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Bend Light

• February 04, 2012
• 20:01

  Line Up

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  You might not know that doctors’ businesses in the US are going bankrupt. Mine did.  Not me personally, but the business. Medicine is a cog in the economy like everything else. Lots of cogs are blowing out. I have a story, like everyone who goes bankrupt.

  When I went to medical school I learned that doctors are pretty well respected. I think that most people live with a level of distrust for doctors…except their own. The other thing I learned was that if I lined up and kept my nose relatively clean (which I have not nearly always done) I would have job security in addition to respect and I could buy a nice house with a manicured yard and super linear shrubbery. I learned that I would work my ass off and I could expect to not make a nickel if I didn’t show up to work. No passive income to speak of.

  Some of those lessons have changed. I have touched on the respect part above. Job security is not a given, although it is much better than many fields (but see below and above), and I still believe that there is always room at the top and I make my plan to be the best surgeon I can. I do indeed work hard and passive income is still hard to come by.

  So my bankruptcy story has to do with a partner playing Jenga with our practice. He suddenly quit (not a typical partner move), defaulted on financial responsibilities, and those remaining got to watch the rather remarkable tumbling and destruction of a decade of work. I recently went to traffic school for a ticket (I got a warning one early morning from a really nice cop and the next day at the same time, place and channel we did a rerun. We both (kind of) had a laugh about it) and during the 6 hours of “class” we saw many slow-mo traffic-signal traffic-cam videos of car wrecks caused by drivers who were either a)inattentive or b)angry, I learned. Even though they are disturbing there is an irresistible modern dance feel to a car wreck that draws me to it. I catch my breath as the cars, which are usually stubbornly solo, find one another, finally. There is something beautiful in it. Anyway, I kept thinking that I was being reminded of something. Now I know that it is the demise of my business caused by inattention, resentments, assumptions. As I have lived through the process, I will indulge myself in another metaphor: it’s like when the charges go on a building being razed and the center gently drops to its knees and the arms of the building appear to rise in praise or supplication.

  Even though I am making (up) something beautiful about this betrayal and embarrassment (I will take the liberty of claiming this blog as my attempt at beauty), I am here writing to get it out of me that I do feel exactly betrayed, pissed, and embarrassed. I am not looking for comfort, to hear its going to be ok (I know for sure it is more than ok, no matter what–for instance we have already been bought by a medium-sized (Ross not Macy’s) box store of a medical-practice-buying group and we didn’t miss a day of work–lots to be grateful for). I am letting myself have the feelings and I since I tell you about things like that, I am telling you about this. My (X)-partner? He knows his motives. I don’t. Don’t want to. I don’t think Karma is too worried about a little medical practice in Central Oregon, but who knows? I do. It’s not. At a minimum I will recommend that he not come here for a reference. His behavior is his problem (or reward depending on if you are me or him, I guess) and I am sure he will have an interesting and rewarding story about all this. My job, today, is to come to terms with rebuilding, remembering who I am instead of looking at what I do, and paying attention to these difficult feelings. Like with my little kiddo, if I pay attention and stay present when he is uncorking, he gets different in a bit. If he goes through uncorking alone or he sees me ignore it, it is actually damaging to him and he saves it as one of those millions of unfelt feelings that we store and eventually have to find an anesthetic for. It’s ironic that anesthesia means to have no feeling and in the world of our emotional selves it is feelings not felt that look for anesthesia, not the ones that we struggle through, feel fully and move on from. Those ones bounce away from us as harmless as the tire thrown bouncing down the road after a wreck.

  

• January 30, 2012
• 23:37

  Little Of Me

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  I have gained weight in the last year. I work with people all day every day on this issue and here I am having gained enough weight that I know that other people notice, wonder, question. Enough that it is getting in the way of relationships, most notably on my side. I feel less of me even though there is more of me. The less of me is what I am noticing the most, ironically. The part of me I have hold of is diminishing. I am falling out of focus.
  When I exercise I feel good. I don’t exercise much. When I exercise I lose weight, fortunately. I am not exercising. I am not able to give myself exercise as a gift, a chore or anything else. The reason is that I undervalue me. There is not a mystery at work. I don’t have enough of me to have enough of me. I am writing this to change this and to hold the intention in these words to look for me in the movement of my well made and good enough body. I spend so much time in my head, but I live in this body. I want it back. I can’t really give it to anyone else or be all there while I have so little of so much of me.

  

• January 27, 2012
• 21:59

  This Is (Not) Grass

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  Scarcity brings out the fundamentals in a personality. I will use myself as an example, although I could refer to others in my life as well, “ex” people of several varieties, wives and business partners come to mind–these darker sides come out as people are leaving my life, I guess, or I maybe bring it out in them. Even if I do bring it out, I didn’t make them that way. Maybe no one did. A person who I thought I knew is completely different when things get tight. I bring it out in me too. I usually find that I am short on space or time. I contract, retreat. In the past when this went on long enough my depression or frustration would leak out as destruction–self, relationships, whatever. Now I try to ask for time or space to recharge. I do this blog, write or take photos. I fill the scarcity with the better side of me. Then I feel. Better.

  I have said many times here that I have trouble with feeling things. I can literally feel nothing at times. Is that possible? Can I be blank? It is not unpleasant, but it is odd. We are emotional beings. I see it in my son. Feelings, like a river, flow through him. Thoughts however, do not. As thoughts come, the feelings have a hard time getting space. I misplace my feelings and I think my thoughts are feelings. I watch you all very carefully and I can tell you what I should be feeling. What should be feelings can be observations. It is hard to have thoughts and feelings at the same time. Since my brain thinks all the time, I have to ask it to quiet itself so I can have a feeling. These crazy conversations in me. How does this happen? Who is having these discussions. The me looking at me thinking of you, feeling for whom, living this life. As my boy finds his brain, which is really beautiful to see, his ability to have the flows of emotions will diminish. I know now that a human who does not feel his feelings will end up with distorted bubbles of emotions stuck inside him, but the brain does not give a shit. It thinks and thinks and it is good at it and it is very interesting too, in a way. I have to talk myself in to having feelings sometimes. If I don’t I miss out on love from my wife and love for my wife, joy with my son, satisfaction with work, with beauty. I rail against this tendency to see the world as a puzzle constantly. I do this because I can’t do anything else. I have to have my heart in order to have yours. My brain can’t be two things, like this crazy blue plastic grass someone planted can’t be real green grass. I look at my son at marvel at his open heart but I know his brain, his mind, is doing push ups, getting strong and waiting for him, with all its power and it downfalls. His work, like mine, is to know himself, head and heart. My job is to teach him generosity and honesty with both.

  

• January 19, 2012
• 22:05

  Burnout

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  My patient had literally burned a hole in his tiny, new stomach with a combination of cigarettes and alcohol. I don’t have a moral position on this except that life is probably worth preserving until one can make an informed decision. Destroying it unconsciously feels arrogant, but again, who am I to judge?
  Most people can smoke and drink a whole lot without any problems to the stomach, but after having weight loss surgery, a gastric bypass, it is really risky. The little pouch is relatively unprotected and the combination of impaired blood flow (smokes) and caustic liquids, is a set up for problems.
  He was out hunting. Actually he was out mostly drinking and smoking and reflecting (dimly, I think) on why his wife wanted to end the marriage. He woke up with a hole in his stomach that felt exactly like that. He tried to drink water and the it ran out of the hole like rain through a drain pipe. He developed peritonitis. He made his way to a local hospital in remote Oregon. The surgeon there saved his life by sewing a patch of fat over the hole, literally.
  He then moved to Central Oregon where I have met him. He is a really nice guy. He can’t figure out the drinking. He used to eat, but then after the operation, he drank. He sits bewildered at night wondering why he still does that, even now, after he almost died. As I talk to him I can see him there with his little glass of vodka, one then two. He is sad, misses his wife, knows it has something to do with this operation he had and how he switched to the vodka from the sugar, but it is fuzzy to him. He is relieved when I tell him there is a way to stop drinking that involves, well, stopping drinking. It is as difficult and as easy as that. The missing ingredient for him is other people. He needs their help. I could tell that made sense to him. I told him where those people were.
  My patient has experienced addiction transfer, a boring term for what is really simply addiction, which is the process of filling our empty human-ness with anything other than ourselves. When we abandon our emotions, numb them, the anesthetics become the substitute and they feel like home and heaven and hell at the same time. He started with his foods of choice, eliminated those by having surgery but without understanding the emptiness and started refilling the emptiness with the next thing. He came to me from Reno. It could have been the craps table, but it wasn’t. It was this.
  It is anything and everything. We are built, I think, with an emptiness. We are forced to connect to someone outside ourselves in order to fill this emptiness or we instinctively, it seems, fill it with some thing. This doesn’t work, and only when the pain of this gets very apparent do we change course.
  Here is what I know from what I have lived and what I see in my work (and I don’t know why this is true, but I think it is): we need love and connection (connection also known as spirituality). We get sick alone and we get better in groups. Healing literally lives in the connection.

  

• January 16, 2012
• 19:30

  Enough

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  I work with people who are changing their relationship to food. Mostly they are obese and don’t want to be. Most have had surgery under my hand to give them a tool to help them relearn two sensations that their bodies have literally forgotten. The two sensations are full and hungry. Because of the disease process of obesity, the body literally experiences hungry/full in a faulty way, much like someone with diabetes experiences sugar in a faulty way. Making the stomach in to a small pouch changes the experience of hungry (reduces hunger dramatically) and full (increases satiety). The effects are dramatic most of the time.

  What does not change is the emotional component of the relationship to food. If food has become the person’s experience of love or connection, that does not miraculously change. When I say something like this to a room full of physicians, some of them do what I imagine you are doing (only they literally do it right in front of me); they shake their heads. These physicians believe that the problem of obesity is eating, and they are wrong. The endgame is eating, like the endgame of alcoholism is drinking, but the problem is one of emptiness. My patients are not hungry. They are empty, like we all are empty. They fill up with food the same way an alcoholic slakes his thirst with a drink: not at all.

  If a child is abused (over half of morbidly obese people were sexually abused as kids) and finds warmth when it’s cold from food, that message gets deeply imprinted. Relearning hunger then also means understanding that what the body needs and wants from food is not what the heart will ever get from food. Love is not there, in the end. The truth is that love happens within a person, and it is for that person and it is received and given between people (ok, and dogs). When the part of us that needs love and connection gets filled with the right stuff, even small amounts of food are enough. This is what my courageous patients are learning every day. As cool as it is to see a person lose a hundred pounds and watch the diabetes go into remission, the high blood pressure normalize, and to see them walk in a 5K for the first time, it is even better to watch them do this deeper work and find the real gold: themselves.

  

• January 10, 2012
• 15:30

  Boing!

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  Do photographs convey the truth? Photojournalism schools have whole courses that make up answers to this question. It is important for journalists who are writing to tell the truth, I think we would agree. It is impossible, “true”, but striving for an objective story allows me as the reader to think that I am making up my own conclusions. Questions arise: what did the writer leave out here? How were the quotes edited? The same questions arise for photography. Photojournalists agonize over retouching, cropping, context.
  I do not do this agonizing, at least not in service of the truth. I am making some level of fiction with my photographs. My writing is creative and while I am telling you something about me, and, I am not (usually) (knowingly) lying, I am formulating an openly subjective perspective. The photograph in this post was recorded digitally and the cloud had that shape and that is what led me to stop the car and record the scene. It’s a funny cloud, like a spring, right? After I get the raw image I believe my job is to make art and to lead you to feel something. To that end, I developed the picture. I cropped it mercilessly, increased contrast, darkened the edges of the roadside, added a bicolor filter, increased the structure and sharpness of the mountain. I reduced the digital noise and I eliminated some tiny clouds in the top right and left corners. That was my perspective and every photograph and photographer has a perspective, even the most hard-boiled journalist who holds the camera a foot from his eye and shoots, which is the problem with truth telling and photography. My act of seeing something with a camera changes the truth about what I am recording. I have changed it to reflect my perspective on the truth. Photographers who own that reality have my respect. With respect to photographers trying to be objective I would also assert this:

  Photographic truth is inversely proportional to the effort exerted to make a photograph tell the truth.

  The harder a journalist tries to make just a straight shot without influencing me and the harder she asserts that what she is doing is objective, the more I have questions about what wasn’t photographed, how the contrast manipulated to convey a point of view, what the angle of light is doing to change my mind. The less a photographer makes a play for the truth, the less I doubt them and the more believable the photograph is. Purely fanciful and contrived photographs are completely believable for what they are and they do not hide anything. This photographer may have whimsy but she has no guile. Purely journalistic photos raise my suspicions and are, inherently I think, prone to lies.

  Discuss.

  

• January 08, 2012
• 20:14

  Eddy

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  What is a truth and a lie?
  A photograph is the lie sitting, like a spider in the web of the truth.

  What stays and what moves?
  A river does both and stops doing both at the same time.

  What is valuable and useless?
  Love makes no sense and is all there is.
       Poetry, good poetry like in The New Yorker,
       Should not mention love.
       It (good poetry) should dance around the emptiness
       of the lack of it ‚or dance
       around
       the poignant reach of hopeless rubes
       living as if in square comic portrayals of themselves.
       Leave love out, yo. (But yes, valuable and useless and all
       senseless, yes.)

  

• January 05, 2012
• 21:57

  Dog’s View

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  December was super busy. I took my national boards (passed..!), the kiddo had a minor operation (waiting in waiting rooms is exhausting–I’ll remember that), and my patients, for one month, finally had real insurance. Deductibles take 11 months to pay and then people finally can have the hernia repaired or some other elective operation–our insane medical system at work. It may sound crass, but I feel like a farmer at harvest when December rolls around. And it’s done and that is good.

  I have more time to be loved by my family which helps me love them back better. I have time to think about what a dog sees on a walk and make the picture. Both the love and the dog make me happy. I feel happy, and I am not going to talk myself out of it.

  

• January 02, 2012
• 14:22

  Hard at Work

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  Ever feel like you are watching over things that don’t matter? Who is it that does that watching? The thin line between personal mayhem, utter apathy or extreme violence is that we don’t know the time of our dying. If we did, of course, we, or I will speak for me since you probably would have loftier ideals–I would light up a cigarette, rob a bank (nonviolently–it’s a personal preference) and give the money back or away or just light in on fire right there in the bank, run until my knees finally did give out as opposed to the not running I do now in fear of the knees and because of laziness. Just that one piece of info keeps us looking over useless chores and keeps us tidying up corners. Even though we all know it’s coming, we do things we would never do if we knew when it’s coming.

  Making dinner does its little part to keep body and soul together so I can see doing that. Plus eating feels good which is a good thing to be doing (feeling, good) while we wait around to meet the inevitable deadline, the one we won’t be late for. In the meantime, I, like millions now and before me, am curious about the thin line of (un)knowing that keeps me doing useless things, shackled to someone else’s beliefs (which they would disavow the second they knew the moment of their own demise, by the way), keeps my head down and my neck bowed staring at my fingers working to the bone.

  

• December 29, 2011
• 22:38

  Shiny

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  It was an accident and let’s just leave it at that, she said.
  My patient was feeling sheepish and guarded. It was Christmas Eve, 9pm. She had shot herself in the chest, but she didn’t mean to. It was maybe a dare or a rash indiscretion. Guns are tricky, as are relationships. Her boyfriend was provoking her, maybe. She wouldn’t say much. It doesn’t matter. After the trigger does its thing, the reasons seem, well, remote. When someone says let’s just leave it at that, we all know that there is more to the story. Also when someone says “just” they mean the opposite. I was just trying to help means that I was also trying to change who you are. I was just leaving means I was staying a little longer. Etc.

  She was right handed. There were no powder burns on her left chest so I figured she was wearing clothes when she just pulled the trigger. She was trying to die when she came in. We put a tube in her chest to drain the blood and re-expand the lung. Her diaphragm was injured and that needed repair. She missed her stomach (5mm) spleen (5mm) and colon (10mm). The bullet left her under the left shoulder blade after tearing through her lung like a sponge, literally. Normally the blood travels in the walls of the little cells of the sponge of our lungs, but when the cells get broken, it is predictably messy.

  This is not an anatomy lesson. It is not a lesson at all. I am seeing what is in front of me. I am a surgeon, I am seeing little bubbles of air gurgling. The difference between respirating and drowning is the difference between air and paper. The surface area of the little spongey bubbles our lungs is that of a tennis court. Massive, and contained. She was struggling for air, breath. Most people who fail at suicide, even those who start out wanting to do themselves in, are happy with the second chance. My patient was happy to be getting to the next breath, to the next
  (happy)
  new
  year.

   

  

  

• December 27, 2011
• 22:22

  Hydra

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  At various times, most of the time, now maybe, I have liked fashion. I subscribe to GQ. I know, but I do. I subscribe to weird French fashion magazines sometimes where the models are nude and waifs, and unhappy and look like gazelles. I have two minds. I have five or six. I like hippies and Upper East Side hopelessly self-important models and real amazing spiritual people and MMA fighting (mixed martial arts–don’t even get me started) and artists and bad-ass punks, and almost anyone who is on the outswing of their pendulum and anyone who is drinking the cup of passion in their life. I like Lindsey Lohan, and I“m not kidding.  I am seeing that this life is the trip I have in this body. This one and that’s it…unless this isn’t it, but can I really be held accountable for material that was not in the syllabus?

  I am not avoiding the topic. I do like fashion. I like thinking about and knowing something about the people who place importance on draped beauty, who define for us what length of pant to wear, or what print works for the cruise collection. I like that they are out there making it matter. What? Are we going to spend all day everyday on the sadness of the world? Even Jesus said the poor will always be with us. He followed it up with an admonition to keep our eye on the heavenly ball, but at this moment I am focusing on the frivolous Gucci ball. It does not matter and it matters a lot…to me. I want there to always be people caring about fashion. I do. I want it to be about clothes and why they matter. Sometimes those clothes are amazing. I’ll stop…after this. Let yourself care a little about the cut of the dress you see winking above the pumps, about the way the tie rebounds off the suit. It’s fun. The misery is always and everywhere; allowing beauty in the midst of it is like having dessert first. Life’s uncertain anyway, so dessert first, as they say, is probably a good idea.

  

• December 22, 2011
• 19:44

  Three

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  6/100 Strangers Project

  Today, my three, my son, my wife and me, were sitting in a preop holding room in Portland at the university hospital. We walked in to the Multnomah pavillion– the word evokes presence and history at the same time–probably built in the 30’s. Finials and foliates garnished solid beige and green brick walls and beyond them and hanging in the clearest blue sky was Mount Hood, the most decadent header for the city itself. We were looking down on the city and the mountains beyond. It was beautiful, truly. Even the inkling of fear that wound round our ankles as we waited for our son to be taken back for elective surgery did not keep us from noticing. Eventually, and as always so far in his short life, he did great and was an inspiration to us about trust and about immediately and without guile, letting us know his needs are as best he can, even though we don’t yet speak the same language.

  The beauty of the pavilion has stayed with me. I have been in operating theaters and old surgical haunts. When I was a resident in Cincinnati, we had our weekly grand rounds–the lecture that includes and everyone and has a very long and wonderful history in medicine–in a refitted surgical amphitheater. You have probably seen one in a picture somewhere. They are tiled white, built in the round and very steep to allow the students to look over white tubular rails at operations they hoped to do some day. The patient would be brought in to a theater literally and the seats were full. The ether flowed and the students watched hernias repaired, cancers excised, femurs set.

  Old things take me to an idea of things solid and safe and good. If they spent this much time on this building, the surgery must be good. This is not true, but it is, I think, what we want to think, and sometimes, it actually is true. When I saw Adam’s car, the car in this photo, it’s fins splitting Greenwood Ave. in Bend, I had to have it–on film. Not only the car though–the whole crew. We were following from behind and saw the girl and dog, who we now know are Ariah, the girl and Myah, the boxer. I asked Rose to wave him over at a stop light and we ended up in a parking lot taking several photos, the last of which you see here. This car means a lot to Adam as it has passed through many people to him and most recently many people he has known. His words:

   “It is a 1960 Chevy Belair. I bought it about a year ago from a friend of mine, who bought it from another friend of ours and he got it from yet another friend of ours. so I am the 4th owner of it in a group of friends. I has the upholstery done in it. some motor work lowered it and did a few cosmetic things such as pinstriping, paint, and fender skirts. There is lots more on the list to do for the car. The car is a daily driver and will always be one, no trailer queen here!”

  Loved taking his picture, looking over the car and watching little Ariah watching me take her dad’s picture. The antique Hasselblad felt really right for this shot and even though my exposures were off, I am very happy with the series after they have been developed.

  Old places, old building, new sons and daughters. Even though they come out perfect in one sense, the sons and daughers, they aren’t. We never are. My kiddo had a little mechanical issue that is probably fixed for good. Our human experience in these amazing bodies involves check ups, bang ups, breaks and fixes.  It is about breaking and healing and repeating.

  

• December 14, 2011
• 0:05

  Some Thing, This Thing, Better

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  May I ask you a question? Will a $200,000 car make you 10x happier than a $20,000 car? Doubt it. Will something well made, somewhat more expensive than what you can get from China mean more to you? Maybe. For me, yes, but there is a limit to the pleasure derived from spending more. The benefits of money are limited, and the law of diminishing returns is in play.

  The business of being productive works against the production of beauty. I can be told a million times to get busier (and I am !!) but I won’t really, because I can’t. I work harder than most people, and there is a limit to what I can pack in to a day. The business may suffer, but what can I do? The business will decide whether to keep me on or not. I have owned the business and I have worked for the business–what I do now. I went without to keep my employees. I came up short to people I hired and respected, but I never was ruthless in my response to scarcity. I was compassionate. I no longer own the business I work in. I work for someone. The bottom line rules because money matters. A lot. Really. The bottom line is weighted and finds the lowest common denominator, unfortunately. Whatever. I have earned the right to say that the bottom line is not the end of the line. It is not what matters most. I have lived and (figuratively) died, by this belief. I have no regrets. What is wondrous, frivolous, well made, evokes my better parts and draws me to excellence.

  Let’s ask the question: Why is it that the pursuit of beauty and excellence in art matters more to me than making more money? This car, a1960 Belair, represents, at this moment, something better than a Kia, a Chevy, an Oldsmobuick. The photo of it and the making of the photo and the writing about it means as much to me as anything I can imagine in terms of work done.  I can’t tell you why, but that is my truth and it matters to me like oxygen matters to me. Whimsy in steel. Why not? I won’t be on my deathbed wishing I had busted my ass for the job harder and harder. I have the honor of whittling my way in to the lives of my patients. That is noble, honorable. The more and more money part? It does not matter. It does not make me happy, although I recognize that having the bills paid is a very good thing for which I am grateful. The pursuit of more money is not lined up with the pursuit of beauty and is less important to me. That’s what I want to know for sure in myself and teach my son. There is no higher bar for my values than that.

  

• December 11, 2011
• 21:55

  The Waking

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  My son is waking up. He is knowing that the world interacts with him and that he has preferences. I have the feeling that he is coming, arriving. I have been with him for seven months, but now I see him knowing what’s up. I can’t fake this father thing much longer. As he does wake up he gives up the sheen of heaven that he came bathed in. Now he takes on the shoddy and earthy layer of a local here on this planet. It is the inevitability of it that is at once sad and wondrous. We don’t get to be here without the tarnish of the place, and seeing that coming down the pike for him raises feelings and questions.
  In one sense it is ridiculous to think he is “affected” by the world already. We have shaded him like mighty oaks, but I know that by now many children have tasted the horrors of the world. That he hasn’t is his luck, and I am grateful in my deepest places. He is still so young and perfectly smooth and amazing. His little body is what bodies are meant to be, working perfectly. His hormones put him to sleep for 12 hours at a time and he listens. He just does and is the next moment. This one moment, this one here. Like that.
  But as he turns his head to see me walk in the room, I know that he is becoming a part of us (as in all of us here on this spinning dime) and he will gain and lose in that deal and the price of getting one more moment here is that one is, moment by moment, affected. The price of maturity is knowing the difference. I don’t mourn for this for him. I am noticing. I am noticing. It is beautiful and poignant and inevitable. As long we draw breath, I know that he will not do any of it alone, and that is my best gift to him. It is the only gift I have.

  

• December 09, 2011
• 12:06

  Beauty

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  I walked out of the exam room, spent and unsure of myself, unsure even though I had been thoroughly identified. Every ten years most doctors have to renew their vows, so to speak. This is done by taking a five hour test in a cubicle in a testing center on a computer. No more sealed booklets and bubble sheets and pencils. Now it is palm vein readers for identification. I thought: if they only knew what my palm was saying right now, but the little reader couldn’t get past lining up my palm veins with the worry lines on the digital photo of my face. So there I was, lined up, in a line, staying in the lines of my life, taking the quiz. When I finished, I grabbed my camera and told myself I was going to find someone beautiful.

