Hospitality

Here I sit in my "island room" at BA somewhere in Utah, struggling to become a true castaway. This assisted care facility is not a hospital, but it is a place where many of us suffer from one kind of malady or other. The root of the word "hospital" is guest, host, stranger. Our feelings about hospitals range from deep gratitude to fear. We feel "estranged." a wary "guest," and always ambiguous about the work rhythm of our "host." Why do they awaken us to see if we are ok? And what of the night sounds: the soft shoes racing across the floor; the chatter at the nurse's station. The moonlit brilliance of stainless steel and porcelain, the smell of alcohol and sometimes the subtle sound and smell of Death approaching your hallway.

When one is marooned, getting your bearings is critical. As I have pointed out in other blogs, routine/ritual is one way of ordering your life. Mornings for a devotional/scriptures, a short walk up and down the halls, a cup of mint tea to settle the jumpy stomach. Breakfast, another walk, an appropriate foreign film, some notes on a possible e-mail or blog. The help here is hospitable and they treat me as a guest. My Level One status allows me freedom to take short errands with family and friends. I am surrounded by books, a computer and a television.

But I often find myself lonely, starved for conversation. When Samuel Johnson's Rasselas finds a would- be city dweller trying to be a country shepherd, he finds the man near madness. He quickly packs his bags and follows Rasselas and company into Cairo, a kind of 17th century Portland, Oregon. He needs to talk and to listen. Conversation is for me a form of prayer. For our distraught "shepherd" the pastoral [rural] life has isolated him from other people. For some, like my son-in-law solitude works. I would rather talk and listen than scale the mountains, mountain goat style. Is your solitude self chosen or are you imprisoned by circumstances? Are you a mere face in the crowd or the congregation? The worst kind of solitude, I think.

Is it possible that solitude is a mere frame of mind---as is loneliness? However, I noticed my last time through Marquez' A Hundred Years of Solitude that solitude turns out to be a negative term, something closer to loneliness or isolation. Gold coins, epic love affairs and numerous military conquest and businesses, yet nothing remains. Emptiness. A journey into demise--and a wonderful warning to the reader. Nothing material in this life but love will remain. With a list of more than a dozen versions of solitude, I am forced to limit myself to a couple. Solitude is aloneness; solitude is sometimes loneliness; solitude can be decay, the inability to withstand time itself. The village Macando "will," says the last Aureliano, "soon be wiped out by the wind." Even the precious hieroglyphics of the family parchment will be only partially translated. Words die, words which capture our past. How do we survive? Along with scripture and "walking prayers" [I seem to be better on my feet than on my knees], my last, most critical resource is the people around me.

In his stirring account of life in a Nazi concentration camp, Victor Frankel discovered that [1] love and [2] work [exercise?] provided the logos [meaning] he so desperately sought. As the camp's only doctor, he lost himself in saving others. When most of the camp was "transferred" out, Frankel volunteered to stay with the sick. Those who left were never heard from again. Out of that "work" came love, and that love for others saved him. If I'm reading the Gospel of John correctly, love of others lies at the heart of meaning in life.

Let me send along an excellent DVD recommendation on Netflix [streaming or disc]. "Happiness" strikes at the heart of our search for meaning. The most unhappy country in the world? Japan. The happiest? Denmark. And it seems the more wealthy people become, the less happy they become.

You ask me what loving others means? I try to meet the simple needs with warmth and affection. A quick shoulder rub, a hand on the arm, a kind word to the confused, walking with the Parkinson's patients who wobble their way heroically down the hall, listening to endless redundancy from the demented, the 10 minute retention of those struck down by Alzheimer's.

There's hope, then, for all of us castaways. At least I'm not talking to a volleyball with a painted smiley face.

 

 

 

 

 

Otherness

 

Once again our country convulses with yet another social problem. Last month people lived in tents for two days in order to get a seat to hear historic arguments concerning same sex marriage. The outcome seems sure under the promises of the Constitution; the right to privacy, to equal treatment under the law and the pursuit of happiness.

