like thunder, from China across the bay. And the Sun would indeed break the horizon, shooting long dark shadows, turning the red rocks into fire for the briefest moment..

Life is like thunder.  The sky fills with an intense light, the roar crashes and fills your head beyond the capacity to hold any sound; then darkness and silence. And another lightning bolt, another, another ; and then, eventually, a quiet night under a black sky drilled with brilliant and unblinking stars.

The Razor's Edge

My husband is close to death.  Bill started feeling rotten about a week ago and descended through weakness, lethargy, confusion and finally into seizures, aphasia, violent delirium and coma.  The sense of being a powerless, horrified onlooker is beyond overwhelming.

The hospital has been great, the staff attentive and responsive, but I feel like I am navigating the razor's edge trying to help with my husband's care.  The same story told over and over and over to any number of skeptical medicos:  a camping trip over a gorgeous weekend in the Arizona desert, headache the following day, then the avalanche. No, not a smoker.  Yes, a social drinker.  And every day, a new, possible diagnosis. Delirium tremens?  Yes, then no; social history and blood chemistry does not support this.  Septicemia?  Yes, then no.  No infection.  We are finally at viral encephalits, probably West Nile Virus, because of abnormal cerebrospinal fluid analysis. 

The doctors and nurses engage in wonderful synchrony, full of shared, private humor and confidence of numbers.  I know that feeling, because I used to work in the same environment.  But now, standing on the other side of the bed, I feel even more isolated, because I know the code,  I recognize the semaphore, I instinctively grasp the message behind the message in the programmed responses from the medical staff.  Bill is very sick.  He almost died Sunday night.

Now I look at my husband, who always has been somewhat larger than life to me.  He is sedated, but not truly asleep.  The ventilator sighs, sounding so much like water hissing up on a rocky shoreline.  His feet float under the sheet; hands wave gently in the air in a strange, Jacksonian dance, reflex to reflexive posture.  Expressions move across his face, cloud shadows over a sun filled landscape, the land of coma.  The barrel chest rises and falls evenly, so much more smoothly than the horrified, screaming gasping, struggling for air and for life.

We are all walking the razor's edge, but most of the time are not aware of it.  Now, I see the exquisite danger in every single step, the gift and threat of life.

The Known Universe

Amazing.

Revelation

Back in 1981 I took a course in Byzantine history when I was a guest student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  During a chapter on mosaic and art, the professor briefly touched on an interesting symbol--in the Byzantine mosaics, behind the figures of immense power, Justin and Theodora and all the forgotten functionaries, there is always the partly drawn curtain.  The instructor said this semi drawn drape was supposed to imply the presence of something sacred, not seen, barely understood.  It was symbology, semiotics, spoken and unspoken, all in one small image behind the giant icons with their immense halos  and eyes that gazed with amazing and unblinking intensity into the Beyond.  But there it was: that half drawn curtain, with a darkened space behind, a veil between here and there.

Now it is Christmas Eve.  The scholars inform that Jesus was actually born in the spring and that Christmas is merely an integration of pagan winter solstice festivals into a general religious festival to bring the unwashed on board with the Roman hegemony.  Maybe so; but tradition shapes conciousness, and now it is December 24th and I am thinking about the birth of Christ.  Luke's story is in our minds:  the young couple, traveling to another city to report for census and taxation, existing under the hand of a foreign tyranny.  Then the panic and immediacy of childbirth,  the parents searching for shelter, protection, food; the stench and squalor of a stable, the labors of a mother and then suddenly, quietly, immediately . . . life.  An infant, defenseless in the face of an angry world, surrounded by draft animals and an exhausted mother and father, sleeps, not knowing what his existence will carve into the marble face of Rome.  The shepherds appear telling the story of celestial visitation, and wise men bearing gifts, with their brilliant star that leads them to search for this new King.  We all know this story, and have heard it so many times, but it still powerful and resonant.