  And I did. They found me, actually. Brittney and Mark were posing for shots in Pioneer Square in Portland, taking advantage of the twinkles at the holidays, taking advantage of love and the energy between them. They needed someone to take their picture. We traded cameras back and forth, and they were their good-looking selves for my photo, which I like a lot.

  It’s a little thing, but I can’t deny that I made my intention to find someone beautiful to photograph. I could have said interesting, troubled, whatever. It’s not magic. I was looking for what found me. I am observant. I put myself in the way of beauty and it rolled over me. No complaints. I left for the drive home feeling like I had finally accomplished something for the day.

  This picture is #5 in my 100 strangers project. Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page

  

• December 03, 2011
• 7:41

  Jeep

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  Hand over hand straight to left
  A thousand hands, wheel too hot to touch,
  an noon, on Wake or Saipan.

  A thousand might be millions,
  The miles from home or to the next shore;
  or lost friends or enemies.

  Comfort of this hardened wheel
  Something of home or of somehwhere cool
  of Buicks and girls and seasons.

  

• November 29, 2011
• 0:01

  Endless

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  So, son, its now, this moment, this moment. You are changing me. Do you have enough of yourself to hear this and believe it? Can it roll through you as the truth without some shadowy part of you telling you otherwise? If we just stop at this one simple truth: you are changing me; does that find a place in you? I won’t deliver the rest of the truths I live with, like: I am feeling into the pajama toes of real love like never before, or, your life is letting me dance like an idiot genius, or, when you kick your legs out when I toss you over my head, my heart stops and starts and stops and starts and its so good. Like that. I won’t go in to all these. We will just stay with: you are changing me. In spite of how you see me day to day, like lead maybe, afraid of this and that and railing against change and wondering about things that don’t matter, know that it is coming, change is, and it is good. The alternative is that things don’t change and I don’t believe in that. Change is hard/good/scary/weird and maybe none of that for you. You seem to adapt within minutes to whatever your rookie parents or life or your diaper throw at you. I want you to know that I value the richness of experience more than riches, that time is better than money, and that love wins even when it loses. Every time. And that finally, yes, Rose does love you that much.

  

• November 26, 2011
• 18:57

  See Through You

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  Sunday morning is the right time for North Beach
  across the bridge from Corpus Christi. Sunday
  morning brings the truth to a place full of Saturday night
  fantastical absurdities fueled and created and sustained,
  desperately, by whatever the drug of the day is, or cheap wine.

  I am twelve and following my father along the shoddy shore. We parked
  and we are heading for TexMex at a nameless diner. Skirting
  outstretched palms, eyes whiter, brightened falsely by the sooted cheeks.
  We eat perfect tortillas and enchiladas and walk back tomy father’s grey Thunderbird.
  Dark now, the hands are gone, more sinister tasks at hand, I imagine.
  We go home, not talking about the oddness of this place, or the danger. It is part
  of normal. My brother lives in these places in other places, under buildings, around
  corners, hand to mouth, hand to vein. Maybe we are looking for him.

  Sunday morning breaks harsh, like thrown plates, over North Beach.
  I found my brother, thirty-five years later. He is safe, squared in a 6 x 8,
  three squares a day, squared away. And I am still looking for him
  among the ruins of refurbished North Beach. It looks worse since the improvements:
  imported sand, dayglo curios; it’s obviously dishonest, but in a sinister way, different
  from the honest lies involved in robbing your car if you leave it open
  there along the “beach”. The motels empty at an erratic pace, old time drunks
  emerge from old time haunts. It is not quaint, but it is honest, this Sunday morning.

  

• November 19, 2011
• 23:10

  What You Know and What You Don’t

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  I am studying for my recertification exam in surgery, which comes around every ten years. The more I review everything (and I mean everything), the less I know. My knowledge base falls off pretty quickly once I get out of my window of expertise. But general surgery is called general for a reason. It’s a broad waterfront. I liked surgery because the doing of it is pretty knowable: create exposure for the target tissue to be worked on (least sexy, most important of the mechanical skills in surgery–ask any surgeon), cut, hold tissue (without damaging it) and sew. That’s it! The tricky part about surgery is not the doing of it, it is the judgment, the responding to problems and complications and the knowing when to operate and when not to operate.

  This latter issue of when to operate is more important than knowing what the diagnosis is. Example: If you get shot in the abdomen I don’t know the diagnosis (hole in stomach? spleen? bowel?) but I know that you need an operation. That is an easy one, but the decisions get more complex as the acuity (the imminent danger) is further away. That process of thinking, consulting with colleagues and medical literature is also what makes surgery fun, believe it or not. I know, it can sound dry as toast, but there’s no accounting for taste. Some people want to be rock stars, some want to operate on infected gallbladders.

  Also I am wondering not only about what I don’t know, but what surgeons and “Medicine” in general does not know. We (“we” as in “we in medicine, Western, Eastern or otherwise–the same principle applies) think we know something and then we study it and it is way more complex than we ever imagined. For instance, steroids help decrease inflammation so “we” assumed that steroids for spinal cord injuries would decrease inflammation and “help”. Turns out that it depends on how far out from the injury the steroids are given and for how long. Very early after the injury, less than three hours and they help a little, but only if given for 24 hours. After eight hours, they hurt. Between three and eight, they might help but they must administered for 48 hours. What? When I read complex solutions like this to serious problems I think that it is not the problem’s fault, but rather the questions “we” are asking to solve the problem. We don’t even know where to begin much of the time, and I think we are missing an important piece of the puzzle. Who knows, though, maybe it is that hard.

  I know this waffling may not inspire confidence, especially when you are reading a blog post from a surgeon who should be studying. In the end though, it is the art of medicine (in all its forms) that aids in healing. The science is the tool in service of that art. Applying the science without the art is like painting technically perfect strokes without a vision for the picture. Applying the art with the science creates a healing environment that is bigger than the sum of its parts. So, take heart, I am working on the art part of things for a few minutes. I am understanding me here, which I think I better do if I hope to understand you well enough to know when to make that first incision.

  

• November 15, 2011
• 22:47

  Drought

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  I drove through the emptiness that is the endlessness of South Texas:
  see forever and nothing at the same time, as the joke goes.

  Having grown up here, I have earned the right to say it as I see it, or at least to relay what the photograph shows. The interior towns, Sinton, Taft, Bishop, Mathis, and others were dying when I lived here two decades ago. After twenty more years of neglect and two years of searing drought they look like the drying husks of the cicadas I keep expecting to come hailing through the skies like Valkyries. The abundance of flat land robs its inhabitants of frugality. If a person wants a new business, a new building is built. The business fails, building is left empty. The towns shuck their skins and a new main street, under a different name, evolves like a snake growing a new body at right angles to the old one. Old Downtown rusts, its meters freeze up, and cars park for free in Old Downtown. Christmas ornaments are dragged out and screwed in to the old sidewalks. The newer parts of town do not hold civic celebrations. Mostly though, the towns are about dead. The grain elevators are quiet, the cotton fields are brittle and dusty.

  I was driving to see my brother outside of Beeville. I didn’t see him. I got to the front door and turned back. I walked back to my car, took a picture of the fence, deleted it, and drove away. His pod has a scabies infection at the moment, apparently. Even the most strict prison lockdown for poor funding or for fighting cannot keep visiting rights away, but infectious diseases can. I cried in the car, thinking of him in there, me out here. The disappointment that paints the walls in there (I have visited before) amplified in my imagination of him lying there, scratching, miserable and missing a hug from me, just on the other side of the fence. Forever and nothing out here, nothing forever in there.

  So I make pictures on the way home, make art when it hurts. This hurts. Being closer, seeing the ridiculous barbed wire, being around the cynical and simultaneously listless guards, it all drives the hurt in to me in a more isolated, singular way, like a nail is driven. They, the guards, are paid to keep it impersonal and to not connect and to make prison what it is, isolation: the worst poison humans tolerate, until they don’t.

  As I get closer to the Gulf again and the smell of the salt gains on the smell of the dust, I let the tide of it draw me out. I walk out to the end of Indian Point pier and make pictures of empty water. Unlike the dead fields, empty water is full of hope and all of life. In my heart I understand my work for today is this: toss my love for my brother out on that water, yes, like bread, and I am waiting.

  

• November 10, 2011
• 21:10

  Burlingame

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  No matter how important I make up my job is, there is always the number cruncher who reduces it to the cold and lowest terms of dollars and hours and widgets and grubbing and the taste in my mouth is of ashes. And then the other side of that truth is that someone else could do my job. I am not necessarily what is important about “my” job. And, also, I am what is necessarily and wonderfully important about my job. We can hold both of these three truths inside us at the same time. The tension between them keeps them afloat.  (Augusten Burroughs writes about the unending pain of a child dying and the first time one laughs after that and how both those things are true and true and…ok.)
  When I am drubbed by the unimportance of my job, I walk out of the hotel in Burlingame and stand with a smoking man and wait for the smoke to cross my path, the acrid smell of it (and also kind of nice, I can’t deny it) swirling in eddies as the stream of wind finds it, and I stand there and the smoke comes past me and I make a photograph. Then I have made something today. There was not this photograph and then I worked with my camera and we agreed on this moment. And I love that and inside me it settles the way a leaf settles in the water, dropping this way and that until it is really settled, in the bottom of me. And I exhale the breath I have been holding all day at my important job.

  

• November 04, 2011
• 17:08

  Meathead

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  One of the ways that I learned about prejudice was Archie Bunker. Archie had a problem with anyone who, well, who wasn’t him. All in the Family was not politically correct in its verbiage, but it did more for stripping the veneer off subtle (and overt) prejudice than all the artificial restraints that vanilla-fy (not a PC term, obviously) language and reduce it to having no meaning. If language is artificially restrained without the substance of belief in the words that we use then the language is full of lies. I guess we have decided that we prefer language with a neutral-dyed glaze rather than one that is allowed to be judged on its own merits or lack.
  Maybe the use of pejorative language was so widespread that universities and government couldn’t take it anymore, so they white washed the language and made it gender/sexual/race/height/etc neutral. This gets rid of the use of some horrible words. Unfortunately it also gets rid of the outrage that rises when those words are used.

  When Meathead (I used to really imagine that–a head of meat. I laughed almost every time) rose up to fight Archie each and every time he was himself, I, as a watching child, learned that outrage is the proper response to prejudice. Simple, and true. With language having been bleached (sorry, I did it again), there is not the opportunity for the appropriate response to the insane belief that there is an intrinsic betterness to one person over another. What is also lost in the clumsy language of PC are the words that describe us as being different from one another. I am surely not a brown or black man. I am white, different but no better than you or anyone else. I love that most black men dance better than me (by most I am thinking of a number well over 99%), and I love noticing that difference, but even as I do and even as I write this, something in me is alarming that the use of black man and dancing and white and me is not politically correct even though I am pretty sure I have my facts right. I would watch the black guys in my school at dances and the seriously effortless way that they let the rhythm move through them and I just imitated them as best I could, which was predictably humorous and, in retrospect, sweet. Something arises in me as I write this that causes confusion to a part of myself that is still not 100% sure it isn’t a bigot maybe. It’s hard to know what it is, but writing about it helps me work it out. Not writing it, not saying it, is useless, damaging. PC robs us of the opportunity to speak out and to know ourselves and our own muddy areas. I trust us all to get it right through more and richer language rather than through censored and muted language.

  I hope to teach my son that he is different from that man over there and just as wonderful; different and the difference is worth knowing more about–it’s the only thing worth knowing more about possibly; different and thank god. A million of him or me or you is a bad idea. Even genetics knows this. Two people too close to each other genetically is a wicked bad idea. Two people widely disparate often makes a stunner of a new human. Find the differences. Use the words that describe those differences and celebrate that.

  

• November 01, 2011
• 22:42

  Jesse

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  Jesse was having dinner and not paying much attention to the World Series game seven. That made him interesting. We were sitting at the bar–every table was packed for the game. I had been taking pictures of a closed and apparently abandoned movie theater in Burlingame and Jesse knew some history.

  He had been coming to the area for a long time. He remembered when the Hyatt across the street was a row of quaint cottages. We let ourselves get nostalgic for old movie theaters, quaint cottages on San Francisco Bay.
  Jesse is one of the slow motion replay editors for CBS. His area of greatest interest is golf. I was very interested in the technology side of this and of his interesting life with that. We talked Tiger Woods for a bit, until that petered out. Jesse was generous in letting me set up his portrait. Of course, I was really glad that sports of any kind was on the TV behind him. Couldn’t have worked out better from that standpoint. I used the on camera flash and there are some specular highlights, but not too bad for a tough lighting situation.

  I am enjoying the stretch of this project. It is really amazing that no one is boring in these encounters. Maybe having the project to ricochet off creates poignancy or interest. I am not sure, because I know I can be enough of a snob and enough of a realist to know that not everyone I meet is interesting to me (and vice versa). Maybe I am discovering that if I see you within a context of art then your beauty makes its way to the surface right away. It is more likely that I have taken off my egotistical shades and you light is evident. And vice versa.

  This picture is #4 in my 100 strangers project. Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page

  

• October 27, 2011
• 23:28

  Lisha

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  I am in Burlingame, CA. I would normally want to just say San Francisco, but it isn’t. I am in Burlingame for four days. I went for a walk along the bay. I was taking pictures of an unusual man against a wall of windows that reflected the other side of the bay. I turned to continue and Lisha said, can I ask you a question? You can if I can, I said, you first.
  She said: Is it the reflection?
  Yes, and the man. May I take your picture?

  Lisha was walking along the bay because she had decided to skip a visit to her family on this side of the bay. We talked about how it can be hard to be with family. She wasn’t the only one talking. Lisha lives in Hayward, on the other side of the bay. She pointed. She is studying French in college. It’s easy for her because she speaks Spanish. I later passed her by on the walkway and she was on the phone speaking passionately, and her Spanish was beautiful with full rolling r’s.

  I took French in high school and college. I don’t have many regrets in my life (although maybe I should) but trying to learn French instead of Spanish is one. I spent two summers in the Dominican Republic, lived in South Texas, and have a family full of Spanish speakers, so, of course, I had to try to learn French, an unspeakable language (ask Bobbi French). I never did learn French, mais non. I only fell in love with the teacher.

  Meeting Lisha was the highlight of the day. I loved having the windows that reflected her side of the bay. The light was good. She has a really great smile, but this image spoke to me of her struggle in being on her family’s side of the bay but calling the other side home.

  

• October 25, 2011
• 23:16

  Kiss Me

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  Nothing profound to report. Architectural seating is a good idea. I think it is a good idea for the people who design buildings to get involved with comfort.

  I want to recommend a blog…

  [ordinarylifeadventures.blogspot.com]

  Kathleen Yago is a looker; she sees. I get her, or at least I make up that I do, but I think I do.  I know about watching and watching and watching and trying to figure out how to feel by knowing.  As I have watched her photographs over the months I am feeling her in the pictures and that spark is so cool.  She is in there!   I think she takes pictures to get a clearer image of herself. I like that and me too. Each post is like going on a walk with her, something I will do next time I get a chance. Check it out, let her know you came by, add her feed, or like most of you here, remain the most welcome (and quiet) 99%.

  

• October 23, 2011
• 11:29

  Developed Tulip

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  Having grown up in the post 60’s, 70’s, I got the idea that natural was better than processed (organic was not yet a cult and natural still had a definition that could be trusted.  This is not the case now.)  I believed that the girl on the Herbal Essence shampoo bottle,with flowers and herbs

  streaming from her perfect hair, was the perfect kind of girl.  She was so natural and so in tune with nature that it lived in her hair.   I confess, I had a thing for her.  From those neo-hippie values, I also extracted that make-up was a bad thing for my girl to wear.  “If you don’t like your face, ‘make up’ a new one,” is what I would say, thinking I was so cool and clever.  I can’t explain how I held this value and still totally loved the Farah Fawcett poster that every adolescent male on the planet lusted over for the second decade of their lives in the 70’s/80’s.  Maybe Farah was the Herbal Essence girl to me, although I know that in the poster, Farrah is totally made up (literally and figuratively it turns out–a lesson learned after decades of striving to find the fantasy that ad companies convinced me of all those years ago).

  Which brings me to the topic of developing photographs.  The translucent, sensual tulip you see here is not what showed up when I uploaded the file to the computer.  It has been developed.  I cropped it, intensified the focus and colors and added a “pastel” effect (this photo is more of a “Color Me Beautiful”  Spring.  My personal coloring is Winter, by the way.), etc.  Lots of make up here.  Snapshots tend to be undeveloped photographs and I don’t like them as much as pictures that the photographer (or someone) works on to make it memorable.  I spent time on these dying tulips to make a point about the beauty still present in the decline of the flower.  I realize that this is my own little conceit.  You are not likely to have known I was thinking about that when you saw the flowers, but I guess a guy can hope.  I don’t mind that you do or don’t “get it” the moment you look at the photo.  You will get what you want to, and that is good enough.  If you get nothing from the photo then I have more work to do.

  Also, ultimately, these things don’t matter too much.  Make up or no make up, developed or raw, beauty is where you find it in yourself.  I don’t mind make up and sometimes I love it–and sometimes it is awful.  Whether a woman, a man, a photograph, or a paragraph leaps out to me as beautiful mostly depends on whether it leaps out of me as beautiful.  I make it up myself and I make the case (or not) for everything I see.  Your hair can only be beautiful if I say so, and my photograph can only be stunning if you say so.  The only exceptions to this are, of course, the Herbal Essence girl and Farrah Fawcett.  They are objectively and eternally beautiful no matter what you say.

  

• October 21, 2011
• 0:21

  Untitled 13

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  Sometimes the beauty comes by accident; the camera sees it for me. This is one of those pictures where I wonder if I am the only one who sees something poetic, graceful. Does the same feeling arise in you when the mundane moment elevates itself with the turn of the hands, the blue in the shorts, the reflection or the dog? Is this a great picture? No. It is a great little moment though.

  

• October 18, 2011
• 16:41

  Oregon Autumn Dusk

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  Moving a circus to the next town might be easier than moving one infant the half the distance. At least the giraffes can be cajoled to participate. A human baby cannot be cajoled. They exist and through them runs a river of feelings that are attached to no story (!) and about all they “do” is be. Having pure feelings is a necessarily self-absorbed and unconscious endeavor. As we get older we look for ways to reproduce this state of feel-everything, do-nothing, but it can’t be imbibed. I have found it has to arise from the inside. Maybe something in us recalls the purity of having feelings without fear stopping them. Most of my waking life is spent in my thoughts and not my feelings but failing to get conscious about my feelings does not make them go away. In fact the opposite happens–they swell to ridiculous bubbles inside. While babies can’t get conscious about their feelings and they feel all of them, I have to know I am having a feeling–I have to feel the feeling–and I have to painstakingly do this one feeling (or two maybe) at a time. Weird. The price of being in purity with the feelings is that it is not possible to be that and know it. As a non-baby we have feelings tarnished with stories and thoughts, but we get to know the wonder of that experience in a human body. Worth it especially since we also get to see the babies have the pure form of feelings.

  Anyway.

  We decided to move the baby to a different place than his nice warm little room in his warm, comfy house. We thought maybe a day away at the hot springs would do him good or at least do us good since he actually does good every minute of the day. What moving the baby does not entail is simply changing his geography. It involves reproducing his comfy little life in as much high def relief as possible. I can get out the door with my camera and a weekend bag (ok and the food and a book and the other camera…hmmm). I won’t list what moving him means. You either know or can imagine what this means(except that if you haven’t done it you really can’t imagine, but it will be super boring if I list everything and this will turn in to a “dad-lovingly-recalls-baby-times” blog, and even though I do reminisce about each moment with him one instant after each moment has passed {and this is exactly as syrupy sick as you can imagine}, this blog won’t be that). I was increasingly exhausted getting to and from our restful day away, and I was not alone, nor was I doing the hard work of actually creating from nothing, the food this baby would eat. I just carried stuff.

  Then, in the midst of the rushing around, I stop because the light is overwhelming and perfect and the lake and the mineral springs bathhouse plop themselves in front of me. I stop doing and make some pictures. The feeling I always get when I am working with light and shutters and rules of thirds, that feeling flowed through me like the warm waters from the springs. The fatigue finds rest, the mayhem falls away and I am not thinking. I am knowing without thinking that I am feeling joy.

  

• October 16, 2011
• 22:24

  The Rain.

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  I lay in the rain to let the drops hit me like downbeats
  to the next breath, like little knocks on the apartment door
  when I lived alone on a Sunday afternoon and the quiet was
  everywhere.

  The clouds, moving water around like the sky’s watering cans,
  start bloated and then dump and then leave
  wistful and empty
  in the wind.

  

• October 11, 2011
• 21:49

  Graffiti

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  Doing an operation a thousand times makes a difference. Like Steve Austin, the bionic man, my operations these days are “better, stronger, faster.” No matter what I thought when I finished “training” and how I thought I was teflon and all-knowing, I had not done anything a thousand times in the operating room. Now I have. I am still not Michael Jordan (go to this link and click around). I am me, but I am probably near my prime as a surgeon. I know what I know about surgical diseases, and by that I mean that I actually know. This is no longer something I have read about. A chef knows the five mother sauces. It is the working vocabulary from which cooking springs. I know what that feels like now. It has been twenty years to get here. I know how to cut and to sew and how to think about operations, and I can be creative without being stupid. I know how to get around in someone’s abdomen and not waste time, and that is beautiful and fun. I can practice surgery now as a craft.

  I am writing this because it feels good to be in this place with my work. I will probably have three complications tomorrow; or maybe I am like a graffiti artist, making sure my horn is blowing on the wall of this post, but I don’t think so. It’s just my truth as I know it now. As demoralizing as surgery can be when things go south, I can only do my best and, as far as I know, I am always doing my best, but I am also doing my best work now. The feeling good part I started this paragraph with is based on…I don’t know, but it does.

  Humility, true humility, is about being right-sized in the world. If I am one down or one up, my ego is running the show (think about this, especially the one down), but when I am right sized, I am telling my best approximation of the truth and showing up for the person who is telling that truth.
  So much of my life (maybe yours too) has been about accepting someone else trying to make me smaller or worse, making myself smaller to fit in some meaningless cookie mold. Saying what is, and letting that hang in the air like the perfect cloud it is, is liberating. Try it.

  And finally, when looking for a surgeon, look for one who is 20 years in or so, admits to being an expert about the question at hand, and (and this is most important of all and I am not kidding) who convinces you that she/he knows they walk on land, require food and water and are not sitting on the right hand of god. You’ll know the difference in them if you know it in yourself.

  

• October 09, 2011
• 13:13

  Family

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  Somehow while growing up, I missed the part about the structure of the family, how it works together. Things like loyalty and sacrifice were lost to me. I knew I should feel those things but I only knew it. I couldn’t feel them inside me. I am now understanding that my parents worked tirelessly to keep the thing cobbled together, but we were spread so far apart on the prairie of the seventies: ten years between me and my eldest sister. She was gone as I was coming into knowing I was on the planet. We have tried at various times to all come together over the past decade or two. One of us four kids (usually me) has gotten the idea that we really are magnets and should be trying to get closer together, but it doesn’t work. Even though we are polar opposites of one another, our polarity lines up when we get close to each and we move away from each other again, smooth as air hockey pucks. I no longer expect that we are meant to be too close geographically.

  Like almost every other lemming on the planet, I am now a part of a new family. My son has the use of me for as long as he needs me or, rather, can tolerate me. It’s a blistering hot path between fathers and sons. The mile markers are often named “injury 1, injury 2…injury x”. My friend Randall, (with whom I travelled across the south eating fried chicken, with whom I rambled through NYC multiple times, with whom I smoked a pipe and waxed weird about Elvis Costello in college, for whom NYC stuck, he’s a writer, wanderer, literary conjurer, photographer) congratulated me as well and as honestly as I have heard:

  Congrats on accepting — and I’m sure doing well with — the challenge of fatherhood.  You necessary evil, you…

  I had to laugh. I look at this smiling little wonder and I can’t imagine conflict, but I do remember it for myself and I recall it is the plot of 90% of the books I have read and loved. The conflict between us will come and I will have to face the evil that I am to him and that hurts even now. But…I am not asleep. I am awake. I have hope that consciousness of the pain that will come in to our family will help me to accept it. Maybe the rifts in families arises because we believe that the smiling cooing baby must remain forever, that our job as parents is to keep them from pain. I don’t buy it. The pain comes like the buffalo moving across the boiling prairies. It just is not stoppable. I believe my job is to let him know that he won’t feel the pain alone, but he will feel it. I won’t stop it, because I can’t. I’ll hold him then and I will tell him what I am telling you: I won’t leave now or ever. And, because that too will fail (somewhere I will leave him and I will let him down, breaking this, my most solemn promise), we have Rose. She will hold us both, mother to him, lover and partner to me, endlessly able, the keeper of the deeper wisdoms of love, and the mortar in the structure of our family.