While watching a Swedish movie about three men thrown together in Greenland, my thoughts turned to Otherness once again. What happens when three Swedes find themselves living in Greenland, a landscape of ice and snow, hunting animals for a fur company based in Oslo?

Larsen,a tender hearted poet, joins Radbaek, more wolf than man, one who has killed his wife's lover. Holm, the middle of these two extreme personalities, does the scientific work for another company. But he fails because conflict is inevitable in this violent ping pong game of life.

 Zero Kelvin dramatizes the struggle we all encounter when facing alien circumstances, i.e., geography, climate, a new work place, a "new" person in our lives as neighbors and acquaintances. Or could the person we loved become someone "different” than we anticipated?
 
The three fall into conflict about everything from Larsen's poetry about his true love and Radbaek's view of human nature as "red tooth and claw," a world of betrayal, hatred and even murder. Holm can only arbitrate, balancing precariously on a tight rope trying to separate two antitypes. But in this universe of ice, there can be no middle ground. And that inability to come to terms can make all the difference in our lives.

Ironically, the film 's language [fair warning: terrible language] was far more Other than I choose to tolerate, I watched, spellbound, by the inevitable decline of Larsen's sensibility, what his girlfriend calls "soulfulness," into just another copy of Radbaek. "You have become me," the wolf-man tells him.

And Larsen does. The poet shoots Radbaek when he finds him beating Larsen's favorite sled dog to death with a rock, then returns with more bullets to finish him off. "You will never find peace and soul-full-ness again," Radaek mutters through bloody lips.

Celebrating Easter this year I thought about The Christ, who was to the Jews, after all, too much Otherness. All the wrong trappings: Nazareth, carpenter's son, not a member of the Sanhedrin, a "religious revolutionary."

So in the end we must anticipate Others and Otherness--the alien. Joseph Conrad's characters can't survive alone--especially in the jungle. In the "Outpost of Progress," solitude, jungle lushness and fevers, bring murder-suicide. For some of our children and adults yet another meeting seems more than they can bear. And for loved ones, sometimes even their own loving family is more than they can bear. Or even a classroom: Rules.Work. The redundancy that builds character and patience and good citizens.

My dad always said, "never say you won't live__________. "Go where the work is.” We all can't live in Orem. Someone is going to have to move to Alabama--or Nevada. And with that traumatic move comes neighbors whose skin is not white, whose marriage style is same-sex, with children. The climate personifies the Mojave desert. You could live miles away from family and too broke to bridge the gap. You may have to learn Spanish. Or Icelandic.

How large is your world? How much Otherness [anything that is not me] can you tolerate and perhaps even love?

Threshold

I notice lately that the news boys are telling us we may be on the threshold of a possible nuclear war with North Korea, that prison-country bound to leader-worship and insanity. But what is this so-called threshold experience?

When we built our new home in Bishop, California, Dad didn't seem to get around to putting thresholds in the doorways. Soon the Mojave winds began to send sand and cold air under the door. Jack Nielsen came to the rescue once again and tightened down the house. 

We spend our whole lives crossing thresholds. This liminal experience shapes and forms our lives like it or not, because crossing a threshold, a boundary, moving from one kind of space to another remains a ritual we can't ignore.

When the bridegroom carries his bride over the threshold, they enter a new space, a new life, fraught with expectation and some fear. Can we make this marriage work?  When we walk the ceremonial Cub Scout bridge and enter Boy Scouts?  We pass into another phase, another passage towards maturity. Hopefully. Failure to jump through the "hoops of life" marks us as "arrested." Our timing is suddenly off. 

Who's looking for a high school dropout these days for a well-paying job, anyway?

My second father, Jack Nielsen, took me to my first day of school. Mom bought a red sweater with double white stripes on the sleeves--very collegiate. We still have the photo of that threshold experience: out of the house, away from my mom four hours a day and into the noisy often confusing world of kindergarten. I tried to keep the crayons inside the lines, relax on my towel for 15 minutes after milk break and then walk home.

