A heart of winter

Another gray day in mid-Ohio, our most common kind of winter day. Yesterday the dentist's assistant told me "This kind of weather gets me down." Gloomy is the word. There is a kind of winter day we like around here, fresh snow on the ground (but not too much), sun shining, blue sky, air crisp (but not too cold). Want, want.

I often think about this issue of our response to winter. Within us there is natural sunshine - this is actually a "true fact" as my English students used to say, who had not learned that a fact by nature is true. From a scientific point of view, we are made of nothing but the light from the sun. We have to get that light by eating plants that have captured it (and to some degree by sun bathing, which Gandhi firmly believed in).

Many of us believe that we have a nature that is golden and unspoiled, whether you think of it in Buddhist terms or Christian, or other religious belief structures. Ah, why can't I call forth that sunny nature on an overcast day?

Maybe I should not be trying to feel that particular lift of the heart. Maybe my intention should be to be here within winter, and not try to build a sunny mood when my neighborhood is overcast. Just be at peace with it. To see what it is like.

Smart Change and Just Change

Thinking so much about death these days, and about change, Change, which is fitting - it is the end of autumn, winter setting in. Every day in this depression seems like such a waste, one more irretrievable day gone, life so short, I am 67! One more day wasted just getting through the day. But then, you waste your whole life that way until you wake up.

Today my rather aimless tracking around the Cloud led me to a photo in a blog called Dashh. Can't get anywhere from the blog to find out if he is still writing. Tom has promised to have a look at my PC, which is often spinning its wheels lately. I wonder whether it picks up my garbled, failed energy. I know Sheba does. One day last week she was just awful, yowling, and finally made a pass at biting/scratching me. We realized she was anxious because I was so different. If you want to make a case that there is nothing in this world you can't measure with your instruments, I don't care. You can say I just didn't pet her enough, it was all behavioral. But the fact is, that kind of science is arrogant. People don't realize it is, because we are all inside of it, it is the Western mind, the mind of the conqueror. There is still a great deal we don't know. Who said he felt like a child playing with a shell on the beach while all around him an ocean roars? Some scientist. You could google it. bing it. If your computer works better than mine.

Dashh was or is being anonymous on the blog. Trying to email him just has the search engine spinning. Alive or dead? Another of the lebenty-zillion blogs sitting there in the cloud, karmic traces of people who have passed by this intersection? Too many people, too many! I don't want to know all of them! It is a crowd.

Last night Tom said Do you realize what has happened these past five years? He was thinking about this kind of thing: Facebook. Smart phones. Twitter. Snail mail, real letters, have just about passed into oblivion. I said, when I was young I guess we had health insurance through Firestone. Nobody gave it any thought. People just died at 62 of a heart attack.

And actually, for all this Smart Change the basic facts of being old are the same, never mind those who want to believe aging is a disease and if you take Spirulina every day you can live forever. I return from the graveside to tell you, it isn't so. It isn't a matter of will. We wanted to stay young and vigorous and healthy. But here we are, slowed down, cautious, wondering what truck will come out of the fog and hit us next.

Still, it was a pleasure to be led to the Pink Floyd video above, from 1994, when they still made good videos. Like life, so many wonderful things just gone, like some kind of great, fancy parade. I think Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about an elephant going down her street. I don't know if a real elephant did, or if it was, you know, just a wild rhinoceros.