  

• October 06, 2011
• 17:13

  I’m Listening, Because This Matters

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  Taking potshots at the places I place my attention. I attend to the sick at work. My attention is riveted on my work much of the day. I make up stories about it mattering. My life does intersect with your death or your near-death or your illness or discomfort. I get involved with that and get paid for that. Paid well. Your health matters to you like mine does to me. Still, as a concept, work doesn’t hold my affection the way art does, the way love does, or beauty, or your smile at my dour mug, or the way the reflection in a car window makes a quick little movie on a tiny little movie screen as I walk by. I hold lots of affection for that.

  Steve Jobs died a month or so after he retired. I don’t know really anything about him, but I make up another story, and that is that he worked a lot. He changed my life from way over there, wherever there was for him. To do that, he was cranking. Tirelessly, he must have worked tirelessly. Even though I am given the gift of literally being inside you when I work, I don’t have any drive to be tireless at it. I couldn’t. I have worked insane hours and it takes from me. Not to be trite or obvious, but I find that terribly hard to do. My personality gets drained and emptied from it. I know surgeons who are the opposite. They feed on it. I try to imagine my poor personality trying to get a meal out of constant work and my stomach rumbles. The more I work the emptier my energy gets. Not Steve Jobs. Don’t you think it had to fill him? Did it fill him the way the plunging syringe fills the junkie? Was it like water to a thirsty thirsty man? One month after retiring, he retired. Working long enough is exhausting, as in: I was tired before, but now I am re-tired. Peace to you, Steve Jobs, and to all the working, worked-out, tired, dying and the dead.

  

• October 03, 2011
• 23:00

  Michael

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  I wore my scrubs in to Starbuck’s. My case was late starting and I stopped by on the way in. I sat down in a faux leather arm chair. Immediately Michael engaged me. Being my usual reclusive self, I acted busy on my phone. He wouldn’t have it. Asked me why they weren’t called Blues, the scrubs. Why not? Unanswerable questions like this poured from him. I stopped fidgeting and just listened. He told me about being drunk on Pilot Butte (local hill) and the $800 ambulance ride to the ER. $800! I know, I said. It’s a lot.
  He told me he was a twin split from his brother at birth. He later found him at age 10, but didn’t stay in touch. His step-father took him to an institution at 18. He broke the one rule that would have had him out of there in a week: he got in a fight. Since then it’s been over 20 years of mental health. At this point he is the rock star of Bend (Oregon) mental health. I asked, then, if I could take his picture as that rock star. He said yes.

  This picture is #2 in my 100 strangers project. Find out more about the project and see pictures taken by other photographers at the 100 Strangers Flickr Group page

  

• October 01, 2011
• 22:40

  Tree, Two Ways, Two

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  A stranger is walking in this exact place where I am walking.
  He stretches out my limbs and uses them.
  He takes my breath away.
  There are no secrets here. It’s me
  Looking at him looking at me.

  I did not do this before, you know,
  my thirties. In my twenties, there was only one:
  Perfect, infallible, except that everything he did
  was to take me to Robert Johnson
  ‘s fork in the road.
  There is a price for knowing.

  It strips the skin right off me, my forties do.
  It’s the turning of a corner, slow, tight, in bleach in
  raw sunlight, at noon.
  This is not the golden hour at the end of the day,
  not morning. It’s straight up specular noon.
  Hold on.
  That’s a little too literal, yo. I should not be naming
  my forties. I should be finding a metaphor.
  This poem just got less sexy.
  Exactly.
  And I can’t get off this ride and still
  I am turning.

   

   

   

   

   

   

  

• September 27, 2011
• 17:01

  Hours of Operation

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  Growing up in Corpus Christi, TX involved a long and tedious relationship with heat. At about 4 every afternoon it comes in waves, borne by the humidity, and it washes over everything in a not water-like way at all. It washes over you like thick wool in a rain forest. I would get out of school at 3:30. The heat didn’t take my breath away; it was more like having a sock straight out of the dryer stuffed into your gullet. Breathing just stopped. I got sleepy every day in the afternoon. It is possible too that I was sleepy because of a 200 gm sugar load at lunch. Very possible. The combination of the sugar and heat was like the junkie’s speedball mix of cocaine and heroin. The come-down is double bad. No soft and gooey rocket ride up happens without a price on the return trip.
  I digress, but not really. The heat was like that. It baked everything into itself. It took my will, every day.I spent a summer working as a tar roofer in South Texas. The buckets of tar had to be carried from points a to b and c etc. That was my job. Looking around there was not a better job. Moving up did not change things relative to the heat. Someone had to work the molten tar, which I assume required no input of energy since the air itself was molten hot. Someone had to spread the tar, someone to add gravel, someone even to stand around, rooted in the melting world and watch. Supervise, they called it. This person had not even the distraction of movement. Anyway, after that summer I applied myself somewhat more to my studies and got clear about going to college one way or another.

  This photo taken in the “heat” of the day in Moro, OR. I don’t know why, but it reminded me of how I felt growing up in the swelt of Corpus Christi. (Swelt is a word, by the way, although I am taking some liberties in its usage, I believe. It is normally a verb, believe it or not, for any of you sentence diagraming nerds out there. It means either to die or to faint or to overpower as with heat, as in the sun in South Texas swelted me.) However Moro’s heat of the day is just a pleasant and comforting and dry and nourishing warmth. Things, like gardens, grow in Moro’s heat. In Corpus Christi, the heat kills. If the heat doesn’t kill you, the wind blows your brain into moist dust devils of disorientation, but that is another story.

  

• September 25, 2011
• 9:54

  Tree, Two Ways

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  I don’t hear music.
  The sounds drift by me, clattering like dishes
  coming out of the machine.

  I hear everything,
  the drummer’s heartbeat,
  the breath in on the upbeat.

  I don’t read poetry.
  The words don’t rhyme
  and I don’t have time.

  All words are syncopated and
  laden beyond their meanings
  with more, always more.

  I can’t dance.
  My body betrayed me at a young age
  and I haven’t forgiven it.

  I am dancing now
  and I can’t stop and
  the sun is coming up.

  

• September 21, 2011
• 21:10

  Bill

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  It is just barely possible that, at the rare moment, Bend Light can be rather, uh, Heavy. This is because I am that way. There is a lighter side to me, however. There is a side that wants to be known in a goofy way, a side that wants to feel less guarded. You get the idea. I really can be funny, although often, the humor comes with a paper cut so you have to like both. Some people actually do. That has little to do with this:

  There is a project on flickr that is bugging the s**t out of me. It is called 100 Strangers. You immediately get it I am sure. Walk up to 100 people I don’t know and discuss a photograph. The photograph is of the them and I am taking it. If you have been here for even 3 posts you will see that portraits are as rare as an Irish Elk (largest deer in the history of the world, which is pretty good for Ireland. Extinct for over 7000 years. You can go back to bed now. You have learned something new today.). I have known for a long time that my camera needs to find faces. I need to. I need to connect with you right in the eyes. I have a decent ability, or at least I will say that I enjoy my own ability to see the unusual beauty of mundane scenes. What I have been less willing to do is look you in the eye and ask for permission to capture your soul on film. I am now going to do that. One at a time, painfully. You can just know that every one you see here will be a source of pain for me. I am reclusive. I only do the chicken dance at home for Rose. I only squeal like a little girl for the kiddo ( but it is way worth it, actually on both counts).

  I am driving between Bend and Redmond, because there are lots of weird things in those 14 miles, trust me. I suspect there are lots of weird and interesting people and I am looking to find them. I run across a yard with planes on metal posts. This was weeks ago. I got out and hid and took some pictures from across the fence, but I knew the story was in there and not just that someone had constructed 10 foot airplanes out of bent sheet metal in their front yard. So once I found out about 100 strangers I went back.

  

  Bill has been making airplanes for his seven kids since they were, well, kids. The blue plane you see is the plane that Bush I was shot down in during WWII, the Big One. (I am a pacifist, but I always thank veterans for their service. I also thank every teacher I ever meet. They get paid nothing to unlock our minds. ? ) I knocked on the door and asked for the person who made the planes. Bill introduced me to Wynona, his lovely bride of 50+ years. Bill was an MP in the army then a welder when he got out. Seven kids were raised in the house I stopped at, a house that looked exactly like a double wide in terms of square feet. While I was there they got 4 phone calls from kids who love them and just wanted to say so on a Sunday. All the models in the photo were hand made (without plans) by Bill. Wynona is in the photo behind Bill.

  I asked Bill if I could make a photograph. He agreed. Wynona was canning tomatoes. I got an extensive tour, but the best part was the feeling welling up in this introvert when he touched a stranger. So there will be more.

  

• September 18, 2011
• 23:29

  Big Dipper

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  I write this blog and I tell you about me, but I don’t often reveal my secrets. That said, I have revealed some here, which for a guy like me, is remarkable. Most secrets are deadly, at least for me. I am not advocating spilling everything that I have done or thought, but I am advocating for living a life more transparent.

  Having done the opposite, lived a life with many rabbit holes of secrets, it is exhausting and it leads to bizarre behavior. I have hurt people who trusted me because I lied to them. In order to cope with the secret life, Ie looked for relief in substances or processes that led to destruction. At the heart of addictions is secrets, I believe. They rob me of time (most important “possession” I have), integrity (doing the right thing when no one is around) and freedom (ability to live with the luxury of choices). Secrets seem to generate shame which is the root problem. By shame I mean the belief that I am intrinsically no good. Maybe shame generates the secrets. Doesn’t matter, together they are a hamster wheel of despair.

  Getting better means shining light in the corners and telling my own truth. I am not talking about the Ultimate Truth as its written in the stars or your favorite scripture or as it is told to you by legitimate experts or quacks who look at stars or scriptures. I am talking about the simple, powerful words that state who I am, where I am, what I do, what I believe and how I feel. My truth. I don’t do this all the time, and sometimes the truth is a process of understanding, but when I get to it I know it is real because it has the feeling of being intrinsic to me. When I live in a lie or in confusion, it feels foreign and I start looking around for relief. Removing secrets reduces shame and makes for the transparent life. There is a turning point going from secrets to truth. It is like cells of truth are added to me to replace cells of secrecy. At some point I am no longer the same person. I am able to tell my truth most of the time even though I still have some secrecy cells left. On balance, I am a different man than I was. Amazing.

  Example: I was molested by Robbie the lifeguard at the local pool at the park down the street in Corpus Christi. That was an awful event for a little boy. I held it as a secret and added many more similar secrets to that one trying to unconsciously work it out. When I finally realized how much space Robbie was occupying in my psyche, and how much damage I had caused as a result, I was grief-stricken. Eventually I was able to talk about the story and even did a photography/writing exhibit around it last year. Through that and through the help of many friends I have been able to let go of that event and of all the labels that came after it and which plagued me for a long time.  Now when I think back I see those events as something that happened. I don’t see them as the deep dark hole in my life that I once did.  Talking about it actually helped.  The secrets scattered when the lights came on.

   

   

   

   

   

   

  

• September 15, 2011
• 7:57

  Moving

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  Changing houses today. I am lucky to have a roof over my head and to have the Oregon sky above that. Rose told me about a TED talk by JJ Abrams–film and TV guy. He likes to take boxes apart. He likes to see how they are engineered. Sounded eccentric until I realized that the promise of a box is usually better than what it holds.  Taking apart that promise, getting to nothing, no box…that is good stuff.

  

• September 13, 2011
• 0:03

  Venography

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  Two’s:
  Hands, kidneys, eyes, ears, lungs, etc.

  One’s:
  The midline: the sex, brain, mouth, the heart.

  If it’s vital for the experience of living, vital for our self-knowing, we get only one. The duplicated organs serve the singular ones, or maybe the duplicated ones have the singular ones on the short leash. Chickens, eggs, carts and horses.

  I am asking questions about the set up. Why does my brain have the experience of being in this body? Is it to know God, really? If no god, then we have a brutal (un)knowing of our loneliness. I say unknowing because we don’t know what happened before or after the moment our little asteroid of a life shot across history. It (this life) is history, isn’t it? It’s not the future, for sure. We don’t shoot across the future. By the time anything happens, it is old news, done, over as it began. I feel sad about that, and that is the condition of being human. Those who say they know god do not anything more than anyone else. They believe something different but are no more (or less) fervent in their belief than the (un)believer who is equally committed to the “fact” of a godless universe. Everyone stakes everything of their existence on this belief. Everyone. More questions..

  Why do we hide our sex? Why are we afraid of nakedness? Shame? We do instantly judge every possible nuance of appearance. How does it help to judge based so much on looks? This is a problem for C. Darwin. The best mate is so much more than the looks, but the looks make us quiver. Smart? Who cares. Big tits please. I don’t get it. Maybe we learned to wear clothes because something in us learned that looks kill. The clothes create the time needed to figure out if I am smart/compassionate/capable enough to be a good mate. Still, no matter how bright/driven/loving, if the smell is off or the hair is wrong, I’m out. I know this because I have ended relationships for these reasons. Turns out I am just as base as…you?

  What’s left? The mouth. Besides politicians who, it turns out, do have two mouths, we have the one. ‘Nuff said, yo.

  ______________

  New feature for you Bend Lightbulbs: If you follow me on twitter @bendlight you will find that I am going to be giving 140 character reviews of photos I like and links to those photos. I have wondered how to share the work of non-me photographers (huh? I know, but it’s true, there are other photo-graphers out there). This is how. Bend Light will continue to beat you incessantly with only my photos. Twitter @bendlight will publish my posts but added value there will be the witty little nothings about great photos. Beware: I won’t hesitate to include nudity or disturbing images if they stir my midline organs. Am I sharing too much now? Maybe? Sorry. I’m out.

  

• September 10, 2011
• 23:29

  What It Takes

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  The music that plays while I am waiting on the phone brings me closer to homicidal than almost anything I can think of…until the voice (I’ll call her Joan) comes on to remind me to look for upcoming specials and to continue to wait. Then I am more homicidal. The music is like a deep water drill bit sinking in to, all the way inside of, me. It hurts. But, of course, hanging up means they win. I won’t let that happen. I have already entered my account number so I have a spot in line, and even though the person who might eventually interrupt Joan, will definitely ask me for the number again (making me beyond mad, beyond words, actually almost bringing me to tears, but not quite–the anger finds a way back), I wait and I listen.

  I start wondering about who the people are who are playing the instruments that makes this sound that I am hearing. Maybe it is all a computer. I hope so, because I can’t bear to think about the guy playing the sax on one of these cuts. He carries his instrument to a studio in Indiana probably, or North Carolina (nothing against Indiana or North Carolina. In fact, check out this photographer from both places. Here is his blog, here is the website  and here is a photo of his that I love. His name is Stephen Jesse Taylor. Don’t know him and I didn’t ask for permission to talk about him, but he does write and make photographs and he spells Stephen correctly so I have taken liberties. Check him out, add his blog to your reader. He’s good.) because the price of doing business is favorable for the company that records this music. So he arrives, exhaling his last drag as he walks in. When he sits down next to his tired colleagues to both see and play for the first time while being recorded, the inane versions BJ Thomas songs, all he can do is sigh, close his eyes, and wet his reed.

  The music way outlasts my short story about the sad musician, however. It is like time itself or the endless rains that carved out the grand canyon. It is patient. I start thinking that the music is actually eating my brain. Parts of it (my brain) feel gone as I am listening. I remember that in malls the music is chosen to discourage fights–happy, light, like this music on the phone, actually. As mad as I started out feeling, I am now, again, feeling the anger melt away. The sound has taken root in me, it is part of me now. I am docile and polite and ready to give the nice man my account number.

  

• September 07, 2011
• 23:34

  Tonka

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  This is number three hundred for Bend Light. I started this about a year and a half ago. I publish about every three to four days now. I made all the pictures except one. It feels like a lifeline to me. I say it feels like one because it isn’t one. I won’t die without it; but within me is a part that is more alive with it. Can I be more alive, less dead? I think I am either dead or not, but I can be more alive. Bend Light stokes the fire of alive.

  Not an insignificant part of the juice I get is you. Would I still do this if you didn’t read it? I would like to think so, but I am familiar enough with my ego to know it would quickly bore from looking at itself and especially at looking at the part of itself that tries to be free of the ego. Writing that makes me think of “Leggo my ego”. Sorry. Anyway, I like that you and I look at one another in this cyber place. I hear less from you than you do from me and my ego seems to tolerate that ok–it is that enamored with itself I guess. I would like to hear from you more. To that end I am going to look for a way to make the comments follow directly under the post so that discussions might arise without leaving the page. This may require a new theme, etc, yawn. In other words, I want to hear from you and really some of you should meet each other. You are great people who read Bend Light, don’t you think? Thank you for reading and sharing Bend Light. For lots of reasons it means a lot to me.

  As part of my celebrating three hundred, I would like to ask you to invite your friends to Bend Light. I want more readers. I like the connections. Send the link along if you fell inclined. I am shamelessly asking you to help me promote the site here.  Check out blogs I like on the blog roll to the right.  These are quality places to visit.  

  You can subscribe to the blog in several ways so you don’t have to keep remembering to come back here. On the sidebar you will find an email subscription. You put your email in and you then receive an email that has a link you click to confirm it’s you. You can unsubscribe any time. You can also find Bend Light on twitter @bendlight. On Facebook, you can find a Bend Light page, although I think FB is kind of a drag, but it’s there if you want. My photos are on Flickr under sb archer. If you click on the photo you go to Flickr. If you click on the blog title you go to that post’s own page with comments. You can “like” posts, retweet posts, tweet thoughts about the post all from the side panel there. You can Stumble posts even. If you like a photo and want a print, contact me. I’ll make one for pretty close to cost plus shipping. I am not looking to make money on this site. If you have a blog reader add Bend Light with the RSS button. If you don’t have one, get one. If you have ideas for the blog, let me know. I would be honored to have the feedback.

  For today’s photo, I would ask you to fill in the blanks. If the word Tonka evokes for you memories the way it does for me, you will have a great set of stories to revel in. You can write one down here if you like. Otherwise, and/or if the word Tonka means nothing to you, that’s ok. I think it’s still a cool moment as the dusk sweeps across the wheat fields, the smoke from a forest fire under Mt. Washington roils through the sunset.

  

• September 03, 2011
• 23:27

  Blue Chair and Slats

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  Some people know the world around them by feeling other people’s feelings. Others have a sense in their bodies. I look. Then I run what you are doing through the database of my billions of watched moments. My brain sifts through nuance and expression and smell and who knows what. I am not sure how it works, but it is what I do. Knowing how I get my information about the world is really helpful. It helps me to try other ways, have compassion for this way’s limits and enjoy the thing I am best at. I also know that I can allow the real feeling to come instead of just the acting out of what I know a feeling looks like. I know, tedious, right?                                                                                                        When I was a kid I would hide behind the bushes outside the house of the girl I had a crush on. I watched. If she walked by a window, I was happy. I wasn’t looking in her bedroom (that would have done me in), just the family room. I was that in love. Just wanted to see her for a second in a window. Then I would ride home on my Schwinn as fast as I could. The little watcher. Kind of creepy maybe, but I was a kid so don’t start throwing tomatoes.  

  This looking at things is obviously and literally what the photography is doing. The voyeur, I am the protected recorder, keeping a light sensor between me and what’s really going on. I take the image and study it and make up a story and that somehow makes me feel good.                                                                                                                                                

  This chair works as an image because of what is not the chair. The light through the fence is what I saw, then the blue. The chair adds the story for the photo, but the photo draws you because of the repeating of the slats in the fence and the chair and the light playing between them, at least, that is what draws me. Then I cropped it, saturated up the blue a bit, worked on the vignetting. You know, I developed the picture. As I see it now, I feel good when I look at it. I guess I think it is beautiful in its own way, and being a part of making a beautiful image is a great way to spend an hour in this life. Totally worth it. The connection to the beauty is the joy of the art. I don’t care why.

  

• September 01, 2011
• 0:33

  Holds This

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  We have to feel a certain amount of pain to change directions, get help, stop injuring ourselves, etc. It turns out we, as a race, are obstinate. If it doesn’t hurt, we don’t stop doing what are doing even if it is destructive. We persist in one direction until pain nudges in a different way–like a perverse Newtonian law of motion. Maybe we are just lazy or maybe it’s a good plan. Why change what isn’t killing me? Of course, once it starts hurting we might persist because changing is inconvenient, a hassle, work. Again, back to us being lazy. Example: I have been in relationships that I certainly should have gotten out of, but didn’t, even though the pain was there. I think of one in particular in which my friends were begging me to bail and I hung in there miserable, until I had burned all options but to either lose a lot of people who loved me or run. I ran and the work of that was worth it. Although I am sure none of you have done anything like this, I had, in several areas of my life, perfected this doomed strategy of denial, adopting it my psyche’s primary strategy. I do it less now and life is better, and it is as simple as that. I stopped ignoring pain. Seems so simple when I say it like that but it took half my life to learn it.

  I got in to surgery because I got in to medicine because I got interested in psychiatry because I was studying psychology because I wanted to know why pain? When I got to medical school I found that everyone was wondering about pain. In the medical world, surgeons touch the pain, literally. They put their fingers in the hole and stop the bleeding, find the pain and try to stop it. In the meantime, between the finding and the stopping, they cause more pain. Is this morbid? yes. Are surgeons aware of the psychological elements of transference and vulnerability that go along with the hands on craft? Rarely. But I will say this: we often (unknowingly for most of us) make up for it with reverence for the beauty we see inside you, and the privilege that you confer on us in letting us open you, look at you at your most naked, and touch you. We touch when you are utterly defenseless. It is so trusting, even tender, and when I think about it at all, it is one of the deepest joys and highest honors of my life. Why do you let us (me!) in so close? Pain. You want to stop hurting. Sometimes I can help with that. Ironically, many people are fully willing let me to do all these intimate surgical things to them but are completely unwillingly to see a counselor about the deepest hurts in their hearts that gnaw at them every day. Some pains are too much to move from.

  The abdominal contents are held in a sac called the peritoneum. It is a thin layered covering that is exquisitely sensitive to pain. If that container gets violated, the person willingly heads for help. Peritonitis is inflammation of that sac. It is what makes appendicitis hurt in the lower right abdomen. The peritoneum is irritated. It’s the life saver, because it generates enough pain to make us stop and change and get help. I am wondering what today lines my heart that is so sensitive that even the slightest violation will cause me to take action. What immediately comes to mind is my new, young family. We feel awkward, faltering, even innocent. We are interdependent, inexperienced, vulnerable. I am on alert to avoid pain as we make our way in the world, but I know the pain is inevitable. What doesn’t have to happen is going through the pain alone. We can move to one another, help each other, get well. So I am learning to let go of avoiding the pain. It will come when it comes. When it does I want to be a body in motion, moving to you to help me, because it’s too much alone.

  

• August 29, 2011
• 12:41

  The Mail

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     The mail rarely bears letters. Mostly it’s not letters. Buy this or pay for that, that’s the mail. The exceptions are the letters from my brother. He is in a prison in Texas. Handwritten on school notebook paper with an ink pen. He tells me about the lockdowns, the intense heat all day, most days, about the typewriter I helped him buy from the commissary. This is a typewriter I have never personally seen evidence of in a letter. He is saving the ribbons, he says. I hope he is saving the ribbon for his novel. I send him surfing magazine subscriptions and he will tear out the best curls from Indonesia or Chile. These are real gifts since he won’t be able to get them back. He sends me his best photos and catches me up on the news.
     He hasn’t joined a gang and that has cost him at times. He says he mostly stays to himself, works out and eats tuna fish, again from the commissary, at every meal. The food in prison is the lowest common denominator of edible material. I have walked through a prison. Lunch smelled like something burnt and rotten. It looked that way too. He is one of the lucky ones with a family who can help subsidize tuna and new tennis shoes from time to time, a typewriter, fresh undershirts, better soap.
     Most days his mail bears nothing, of course. I send him letters via email through a special service. He gets a print out of it. Sometimes I will send him the latest photos from Bend Light or of the kiddo. He does love that, I think, because it is a real letter as much as anything, but my letters are mostly pathetic. I don’t know what to write. I catch him up on the news, on how work is (I am yawning even as I write that), etc. I put myself where he is and I wonder what I would care to hear? Everything? Nothing? My personality might tender to want to hear nothing. What I would need to hear though, is everything. The worst part about prison must be the disconnection. Humans get sick when they are alone. Prison, I imagine, makes being with a whole lot of people in very tight quarters feel like being the most alone. I usually end with a paragraph to remind him that he is not alone in this world, that we are connected. These words connect us, brother. When it is night and hot and lonely, read this: I love you. After the meaningless bills and the ads, and the promos and the catalogues and the work and the long day, the thing that will make sleep come and the morning seem ok and worth getting up for is that someone loves me and that I am not alone. I hope that works for him too.