And so since then Christianity stumbles along, waiting for the new revelation, the lifting of the curtain, the new Messiah.

Tonight, I went out into the desert.  It is quiet here in Arizona; we are in between winter storms and wind that rips the sand away from the rocky ground; indeed, a recent dust storm caused the deaths of four people.  But now it is quiet, so still that I can hear the half movements of the birds nesting in the acacia tree behind our home.  The stars shine with almost no twinkle because the air is so dry and still and a half moon is just past zenith.  You get the sense that the planet is . . . well . . . waiting.  What curtain is drawn, what monster or god lurks in the darkness just behind the fabric?

Or is it even that important?  I am struggling now--so many things--the loss of a parent, the illness of a spouse, challenges of a career, worries about money, health, and whether or not Obama and his cast of clowns are driving us all over a cliff.   When my father died last spring, I looked at that dear, quiet and dead face and promised to be a better person--to serve with a humble heart--and to somehow try to be a light to others even when I was met with my own darkness.  I'm trying, but still manage to fall flat at least once a day.  I keep looking for something to orient me, to give it all some meaning and direction.

But overhead, the stars turn through the night sky and the Moon glides across the ecliptic; the Hunter chases the Bear and the galaxies whirl in the coldness of space.  The sense of anticipation, waiting, threat, hairs rising on the back of my neck: what is coming?  Will it by like Yeats, with a disintegration from order to chaos and a monster emerging out of the desert?  Or will it be something as small and inconsequential as a newborn with the message of peace?  Lord help me, I don't know.

Interesting Times

That old Chinese curse--May you live in interesting times.  Up until now I had dismissed out of hand Panarin's assertion that the United States would fall into civil war within the next few years; and yet when I see the heat and hatred rising out of the different forums I frequent, I am truly beginning to think that our country is indeed in grave danger.

So who is going to stand up for the United States?  I'm not so simplistic to think it will be one party, one religion, one way of thinking.  I don't care for the politcally correct mandates for diversity, social justice and green oriented redistribution of wealth; but it is equally as clear that difference is good--otherwise the gene pool gets too shallow.  Ultimately the message that is most clear to me is what rings out of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  Freedom from tyranny.  Freedom from religious persecution.  Freedom of speech.  The ultimate right to bear arms to defend and protect you and yours, your life, your country. 

What was the Revolutionary Army?  A collection of farmers, shopkeepers, apprentices, lawyers and doctors, led by a gentleman farmer from Virginia who in the past was a failed surveyor.  But somehow the sum of all these people was far greater than the parts.  More battles lost than won, but the important battles were won, at great cost in both blood and wealth.  What was that phrase?  "Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor?"  The spirit of '76 isn't so far away--it flashed back into being after 9/11, and even though it has been drowned almost out of existence by the rising partisan swamp of Washingtonian politics, I believe that spirit is still there, sparking quietly away until needed.



http://mausersandmuffins.blogspot.com/2009/12/true-measure-of-patriot-is.html

Brigid is a great blogger; her prose is eloquent and clear--but her message rings much more strongly than any other commentary I have read to date:

"Yet when we strive to hold true, to stand firm to our beliefs as free men, together, to carry our weapons and defend our land, the weak become strong, and the wandering hold together as one."  Brigid, 2009.

Why we fight . . .

A thoughtful essay and one of the best explanations of the survival mentality I have found.  I tend to bridle a bit at the term "survivalist" just because of the inference of "angry redneck syndrome".  Instead, I  prefer the term "prepared" with the implied idea of beans, bullets, bandaids, and the flexible and realistic mindset necessary to implement the use of those supplies in a time of crisis.