Going off to elementary school or high school only prepares for the more traumatic farewell to friends and family when we drive off to another state and a whole new set of rules. And in some of those university settings, kids who were eating hamburgers and dating girls find themselves rushing fraternities and sororities, drinking gallons of beer and enduring endless indignities in order to be a  "member." Sense of time falls away; they sleep less, study occasionally, if at all.

What are the liminal experiences in your life?  An  LDS mission--off sometimes to a new country/culture/food and language. And constant rejection. Or, what of marriage?  Of becoming parents? Of joining or leaving a church or a neighborhood--or taking on your first "real" job. Some corporations are hiring "life coaches" just to get their newly hired MBAs through the day. "Hey, no one ever told me I do sloppy work and that I often fail to finish my project on time."

Yes, sometimes we stumble on the entryway or choose to remain in the visitor’s waiting room in a temple. Once you pass by those boys in white, card in hand, you've entered a whole new world of religious experience--you enter a forest of symbols. You've moved from the Profane to the Sacred. A friend who had been on Pioneer Trek one summer, said, "I am not quite the same person I was before we left. I stood on holy ground, and I felt it."

I see us moving through these boundary experiences until our final passage: from life to death. Sometimes our life rhythm shifts, however. I am now where my life has arrived. With little anticipation, I am still amazed how "old age" challenges me. I thought one Zion's Camp would be sufficient.  [Guess not!]

But in all our passing, however, we learn by experience. Sometimes it's like jumping off the river bank high above 7 feet in Bishop creek. It had to be done, if Buzzy Koonz could do it. 

Here we go--into another new, sometimes dangerous space by crossing one boundary and landing in a completely different setting.

Hermit of Bel Aire

 

 

March 11, 2013

                                                                         

Dear Allen and Linda,

Thanks for your friendship. You bring me a wide range of thoughts and emotions and even tools. The rocker rocks fine, Allen. I hope you found things improving across the sea, Linda. As parents you have always been there. And, in the end, perhaps that's all we can really do for our children. Until they realize at some point in eternity that Someone Else has always been There for them [as we say], we must stand by and serve--with warm embraces and unconditional love. And that love sometimes means allowing those we love to pivot, stumble, then free fall until they reach the inevitable "bottom" of the abyss. And there is always a "bottom."

 

This parental "work" we do is our battle. Like the ancient Spartan warriors, their ergon, their work was war. But parenting is about peace. Peace and sorrow. Samuel Johnson was gutsy enough to claim that sorrow often leads to a "cure." We are all three, we happy three, engaged in this ergon. Our relentless sorrow sometimes, says Johnson, "rusts the soul." If allowed to build on itself, it threatens to "putrefy and stagnate" our lives.

 

Our hope? Such inertia, such ennui can only be overcome "by exercise and motion." So, your constant "exercise is" is to continue reaching out to others with your hearts [big hearts] and minds [big minds].

 

And so you come to visit the hermit of Bel Aire.

Misperceptions

One of the joys and pains of life is looking back on our perceptions--those views we once thought infallible. When 13-year old Briony, the child prodigy poet, in Ian McEwan's novel, Atonement, bursts into the library to find her sister, Cecilia and Robbie, locked in what Briony assumes as assault--a "true" act of violence, her young mind cannot register the event, the act of love.  She immediately assumes the worst.  It confirms a letter Robbie has sent Cecelia, a torrid letter marked with a word Briony doesn't even know, let alone understand.

The letter moves through the outraged Tallis [tentacles, trellis-like?] family. The police arrive and take Robbie away to prison for assault.  Cecelia remains frozen--whispering only, "I will wait for you. Come home to me." Robbie spends three years in prison and then heads off to Dunkirk and the Somme.

What of our own youthful misperceptions?  Like Briony, we had only the language of our surroundings.  We defined events with the limited words and experiences of youth.  When Buzzy Koonz, baseball cap backwards on his head, an oily hank of hair blowing in the Mojave wind, screeched his Western Flyer around the Stover twins, my heart leaped.  Now there is a cool guy with a cool bike and as a 6th grader, "going out" with twins!  Twins who were 7th graders!