  

• August 27, 2011
• 15:15

  The Road

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  In spite of the uncertainty in my life I feel the openness of the blue above me more than I feel the constraints of the road I can’t see, more than the curve’s unexpected challenges. If I choose, I can call the sky whatever I like. I will choose hope or love. The sky is enough to cover anything the narrowness ahead can throw my way.

  This may sound like a Stephen Covey 7 Habits inspirational poster, but if you have read enough of me you know that I tend to the narrows, to the grey. I have learned to ask people, Rose, you, Reader, my friends–but not my banker, my attorneys, my physicians, my co-workers (mostly), my tax collector–to hold hope and love for me when I am tending toward tunnel vision. I make up the story that these qualities I need so much can be held for me until I can look up and see them, own them. And then, I do look up and the sky has been there all along, simple,
  as that.

  

• August 23, 2011
• 20:17

  Metronome

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  We stand side by side waving our arms beating time in the wind
  beautiful and senseless.

  I can’t get away from the turbines. The sound is the placental rhythm,
  the wind cut by the blade is the same as the heart closing around gulps of blood
  is the same as my arms stroking through a pool in summer is the same as your
  breath heaving while we make love.

  If I could believe that after this is something so different, which I guess nothing is (really different) I would say, and I am saying, that I will miss this rhythm. I will miss the sound of the air moving in and out, the breathing, the and…

  Today a family I have been working with let go of their sister/daughter/mother. She is in a cyclone of septic infection. The bacteria are eating her skin and I have taken off huge swaths of her landscape and I am losing. I can’t get ahead of it. I am constantly caught in the backwash. These are the flesh eating bacteria that incite dread when people read about it or see the pseudo-documentaries on cable tv. These are those bugs. The flesh becomes the food and the only treatment is to cut away what is dead. The problem with these infections is that the blood supply to the tissue is inadequate for the antibiotics. A knife is the only hope and it is literally barbaric. The antibiotics wash around the edges of the infection but if the dead tissue is not removed, there is no winning. I took this woman back to the OR five times in ten days. Finally the family looked up, as if seeing her in a new way–or maybe an old, love-filled way and said stop. Essentially, “let the dying finish.” The time beats out the last seconds for her soon and then the next second happens and the next and time does its thing and she will have passed through the windmill herself.

  The windmills stand guard over the moments and I want to hug them when I finally hear the might of the air they move. If you pass by them, stop and listen. I am comforted by their neutrality, by the simple progression. Nothing might happen in this one stroke or I might be done in this one, or I might play a C Major 7th, full and round on my guitar, and harness joy and store it until the next moment comes.

  

• August 21, 2011
• 0:32

  Rolling

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  When all of an ocean streams through me like a river,
  When the plane out the window follows the cirrus cloud lane
  When half the moon glints on the plane’s window, a wink to me
  When the midnight train wails mournful while the wheels clack oblivious and joyful
  When the rhythm sets up a house mix in my chest
  When I am the the space between the beats and the spaces stretches to morning
  every time the beat goes down
  When that matters so much and is instantly also forgotten
  When the edge finds its angle again
  When the arid dawn replaces the bubbles from the passing dark
  When sleep never comes and its over.

  

• August 19, 2011
• 0:43

  Percocet

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  The warm blanket of oblivion leaves me craving, even in its best moment.
  I still want a little more, a little less, something to make it just perfect
  and unending. As soon as I realize this is happening, I am right back where I started:
  less happy, less confident, dissatisfied.
  I get alone in these moments. I am alone. I abandon everyone and that’s how
  I am alone.
  Aloneliness.

  This art helps me. You are out there on the other side of the pixels I am typing on. You are looking through this mirror, at me. Right? That I feel that, that stops the craving. I do not like the craving. It is the part of numb that drains the water out of the tub. But, this making of pictures of friends moving away to LA, unexpectedly not really and depressing a little and have a great time there find your people your tribe you will you always do even here, and the writing–it helps too. Right?

  

• August 14, 2011
• 23:19

  Between Us

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  I turned down a loping dirt road that divided wheat fields. The windmills were there playing through the changes with the wind. The windmills drew me. They are a new shape in my world, minimalist, modern, engineered to zero tolerance and max efficiency, beautiful. They are turbines because they don’t drive a machine. Mills drive machines, turbines store power. The wheat is a massive calorie bank. This was an energy field and I could feel it.

  The wind was whipping and disorienting. The turbines centered me. I moved closer. From far away and close up, they are beautiful and simple, perfectly designed. My brain moves to patterns and to questions.
  Why are they placed this way?
  They line the ridges where the wind rises to meet them. I think about the Irish blessing I grew up with:

  May the road rise up to meet you
  May the wind be always at your back.

  Why are they spaced like that? Can one hog the wind?
  Apparently so. They should be spaced at 15–20 diameters apart. Scientists at Johns Hopkins figured that out.

  LIke me, they tolerate company but not too close. I like the idea of being alone together. I don’t want to be abandoned or lonely, and I don’t want…blah blah blah, you get it. Figuring out how to be close to me is hard and potentially boring. It involves leaving me alone and sticking around. I will come to you, curious about your willingness to think I am worth that. Because of the risk that that will bore you (as it should) I have realized that my ego-driven strategy needs to be challenged or I will find myself batting the air alone, Don Quixote style. As I grow up and recognize that this is a game, I let the wind blow us together quicker. I don’t wait around for momentous occasions, because they are all important all the moments are occasions.  I give ground.

  Still, in spite of my desire to desire to hang around all of you, the windmills give me solace.  

  

• August 13, 2011
• 23:55

  Cow

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  My family is spread to the four corners of the country. 4 kids, four corners. One in Oregon, one in NYC, one in Cleveland, one in South Texas, in a prison. We learned from our parents, who fled Ireland for religious persecution. Once we got to the United States our parents made good use of the road and the big cars. We took summer vacations in the car. We went for drives in the evening after dinner or after church. As in, “Let’s go for a drive down the front.” That meant we would drive down Ocean Drive where the wealthy live in Corpus Christi, taking the long way past Oso Bay (means bear in English) and all the way along the bay that forms the empty concavity that is downtown Corpus Christi. I would ask why we didn’t live on Ocean Drive. My mom would tell me to stop being ridiculous, but I secretly felt entitled. Then we would drive through six points or down Leopard Street, which was exotic because rich people didn’t live there. We might stop at the Mexican bakery for the rolls we ate almost every day of my growing up life. The last leg home we usually ended up driving along Saratoga road, the southern limit of town, inhabited by cows living in little pastures between sorghum fields.Then we would get home and tumble out of the car, the six of us and head back in to the house,somewhat peaceful or probably sedated. Maybe our family had collective colic and the drive settled us. My memory is that that’s the case. We weren’t often settled at any other time being all together. The white noise of the car and the AC set to “MAX” (not “NORM”) probably took us back to the quieter, sleepier place we all passed through before we met each other.

  Does anyone do that anymore, go for a “drive” as if its a treat? Do families of six take an hour to be in the car together? When I am back in CC I make the loop almost every time. I am inexplicably drawn to it. I know what the salmon must think of themselves.

  This country has outstanding geography. It makes a great excuse for getting away from anyone, or anything. In AA a “geographic” is a legit form of denial in which one tries to escape from the inner demons by exploring new locales–moving, changing jobs and cities. I have completed my share of epic geographics. I moved from Atlanta to Bend, essentially fleeing the city, having convinced myself it was on fire like in the Civil War. Reality: I was on fire and had to get quite a bit more deeply burned before I knew it. Denial is awesome. It allows one to get all the way to the very end of life’s lesson plan before realizing school is even in session.

  I loved going on family vacations in this country. In the summer now I itch for the road trip. I like stopping at truck stops. As a kid I would crank on the invisible air horn chain until the trucker yanked on their visible ones. I still want to do that. I want to pull in to the motor in too late at night after having rolled past the barren desert southwest and jump in the pool before going to sleep on starched sheets. I want the terrible vanilla-oid ice cream at Howard Johnson’s (Free cones for the kids!). We fought constantly, but we were all in the same car, ranging across the country in the summers and now I loop back to those memories to comfort me when the meaningless grind of work sands me smooth and uninteresting. I was with my people I guess. Maybe I am unnecessarily and inaccurately romanticizing this–very likely true. Oh well, I do enjoy the memories and I enjoy reliving them when I am now on the road especially in the summertime. The more the distance between my brother and sisters, the more I am connected to them in this world of my imaginary memory. It’s as good as I can do most of the time. Today, however, to all you Archers who likely don’t get this blog much (and that’s fine, by the way), hello. I am thinking about you.

  

• August 08, 2011
• 21:20

  Road Trip

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  So there I am, standing, arms slack, on Highway 97. US 97 makes up the spine running through the middle of Oregon. I am somewhere on the cervical part of that spine up near the Washington border. Night’s coming on. I am surrounded by wheat fields and trucks are rolling along the two lane, ghostly and angry. I am just standing there on the side of the road, looking at a fire burn at the feet of Mt. Jefferson, the glow intensifies as the night comes on. The smoke is sickly, sweet, and fortunately, mostly blowing another way. I get enough of it though, to feel the primal urge to run from it. I imagine the deer are long gone from the band of burning trees, smaller animals too, though some will get caught.
  The wheat shifts around me, swishing in the wind. It sounds like the polyester slips that ladies in the Baptist church wore under their skirts. The wind and wheat sound like peace. The slips sounded like torture, even when I the kid in Sunday school wondering what was causing all the commotion under there.
  The trucks make me and the van shake a little, blows me back a little, but I don’t move further back. They see me, I feel them. It’s a moment. What goes on in that green lit cab? Who cares? The quiet and the night immediately fill in the well left by the passing truck. It’s dark now except the fire outlining the burning trees 20 miles away. I turn away.
  The fields to the east are holding the last bent rays of light. The rays do their last deed and then are swallowed by widening shadows in the hollows between the rises and steeps in the fields. It is very beautiful. I want to cry over it. I don’t. I close the door to the van, my water bottle full. I take a long pull. The air, even at night, is dry. I am resting, awake as I am. I can feel myself drawing in the energy from the closing day, from the night coming along, from the quiet of solitude most of all.

• August 03, 2011
• 23:44

  half the story

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  sometimes the morning breaks like a wave,
  sometimes, and sometimes
  the night recedes like the neap tide,
  quietly, with you in tow,
  leaving me stuck in the hollow,
  between today and this dream.

  (The blog needs a little r&r. your homework is to continue to come back even though things are not changing. You will find that they actually are changing. As you bring all your email contacts to the blog, a party will break out and I will come back and start asking uncomfortable questions about the broken glass and the bubbles in the hot tub.)

• August 02, 2011
• 0:03

  Summertime 2

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  Random advice for me:

  Laugh lots (more)
  Show my teeth when I smile.
  Uh, smile.
  Love people, use things, not vice versa.
  Show up.
  Nurture curiosity.
  Believe in generosity.
  Listening is better than speaking.
  Play.
  Push play.

   

   

   

  

• July 29, 2011
• 22:46

  As the Shadows, Long

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  god, the universe, the not-me, the power, the void, nothing at all:

  Like the arm on a skeet trap flinging clay,
  automatic, relentless flinging
  a spinning disc to water,
  flying, the critical first few
  rev-o-lu-tions                                                                                                                               determine entry angle, providing work
  for soothsayers who make stories out of
  the geometry, ridiculously or not–
  maybe they get lucky sometimes.

  And there it is, the random trap shot clay,
  running flat, true or turned, inevitable,
  a glance on the surface of time
  and then up, still spinning as if time
  itself is doing the throwing.

  The apex,
  the stoppage is so brief.
  One moment, clarity, fake or real who cares,
  but everything is slow for a moment,
  I’m in it now I imagine, and then back down
  having never really stopped at all,

  And skipping to a stop, petered out.

  The writers call it the arc,
  pretentious and poetic a little.
  Other people, the rest of us, call it a pastime, a life?–
  all that happens between two skips of a stone
  and the skips too,
  before we sink                                                                                                                        

  (five? ten?, one day on the Frio River I threw a stone for 13 skips)                                                                           across the water.

  

• July 26, 2011
• 23:35

  Part (for Jean)

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  In spite of the sureness of this ground and what I can see and the breath in my mouth and the love of my child,
  In spite of the sorrow that blankets the sick, the poor, the lonely; my god, the lonely:all of us,

  In spite of the fantasy of knowing and of faith and cynicism and secrecy,
  In spite of my intention for good and my realization of that good,
  In spite of the sun rising today, like a golden apple today, so perfectly warm and reliable,

  the ground inevitably shifts and my eyes dim, and my breath rattles along like the clatter of a forlorn train in the night and even my son, I will betray in some critical way.
  The ground I thought I knew will fall away and away I will fall, taken over this last edge, the falls. This wasn’t here a minute ago. I know it. I don’t know, I know that.

  _________

  My son’s birth brought to me the reality of life’s insistence. That baby is coming out, I thought as I looked at Rose’s swollen self.  No matter what.  Relentlessness is one of the corners of life’s personality. Life, once set in motion, comes and comes.

  The slipping over the falls into dying is like the leaf laying still as a baby in the stream and then
  gone,
  swallowed by gravity. When I see it happen I always insert the yelp for the leaf, but it stays silent, serene, I guess, and then gone. Like that, Jean, like that, like you: peaceful, untangling the last attachments, and heading for adventure.

  

• July 23, 2011
• 16:14

  Boat

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  Most of what I imagine to be impossible results from a lack of knowing. How can a steel boat float? It can float because the water it displaces is equal to its weight and it gets equal before the boat is submerged. So it is not only about the water or the steel in the boat, it is about the shape of the boat and the fact that most of what a boat is, is air. The air gives the boat time for the water to buoy it before it is submerged. This is why the tiny little rocks sinks. By the time the weight of the rock is buoyed by the equal weight of water, the rock is already under: game over. I learned this in college and it took me a good while to understand it and I still got the problems wrong, I am sure, on the physics test. I can understand physics in the realm of the language as long as that language has letters. Once it switches to the language of math (an incredibly elegant language by the way, and in fact, I remember a grad student telling me, one day when he was saddled with trying to tutor me  there at UT in Austin–my eyes were glazed by the way–he told me this: math is the poetry of science. Because he said that in words, I got it on a fundamental level, and it resonated in a beautiful way and I respected him deeply after that. If he had proven his statement with an equation I would have glazed over again immediately.)I glaze over.
  If it is true that knowledge turns the impossible to the simply known, as in, hmmm, I didn’t know that, (which implies that now I do know that and now whatever it is I now know is kind of dull and commonplace suddenly, like the way a new album is so much more when it is still in the shrink wrap and becomes somehow less once on the turntable.   The luster starts fading the same way a dolphin’s colors {not Flipper the other kind} fade within minutes after being caught, unless it is one of the rare impeccable great albums, like Imperial Bedroom, for example) then maybe knowing is all that I need? But it isn’t, I actually need the not knowing the same way that the boat needs the air to float. The not knowing means I am asking questions, using my mind, feeling with my heart, staying curious.  Curiosity is more important than knowing anything.  Not knowing keeps me buoyed.  Knowledge alone is like a rock around my neck, sinking me with boredom.

  

• July 19, 2011
• 23:13

  Tree

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  What is the equation that equals hope? I have never really understood hope. As a kid, I didn’t want to look forward to something with an expectation. Too easy to get burned. I didn’t hold any ideas about the presents under the tree–I turned my wishing off and let myself be surprised or disappointed when the time came.
  Recently I heard a friend say she relies on hope to help her with a present moment that feels overwhelming; maybe hope is about providing a perspective on “now” that is not based in despair. Maybe hope is not simply wishing for a future that is not like this present. If I can infuse the present with a flavor of optimism then I can endure it or I can thrive even. Hmmm…sounds fishy. Am I just putting on the rose colored glasses, or, in this case, the Rainbow Eucalyptus glasses?
  If I succumb to cynicism then hope dies right away. Cynicism is the dark that squelches light. Avoid it. If false hope is fantasy, cynicism is irrational bleakness.
  Then there is faith.  If I move beyond simply daydreaming of things I want and get confident about those things I have hoped for, then I am, apparently, demonstrating faith. Faith is fortified hope, but it is still based on a wish for something to be something other than what it is in this moment. I believe in what I hope for and this makes me feel even better, safer, more powerful, possibly deluded if I put my faith/hope in the wrong basket. Choose wisely kiddos.
  Here is my definition for hope: I can choose to believe that I can bring all available resources to this moment, and that that is better and righter and more valuable than not doing that. I am unwilling to forsake this moment as not good enough. I am looking for the best this moment has to offer. If I lose hope to the future, I am missing now and that seems a waste. All the hope you will ever have is happening right…NOW.

  So all that is left is to find a way to make this rambling about the amazing Rainbow Eucalyptus in the photo. These beings are the psychedelic mardi gras of trees. I walked in to the grove of them (was led into the grove of them as a gift from Rose, which was really so great) and I felt joy and wonder and I didn’t need hope at all because I had everything I wanted.

  

• July 17, 2011
• 16:12

  Summertime

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  I would sit somewhere, quiet, always alone and think to myself: This second. I am never going to forget, this second. I would try to put that moment onto some prominent, mural in my memory so I could remember it when and how I wanted. I was around ten years old when I did this a lot.

  The fact I was doing it tells me I already knew that memory doesn’t work that way. Everything stays packed away in little boxes until nudged by some other thing–aroma, place, the wind, whatever. Hopefully anyway, because when a memory is immediately recall-able without context, it tends to be intrusive.

  Still, for whatever reason I wanted to play that game. I can’t remember any of those moments in particular even though I remember playing this game many times. Now I look for the the little nudges. I get near things that will be the catalyst for memory. I try to identify what will be the memory catalyst for a moment I am making in to a treasure: Rose’s perfume, lint in our son’s hand, the sun through a bubble.

  

• 15:31

  Summertime

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  I would sit somewhere, quiet, always alone and think to myself:  This second. I am never going to forget, this second.  I would try to put that moment onto some prominent, mural in my memory so I could remember it when and how I wanted.  I was around ten years old when I did this a lot.  

  The fact I was doing it tells me I already knew that memory doesn’t work that way. Everything stays packed away in little boxes until nudged by some other thing–aroma, place, the wind, whatever.  Hopefully anyway, because when a memory is immediately recall-able without context, it tends to be intrusive.  

  Still, for whatever reason I wanted to play that game.  I can’t remember any of those moments in particular even though I remember playing this game many times.  Now I look for the the little nudges.  I get near things that will be the catalyst for memory.  I try to identify what will be the catalyst for a moment I am treasuring: Rose’s perfume, lint in our son’s hand, the sun through a bubble.

   

   

  

• July 12, 2011
• 21:40

  Scarce

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  I was going to write this:  It is my personality to try to fit in smaller spaces.  Really though, I will write this:  I try to fit in empty spaces, barren, naked places.  Some people use clutter to hide.  I use a desert, maybe a big one.  This quandary of scarcity has been a way for me to hide in emptiness.  It comes from a belief in me that I don’t need (read: deserve) much and will fit just fine in this vast wide space  that I create wherever I go.  The most convenient venue for this space is my mind.  So I may be sitting in a room full of people and be not seen.  In the physical space I am in, I minimize, but inside I am wandering the universe.

  If you are reading this and you work with me you will be saying to yourself that I am bulls**tting for the sake of a post that fits a feng shui photo.  True, I can fill a room at work but I can also be quite hard to know at work.  The times that I have opened my heart to my work colleagues are rare.  I tend to be hiding behind the work.   The next patient, the next operation create a busy-ness that I use to protect myself, how I create the space I think I need to be safe.  Having the kiddo has definitely started to blur the lines, thankfully.  I smile some, I remember my heart at work.  I see the hearts of the people I work with .  Also, when I let my patients break through, it is wonderful, and healing.

  This tendency to isolation/space sounds romantic, but it sets up in me a greedy feeling that I don’t have enough, a kind of desperation.  The desperation arises from the habit of applying my poor, unskilled mind to make up for the lack of connection that my deeply feeling heart craves.  My brain tries to do the math, but laughter, love, joy aren’t experienced by the numbers, and neither is loneliness.  I try to puzzle loneliness into an equation of solitude.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it is the truth, but lots of times fear keeps me frozen in the desert of isolation.  This makes my heart ache.

  Taking the pictures helps me know the truth, writing forces the wonder of art in to my brain and stops the logical nonsense, reminds me of everything roiling in my heart, a foot below my brain.  It brings the love.

   

   

   

   

   

  

• July 10, 2011
• 0:03

  It’s A River

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  My ridiculous separateness from you is the mirage,
  Laughing behind me, always, is a river that waits
  for nothing.
  Mostly I am the last to know this,
  But maybe, for the waiting, I feel more it’s
  effortless power to take me to you, and
  maybe more, for the waiting, I come to learn
  it’s name. It’s love.
  As trite as it is, it’s the river
  itself.

  

• July 07, 2011
• 21:34

  Skin

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  Exactly what lies
  Beneath the almost not there
  veneer of what you see?
  Comfort finds me in the sheer
  folds of the curtain between you and me.
  ____________________________ As much as I want you to know me and as much as I want to know you, it’s a great gift that we are alone with our thoughts and feelings. We are unknowable and infinitely worth exploring. It changes so fast, the me I experience inside, like a film. I remember being young and finding incredible relief in the world I could submerge to in myself. I would go to bed and wait to see what my brain would make for me to rest in before sleep. Using my brain privately, creatively, is an actual source of rest. I will skip sleep for it. 

  I have work to do in the world in my head. I have places to explore. I don’t know hardly any of it. I like it. Is that weird I wonder, but how could it be? My mind thinks independently of the part of me that watches it. I generate images, ideas, connections that cause this other part of me to say “wow”. I like it that I am able to recharge within myself, that knowing my brain holds interest for me. I like it that my feelings, rounder and windier than my thoughts, are gaining their own prominence and fascination for me also.
  I experience my brain like beautiful geometry and puzzles, like the wonder of something well made, something that fits well in my hand. I experience my heart like a wave, like the lump in my throat when I body surf and the wave takes me in its breaking, when I have no way out but through–scary, exhilarating, risky.

  

• July 04, 2011
• 23:28

  4th

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  Summers are getting poignant.   When I was younger the summer’s were relentlessly, joyously moving in one direction, like a river.  They unfolded new and without a past. Now I still float along in my summer, but I am seeing them through the eyes of memory even as I live them new, now.  Or maybe…

  the fresh new girlfriend
  wears a lost lover’s perfume:
  46th summer.

  

• June 29, 2011
• 21:35

  Molten

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  Today I learned that 65% of the stars we see burning through the draped velvet are really double stars. If one looks through a telescope it is two stars most of the time.  I am thinking of relationships.  The bright ones are mostly made of two individuals who maintain themselves as their own, follow their own paths and interests. They can say “no” without having to apply a lot of sugar. This allows them to say yes with a light heart, I think. I am lucky to have a partner who is aware and willful enough to strive for herself.

  Anyway, this could sound preachy if I leave it there, so I will circle in on myself.  I am now wondering about triptych stars.  The child arrives.  (My own personal tale about that miracle involves him shooting through a bright hole in the velvet straight into our arms.) At this golden moment in the first weeks of life I have no say in what he does or does not do.  We can think we want a nap now or a poop then, but we can’t.  He is completely his own person, and I can’t do much to interfere with that.  He is getting his shot at living only n this moment, responding only to his needs.  The cruelty is that he won’t remember the power of now.  At some point in the future I will start to impose myself and my will on him, for his own good of course. Sometimes truly, but sometimes not.  I will force him to fuse with me.  I will question or squash his “no” and miss his “yes”.  I will mourn that and he will have to heal from that.

  I want to raise a wild human.  The rest of the world will want to domesticate him, make him stand in line. Can I learn to know myself well enough to keep him safe while he truly explores the world he finds himself in? Can I tolerate his wild, beautiful heart? Can I let him flow and flower?

  

• June 26, 2011
• 23:36

  Jellyfish Four Ways

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  Your hair fell like Grace Kelly’s, a perfect swish
  off the shoulder, in my mind.

  In the ocean the jellyfish swayed sexy-like. At the same time
  I knew I saw beauty in a way that fed me and
  I felt guilty about the watching and I figured their tentacles were
  poison on purpose. My brother called them cabbage heads
  and that squashed the beauty right out of them.

  Everything about you walking away was beautiful.

  The knowing about seeing beauty is oxygen for me.
  I can breathe under water with it.

  

• June 25, 2011
• 23:38

  Nothing There

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  My third grade teacher told me to take time to look around.  He suggested we look at our shoes, at the edges of windows where the dust was thick, at the middle of a blank wall.  Just look, he said, because you never know. Something in me clunked deep on that one.  It felt like he was saying he agreed with something that only I had ever thought of.

  One of my favorite books growing up was Sherlock Holmes:  the criminal found by the pattern of ash droppings from his cigar, etc.  In medicine, seeing what is right in front of me and believing it took years of practice, but listening and looking (in that order) are by far the best tests available to me and the most cost efficient.