What Does It Mean To Be A Survivalist?

by Giordano Bruno
Neithercorp Press - 10/1/2009

We’ve all seen the stereotypes depicted in TV and film; a lonely, semi-frustrated man with a knack for carpentry, BBQ, and ammo reloading. He stockpiles guns and food in his secret log cabin in the hills near his home and waits, even “anxiously anticipates”, the inevitable “end of the world.” He believes only he will survive, because everyone else is an idiot. Oh, and he’s “crazy.” They all are…
But is this stereotype in any way honest? Does one have to take on all these cumbersome character qualities in order to be a survivalist, or does one choose to become a survivalist, and is suddenly stricken with angry redneck’s disease?
Three years ago I became a survivalist, and I can say without a doubt, one does not have to live the stereotype.
Survivalism is not about taking on a new identity, it is about being prepared. It is not about paranoia and fear. It is about awareness, responsibility, and common sense. The average American today is often so disconnected from his own survival and self defense that when confronted with the idea of “preparedness” he becomes incredulous, as if the entire concept is so fantastical it should be buried in a book of folklore along with faeries and unicorns. The fact of the matter is, true survival will soon be the first thing on many people’s minds in this country, instead of the last, and every man, whether he be a farmer in the country or a yuppie office jockey in the suburbs, will have to decide NOW what he is going to do, mentally above all else, to be ready for what is coming.

Taking Responsibility For Your Own Life
A survivalist understands that until we are self-reliant, we cannot help others. Our life is our own, and if we fail in protecting it then it is only we who are to blame. No survivalist “expects” others to save him from peril, and this includes the government. No true survivalist will find himself after an inflationary collapse of the dollar crying on a street corner demanding free food and a job. He knows that he will not get it anyway, and anything he does get will only be through his own struggle and sacrifice. Being truly free is a double edged sword; while the possibilities of life become endless, one must be capably independent in order to make use of those possibilities freedom presents. This means taking one’s destiny into one’s own hands. It means hardship and heartbreak. It means striving, never stopping, always moving forward through any obstacle regardless of how seemingly impassable. It means having the will to fight back against oppression that appears insurmountable. Your world begins and ends with you, and the same goes for your problems. You are the maker of your own epoch.

Independence Is Not The Same As Selfishness
While it is impossible to be a survivalist without breaking free of our dependence on society, this does not mean we leave society in the dust. Survivalists are very aware, very insightful people, and when confronted with the ignorance of the average person, we often reel in horror and disgust. We can become jaded and uncaring for those who do not see the trouble coming, taking on an attitude of complacency when confronted with the plight of those we tried to warn. The cold Darwinian mantle “Survival of the Fittest” can take hold of us and make us lose our humanity. Some of us may even stop trying to warn people.
“Let them find out the hard way,” we think, “What’s the point, if they haven’t figured it out by now, they never will.”
But this is pure rationality, not wisdom, and there is a very big difference. While the survivalist movement is often linked with the “objectivist” philosophies of Ayn Rand, and such philosophies lean towards the “every man for himself attitude,” wisdom dictates that this is simply not practical. It is, at the very least, an exaggeration of the truth. Human beings have an inborn sense of individualism. Cultivating this is at the very core of survivalism. However, we also have an incredibly strong inborn sense of compassion and connectivity to our fellow man. It is a part of our conscience, and it is something we cannot escape. It is in the nature of those who are aware of danger to try to protect those who are not.
The survivalist is not an island, and there is something much greater at work in the universe than the narrow mechanics of pure logic. The human heart must be heeded, lest we face the dire consequences, and the heart tells us that all life has a meaning, even the life of a stupid useless man.