A few months later we moved to our new home in town.  I left Buzzy and his strange swearing habits and the Stover twins whose parents were proud owners of a collection of books, hidden under their bed. Then one Saturday afternoon I "read" the secret books with Buzzy and the Stover redheads.  I waded through plots and descriptions of hot-breathed encounters in woods and in the backseats of cars, parked like trout, tail to head in what they called The Drive-In Theater.  But my attention wandered over to Tommy Weaver's, who had the most exquisite collection of matchbooks in town.  We made our last foray to Bishop Creek to the dreaded Seven Foot, the infamous "deep" pool and waterfall that cooled our desert-baked bodies that last summer on Emory Lane.

I believe that the people in our lives are "messengers"--of light and truth--and darkness.  Yet a darkness that could contain later light. Our conversations, our musings and imaginations are forms of prayer and bring insight and "light" [but often conflicting opinions]. One scholar calls conversation a "sifting of opinions." Could his mean that a conversation, a kind of sharing of light and darkness becomes something else when it morphs into a debate, an argument, a contentious parallel battle with words?  Wendy Ulrich contends that lasting marriages are built on the foundation of "settling critical issues."  Even these differences often transform us and the marriage.

Is there room, then, for those apparently dark messengers who pass into and out of our lives?  Do I yet have space for Buzzy and the dreaded Stover girls?

We are sent here to learn the right words, light that secures [but not always and forever sometimes] our encounters with other humans.  What could I bring as an 8th grader to my relationship with R. Tomayo?  He could throw a tight spiral 30 yards [usually on the money], he knew all about Tijuana Bibles, and much about female topography.  His carnal knowledge stretched far beyond my own. I would catch some of those spirals and read a couple of his cartoon-like illustrated Bibles, but I remained too light to follow him into the trenches of tackle football.  It took two weeks and several scrimmages to realize that even in the days of leather helmets and no face masks that 125 lbs. was not enough weight for a middle linebacker.

RT and I met daily in band.  I couldn't bulldoze a running back like Dale Denton but I excelled at the trumpet---First Trumpet.  Under RT's  tutelage, however, my sophomore year the trumpet sounded less clear.  I answered instead the Siren whisper of girls. Yet I treasure the "youthful follies" of which Joseph Smith speaks [But I'm certain his "follies were not mine]. 

With darkness or folly came experience and eventually resolution about the kind of truth I wanted that would outlast a Saturday night. 

Mercy Messages

A couple of mercy missions this morning, visiting the afflicted here at Bel Aire. Some talk about their lives--many of them abandoned early in bad marriages.  I shared a Dr. Pepper with Anne, who is blind and alone, though she has two good daughters close by who help her.  Other residents don't relate to her, however.  

I thought again of Pio's Prayer-Blessing for me.  It is something which means more now, even though I only recover the feelings, not the Spanish.

It was a bold move asking Pio to give me a blessing, Lora.  A private moment with Pio, a teacher or priest and doubtless marginal in the institutional church.  But he indeed knows how to talk to God and I wanted him of all the male members in your ward to intercede for me at that time.  His Spanish was beautiful, as he blessed my “broken heart” (literally and figuratively).

The strangest recollection, lately, was of a beautiful little gal I dated off and on, Dolly Golich. One day at school, my senior-screwed-up-year, she stopped me, pulled out of my front shirt pocket a scripture I had typed up.  "So if you study the Bible, Larry, why do you make out with girls in your trailer?"  There was my chance!  Why didn't I hold her cheeks in both hands and kiss her, saying, "You're right. I begin today; now." Strange how this little hot make-out would chide me.  A messenger of counsel.

Wendy Ulrich [Experiencing the Temple] cautions us that people, sometimes people very different from us, just may come into our lives with a "message."  Be on the lookout for so-called wolves who are really sheep, often unconscious of their lamb-like counsel.

Love, Dad

P.S.  It was, after all, Steve Oakey who ushered me into the Assisted Living [Homestead] Ranch decision.  He, no wolf, by the way, was there at the right moment with the right advice. Did he know in his bones I was inevitably heading for a complete physical and emotional collapse?

Coming Soon...

Larry has resurfaced, and will publish a few more blogs as early as this weekend!  Stay tuned.