  I walked past this tangle and saw nothing and so I took a picture to prove it.

  

• June 22, 2011
• 22:58

  Koan

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  I sat with a friend who wept as she said she believes she is worthless.
  I asked her who is it that is grieving for this worthless girl?

  

• June 18, 2011
• 13:21

  Chalk

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  A 16 year old girl went to ride her horse in her pick-up.  Three hours later her mother found the truck upside down in the berm, the tires having long since stopped their lazy spinning in the air.  Her daughter’s seat belt was on.  She was unconscious.  It took several hours for her to make her way to my ER.  The ambulance got a flat tire 20 miles from nowhere in Eastern Oregon.  We sent the helicopter.  Meanwhile the ambulance crew, having changed the tire, got her to a small hospital.  There, she got expert care and was eventually flown to our hospital for specialty care.  I met her in the ER. The Glasgow Coma Scale or GCS is a measure of consciousness.  15 is normal and it means you come when called, make spontaneous and purposeful movements.  A GCS of even 14 indicates a head injury.  A GCS of 10 is grave.  Hers was 3 from the moment she was found.  Deep coma.  No pain can find her as far as we know.  Her heart beats, but she can’t breathe on her own and she does not move for anything.  She tolerates every intervention without anesthetics, although we give them anyway. I am the new father sitting across from this beautiful girl’s mother and father, telling them about the Glasgow Coma Scale at 4 in the morning.  As I talk I see them fall into themselves like a building being razed by the Loizeaux family.  What I see has that same eerie and time delayed feeling that the building has after the charges fire:  nothing happening and then the critical spans snap quietly and it collapses in on itself, all the parts razed and contained in the weird empty footprint of the structure that had been there.  I am the new father trying to hear with their ears now.  I am sure it sounds like hollow clanging after the first few seconds, so I wait to see if they can recover enough to hear.  They don’t. They can’t.  What I say turns in to clinical data.  I feel like I am taking all the color out of her life and making a black and white chalk line drawing.  All the vibrancy is reduced to this number on a scale that has the word coma in it. As I am walking back to the ICU to keep working on her, I check in with myself. I can’t feel much.  I know I am capable, but there is nothing there.  I am in the numbers, the doing, working.  How is this possible?  I remember thinking about my son as I started talking to this family and I literally just stopped that thinking and everything it might bring. I could not have worked with the emotional upheaval, but I could feeling it rising like a wave being ridiculously held back.  I am feeling it now.  Grief for this family from Eastern Oregon, for their daughter, for the village that has raised her. I feel grief for my own son’s pains and trials yet to come, for my own having come and some that stayed, but none which have been like what I saw in that waiting room.  I have seen it many times. What I believe is this:  we humans, even the children and their parents and the village, can sustain almost anything eventually if we are connected to one another.  We can’t take much of an insult if we are alone.  I have no idea if I am right, and I guess it doesn’t matter since belief isn’t about right or wrong.  For me, for my son, I can’t stop the inevitable pain that will come.  I will work hard to teach him the skills to be connected when the pain comes.  I hope he has the will that binds the family I saw in the waiting room that night.

   

  

• June 14, 2011
• 22:48

  Summer

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  Rickety pickets finally emerge after months of gray sodden slodgy snow; the fences are as thawed as the ground, gates in fences are now open. One day I walk outside and the air is lilacs and honeysuckle. The sky turned blue one day.  The wind turned the vane and the rooster points south.  Now the day fades gently into azure then black instead of the curtain falling into the winter night: day’s performance ends in a second in December. The full moon feels warm and yellow, cheddary.  My food is green.  I have a feeling that I would like to run.  It smells earthy outside in between the waves of lilac perfume.  It was dank yesterday or the day before, last Thursday maybe.  Today it is…

  summer.

  

• June 12, 2011
• 20:57

  Dogs Run

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  In my dream dogs run,
  Grass bends; I hear them gallop.
  A river turns north.

  

• June 09, 2011
• 21:20

  Wander

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  Being able to say what I need has been one of the hardest things for me to do in my life.  Most of the time, meaning many many years on end, I have literally not known the answer to the question, what do you want/need.  Maybe as a result of that (or vice versa) I diminished what I thought I needed.  I tried to disappear, not exist.  The tricky part of that is that it was my ego looking for a back door in to the spot light of your attention still, even when I was fading in to the background.  I can’t explain how, and it doesn’t help to make too big a deal out of that part, but it’s in there. Mostly though I just had no idea what I felt, what I wanted, what I needed.  I stayed paralyzed in that.  I tried lots of things to help me feel so I could know where I began and ended.  Some of them worked.

  What has worked best is simply using my voice to say what is true about me.  Starts with things like:  I am hungry.  That sun is in my eyes.  Little stuff.  Eventually I was able to expand in to saying deeper truths:  you won’t abuse me anymore, because I deserve better.  Or, I need to explore my inner spaces so that I can return to the world without being insane.

  I am struggling to remember what I have learned.  I am forgetting myself.  I am feeling adrift, off the path of me.  This is my truth in this moment.

   

  

• June 05, 2011
• 10:28

  After The Rain

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  Jellyfish like Dale Chihuly glass float through your heavy-lidded eyes.
  It’s the light after the rain catching retinal corners as you drift down and away;
  again, the jellyfish, all rhythm and sway, taking you back to salt water dreams before
  you were born.

  I sing Paul Simon’s Kodachrome
  and I imagine it’s the faint vibration of my chest moving
  that you nestle to, maybe the low, harmless rumble of a friend jumping
  into the water beside you.

  You are silent. I shush and your eyes widen briefly as if
  to ask if I hear it too, the whole of the ocean’s shush.
  If desire had ears, I would hear.
  What you see in full is for me the
  edge of gull’s shadow glancing
  on the surface of the water.

  I blanket you with metaphors and images, drape you with
  blushed chroma, swaddle you in diffused and spackled light,
  light like looking up from the deep end at the sun dancing
  on the water. I baptize you in art, because I have no
  greater gift to lay at the foot of your perfect, sleeping
  self.

  

• June 03, 2011
• 8:50

  Trunk

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  I have read that the distractions and addictions we play with are the branches and leaves of a tree.  The trunk of the tree is called codependence, a ridiculous word with no relationship by meaning to the word that makes it up. The sinister root of the addiction tree is shame.  You can look up addiction tree on google and you will find many ads for rehab centers that have the diagram to see.  The tree gets a bad rap, I think, even though the metaphor might be useful.  Codependence.  It’s an annoying word.  What it tries to convey is that the person who is riddled with and rooted in shame looks outward for some sense of his own worth, which is not forthcoming out there, because it is inherent anyway.  Anyway,  when that fails, all the shiny leaves start to look good, and are good, for a while.  Who knows, maybe they are good for a long time or forever.  Let’s not judge.

  Anyway.  Anywho.  This is not a post about addiction.  Think of something else please. When I am looking for a vocabulary to describe what I aspire to be, a tree comes to mind.  Rooted, connected; growing curiously upward and strong; from a solid footing, playing in the wind.

   

  

• May 30, 2011
• 16:47

  Rising Tide

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  The creative process in me craves edges to grind on.  This ain’t it.  I face west out to sea, beyond this country, to sea,  to the pacified calm, but my camera is facing back in, eastward, looking for some action.  Get up, move, connect, create:  Feel.  Repeat.

   

  

• May 27, 2011
• 21:30

  Objects are Closer

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  If I could look in reverse in my life I might see that the end was always coming along for the ride from the beginning.  My son was born perfect and yet there he is, several days later, with a decaying umbilical cord stump.  This is the part that is not included in the “Your Perfect Baby” greeting cards.  None of them say:  “Sorry about the reminder of our demise that is included and attached to your fresh as a daisy newborn.”  I am hoping to avoid being morbid, so hang in there until the end.

  The cord is the lifeline.  A popular myth that I would like to believe, says that we travel through the worm hole in the universe or through a hole in the heavens, a star, that brings us to our chosen mother’s arms.  We might do that and it sounds cool if we do.  Maybe the cord is our connection to the other side, like the line the astronauts use in space walks. I don’t know.  What I am quite sure does happen is that the first experience we have in this world is an operation.  I did the operation on my son.  I cut him off from the evenflow, from the beyond, from the within. Whatever we were connected to before has to come to an end so we can start this one way journey.  It is definitive, necessary and no anesthesia is used.  This cord that is everything to the baby and that has seen every ounce of the mother’s blood hangs in the wind, between them at the birth, insensate, useless now, even though it is still wonderful, amazing.  So there I am, a surgeon, operating on my own son. The irony is not lost on me, although I am not sure I get all of it.  It is bigger than what I know.  In real life, I am with my boy and I see what is left of the connection he had to all that before stuff, and I can’t make sense of it.  In an instant, literally, everything changed, and the cord will become a cute little scar that every parent obsesses over, and believe me, if it weren’t there we would really be freaked out.  The scar is the reminder that we can’t do any of this alone, from start to finish, we must have connection.  The stump I see today that is wilting away?  It’s last job is to remind us that the human experience for these souls of ours occurs in a body that is precariously functioning and already slowly in decline. Keep an eye on that rearview, I suppose, but it won’t change anything if you do.  Definitely better to hang your tongue in the wind and let the world fly by your nose like a grand buffet of wonderful aromas. There is nothing else like this brief, wondrous ride we take together through our mortal, beautiful bodies.

   

  

• May 24, 2011
• 11:49

  Undertow

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  As a kid I often stood in receding waters at the sand bars staring out at the straight line separating the Gulf of Mexico from the bleached blue sky.  Faded clouds, baked in the relentless heat, not even white, coloroless, lolled along in the distance.  At my feet the undertow drew me out hypnotically, pleasantly, ominously.

  This is how my heart works. The waves crash in and I am enamored with the lip and the curl and power, but the balance of the action is the undertow sucking it all back down to the deeps.   I body surfed my son’s arrival.  Oceanic, blissful.  But I can’t escape that I am the person who then stands up in the surf, faces outward and feels the undertow drawing me back.  The undertow holds all the information of the wave, in the negative space.  It is the place where the wave was, empty and full at the same time.  It is the photograph’s negative, the yin’s yang.  I go to the deep blue to make sense of what has happened along the shore. More than most, I am able to withstand the undertow, make sense of it, feel it as fully as I feel the wave breaking.  As I have awakened to myself I have learned that this where I am nourished and where I find the deeper edges of myself. To anyone with me I look like I am withdrawing, but the wheel of the ocean rolls like any other wheel.  You might make up that I am simply swimming away, but that which strives with the undertow comes back fully itself and beautiful and ready to rise with the tide.

  technical note: I am working on improving the shoddy quality of the photo uploads to wordpress. Hopefully you will start to see an improvement in sharpness.

  

• May 20, 2011
• 22:27

  Pomegranate

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  I was asked today, as I am on many days, what I like to pho­to­graph. I said I like to pho­to­graph what I am see­ing in front of me now, which is not a great answer. Great pho­tog­ra­phers, I think, have a dis­cernible point of view, in the same way a chef‘s culi­nary point of view is dis­cernible across dishes. My answer to the ques­tion then, is always, weak, because I bounce around. The tag line for this blog speaks to the jour­ney I am on from my head to my heart. Maybe it is the left brain to the right. These pic­tures are mostly images of found things that I make in the attempt to find me. My brain ranges over wide coun­try. It is curi­ous. It likes what it likes. As I do the writ­ing, I find that each image finds its way to com­mon path­ways that even­tu­ally lead to some­thing that is not my brain, and is maybe my soul, my core, my heart, my self. As I said in the last post, all the pic­tures are of me.

• May 18, 2011
• 10:12

  More

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  I go to con­certs, spo­ken word, gal­leries, muse­ums to expand the ques­tions and pos­si­bil­i­ties for my own art. I make con­nec­tions when I am in the midst of art. And I feel. Where there was noth­ing hap­pen­ing for me artis­ti­cally, there is sud­denly a lot. Beauty begets beauty. We went to a party for a friend. One of her gifts was three friends doing a dance for her. I loved how open and gen­er­ous it was. I took pictures.

  Yes­ter­day our son, was born. Beauty and love so over­whelm­ing I lost my breath. His first gift for me. I felt walls in me wash­ing away and floods rolling through me. I lost my breath and then he brought me more. Breath and beauty together: inspiration.

• May 13, 2011
• 22:27

  Self Portrait I

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  I did not make this up: Every­thing I say is about me. Even if I tell you that you are a genius, I am really just telling you some­thing about me, and not nec­es­sar­ily that I am a genius. What I also real­ized today is that every pic­ture I take is a pic­ture of me. We turn, dri­ving by a garage and the lights of the car swing through paint cans, gas cans, cans of beer, a towel, glint of a side win­dow. That garage needs a pic­ture of itself, I think, and some­thing tunes itself in me. It is the lit­tle human wink of hav­ing seen beauty and being awake for it, allow­ing it to land in me. It feels like my head falling back smooth against a pil­low, but in my soul.
  This wheel, the sum­mer rolling slowly in to Bend. I see this photo inside myself before I see it with my eyes and way ahead of the cam­era. I am writ­ing this to remem­ber this feel­ing, so that I always know this is in me. It‘s joy, I think.

• May 10, 2011
• 21:42

  Wait

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  So spring is com­ing around, I think. Usu­ally here it lasts a week or so. Then back to win­ter for a time, then some­where around the first week in August we move in to sum­mer. It‘s a process here in Bend, OR. The pass­ing of sea­sons has the fla­vor of a nego­ti­a­tion that the town has with the weather. Dur­ing these unmedi­ated rounds of plead­ing with the tilt­ing earth. if the sun pokes out, even as a joke, the houses empty imme­di­ately and we all gather around the warm air and rub our hands together. The moun­tains are cur­rently loaded with snow still and the rivers are as swollen as vari­cose veins. The deer, await­ing an even slower Sum­mer to reach the high­lands, mosey through town eat­ing every­thing green, red, vio­let, orange. They eat any­thing grow­ing. They are fear­less, hang­ing out every­where. Actu­ally I find them a bit smug.

  Rose and I are wait­ing for our son. He is right here in the house with us. I can feel his foot try­ing to find the exact mid­dle of Rose‘s liver. Her belly has knobs on it now. We wait, and he, like sum­mer, is shy. I am patient. I live in Bend. Nine months of a preg­nant win­ter, but the sum­mer is deli­cious.
  ___________________________________

  Tech­ni­cal note: the best cam­era you have is the one you are hold­ing. This pic­ture was made with a phone through a win­dow. It won‘t win a Pulitzer, but I still like it. Hold the cam­era you have. Take it with you. Put it up to your eye and hit the but­ton. Good things happen.

• May 08, 2011
• 18:13

  Night Falling

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  We pass from water to air through
  the pause, before the go, a cusp.
  Then, a chan­nel to the open world,
  like the crack­ing of a nut,
  and time­less starts counting.

  But what about “before”?
  We move, I‘ll say it again, nowhere, from less than,
  to, per­fect zero, and then relent­less, un-mattering
  count­ing: moments, the days. Each count­ing,
  a reminder of our sep­a­rate­ness: this day then that;
  this moment, not that.
  It would be too much, the crush­ing lone­li­ness, but for
  the reminders, like you son, that we pass not from
  the day to night; we live and move from light
  to light.

• May 05, 2011
• 23:40

  Two Things

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  Two Things, or What I Said to the Bank One Day

  1. So you are com­ing for me now? There is no shapeshift­ing from you and really it‘s just busi­ness any­way. I, teth­ered to a mirage, float­ing on some Amer­i­can dream of itself. The promise of plenty is based on the always inward, always self­ish, always nonex­is­tent myth. At least own that you man­u­fac­ture that. You don‘t make any­thing I can hold, but you do make up sto­ries, right? I bought my slice of the pie and now you are tying me to this log of a lie while the mirage of hap­pi­ness floats to light. The real thing was never a part of this. I missed that. My bad.

  2. What you see float­ing is the shapeshift­ing me sim­ply leav­ing this story behind. I am not abdi­cat­ing any­thing, not run­ning, not not doing some­thing. What is hap­pen­ing here is that the Me you seek is not the per­son I am. I am not inhab­it­ing the space that you take up with paper­work and dead­lines and threats, which are really all just busi­ness, and I know you love your work. My lack of expe­ri­ence and spe­cial­ized knowl­edge led to pre­dictable, unwor­thy alliances. Come for me and find what you came for but it won‘t be me. I will still be here, right in front of you, hav­ing just left on the next float­ing thing out of here.

• May 01, 2011
• 22:11

  Branch

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  Bin Laden was killed today, almost ten years after the tow­ers fell. I won­der how impor­tant he still is to the net­work that he is con­nected to. Did the root get pulled today or was it a prun­ing? In any case, I felt relieved that he is gone.

  In med­i­cine it is often true that we think we have done the right thing, made a good deci­sion or dis­cov­ered a great treat­ment, but later, after all the con­se­quences are known, we find that we did not know enough and that we couldn‘t know enough. I think some­times our premise is off to begin with. West­ern med­i­cine, which is what I prac­tice, does not take a sys­tems view of our bod­ies. Even say­ing the word body does not take in to account that a per­son is more than her body. The sys­tem runs infi­nitely deeper and wider. We are more than our bod­ies. We are more than our thoughts. Our thoughts are not really even our mind. My self looks at itself and knows the thoughts I think are run­ning through me the way the Deschutes River runs through town. My friend Jodi says that her mind is sim­ply some­thing that thinks. Think­ing is what it does, but it is not her – and she can­not quiet the mind, any more than she can stop the river from flow­ing. The med­i­cine I prac­tice does not take any of this in to account most of the time. It can‘t. We are not smart enough.

  After much long expe­ri­ence we have learned some things that are usu­ally use­ful. It is good to tie off a blood ves­sel that is bleed­ing, for instance. But even that can be tricky. If that blood ves­sel hap­pens to be one of the ves­sels that feeds the lungs (there are two) and you sud­denly make all the blood go to other lung, it cre­ates a flood to the remain­ing lung and the patient can drown. Stop­ping the bleed­ing (good) was poten­tially fatal (not so good). This is an extreme exam­ple, but I was involved in a case in which it almost happened.

  A young woman was shot in the chest by her hus­band and the ves­sel to her right lung was gap­ing. Our only choice was to tie off the ves­sel. She mirac­u­lously sur­vived, and a decade later sent me an amaz­ing let­ter of what her life had become. She went in to the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem and was work­ing to pro­tect women from abu­sive part­ners. The treat­ment for the near-fatal shoot­ing should also have been fatal, but it wasn‘t. Some­times, try­ing to the right thing to treat a prob­lem, doesn‘t turn out well. That is a com­pli­ca­tion, and they are com­pli­cated, and hum­bling. Noth­ing points out the lim­its of what I know as a doc­tor as quickly as a complication does.

  I can‘t see the for­est con­nected to the trees that I oper­ate on. I strain my eyes and still can only see this lit­tle, injured branch. About the best I can do is to remem­ber that every per­son is con­nected to innu­mer­able peo­ple and, in fact, con­nected to me.

• April 28, 2011
• 23:08

  Good Thoughts

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  When I was a kid there was a pic­ture in the house of snow melt­ing that looked like the clas­sic man-with-a-beard-must-be-Jesus image of a man. It was taken by a Chi­nese phở­tog­ra­pher look­ing for answers. What I liked to do was to not see Jesus in the pic­ture. I wanted to just see the snow and the dirt. Never could. That man with the beard was branded in to me. Can I unsee what I have seen?

  Also, when I was a kid I would try to not think of some­thing I had thought of. It is some­thing my brain can‘t do. Don‘t think of…
  a giraffe. Can‘t do it. Of course, as a kid grow­ing to a man, there were many things I was sup­posed to not think of. Sway­ing hips, pout­ing lips were taboo, off lim­its. At church I was taught the road to perdi­tion was paved with these thoughts. I thought of them con­stantly. I was con­fused. I could not unthink of all these things I was told to avoid think­ing about, and I was pretty pleased about that because I liked most of the no-think topics.

  I guess I should not be think­ing about hunger in the world. I should shut from my brain the idea of char­ity or com­pas­sion. I should actively avoid love as a thought. I won‘t think about you for sure today. By the way, who are you out there? Maybe leave a com­ment with a zip code. It has been a while since I found out who was isn‘t on my mind.

• April 24, 2011
• 16:49

  Term

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  I am dri­ving and I stop my car because the curve of some­thing slipped into and out of the edge of my mind. This curve…

  I stop and watch geese using the shal­lows for touch and go land­ings; the young Navy pilots at the airstrip near my house grow­ing up. Geese and the pilots and the Viet Nam war that was only half way done when I was born. Every­thing in my ear­li­est mem­o­ries had that war as its set. I was nowhere near it, but the tides in my life were affected as sure as the tides in Cal­i­for­nia feel the tsunami in Japan. Those tsunami tides push a lit­tle harder, draw a lit­tle deeper. Inces­sant, seem­ingly, but then they do end. The end­ing is imper­cep­ti­ble, but the effect lasts, ubiq­ui­tous as air or water.

  My son is round­ing the bend, com­ing, and soon. The world is in the midst of another twenty year or more war. The set. The tides roll in and out. He will soon, in one gulp, go from breath­ing water to breath­ing air. In that breath, all that the world is will rush in…greetings and may­hem both. We, Rose, Aidan, me, our lit­tle fam­ily, will add our love to the oceans of every­thing else. There is no beat­ing back the per­va­sive grey of this war or the next one. It is part of (t)his world. No need to push against the air. Just breathe and breathe and breathe.

• April 23, 2011
• 0:02

  Enough

   » ‎ Bend Light

  Tags:    [edit]

  

  What kind of med­dling will I jus­tify today?
  When will I end the reluc­tant (and gor­geous) silence this day started with?
  Who will I fail to hear? See? Know?
  What story will I cog­i­tate to keep it about me?
  How long will I hold my breath?
  What fear will I swal­low with my lunch?
  What will I for­get in order to sleep tonight?

  I live mostly fairly on the space I have.
  I cre­ate some­thing every day.
  I am pas­sion­ate, curi­ous and able.
  I con­nect in spite of the odds.

  The bal­ance still falls in favor of mak­ing the morning tea.

• April 20, 2011
• 20:12

  Red #2

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  Much of what I do here is to allow myself moments to notice what is around me. Even­tu­ally I am hop­ing to notice myself along the way.

  So I am stand­ing out­side the hos­pi­tal at dusk in my white coat and scrubs tak­ing pic­tures of the light post. A col­league hap­pens by. When I finally turn around and see him he is look­ing up at the sky try­ing to fig­ure out, I think, where the UFO is. I have not the words to explain that I like the lit­tle sheaths of red along the edge of the tree. Or that tak­ing this pic­ture and see­ing those lit­tle smudges of red under sodium lights at dusk makes an oth­er­wise tough day in the hos­pi­tal with all its bick­er­ing and mad­ness, with all its self-imposed suf­fer­ing, with all my own self-imposed suf­fer­ing and attach­ment, that doing this in light of all that makes me ok. I want to tell him that this three min­utes bal­ances that some­how, and that the beauty of the red­ness is almost heart break­ing to me. I don‘t tell him that though. I know bet­ter now. It‘s a good thing to guard one‘s heart. Instead I am putting it here for the whole planet to feed on. Some­how that feels safer. I told him I was wait­ing for light­ning to strike.

• April 16, 2011
• 16:39

  Virgin

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  While she still slept, she turned and
  A small cupula of light eddied above her clav­i­cle;
  I had not known that glanc­ing blows of beauty
  would be a part of sleep­ing with a woman.
  I had not known any­thing.
  I made the tea; sun­light streamed across the
  white porce­lain sink, and the house was utterly silent.
  Like Mary, I kept these things and pon­dered them in my heart.

• April 14, 2011
• 14:36

  The A

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  Some­where in the midst of every night
  comes the morn­ing,
  unno­tice­ably and grad­u­ally
  and then it is light.

  Through the whole day, the night lingers
  drawn in edges,
  under and behind every­thing, the
  shad­ows clasp, like fingers.

• April 11, 2011
• 18:31

  Untitiled 47

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  A lot of the work I do on myself, in myself, is about get­ting unstuck. Attach­ments. I am attached to you. That sounds innocu­ous. But then I get stuck, sticky, fused even. I lose myself a lit­tle. I have real­ized that my deep­est attach­ment is to time. I am jeal­ous of it, can‘t stand to be with­out it. My attach­ment to time leads to all the worry about the end of (my) time. I try to hoard it, which is like try­ing to make a fist around a palm full of water.

  When I work with patients who are dying, I some­times see them let go of this deep­est of attach­ments. Then they become serene, all the way down. Their lin­ear under­stand­ing of them­selves dis­solves and washes away. It turns into an oceanic aware­ness of them­selves and the world. They hop off the one-way train tracks and are every­where at once. Mostly they are in themselves.