Why We Fight
Saving our own lives and the lives of our family is, of course, of optimum importance, but this alone is not enough. What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? What is the point of it all?
Do I personally feel a great sense of “admiration” for the large part of humanity? Certainly not! Nine out of ten people I meet on a daily basis are earth shatteringly ignorant, self-absorbed, egotistical, self-centered, socially backwards products of the pop-culture sewage pit.
But do we condemn them to death for this? No, we do not… instead, we fight for them, every day.
We do not fight because of what humanity is. Most of us despise what humanity is. We fight for what it COULD BE. We fight for the very real possibility of something far better that what we now know; a world where individualism is the norm, where elite minorities of men bent on dominion are given no ground, no foothold, no quarter. A world where original thought is encouraged instead of crushed, logic and emotion are given equal importance instead of generically separated and compartmentalized, honesty and courage are rewarded instead of mocked, and the love of our fellow man is natural and real, instead of fabricated and forced for the sake of appearances.
We fight for a world we may never live to see, not because it is “reasonable,” but because every impulse at our very core tells us it is right. It is necessary. It is one of the reasons we are here, now. The survivalist is not just a self-reliant and insightful man of resolve, he is the levy upon which the ripping torrential waters of history collide. He is the wall that stays the tide. If the survivalist collapses, then nothing can hold, but if he remains, solid as stone, then there is a chance for everyone.
Whether we like it or not, in times of pain the world turns to those men who have either the conviction and great strength of an honorable soul, or those who are clever and evil enough to fake it. By becoming a survivalist in such times, one also inadvertently becomes a symbol to others. By breaking free of the masses, ironically, we also in a sense become partly responsible for them. The example we set could determine the very direction of the future. The way of the survivalist becomes a steadfast light in the darkness, until finally, all men can see.

Posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 8:52 am in the category:All Posts. Comment RSS 2.0 feed. Comment it , or trackback this post. 

(printed with permission from author to reproduce "ad nauseum"  J. F.) 

Pedaling squares

A lot of people ask me what it means.  In the world of cycling, the peak of performance and technique is to keep a fluid and smooth cycling cadence as you pedal the bike.  Unfortunately, human anatomy, geometry and physics limit this ability, so the skill of a smooth spin only comes after a long time on the bike, and is easily lost with any absence from riding.

I haven't ridden with any frequency in years, and with all the usual excuses of work, family life, illness and other responsibilities.  But when I was a kid, I loved to ride my bike, and made a several year foray as a citizen racer in my teens.  I have a garageful of bikes I don't ride, that get dustier and dustier, the tires rotting away from the rims and the leather saddles developing a fine web of cracks from the dryness of neglect.

But the other day, while straightening out the garage, I leaned my Litespeed road bike outside against the truck so it wouldn't get knocked over.  In the middle of heaving boxes and moving bags of water softener salt, I glanced outside and the familiar diamond profile of my bike was suddenly on fire in the sunlight, gleaming and luminous.  The memories came flooding back:  tucked down in a tight wedge over the handlebars and screaming down Sugar Hill in upstate New York, the speedometer approaching sixty three miles per hour, the fork acquiring a queer harmonic resonance as I wondered if the front wheel would fall off; the soft crunch of the tires over pebbles and the squeak of the chain as I grunted and groaned up interminable steep hills outside of Binghamton and Erie; and then the abrupt transplantation to Arizona, sightlines of twenty miles in every direction and *no cars* and a headwind determined to kill me.

It was as if in the middle of middle age, my past reared up and slapped me in the face.  Is it ever too late to remember dreams? To try again?  When my dad died last spring, I made a promise to myself to serve with humility, to be a better person, to try to be a light to others (even if it was a dim one!)  I realized it is never a black to white kind of change, but instead the constant erosion of life that models us, changes us, destroys us and renews us.

So I aired up the tires on the Litespeed and rode it around the block, praying the dry rotted tires wouldn't blow--and they didn't, being quality Continentals!  At first awkward, shifting my hands from hoods to the tops of the bars, squirming on the now rock hard saddle, feet stabbing at the pedals . . . pedaling squares.  And then, suddenly, for all too brief a moment, it all fell together.  Power moving from my legs to the pedals, the ground flowing backwards with a gentle hiss, me almost floating over the handlebars and clicking smoothly through the gears, heart, breathing, cadence all in harmony..

I'm still not sure if existence is a progression to chaos or organization--most of the time I'm inclined to think chaos--but every once in a rare while things move into place and instead of pedaling squares, I'm spinning perfect circles.



"Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one."


T. S. Eliot   "Little Gidding"