  Free of time is very dif­fer­ent than free time. I don‘t have a lot of either, but I spend time try­ing to find the lat­ter and miss­ing the chances at embrac­ing the for­mer. I wring my hands about the inex­orable tick tock, not overtly or even con­sciously, but I do it. I even worry about the time that has (appar­ently) passed. I say appar­ently because when I see my time-free patients they are not only free of the future time but also of the past-time. They teach me that the present is the gift. The other experts at this of course, are kid­dos, but they are the unknow­ing per­fect mod­els. The ones who get there in spite of hav­ing been on the train for a while are my heroes.

  The present is the gift.

  
  

• April 06, 2011
• 19:56

  Cerebral

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  In med­ical school we were given a box with a skull in it that we could take home. We had to sign our souls away for the priv­i­lege. Appar­ently human skulls gen­er­ate an under­ground mar­ket. We were also given a bucket with a brain in it. It was, um, unnerv­ing. We had to know every groove and hole and sur­face on the inside and the out­side of the skull. The brain, how­ever, was not so easy to work with. Very cool in the abstract, but in real­ity, the brain is rather homoge­nous. One has to fall in love with the idea of the brain. That is worth doing, by the way.
  A liv­ing brain is much more inter­est­ing. I have never oper­ated on a brain, but when tak­ing care of trauma patients I would fol­low them (mean­ing patients with brain injuries) to the oper­at­ing room when the bra­ni­acs were work­ing on them. Mostly they (brain sur­geons) were remov­ing blood clots from around the brain after some­one cracked their skull. What I loved to see was the brain puls­ing. The whole thing looks like it is on a tiny tram­po­line going up and down. It is incred­i­bly alive. We expect the heart to beat and, of course, any­thing that has an artery in it pulses, but the whole brain vibes with the rhythm of life. The liver and the spleen don‘t do that. I don‘t have any big point here, and I am sure if a neu­ro­sur­geon read this her eyes would be rolling, but for us lowly gen­eral sur­geons, the liv­ing brain still inspires wonder.
• April 03, 2011
• 21:08

  Impending

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  I was 24 in Mem­phis on one of my first rota­tions as a med­ical stu­dent. Finally away from books and learn­ing to learn in a new way. One day I was read­ing books and lis­ten­ing to lec­tures. Lit­er­ally, the next day I had a stetho­scope in my hand and I was learn­ing in the four dimen­sions of human lives. I was dis­ori­ented, relieved, scared, truly excited – pound­ing heart and short, quick breaths. The county hos­pi­tal in Mem­phis is called The Med. It is a wild ride to work there. I deliv­ered about 30 babies, scrubbed in oper­a­tions until ten at night, most nights for 3 months, saw gun­shot wounds and stab­bings at the sur­gi­cal ER called the Elvis Pres­ley Memo­r­ial Trauma Cen­ter – no kid­ding. On the med­i­cine rota­tion I met a young man, Matt, who was short of breath.

  He had a weird rash, looked pale under the rash, fast heart rate. My pro­fes­sor asked him to walk across the room and we mea­sured the oxy­gen sat­u­ra­tion in his blood before and after. It dropped 15% in 15 feet. Nor­mally you can‘t make it drop that much even if you try. This kid was 19. I admit­ted him, took a very long his­tory as young med­ical stu­dents usu­ally do and felt the fear in him stronger than I felt his pulse. The year was 1989.

  HIV changed all our lives around 1983, my senior year in high school. I remem­ber think­ing to myself that hav­ing sex could kill me. In the 50‘s school chil­dren learned that they lived in a world that could destroy itself any time with nuclear weapons. It changed how those kids felt about things like safety. By the 60‘s they were throw­ing off every­thing about the gov­ern­ment that asked them to agree to that kind of world. HIV was a dif­fer­ent kind of insta­bil­ity. Rela­tion­ships, sex, were now unsafe. Safe sex. There is some­thing in sex that should feel a lit­tle unsafe, like look­ing over the edge of a cliff. HIV made us prac­ti­cal, methodical.

  Matt got caught in the under­tow of the first set of waves that crashed into our lives with HIV. He, like thou­sands, mil­lions now, died. He was dead within 3 days. I sat with him and his fam­ily while he died. Noth­ing any­one could do, espe­cially me. He allowed me to sit with him. He was the fist per­son I saw die. His last breath lin­gered a lit­tle, the room filled with some­thing and then, like a vac­uum, it was empty. I cried, mourned. I tell Matt‘s story in grat­i­tude for the courage and wis­dom he gave me in his last, sad breaths.

• March 31, 2011
• 15:55

  Cape

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  I did every­thing with a towel safety-pinned around my neck that Super­man ever did. I flew off the roof of the house. I closed my eyes and really really really believed I could. I have mem­ory of few toys. I remem­ber a Tonka Truck I loved, a 3 foot tall Snoopy I loved, green plas­tic army men that I would line up and bowl down with air­borne tragedies of var­i­ous kinds. Lin­coln Logs, Etch a Sketch. Most of the time I played in my head and used what­ever was around to add the last touch of magic to get me trans­ported to Imag­i­nary Land, like the towel. After that all I needed was prox­im­ity to world wide dis­as­ters. Some­times I would make up fun games, like this one…

  I was about six. I sat on Con­gres­sional Drive on the curb and col­lected all the lit­tle rocks in the gut­ter. I made a cool lit­tle pile of them, and sat next to them. I would often rum­mage through the curb stock and find lit­tle shards of glass (magic crys­tals) or bot­tle caps (medals or money, depend­ing), etc. It was the typ­i­cal six year old trove. On this par­tic­u­lar day, I went only for lit­tle peb­bles and had a pretty good lit­tle pyra­mid of them going. The game as I imag­ined it, was to destroy one car with each peb­ble bomb. About the 10^th car I plinked a peb­ble off of made the block and eased back around. She, the witch of a dri­ver, caught me off guard, how­ever I did still man­age to run when I saw the win­dow roll down (by hand by the way) and saw her foul gri­mace. Home. What I failed to see was her gen­tly put the Oldsmobuick into reverse and glide into park in front of my house as she saw me make the turbo-charged turn into the dri­ve­way. She and my mom found me in the back of the back yard, hid­ing where Buck the mutt took his dumps. (I knew the area well as it was my work­space for the pick­ing up dog poop chore.) I don‘t remem­ber what hap­pened next. Just the run­ning and the hid­ing and the time spent that night work­ing out how this evil wizard-ess trans­ported her­self to my house and found me. Les­son learned: don‘t run home in a crisis.

• March 28, 2011
• 16:20

  Twirl

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  “Time is a strip­per, doin’ it just for you.“
  –Robert Hunter

  A labor­ing woman imag­ines her­self a lotus
  open­ing in time lapse; or maybe waves in a tide
  rolling in, slip­ping back,
  slowly, surely bring­ing in the tide.
  The sound of the water clack­ing
  through smooth flip­ping shore stones:
  that sound rip­ples through me,
  feels like your fin­gers trac­ing my spine.

  The water then, the wind now,
  fill­ing the skirts of whirling girls
  like flags clap­ping at full mast.
  Music, the third dimen­sion of air,
  cre­ates the lat­tice on which the twirlers
  catch and glim­mer and spin.
  Sound the bells, let fly the rib­bons,
  it‘s time to dance!

• March 24, 2011
• 21:46

  Oh

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  Ten and a half, Sat­ur­day, dusk, curled up on the Saratoga hills,
  hug­ging my knees, implod­ing,
  watch­ing the house, believ­ing the house
  was going to burn; the hate was hot enough to make it so,
  when I ran out.
  The hole in me opened then, or it closed. It flapped a lit­tle.
  I emp­tied myself, for, you know,
  safety.

  Whis­per to the thun­der.
  Lasso light­en­ing.
  Do some­thing else futile.
  When every­thing is crit­i­cal,
  noth­ing is not about me.
  Every­thing in this cir­cle is sus­pect:
  you, me, the circle.

  Roll ten thou­sand more days on guard
  and all sounds are the white noise of self involve­ment.
  Even war gets bor­ing.
  Roll ten thou­sand more days.

  I look around now at the spent matches at my feet
  as if I just woke up, sleep in my eyes,
  and won­der if I can hold myself at bay
  long enough,
  for a minut,e, maybe tw„o,
  to hear you as if I believed you
  weren‘t talk­ing about me.

  Here it is: I want to be off this ride, round
  and round, and stand still, arms at my side and see you
  and allow you to hold
  my atten­tion
  and I want to love that.

• March 22, 2011
• 22:14

  Third to Home

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  I can still feel the hot chili in the less-than-paper-thin Frito‘s bag at the ball­park as a kid. Frito Pie is what hap­pened after play­ing in the game.

  Recipe
  Canned chili, warmed, one ladle‘s worth
  Small bag Frito‘s, bag cut lenth­wise
  Add chili
  Serve with white paper nap­kin and lit­tle white spoon
  Delight.

  Dur­ing the game the gig was to put as much bub­ble gum in my mouth as pos­si­ble while yelling “bat­ter bat­ter bat­ter bat­ter batter…swing!” The sun set warm and I can‘t remem­ber now if I won or lost any of those games. I just played.

  Peo­ple who have been to death‘s door say that when we die we see a light and peo­ple flood back into our brains and mem­o­ries jum­ble back, maybe like a tsunami. All those cells hold­ing those mem­o­ries unload all at once, one last Pollack-esque mural of every­thing. Mem­o­ries are a lit­tle bit of dying, a lit­tle bit of the end. They are yesterday‘s news. When I was young I was not remem­ber­ing any­thing. I was doing the liv­ing. I keep going back in this writ­ing place because I am return­ing for that kid at the ball park, liv­ing now the best way I can, know­ing every­thing I know and doing it any­way. It wont’ be, can‘t be, the same as then. I am com­ing back with mem­ory, for one. Also, I don‘t want to go back in a non-conscious way. I want to be there for the sec­ond time and, as Eliot says, know it for the first time.
  I am on this jour­ney to my heart. Mem­ory, now, is the road I am trav­el­ing.
  Tonight Rose asked me if I am ready to have my heart walk­ing around out­side of me when Aidan comes. I need to know that heart so I know it when I see it out there, so I know him when I see him round­ing third, coming home.

• March 20, 2011
• 20:42

  Untitled 24

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  The Brady Bunch house was what I grew up see­ing as super cool and super mod­ern. The ranch exte­rior, straight stair­way with open stairs. My sis­ter lived in our attic in New York just like Greg. What was cooler than that? It was like a dream to me, the happy fam­ily whose prob­lems ended in 24 min­utes. In fact it was a dream. The prob­lem was that I believed that was how it should go. Some­thing inside really bit on the mirage that TV painted. In my secret heart I believed life could be like that. That fan­tasy got wound tight into my inte­rior world and it took me a long time to unravel that ball of yarn. I still like the archi­tec­ture though. Give me a flat, low roof and broad win­dows and the lit­tle boy in me is trans­ported to south­ern Cal­i­for­nia and lives in bright sun­shine with nat­ural high­lights bounc­ing off blonding hair.

• March 17, 2011
• 19:35

  Inevitable

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  Wild King­dom came on at 5 on Sat­ur­day evenings when I was a kid. Fol­low­ing that was Lawrence Welk. The car­nage on Wild King­dom was not assuaged by the Waltz‘s on LW. At no age did I find LW fun/interesting/funny/worth my time. How­ever, and unfor­tu­nately, the two shows are stuck in my mem­ory like post-it notes that have melted together. I did love WK. Thank you to Mutual of Omaha for intro­duc­ing me to nature‘s way with sex (edited) and vio­lence (unedited, of course).
  The mat­ter of fact way that ani­mals kill each other and die is what most indeli­bly tat­tooed my lit­tle brain on those Sat­ur­day after­noons. My dad would be out grilling ham­burg­ers (Happy Birth­day by the way, Les) and I was trans­fixed by Mar­lin Perkins’ voice urg­ing Jim to pet the lion lick­ing her chops on gazelle blood. I digress: it is the hack­neyed joke about Jim and the lions, I know. I couldn‘t resist.
  The dying. I have writ­ten here before about humans dying and find­ing unfath­omable dig­nity in that process. I have real­ized that ani­mals and plants and flow­ers too, die, well, nat­u­rally. It is a part of the liv­ing process. The ante­lope would fall and as the cheetah‘s teeth sunk per­fectly into it‘s jugu­lar, the ante­lope stopped its striv­ing. Acqui­es­cence, accep­tance. The final stage of Kubler-Ross instantly. It was shock­ing to me at the time. That is because the story about death I picked up as a kid was much more ornate and fic­tional. Some­how I thought it was attended by trum­pets and angels that every­one could see. I thought that lions and mice really did get along and pulled thorns out of paws. Not so much. The order is quite a bit more fixed and mat­ter of fact. Maybe if I had been to slaugh­ter house and seen how we deal with our food ani­mals I would have seen the human take on matter-of-fact dying.
  I appre­ci­ate the Wild King­dom for show­ing the truth about dying. It pre­pared me for what I have been priv­i­leged to expe­ri­ence with many peo­ple in my work as a sur­geon. One moment we are run­ning strong, aware or not of the chee­tah in pur­suit, the next, we are not run­ning. We are falling and return­ing to the dirt, noble in our last breath.

• March 13, 2011
• 18:20

  Something Fallen

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  Some­thing small, fallen, beau­ti­ful,
  some­thing won­drous, bro­ken, com­plete
  a thing vibrant, dying, rare,
  a lit­tle moment passed,
  suf­fi­cient unto itself.

• March 10, 2011
• 15:07

  The Wait

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  There is a feel­ing that arises in me when I am con­fronted with sim­ply being in my own pres­ence. It is fear. It dri­ves me to dis­trac­tion, any dis­trac­tion. It is as if I am in mid­dle of a room and I am always rear­rang­ing the fur­ni­ture to avoid con­tact. I skirt around avoid­ing this uncom­fort­able part in me. What will hap­pen if I set­tle down and just be with what­ever is in the mid­dle of that room?

  As a result of all the avoid­ance, every­thing nec­es­sar­ily becomes about me. I have to won­der who I really am (that guy in the mid­dle of the room, sit­ting alone) and so I am unable to hear any­thing with­out the con­stant fil­ter of “how does this affect me, what are they doing to me, where am I?” If you are talk­ing to me and I am not there, this is why. I am not with me either and so I am nowhere. I can‘t hear you. I lose out on you.

  This jour­ney I write about, try­ing to find my heart, is really about this. It is about stop­ping the process of walk­ing around myself with my head­phones on, being with who­ever I am and sit­ting there until I real­ize that I just made up the fear any­way. It‘s all sto­ries. Every­thing is ok, includ­ing me. I really am inter­ested in you and inter­ested in just hear­ing you. Let me take a seat here…

• March 07, 2011
• 7:18

  Filled

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  Hav­ing just been sick I am reminded how much I need this body. It is just like me to for­get that I am attached here, that the bal­loon of me has a string. I can spend lots of time up in my head, rang­ing all over the world with­out ever leav­ing a quiet spot. I prob­a­bly shouldn‘t tell you what I mean by “lots of time”. Take my word for it.

  Even­tu­ally though I emerge from the dreams and start look­ing around for peo­ple. That is when I remem­ber how much I need my teth­ered self to be in the world. Tak­ing care of that self is a full time job. For instance, eat­ing. What goes on in our brain that stirs real inter­est in food/drink at least three times a day. Noth­ing else is so com­pelling. Not even close. By the time the next meal rolls around, I am curi­ous and a lit­tle happy, even delighted. I don‘t feel this way about my next breath, work, you or myself. Food how­ever, every time is the ticket.

  So I am always in the flux of enough time to get my head empty so that I can re-inhabit my body and con­nect with the life it lives con­nected to you. Being sick puts me 100% in my body, maybe as a way to reset my aware­ness. So I am eat­ing, walk­ing, tak­ing the next breath. Good enough.

• March 03, 2011
• 21:50

  Fever

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  The ache and the cold and the heat come on together. There is no cold, just less heat. There is no dark, just less light. The fever rises and falls in me like a wave. My body keeps over­shoot­ing and under­shoot­ing its set points and I am left in sweats or shiv­er­ing. I sleep as the pen­du­lum passes through its nadir, briefly.

  My imag­i­na­tion takes off as soon as I finally sleep, the flut­ter­ing of its ris­ing wings…a lit­tle bas­ket hold­ing my ill­ness, float­ing like Moses in the bull rushes.

• March 01, 2011
• 15:57

  Unlikely

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  Yes­ter­day Rose and I vol­un­teered at a local high school for Chal­lenge Day. Rose had done it before and asked me to come along. Wow. Thank you Rose. Chal­lenge Day is a one day pro­gram that helps kids break down bar­ri­ers, recon­sider cliques, have a moment to feel with­out being laughed at (what? Yo! really?) and to rethink bullying.

  Armando (name changed) was a kid I did not meet. He would not meet me. The adults are sup­posed to help the kids get crazy all morn­ing so that in the after­noon they feel safe to go deep. In fact the harder they play, the deeper they go. This was a quote. (I think I will store this one away as I get to know the youn­gin on the way). Any­way, Armando, was tough, stuck to a friend, uncom­mu­nica­tive, dressed to threaten. I tried to meet the kid sev­eral times. Chin would jut out, he would nod, say noth­ing. I stopped hang­ing around.

  By the end of the day, I saw him again. His hat (which was cov­er­ing his eyes before) was off, he was smil­ing. He hugged his friend, who was cry­ing. I am not mak­ing that up. He looked like so many of the kids looked. I finally fig­ured out what I was see­ing. It was relief. Finally a breath a space, per­mis­sion, to be who they are, to feel, to care. Most of us got in line in the first grade and from then on had the feeling/loving/caring dis­ci­plined right out of us.

  As these kids saw that they are the same in more ways than they are dif­fer­ent the walls came down. I saw myself in Armando. I spent the day mostly in tears, for myself and for the kids. So great to see them find a lit­tle oasis in the mid­dle of the desert, a place to bloom, a lit­tle, for a minute. At the end the facil­i­ta­tors said that they believe that lives had been changed in that day. Mine was. I have hope for Armando. Who knows what pres­sure cooker he goes in to when his hat goes back on and he walks out that door, but I do have hope and that feels fresh. Watch this.

• February 26, 2011
• 10:24

  Swim Away

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  In med­ical school a pro­fes­sor once said to a group of 150 bright-eyed stu­dents that we would decide on a diag­no­sis within 30 sec­onds of a patient start­ing to give their his­tory. He said this would be true 95% of the time. I was offended. It implied that I would turn off my brain and see what I expected to see. Turns out he was right. Most of the time I can fin­ish the story within the first few sec­onds. Com­mon things hap­pen com­monly in the life of a sur­geon.
  Occa­sion­ally, how­ever, there is a lit­tle some­thing off. Usu­ally this comes a lit­tle later in the story. The pain is act­ing oddly.
  Although we all expe­ri­ence pain dif­fer­ently, some more, some less, I see pain move in to peo­ple like wind or a miasma and it‘s per­son­al­ity, its way of mov­ing is typ­i­cal one to another. Appen­dici­tis starts with a stom­ach ache gen­er­ally and then robs the appetite, then moves to the right side, where it set­tles until some­thing is done. But this kid has a sore throat you say? Pain came on with­out nau­sea? Hmmm. Pain is not being him­self. I get sus­pi­cious. What I do is still take the appen­dix out, but sure enough, it was enlarged lymph nodes in his abdomen from the Strep throat we knew he had. The appen­dix came out because we can‘t afford to be wrong about that.
  I love this part of my job when the patient reli­ably tells me what is going on and I actu­ally hear it, even if it doesn‘t change what I do. It is a good reminder that I am still lis­ten­ing and that I am still inter­ested in get­ting to know pain. It feels good to be an obser­vant per­son – some­thing that is at the core of my fab­ric any­way. Some­times I have missed the turn in pain‘s plot. I always have a hard les­son in front of me when I stop look­ing and lis­ten­ing, no mat­ter how many times I have heard the story.
  In any story, the same is true. I make up that I know what the poten­tial for beau­ti­ful phở­tos is at my house, in my town, in this moment. I act bored and supe­rior and I start los­ing out. The truth is that every moment has some­thing new if I look and try. Not try­ing is the end of art. So even in a sim­ple moment of Rose swim­ming away in a nat­ural pool in Hawaii there is the whole story of that day for me. This moment holds the whole story. It holds the smell of the guava when she picked it off the tree for us as we walked out. Just before this, Rose jumped off some rocks into the water. Just after, I took 50 shots of water and rocks that I didn‘t keep but I loved tak­ing, while she lay at the edge of the pool medi­at­ing and radi­at­ing tran­quil­ity. The cou­ple we me there, the tide ris­ing, the joy, the sun on my back, the per­fect cool­ness of the water. All of that story is in this story, this pic­ture, of the arc of her wrist and the water shed­ding, falling like a cur­tain after a wondrous play.

• February 24, 2011
• 15:36

  Accidental Pathway

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  Two friends told me yes­ter­day that as the moment of their dying approached they felt noth­ing but peace and antic­i­pa­tion and curios­ity. I was unex­pect­edly moved. Don had been thrown off a pole by 20,000 volts. As the first respon­der worked on him, his only thought was “leave me alone. I want to see what this is”. Kelly was dead for ten min­utes and was get­ting CPR in an ICU. Believe me, few peo­ple are deader than the sce­nario this paints. He said he came to a state of unbe­liev­able peace and he said he had a dis­tinct choice about whether to go back. He came back and he doesn‘t know why because every­thing he was expe­ri­enc­ing was only good. An ICU in the midst of a code is, uh, not peace­ful, not good. He came back though, chose to come back.

  I arrived at the ER on Fri­day. A car crossed the line, hit another car on a snowy road. Nine peo­ple on the way to the ER. This was the first. Out of the blue my patient‘s heart stopped beat­ing on the heli­copter ride in from the wreck. He was, right­fully, get­ting the full treat­ment in the ER – a medic was lean­ing into the heart com­pres­sions. Ribs broke, which is typ­i­cal if the com­pres­sions are effec­tive enough to actu­ally move blood through reluc­tant ves­sels. We went through the algo­rithms we were taught: col­lapsed lung: no. mis­placed air­way tube: no. fluid around the heart: no cat­a­strophic injury to a great ves­sel: maybe, but we could not find it, and he kept dying. Then he did die. I don‘t know how exactly, which has both­ered me. I did not have a great answer for his wife in the office yes­ter­day when she looked at me blankly. She was bruised and her bones had been shaken like dice in bag. I had not yet heard from my friends.

  This acci­den­tal jour­ney
  turns itself and looks back at me.
  It rides me, hard.
  The crop swishes past my wild wide eyes
  and I am hurtling through no time at all.
  My desire, your desire, to tran­scend the end,
  or at least to be there for it,
  has not even the time to form itself into a scream
  before the crop cracks and dri­ves the race past us,
  still, mute at the momen­tary parade.

• February 21, 2011
• 23:17

  Chorus

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  Some, rare, moments in the life of a boy…

• February 19, 2011
• 15:40

  Not Here

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  Turn­ing a cor­ner after the secu­rity check, he lost the thought that was qui­et­ing his mind. Easy as that, the turn of a cor­ner, and the peace swirls away. Now what? The dif­fer­ence between think­ing and the mind? The stream of worry: that is what he called it at night before he finally fell asleep. Float­ing on it. What was that qui­et­ing thought? Was it her, the curve in the mus­cle con­nected to her col­lar­bone? He saw the light glance along it as he glanced at her walk to nowhere in the room this morn­ing. He and the light glance at one another through her, on her. He saw her strength in the sinews the shad­ows out­lined. He felt her that way. Was it the sound of some­thing, maybe the crunch in the snow walk­ing to the ter­mi­nal at the air­port? Why is it always some sen­sa­tion that qui­ets him – the mango smell of her, the mod­u­la­tion to a minor key in a song some­where, the light in the prop blades on the turn to the take-off?

• February 15, 2011
• 22:38

  Vapor Trail (memory)

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  The Blue Angels skipped like stones across the blue sky above Cor­pus Christi bay in 1971 when I was seven and in gaped awe.
  I have not thought of this for over thirty-five years until this moment. I have
  not thought of the lines of flat bed trucks rolling down Saratoga Boule­vard in 1971, bro­ken heli­copters strapped on like the dragon flies we plucked the wings off in the muddy water in the ditch that crossed through Coun­try Club Estates. The war, Viet Nam, brought them, the bro­ken heli­copters, to the Naval Air Sta­tion for repair or scrap. I never knew. It was all I knew first hand of the war.

  The black and white TV in the den cre­ated mem­o­ries of the war, like TV din­ners cre­ate a meal. The trucks and the matte black or green bro­ken heli­copters, how­ever, seared the dread of the war in to me. They made me a pacifist.

  I have not thought of the new navy pilots prac­tic­ing touch and go land­ings at Cab­i­ness Field on Saratoga Boule­vard. I am watch­ing them (again, now) as we passed on the back way to school, down­town near the hos­pi­tal. The sun up, my dad‘s cof­fee steam­ing, the planes loop­ing through their turns over brown­ing sorghum fields alter­nat­ing with cot­ton fields, bolls bend­ing the lit­tle plants down like orna­ments on Char­lie Brown‘s Christ­mas tree. I some­times thought of them that way, the cot­ton bolls.

  I have not thought of the cof­fee house my older sis­ters would go to dur­ing the war time, the hip­pie time, at Six Points in down­town Cor­pus Christi. They would go to help the heroin addicts I think. I don‘t know. They were all gone by the time I was able to prop­erly explore Six Points. The addicts remained. I remem­ber the cof­fee houses my sis­ters went to and I never went to them. I have a pic­ture of them and what hap­pened there and none of that hap­pened, what I remem­ber, but I have just thought of that and it is as real as the heli­copters to me and what it meant to me is real…being nine and my sis­ter heroes eigh­teen and nineteen.

  I expe­ri­ence my life in the dream of mem­ory. The dream is all I have after this moment and this one and the for­get­ting begins now. They feel exactly the same, dreams and mem­o­ries: the wil­lowy edges, the com­pres­sion of time and the expan­sion, the vapor trails.

• February 13, 2011
• 20:28

  All Day Long

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  What is real life? When I was with Rose in Hawaii that felt very real. Being back here and in the muck, feels sur­real. Sur­real means to have the dis­ori­ent­ing and hal­lu­ci­na­tory qual­i­ties of a dream. It is easy to say that life is a dream or say that none of this is real. If that is true, what is the point? My attach­ments to things and places and peo­ple feel real, espe­cially when I lose the attach­ment or feel threat­ened. That is called suf­fer­ing. It is worse than pain. So what is the oppo­site or, at least, the other side of suf­fer­ing? What do i feel when I am here, expe­ri­enc­ing this dream and not feel­ing attached to it.

  I expe­ri­ence suf­fer­ing as a deep seated achy fear­long­ingde­spair sense of being over­whelmed. The other side of that I think is trans­parency and light­ness. I have writ­ten about dis­so­ci­a­tion and the unbear­able­ness of that and obvi­ously I am not talk­ing about check­ing out emo­tion­ally here. I am talk­ing about check­ing in, about being there, here actu­ally. Savor­ing this moment as good enough, per­fect. Even though I think this is a great way to be and I have found myself in that space, I don‘t think it is any­more real than the suf­fer­ing. It just feels bet­ter. I don‘t under­es­ti­mate the impor­tance of feel­ing bet­ter. I do lots of things to make my expe­ri­ence in this shell com­fort­able and pleasant.

  How do I get to the begin­ning of the end of suf­fer­ing? I don‘t. I am always in the gap between this and that. The more I abide in that (like The Dude in the Big Lebowski) the closer I am to the answer to that ques­tion, and the less the ques­tion even matters.

• February 10, 2011
• 17:53

  Straight

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  So there I am on the plane, the ulti­mate petri dish of per­son­al­ity, bac­te­ria and weird­ness. I have taken the last avail­able seat, accord­ing to the agent at the counter, and I believe her. Mid­dle seat, bulk­head, stare at the wall sep­a­rat­ing the rats from the roy­alty in first class. I think I am the last per­son to get on this flight from Maui to Port­land, and I can‘t believe my luck. The win­dow seat is still open. The atten­dants do their final counts and say the door is closing…and then he arrives. Win­dow seat, row 6.

  He hus­tles in, late for every­thing in his entire life, you can tell. Smil­ing, greet­ing every­one around him and still on the phone. The rest of us rats have dark­ened Kin­dles and are read­ing the in-flight 60 page advert mag for Spokane, Wash­ing­ton. He climbs in and pro­ceeds to tor­ture me all the way home.

  1. Pulls out greasy, cold bro­ken chicken breast sand­wich, holds it under my nose and offers me a bite. I am not kid­ding. Laughs when I say, no thanks, takes a bite and offers again. Still not kidding.

  2. Starts…starts a phone call as we are taxi­ing for take-off. I am not a rules guy and I do not believe that my cell phone call derails an air­plane any­more than I believe it can turn off an anes­the­sia machine in the oper­at­ing room. What bugs me is that even though this guy is seri­ously irri­tat­ing every­one around him, or maybe just me, the flight atten­dants walk by and smile and seem to find him invis­i­ble. He is tak­ing odds on the super­bowl with a guy in Denver. Whatever.

  3. We get our lit­tle cups of passion-orange-guava juice (Hawaii flight, don‘t for­get) in our lit­tle plas­tic cups and we are all bal­anc­ing them in the lit­tle cir­cle in the tray table. I get through one sip and Win­dow seat, row 6 makes the move to get up. “Sorry mate, bathroom?”

  4. Asks me to lend him money for a beer. Actu­ally wants me to put the beer on my credit card because he doesn‘t have one, I mean it doesn‘t work, I mean I don‘t like to use it, I mean, it is expired. Gave me all those answers when I sim­ply repeated, “Really, you don‘t have a credit card?” Atten­dant comes up to ask if we want our sec­ond cup of P-O-G and he pulls out a fiver and looks like a puppy at me. Beers are a sixer how­ever and I now get the grift. Nice. No dice dude.

  5. Finally he falls asleep and pro­ceeds to have a con­ver­sa­tion with, what I assume was, the demon infect­ing his brain dur­ing wak­ing hours. I wake him up. “Sorry dude”. Repeat.

  I did not take my shoe off and blow up the plane with my stand-by shoe bomb, but I was close. Mid­dle seat is bad enough, but this guy had my num­ber. Dialed in.

  Being away from work was great. Needed the break. We went every­where and spent lots of time doing noth­ing. I did how­ever have time to look up a tree‘s dress which is prob­a­bly the sign of good rest.
  

• February 07, 2011
• 19:07

  Between Me and Everything Else

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  When I was about 12 I stole $20 from my dad‘s money clip. I knew that I could blame my brother and that my par­ents would believe me, and that is how it went down. It was a piv­otal moment for me because I got a crazy wave of excite­ment from get­ting away with it. I got a rush from lying. I have since owned up to this mal­ice, but I held on to it for decades.

  As I look back on it now, it was a sen­tinel event (in more ways than one). In my young mind, I gained the trust of my par­ents, got the $20, found a fall guy and devel­oped a new strat­egy for all of it. The prob­lem with lying is that it ends up iso­lat­ing me. I don‘t have the tol­er­ance for it that I once did, but it is still in me.

  Later in my life, the secret was more impor­tant than the drugs I took in secret. Once the secret part of it is gone, I am no longer inter­ested in the behavior/drug/pattern. Peo­ple who are hurt by my secrets only want the secrets to stop. It is more impor­tant than the behav­ior – to them and to me. It is like when the par­ent knows their child made a mark on the table but asks any­way if he did. The par­ent wants to hear that the child will tell the truth, but what the child wants to do is please the par­ent – no mat­ter what. Lying makes more sense to the kiddo. I learned that les­son early and often and applied it relent­lessly for years. The tran­si­tion to the truth is free­ing, scary, and feels good. And feel­ing good this way is bet­ter than safe loneliness.

  The wild open sea of life waits for me when I am liv­ing my truth and being truth­ful. Oth­er­wise I am repeat­ing old, lonely exper­i­ments that leave me in safe, famil­iar and shal­low waters.

• February 02, 2011
• 9:31

  Sometimes Magic

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  A world that I think I have to be able to explain sci­en­tif­i­cally or that I think I want to explain, is bor­ing. Or maybe what I mean is this: If I have to go through the rig­ors of expla­na­tion for my expe­ri­ence of life, that is bor­ing. Life and all its amaz­ing mov­ing parts has an expla­na­tion, a the­ory. Maybe my expe­ri­ence does too, but I don‘t care. I don‘t have time.

  If I reduce the con­nect­ed­ness I feel in the world to rushes of chem­i­cals in my brain, I will be bored and wrong. I know I will be wrong because we don‘t know what we think we know about much of any­thing in sci­ence. I have earned my right to say this because I work in a very applied sci­ence. All the time I encounter the unex­pected. It is not magic in those moments, it is that my scope is too nar­row, pointed in the wrong direc­tion or clouded by my expec­ta­tions, pre­tense, ego. Life is sur­pris­ing, erratic.

  Sci­ence often does not want to incor­po­rate the chaotic ele­ments in the the­ory because the math gets com­plex very quickly. But chaos is what I see all the time. Our breath is not reg­u­lar and that is a good thing. We need to sigh and yawn to open up all the lit­tle air­ways at the very end of the lung. Some­times the appen­dix is on the left side instead of the right, and even though I can explain it, I can‘t pre­dict it and don‘t want to.

  All this to say that I am in Hana, Maui. The mist rolls down ver­dant hills at the base of of Haleakala. It is seven in the morn­ing. The light is golden here. The arc of Hamoa Bay ends in a per­fect dark sand beach. The scent of plume­ria swirls around us. Plume­ria are highly unlikely flow­ers that grow at the end of leaf­less branches on trees that oth­er­wise look dead. They might be the most beau­ti­ful, fra­grant flow­ers I have seen. Beau­ti­ful local peo­ple sat with me in the grass of a church here and told me their sto­ries and lis­tened to my own for two hours in the evening yes­ter­day, hugged me like I was one of their own. I was. I am.

  Maybe you would say these are all just things I have not seen and new­ness makes us believe in magic. It is igno­rance that starts that process toward magic and then expe­ri­ence tem­pers us and allows truth in. Maybe. Being tem­pered means to be hard­ened. I don‘t want to be hard­ened. I want to stay sup­ple, open. I want the sur­prise to raise the ques­tion over and over in me, like the waves rolling in to Hamoa Bay in magical Hana.

• January 30, 2011
• 22:11

  Time Off

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  I have the same amount of time every day, of course. Cur­rently my time feels like the min­utes are made of gold because I am in Maui. If I were enlight­ened maybe I would see the value in each minute the same. Maybe if I were sick I would. Maybe if I had almost died on the way over here. What does it take to see the won­der of each moment the same? I don‘t think I can.

  I left my part­ner in Bend with loose ends and patients with prob­lems, but it will always be that way. If I waited until every­thing was per­fectly quiet I would be an unem­ployed sur­geon. It is the nature of the job. The gift is hav­ing part­ners I trust. One of the core tenets in sur­gi­cal train­ing (we don‘t say edu­ca­tion in surgery; it is more like obe­di­ence school if you get my drift) is that the sur­geon is to remain close espe­cially when there are prob­lems. Leav­ing in the midst of prob­lems sits in my craw and I hear the voices of my pro­fes­sors ask­ing me who I think I am. From the van­tage point of years in prac­tice I now think it is easy to trans­form this com­mit­ment to the patient into ego dri­ven insan­ity. I am not sure how to describe this really, but I know when I am in it. Now is not one of those times and a big rea­son is that I trust my partners.

  For now, get ready for some relax­ing pic­tures of Hawaii. Input to the blog will be spotty as I will be sleep­ing, eat­ing, swim­ming and think­ing of as lit­tle as possible.

• January 25, 2011
• 14:46

  Turn

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  I want to write about being tired, and about being on call for months now with­out a day of not being on call. I want to focus on that, because I am sim­ply tired. I am in a self abu­sive state over it all and I am com­ing to the end of that too.

  But the story today is about Adam (name changed). Adam sat in his wheel­chair in front of me yes­ter­day, tears rolling down his face. “If I stop drink­ing I start eat­ing again.” “It has always been some­thing, even before the chair.” I can‘t stop. I know that feel­ing, inti­mately. Adam is really tired of the merry go round (his word). When he said that I was reminded of a thing called the addic­tion cycle, which I am also familiar with.

  The addict uses and feels good for dimin­ish­ing lengths of time and imme­di­ately feels shame, some­times while using, usu­ally while using, once the new wears off, which hap­pens at an alarm­ing pace when one is using. It is always such a sur­prise, that. Like, “really, already the dark side of this lovely high has shown up” and the pipe/spoon/glass/dice are still in my hand. The shame is the killer. The shame fol­lows the use in the cycle. The belief that I am sim­ply made wrong, bad. You know, the Orig­i­nal Bad­ness. To get out of that the addict engages in fan­tasy about some­thing pleas­ant, like drugs/sex/rock and roll/sugar/dice. The fan­tasy makes the illu­sion of the orig­i­nal high, the one where every­thing truly was great, truly, come back like dawn after a cold night. This fan­tasy part is very pow­er­ful and works like a charm and in a very charm­ing way. Feels like vel­vet. The brain is already using at this point. Dopamine is being dumped in to fill in the cracks between the unhappy places in my/your/our brain. Dopamine is the brain candy. It is why we take the cocaine. The dopamine is released and washes over our unhap­pi­ness like 8 wave sets on Oahu‘s north shore. That is the fantasy part.

  Next comes the rit­ual. Gather the toys, get in the car, make the call, get the works lined up, see the man, pay the money, cut the line, crush the pill, buy the paper go to McDonald‘s, visit the wood shed, debate with your­self at the strip club (know­ing the con­ver­sa­tion is over), get in line, line it up, clean the pipe. Once the rit­ual starts it won‘t mat­ter if the man knocks on the door. The née­dle is going to plunge. It is an over­whelm­ing promise that must be kept, pretty much no mat­ter what. Brain is rac­ing and no risk is unrea­son­able dur­ing the ritual phase.

  Then the use itself. At first it is every­thing and noth­ing, a church not made with hands, the real­iza­tion of com­fort and love and hope and the dark­ness comes as quickly as this sen­tence changes course. Like that. The words “oh no” come to mind. The merry go round spins faster and faster until you die or some­one helps you off. With­out help it is nearly impos­si­ble to get off. I am sure it hap­pens but “rare” is a gen­er­ous descrip­tor of its frequency.

  So there is Adam telling me about it. He wants off. He is ask­ing, sim­ply, for help. And in all this story, the part that finally makes the tears stream is when he asks me what he and his ther­a­pist have been work­ing up to him ask­ing me…“Doc are you ashamed of me as as patient because of all these struggles.”

  No. Adam, no. I am your brother in this. This is the jour­ney of our human lives. This is your day of heal­ing. I am wit­ness­ing your birth and your death. The cycle, the merry go round has the chance to stop when you/I/we get help from some one other per­son, some­thing out­side of our closed loop of lies. It is our poor, piti­ful, incred­i­bly pow­er­ful brains that our looped up in the itchy hunger. The way to stop the cycle is a brief reprieve in which we allow a lit­tle of some­one else‘s power/love to creep in and help. A brief and hon­est reprieve allows a lit­tle self esteem to root. That can actu­ally grow as the reprieve is main­tained. My brain still wants dopamine, but I am now not in the cycle alone. Someone/thing has inter­vened. That brings hope in to a dis­mal real­ity and bal­ances the mind. It allows an alter­nate end­ing. For the addict the inevitable end­ing is the relief of death. For the recov­er­ing addict, death is no less inevitable, but between now and that moment is one price­less gift: choice.

  Adam is my Mon­day at 11am hero. He is fol­lowed by another and another and I am in that line too. My own hero, help­less, ulti­mately alone in the world except for the thin thread of love between you and me that is so frail and yet strong enough to hoist me from wells of despair. And still we are alone, even with the love, but the love makes it ok, bear­able, pos­si­ble to come off the merry go round.

• January 23, 2011
• 1:26

  Untitled

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  Noth­ing to say today. Feel free to make up the story for the photo.

• January 19, 2011
• 21:33

  Hat

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  Cass makes hats. Love that sen­tence. Sounds Seuss-ish, or maybe like an album by They Might be Giants.

  When I got home from work today there was a pack­age in the box from Cass with hats she designed for Pis­til Designs. No note, no rea­son, just a gift. I love that. One of the harder things for me to do is receive. One way to stay iso­lated is to be need­less and want­less, espe­cially want­less. But wants are a way to let you know me. I like that. I want a lit­tle of that. I need that. If I don‘t ever need or want any­thing I cre­ate the illu­sion that I can do this life alone. But I now know (through repeated exper­i­men­ta­tion) that I nei­ther need, nor want, that.

  We like the hats Cass. Thank you. Here is an idea for Fall ’11.

• January 16, 2011
• 13:12

  World with Heart

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  But what we can’t do is use this tragedy as one more occa­sion to turn on one another. As we dis­cuss these issues, let each of us do so with a good dose of humil­ity. Rather than point­ing fin­gers or assign­ing blame, let us use this occa­sion to expand our moral imag­i­na­tions, to lis­ten to each other more care­fully, to sharpen our instincts for empa­thy, and remind our­selves of all the ways our hopes and dreams are bound together.

  Did we tell a spouse just how des­per­ately we loved them, not just once in awhile but every single day?

  Barack Obama

  Yes­ter­day I drove past a boy and his father play­ing catch in the school yard. It was Sat­ur­day so just the two of them. I was a ghost to them, noth­ing, a moment of a car they did not see. What I saw was the boy watch­ing his father run to get the ball. The boy was com­pletely and only in that moment. His shoul­ders were rolled back loose; his smile effort­less. His father was run­ning as if back in time to reach him­self as a boy, his own pres­ence, his own effort­less­ness, and he was happy too, as best as he could be, but not like his son. I zipped by them, father, then son and then me look­ing at myself in the rearview mir­ror. And me look­ing to the future and to a boy‘s world. I know what it is to be a boy. That is some­thing I know. I remem­ber, but I have for­got­ten every­thing, like a lan­guage I stopped speak­ing before it became my native tongue. A love welled up in me.

  But the love that I am won­der­ing about is des­per­ate love. Out of the whole amaz­ing speech Obama gave in Ari­zona after the shoot­ings this week, this line sunk in me like a stone, like truth. The des­per­ate lone­li­ness of life itself calls for some­thing to get me out of me. It must be this des­per­ate love. Does he know about this? He is about my age, a lit­tle older, but we are con­tem­po­raries. He talks of des­per­ate love from the pres­i­den­tial podium. I won­der if we heard this? I won­der if we heard the sup­posed most pow­er­ful man reveal that he knows the secret lone­li­ness of being here at all, that he know­sthat our hope is to look at the real­ity of life and love still. Love is the only coun­ter­weight for the loneliness.

  There are cir­cles of this love. The world needs to hear the words, out there. My com­mu­nity needs to see me walk and work with integrity and love, my friends need my open heart. But a closer world cir­cles in around me. In that world there is a very small space, the holy of holies in me. In this place in me, lan­guage breaks down and I am left with my naked self. That place is where I am feel­ing Rose, because it is where I am invit­ing her. It is not fate. It‘s a choice. Sim­ple. Love. This deci­sion in me is my gift to me and it is my gift to my son. Noth­ing I can say to him mat­ters com­pared to the action of accept­ing love from his mother and lov­ing his mother. And I am lov­ing you Rose, des­per­ately, in this quiet place in me, for you, only.

• January 13, 2011
• 19:18

  Closer

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  There I was lay­ing on the golden shag car­pet­ing in our liv­ing room, circa 1975 , watch­ing the ABC movie of the week (it was, I now know, a rerun). I was glued to the lit­tle 17” set with the hand turn knob that went “chunk” when you changed chan­nels by get­ting up and walk­ing over to the TV and touch­ing it and turn­ing the knob.

  On the set was a ter­ri­fied guy in a fat tie dri­ving for his life in a square car through dusty Cal­i­for­nia Sierra canyons while being chased by a psy­chotic trucker. In the end the dri­ver wins some­how, but I don‘t remem­ber how. The cra­zi­est part was that the trucker was never seen, not even after he died. All you got to see was his quick mov­ing feet chang­ing gears and smash­ing down on the gas and then back to Den­nis Weaver (that was the scared guy, I now know) and his mus­tache swerv­ing around. It was so dope.

  So I am dri­ving back from Red­mond to Bend today and the sun is out in the rain, which is always beau­ti­ful to me and I am sand­wiched between crazed truck­ers and I am swerv­ing and try­ing to run them off the road, and its all steer­ing wheel clutch time and mad­ness. And then I turn off at my exit for a latte, nar­rowly escap­ing with my life to write this for you tonight.

  So (again, “so”?, I know, but it has to be this way) I am writ­ing this up and I think I won­der if I can find out the name of that awe­some thriller from way back when I was 11 and stay­ing up til 10. In about 3 sec­onds I find out that I had the right net­work, because not only do I find it, but I learn that Duel is the best-known ABC movie of the week of all time. That must be fate or someone‘s will or have mean­ing right? That is what we humans think when some­thing unex­pected hap­pens, that it had to be, that it‘s impor­tant, that I should pay spe­cial atten­tion. Or maybe I was a kid at the right time who fin­ished doing the dishes on a Wednes­day and caught a rerun of the most famous Movie of the Week of all time (!).

• January 10, 2011
• 18:50

  Summer

   » ‎ Bend Light

  Tags:    [edit]

  
  Send this picture as an ecard

  Be present. Live in this moment. Con­tent­ment is found now, not in the past or future. Etc.

  But it is cold out­side, seri­ously. I am miss­ing the sharp shad­ows of sum­mer. I miss side­walks too hot to walk on, col­ors every­where, flow­ers crack­ling like visual pop rocks, girls in tanks, cou­ples rid­ing cruis­ers to din­ner, the sun finally going down at ten. For­tu­nately here in Bend we only have to wait until mid July for sum­mer to show up and then we will get a whole 4 or even 5 weeks! For now, I can smell the pix­els on this daisy.

  Have a warm day!

• January 08, 2011
• 12:16

  The Trees

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  I am a still life. Lit­tle lights dance in the cor­ner of my imag­i­na­tion,
  teas­ing me like candy, keep­ing me breath­ing.
  I stare at unmov­ing water look­ing for action.
  The longer I stare the less I see.
  This town is drown­ing;
  This is your cap­tain: we are going down.
  

  I am going to close my eyes and wake up
  I am going to close my eyes and wake up.

  Even­tu­ally all the placid nice things
  I have to say
  about being here
  wear thin, like skin
  pulled tight over a weary
  plastic-jawed fifty year old in
  furry lined boots scur­ry­ing to yoga.

  I am going to close my eyes and wake up
  I am going to close my eyes and wake up.

  I am going to burn down my nice still life
  and enjoy the sight of the tiny lit­tle fire
  in the cor­ner of my rear view.
  My arm will be draped across a bench seat
  (All the new cars suck)
  You com­ing? I still can‘t do this alone.

• January 04, 2011
• 22:43

  Bling

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  There are a mil­lion myths for death. Here is one for the egghead in me that does not aban­don the hope of mystery.

  Water to ice and then what. Steam. Sub­li­ma­tion in physics is the trans­for­ma­tion (poof!) of a solid to a gas with­out pass­ing through the liq­uid phase. (Freud then made up a whole dif­fer­ent def­i­n­i­tion of sub­li­ma­tion, which I find odd – not the def­i­n­i­tion he has for it, but that he seri­ously mud­died the waters on won­drous word.)

  New souls flow­ing over the falls into the world, new lives on the run and all about action. Make room. Old souls find­ing their dia­mond selves in rest. For me there are few things more beau­ti­ful than a young human on the run in a life, and yet wis­dom is the jewel the old human leaves as her gift to life. And then steam. Death isn‘t cold, I guess? It is the odd trans­for­ma­tion of this solid self to a vapor and it requires heat. Even as our bod­ies vibrate more slowly and then stop vibrat­ing alto­gether and the quan­tum ques­tion of where the atoms find them­selves becomes mean­ing­less, the soul slips out the back door, a shadow with­out its solid self to get in the way of light. We die, we sublimate.

  Am I mak­ing this up? Yes.

• January 03, 2011
• 16:44

  Like a Duck

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  Tags:    [edit]

  

  When I was a surgery res­i­dent we had a weekly con­fer­ence with our chair­man of surgery. He, like most chairs in depart­ments of surgery, was a delight­ful tyrant. His job, his mis sion, was to find our small est mis­takes and equate them to the end of the world. He took this seri­ously and was very good at his job. We loved our hour with him each week. I have a dis­tinct mem­ory of sit­ting in the room with my fel­low res­i­dents before professor‘s hour (what we called the weekly interroga­tion) one day and talk­ing about some grim real­ity of our 100 hour a week jobs. I think it had to do with some other set of res­i­dents dump­ing work on us. I was deny­ing that they knew how this was affect ing us. I was in the back of the room when I said this and I saw every head turn to look at me, jaws dropped at my naïveté.
  “What?” That‘s what I said. Their heads were already shak­ing. I said, “Well, I don‘t believe it and I don‘t want to live in that kind of world.” More shak­ing heads. Then the prof walked in and we smiled as he lashed us.

  Some­times I don‘t want to believe what is pretty clearly in front of me. Most of the time this involves me choos­ing to dis­be­lieve that I am being mis­treated in some way. I hold on to the rosy belief that peo­ple want to be decent. I get burned.

  I am not writ ing this to paint a pic­ture of a beatific me. It is not a great trait. It is blind in a harm­ful way. My think­ing I am doing the right thing, being decent, etc. dose not change the bru tal world that rises up to take care of itself out there. It does not change dis hon­esty in the work place. It doesn‘t change money grub­bing. It doesn‘t change my respon­si­bil­ity either.

  I am cur­rently in a cou­ple of sit­u­a­tions in which real peo­ple that I know and work with are either com­ing for me fina­cially and/or unjustly tak­ing advan­tage of my good will at work. Tomor­row that stops. I have a meet­ing in which I will meet with my smil­ing col leagues. Even though they will change their story and back ped­dle and claim they are walk­ing on water, I will keep my eye on the real ity that they quack and walk…

  like ducks.

• 13:10

  In the Ring

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• 13:10

  Like a Duck

   » ‎ Bend Light

  Tags:    [edit]

  

  When I was a surgery res­i­dent we had a weekly con­fer­ence with our chair­man of surgery. He, like most chairs in depart­ments of surgery, was a delight­ful tyrant. His job, his mis­sion, was to find our small­est mis­takes and equate them to the end of the world. He took this seri­ously and was very good at his job. We loved our hour with him each week. I have a dis­tinct mem­ory of sit­ting in the room with my fel­low res­i­dents before professor‘s hour (what we called the weekly inter­ro­ga­tion) one day and talk­ing about some grim real­ity of our 100 hour a week jobs. I think it had to do with some other set of res­i­dents dump­ing work on us. I was deny­ing that they knew how this was affect­ing us. I was in the back of the room when I said this and I saw every head turn to look at me, jaws dropped at my naïveté.
  “What?” That‘s what I said. Their heads were already shak­ing. I said, “Well, I don‘t believe it and I don‘t want to live in that kind of world.” More shak­ing heads. Then the prof walked in and we smiled as he lashed us.

  Some­times I don‘t want to believe what is pretty clearly in front of me. Most of the time this involves me choos­ing to dis­be­lieve that I am being mis­treated in some way. I hold on to the rosy belief that peo­ple want to be decent. I get burned.

  I am not writ­ing this to paint a pic­ture of a beatific me. It is not a great trait. It is blind in a harm­ful way. My think­ing I am doing the right thing, being decent, etc. dose not change the bru­tal world that rises up to take care of itself out there. It does not change dis­hon­esty in the work­place. It doesn‘t change money grub­bing. It doesn‘t change my respon­si­bil­ity either.

  I am cur­rently in a cou­ple of sit­u­a­tions in which real peo­ple that I know and work with are either com­ing for me finan­cially and/or unjustly tak­ing advan­tage of my good will at work. Tomor­row that stops. I have a meet­ing in which I will meet with my smil­ing col­leagues. Even though they will change their story and back ped­dle and claim they are walk­ing on water, I will keep my eye on the real­ity that they quack and walk…

  like ducks.

• January 01, 2011
• 11:48

  Every Moment

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  The thou­sands of moments my eyes pass every moment,
  life­times in each, if I knew all the things my senses
  engaged. What am I tast­ing right now?
  What am I miss­ing in every thing I see?
  Stop­ping now, even slow­ing, even a lit­tle,
  a glance, place my atten­tion: wham. It is all
  amaz­ing. Wher­ever I place my atten­tion,
  I am amazed. My atten­tion cre­ates
  won­der. The won­der is there before my atten­tion,
  you say, but I don‘t know until my atten­tion
  unwraps it. Keep­ing up with my atten­tion sounds
  like a good way to spend my moments.

• December 30, 2010
• 21:12

  Fence, Two Ways

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  I notice well made things.  I like well crafted tools.  I can tell the dif­fer­ence between sur­gi­cal instru­ments made in Ger­many and Pak­istan by hold­ing them.  The Ger­man ones are bal­anced, sturdy, right.  The Pak­istani ones are less pre­cise even in the hold­ing of them.  Sub­tle dif­fer­ences, but in hold­ing the well made tool I feel (lit­er­ally) hap­pier.  This is a weird thing I guess.  Can‘t explain it.  Maybe I feel con­nected to the per­son who spent the extra time forg­ing it well.

  Doing surgery for a while, as I have, I can tell the dif­fer­ence between threads that are a tenth of a mil­lime­ter in diam­e­ter by how they feel in my gloved hand.  This doesn‘t mat­ter, except that it is amaz­ing to think of what our brains can learn to do.

  Some­one made a fence out of old cor­ru­gated metal and grat­ing.  It is bet­ter than a fence that you can buy, I think.  Why is that? I mean why is it that I think that and why do I think about that and take a pic­ture and write a blog post?  It‘s bet­ter than think­ing about all the things that don‘t matter…all the ways that we divide ourselves–gossip (I do it), under­cut­ting, exploit­ing weak­nesses in those around us.  I am think­ing about the work­ing world now.  I like this fence.  When I saw it I believed it was made to bring neigh­bors together and not as way to keep them out.  That is why these lit­tle emphases on qual­ity and craft and beauty mat­ter to me.

• December 27, 2010
• 23:18

  Snow 4

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  Anita asked me how I am chang­ing with a child on the way.
  I am rooted, more, earthly.
  The spot of ground around me feels like a whole lot more because I am no longer in it
  alone.
  The spot of ground around me feels like a whole lot less because I am no longer
  in it alone.
  My influ­ence on another world of life is sub­tle, unmis­tak­able, lim­ited and pos­si­bly
  won­der­ful.
  I am look­ing for him every­where now.
  I am to be the hon­est man he finds in this world.
  I am to be that man.

• December 26, 2010
• 0:36

  Snow 3

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  Some­times the dif­fer­ence
  between some­thing
  and noth­ing is
  not much.

• December 22, 2010
• 22:33

  Todos Santos

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  In Todos San­tos the dust splashes from pass­ing cars like pud­dle water,
  mak­ing a fil­ter in the air that col­ors the light, soft­ens it, makes it like the light in dreams
  on TV. The dust set­tles like gauze over every­thing, giv­ing form to the set­tling air.
  It lets you know which way the wind blew a while ago.
  The dust col­ors the town a rich Mex­i­can sepia. We are walk­ing after dinner.

  The vir­gin waits on most cor­ners this time of year, burlap or silk draped, lighted,
  plugged in, sur­rounded by relics of the present time. She is stolid and still vul­ner­a­ble.
  Her shrine is every­where: a block up from the yel­low cathe­dral here,
  a block over from the Hotel Cal­i­for­nia, a tourist night­mare.
  The dusty dogs skulk nearby, respect­fully, in a way. Not really, but I make it so
  in my desire for them to know who she is. They don‘t care. These dogs are hun­gry.
  Street ven­dors, la tien­di­tas, sell pork tacos, man­gos, Marl­boros, Bic pens until
  9 o‘clock. They lounge like cats over the coun­ters talk­ing with friends by yel­low
  incan­des­cence, also dusted.

  Christ­mas lurks in Todos San­tos. It is brought in on trucks with unrec­og­niz­able paint jobs
  from Cabo San Lucas or La Paz and from Laredo or Mex­ico City before that. The tin­sel hangs
  limp in the heat and the still air. On one bal­cony an inflat­able Santa takes up every inch of space,
  his head bent over a bit as if inquis­i­tive. On another street a hawker sells all the Christ­mas wares for the
  town. This is where the truck parked. A tent filled with the same down­ward gaz­ing vir­gin, blinged out
  in twin­kling lights (we bought one of those), dogs with red noses–inflatable, fire­crack­ers, plas­tic pines
  already dec­o­rated, plas­tic candy canes, pinatas, every­thing you need. The locals drift through not buy­ing much,
  but buy­ing enough.

  Music every­where on the streets of Todos San­tos at night, from AM radios,
  decked out Baja-ready Toy­ota trucks, bars. Walk­ing the streets takes us
  from one accordion-heavy song to the next, mak­ing a rau­cous fab­ric of sound, a Mex­i­can blan­ket of sound.
  The streets are dirt or paved in no par­tic­u­lar order. Even­tu­ally all of them are dirt, it seems.
  We make our way back to Casa Huerta and climb under mos­quito nets and hear
  the bale­ful cries of the hun­gry dogs mixed with the sound of gear grind­ing trucks mak­ing
  their last turns over dust filled pot holes onto the tiny alley­ways that get them home.

• December 20, 2010
• 22:39

  Snow 2

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  In an unlikely time of mad­ness and chaos, life has emerged with some­thing beau­ti­ful, a boy. Rose and I saw him today doing flips and rolls in a pool way too small. I thought about all times I have said that maybe we were hap­pier being lit­tle astro­nauts float­ing in our first oceans. It is a good thing I can‘t remem­ber being in there. I would have wanted only to stretch my legs. Still, when I am in a car/plane/theater/anywhere all I think about is being able to stretch out. I was want­ing it for him too. Already I am try­ing to make things dif­fer­ent for him. Look out, kiddo.
  Then I saw the heart beat­ing away at 140 raps a minute, about twice what it will do when he is grown. So eager, this lit­tle heart, rac­ing away as if it has an unlim­ited num­ber of beats. I loved see­ing that. Even as I sense the chang­ing cadence of my life, today I felt a new syn­cope: me on the toms, boy on the snare, and Rose‘s high hat siz­zling among us, bring­ing the color.

• December 19, 2010
• 21:48

  Snow 1

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  One of the cool things about pho­tog­ra­phy is the illu­sion that I get to con­trol two huge play­ers in the uni­verse: light and time. If the cam­era stares at some­thing long enough it even­tu­ally stops look­ing like itself and starts to look like the smooth sur­face that enough time seems to impart to mem­ory. It‘s only true for bod­ies in motion how­ever, like the water in the pic­ture above. The chaos of each lit­tle rip­ple is relieved by just leav­ing the cam­era to look at it long enough. Emily Dick­in­son believed that the pass­ing of time doesn‘t help..

  They say that “Time assuages”
  Time never did assuage –
  An actual suf­fer­ing strength­ens
  As Sinews do, with age

  The suf­fer­ing is the prob­lem. Pain, incon­ve­nience, “bad days” pass like a stream and start to look dif­fer­ent as soon as they reach the rear view mir­ror. I have learned (and said here, recently even) that my attach­ments cause the suf­fer­ing. They keep the painful stuff right in front of me, frozen, while just beneath that, time and pain and this moment and that moment and hap­pi­ness and a good day and a hard day and every­thing else, flow away like water­col­ors in the rain.

• December 16, 2010
• 18:07

  Frivolous

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  I walked in to the gym where I work out with Sara every week.  She puts the hurt on me in a good way.  The weekly white board slo­gan this week in the gym read:  Life is good, and the uni­verse is on your side.  I don‘t believe that the uni­verse picks a side.  If it is on my side, does that mean it is not on some­one else‘s side?  If you are on one side you are not on the other side.   The uni­verse likely has big­ger fish to fry.  Even more likely is that the uni­verse is not will­ful, and is not fry­ing fish at all.

  What I see around me is a uni­verse that spends a lot of energy and time mak­ing seem­ingly friv­o­lous bits of eye candy like this bearded iris.  Maybe some­thing eats these. Bees hang out around them.  I live in a uni­verse that does funny things like bearded iris’. I am encour­aged by that.  I know mak­ing one of these flow­ers is not easy, yet there it is.  It is good that the uni­verse doesn‘t do the world the way many peo­ple would–squared off walls in shades of Pot­tery Barn taupe, shoddy, hid­den seams and use­less money back guar­an­tees.  No guar­an­tees in the real, beau­ti­ful, unpre­dictable world.  It is mind­less, with­out will.  It is equal opportunity–both for bru­tal­ity (as a kid I would have used this flower as bat­ting prac­tice, lop­ping off its lovely head with­out a thought) and for won­der (also as a kid I would have turned over every mil­lime­ter of this, in love with pur­ple for the first time).  To need the uni­verse to be on my side lessens its awe­some­ness.  It is enough on my side by being on all sides and no sides.

• December 14, 2010
• 21:49

  Cusp

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  Around this cor­ner
  Where every­thing is still
  A storm is brewing.

  Once I stop think­ing that things “shouldn‘t be this way” I start things as they are, and I start see­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. I am look­ing at myself and the changes going on in my life. I know I need help to make it through an inevitable turn. The prob­lem for a guy like me is that I start ques­tion­ing my right to ask for that help. Have I been there for oth­ers when they needed help? Have I done enough to earn a spot at the table of com­mu­nity spirit avail­able to me and to you and to any­one asking?

  I think this is not help­ing. Even say­ing it is a way of deflect­ing from real­ity. It sets up peo­ple around me to have to either rush in reas­sure me of some­thing they would will­ing do any­way, which is a way of being “one down” and con­trol­ling and in the end is ego dis­guised at self efface­ment. Sticky. But I have to say it so that it is exposed to light. My friend Mar­sha recently wrote about our cracks and how we need them to let the light in. I believe this, but I am still attached to the veneer of who I think you should think I am.  I am attached to poor def­i­n­i­tions of sev­eral words:  suc­cess­ful, com­pe­tent, self suf­fi­cient.  My con­nec­tion to these words drops bread crumbs that allow var­i­ous wolves to fol­low me and even­tu­ally put me in to the hot water of being alone and lonely.

  So, as I go through the var­i­ous changes in my life that are com­ing up–business fal­ter­ing while a new fam­ily is arriv­ing for instance–I will be need­ing help and I am start­ing to ask for it. Today I called and friend and sim­ply said, what do you see here? what advice do you have? I don‘t know what to do. I was scared to do this but he was kind and hon­est but didn‘t spend time res­cu­ing me. My fear was all based in my con­nec­tion to all those words that I have mis­guided def­i­n­i­tions for. My oppor­tu­nity is to be hon­est about need­ing help, let it come and resist being cyn­i­cal. I have a lot to be thank­ful for.

  I have been writ­ing about this a lot lately. Your patience, as I evolve here in front of you, is appreciated.

• December 12, 2010
• 22:22

  A Ceiling Light

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  “The first time I really noticed a ceil­ing lamp was in a hotel lobby in Union­town, Ohio. I was intrigued by how it looked when I stood directly below it; from that per­spec­tive it was an abstract kalei­do­scope and didn‘t resem­ble the func­tional object that I had viewed from the side. As I lay on the lobby floor, study­ing the lamp, I decided to pro­duce this portfolio.

  When­ever I con­sider this project com­pleted, I see another lamp that excites my imag­i­na­tion. Every­where I go, I still find myself look­ing up.“
  Cole Thomp­son
  please go now and see this series… [www.flickr.com] N00/sets/72157623172073777/

  I took the pho­to­graph above (ISO 400, 1/250, f 8), but I did not have the idea. Cole Thomp­son had the idea. He has made a beau­ti­ful port­fo­lio of pho­tos of ceil­ing lamps. Please go to his blog and his web­site and check out his work. His blog is here: [www.photographyblackwhite.com] . His pho­tographs are soul­ful and thought­ful. On his Flickr page he was asked how much retouch­ing is done to make these pho­tos of ordi­nary ceil­ing lamps looks so beau­ti­ful and clean. I decided to see what was involved. The photo above is hardly retouched at all. I sim­ply pointed the cam­era up, focused and fired. I edited out a small amount of ambi­ent light around the light (very lit­tle) and adjusted the con­trast a bit, no more than I do for any photo on this blog. I find this pho­to­graph very sat­is­fy­ing even though I didn‘t have the idea.

  The feel­ing I have is the same I would have if I sang Let It Be well. It feels great to make a unique image and have a new idea, but there is still some­thing valu­able in mak­ing any art. Some­thing in me rises to meet the oppor­tu­nity to be cre­ative. Another artist I admire is Andy Goldswor­thy. There are whole web­sites devoted to peo­ple recre­at­ing and refash­ion­ing and spring-boarding off his amaz­ing art. Very lit­tle art, and no sci­ence that I know of, arises in a vac­uum. It is all deriv­a­tive, and that is one of its great­est strengths. Art and sci­ence are both wholly human activ­i­ties, because they both ref­er­ence pre­vi­ous work. In other words, art con­nects itself to what hap­pened before. I love that.

  In Sep­tem­ber of this year I pho­tographed a Les Lyden paint­ing that hangs in our home ( [www.bendlight.me] ). I sent Les (I feel I can now call him Les, which is the big point I am slowly dri­ving to here) a note about the posts. We had a great con­ver­sa­tion about his work, mine. We got to know each other a bit, connected.

  This blog, my writ­ing, art (for me), life, is a process of con­nect­ing. I am look­ing for myself, my heart. I am look­ing for you. I am look­ing for that which holds us together even as we live our lives alone together. In the end (and in the begin­ning) it is the process of giv­ing and receiv­ing love. I am grate­ful for Cole Thompson‘s work, for what it stirred in me and for what I did after experiencing it.

• 1:35

  Art Show on a Brick Wall, or the Lost Supper

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  The best cam­era is the one in your hand.  Chase Jarvis

  The upside of cliches is that they point us to images of deep beauty or truth. The down­side is that every­one is point­ing to the same things. Still I am find­ing myself drawn to cliches these days. I am lik­ing the moon on the water. I am lik­ing the wind in the trees. I am lik­ing that an iphone photo from a com­mu­nity din­ner in down­town Bend has ele­ments of sur­re­al­ism in reflected paint­ings on the brick wall across the street, a Mary earnestly at the side of a man with a beard, and a cas­cade of lights trail­ing down from the sky. Etc.

  The acqui­es­cence to the power of the cliche…is that a sign of my mel­low­ing or an early sign of my dis­ap­pointed men­tal soft­en­ing. Inside it feels like a let­ting go of some of the cyn­i­cism I needed in ear­lier decades of my life. That is a good thing, and a funny thing. I won‘t be buy­ing glossy prints of Ore­gon coast sun­sets, but I won‘t give up on the moon or the sea as wor­thy images in my writ­ing if I can breathe a lit­tle new life into a far, for­got­ten cor­ner of either one of them. Some­how that would make me smile.

• December 08, 2010
• 22:42

  What You Think You Thought

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  A boy, eight, swings a bat and clack,
  con­nects. This moment of the ball‘s
  still­ness between for­ward and back,
  is the moment of the boy‘s first, deep­est know­ing
  of his own belong­ing to the world.

• December 07, 2010
• 19:21

  Kite

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  This sum­mer, Rose and I went to Bre­it­en­bush Hot Springs.  There was a man there fly­ing a kite in vir­tu­ally no wind and sur­rounded by trees and branches.  By sur­rounded I mean that he was fly­ing a kite in the trees.  The was a lit­tle open­ing, where the walk­way went, but not much.  So there he is at a calm dusk among the trees pulling on the string of the kite and cre­at­ing lift by his own move­ment.  It was all back­wards and it was beau­ti­ful.  He became the wind for his kite and the kite ducked and winked and luffed and sailed for him.  He and the kite were danc­ing.  I am not going to wax philo­soph­i­cal on this.  It was just so cool and won­der­ful and point­less; and it was art.

• December 05, 2010
• 22:19

  Voices

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  A month after we moved to Cor­pus Christi, TX, hur­ri­cane Celia hit the coast like a hard swung bat. We hud­dled in the hall­way, my brother, my two sis­ters and my mom. My dad was at the hos­pi­tal hold­ing doors shut against the winds blow­ing freely through shat­tered win­dows. I have a mem­ory that he came home with cuts from fly­ing glass in his arms–not sure if that is true or if it is the mem­ory of my young self see­ing my dad as the hero he was for his patients on that day. Then the eye of the store rolled over the land. I love that image. The storm‘s eye makes for a very ten­u­ous peace, and if you are in that eye, the only promise you have is that the storm‘s back­hand is wind­ing up to hit you soon. But dur­ing that eye we had a reprieve. My dad rushed home and climbed on the roof and tried to do some­thing to repair the hole caused by a 4x4 post that flew into the liv­ing room like a lawn dart. I remem­ber all around us were men­ac­ing and roil­ing clouds but lit­tle wind. Like an ani­mal I think I could feel the plum­met­ing baro­met­ric pres­sure. Every­thing in me was say­ing run. But we didn‘t run. We stayed together, rehud­dled and weath­ered the sec­ond half of Celia. I am think­ing of the rest­less quiet in the storm today, about what the wind of voices that sur­round me are up to. I am wait­ing for the eye because I have deci­sions to make.

  As I approach inevitable change in my life, voices start want­ing to be heard. Like the dog lis­ten­ing to the speaker horn on the old record label for “His Master‘s Voice”, I incline my ear. Where will I place my atten­tion in this moment of change? All of the voices…“do this” “stop, wait” “go”, all these sounds com­ing at me with good inten­tion, all of them sum­moned by me in some way–it is impor­tant to remem­ber that I do invite the din. I feel like the mother bird with the worm and the lit­tle birds are chirp­ing away. It is easy to for­get that I hold the worm, and in this case, as with every case, the worm is choice.

  My friend/mentor Don, asked me a sim­ple ques­tion and then shut up and said noth­ing else: What do you want your life to look like, because you have the chance to make it look dif­fer­ent. This is, of course, prob­a­bly true every day, but when so many things are in flux (love that word), it feels more true now. What I am feel­ing in me is that it is time to look for the quiet. Now is not the time for a mil­lion ideas from a mil­lion well (or not) wish­ers. I want to know me, and I do know me (!). In the midst of the change, the fear, the chaos, is oppor­tu­nity. While I know I won‘t run off and join the cir­cus or aban­don com­mit­ments and respon­si­bil­i­ties, I have lots of room to move within those respon­si­bil­i­ties. Some­times it is easy to think I am trapped because I made deci­sions pre­vi­ously that didn‘t pan out and that I am respon­si­ble for, or to think I am trapped because the sec­ond storm is com­ing. Here is the truth. I am not trapped. I am free. I am not alone. I am con­nected, loved. I have worlds of choices, even within sit­u­a­tions that feel con­stricted, for­eign, and soul-less. I am not pow­er­less in this storm, and this is not my first or last storm.

• December 03, 2010
• 17:35

  Suffering

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  Hav­ing expec­ta­tions in my life is the begin­ning of suf­fer­ing, always. The want­ing, the expect­ing, the suf­fer­ing; in that order. Like one of those inven­tory con­trol devices that are attached to shirts at the mall, suf­fer­ing is attached to expec­ta­tion. There is the say­ing, pain is inevitable, suf­fer­ing, optional. It is optional because I can choose where to place my atten­tion, or my want­ing. Bud­dhists say to want noth­ing, and suf­fer­ing goes away. My seren­ity is inversely pro­por­tional to my expec­ta­tions and wants. My hap­pi­ness is directly pro­por­tional to my abil­ity to accept life as it is right now. Accep­tance means that I don‘t have the tug­ging in me that says “But wait, it should…” Fin­ish that sen­tence and it is like pulling the pin on the grenade.

  My suf­fer­ing arises from the belief that some­thing, this or that thing, should not be the way it is. As soon as I start down Should Road, I am in for it. I know this, or at least, I have said this/read this/written this/taught this before. When I teach you about it, it is a pretty sim­ple con­cept. When I am con­vinc­ing myself of it, I feel like I have been told to stand in the cor­ner of a round, white room. As I have recently writ­ten here, I have been strug­gling with changes at my work. The actual work of see­ing patients, doing oper­a­tions and show­ing up in the hos­pi­tal is all going well…hmmm, it is good to even write that; what is not going as planned is pretty much every­thing else. All the mechan­ics of run­ning the busi­ness are not what I thought they would be. I had this thought, this expec­ta­tion, that it would be dif­fer­ent than what it is right now. So I have all the right answers that would sound great in a blog, but I am not feel­ing them.

  For me, that is really the issue, the feel­ings. I have all these feel­ings that I am not sure what to do with. Feel­ing them, really just allow­ing those hard feel­ings, would be a good place to start. I guess I am attached to the idea that I should have the answers all sewn up and that I should not have hard feel­ings like embar­rass­ment, anger, shame, etc. But the truth is that I do feel all those things, because I have had an image of what my busi­ness would be like and I have become attached to those beliefs. I fail to see that I am just where I am sup­posed to be, that I am a lucky bee liv­ing in a nectar-filled flower of opportunity…gag.

  What I do know is that I can‘t get out of this or through this–the feel­ings or the real­i­ties at work–on my own. It is lit­er­ally not pos­si­ble to lift one­self off the ground by pulling on straps attached to one‘s own boots. I know I need help, even to just have feel­ings, to let my heart run freaky and wild and scary and weird. I have grief to feel and anger. I need help with those things. Once I do that work, I can usu­ally count on my brain to help me see the land­scape as it is and then, with­out hav­ing to try to hard I can become grate­ful for what I have. Once I am in that place, I usu­ally start to feel bet­ter, and I guess that is what we humans really like, isn‘t it. We like to feel better.

• December 01, 2010
• 21:16

  Lava Lamp

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  I have looked at this pic­ture and won­dered what pithy lit­tle vignette I could write, but some­times, a pic­ture really is worth all the words I could think of. All I can say is that this really hap­pened and at the time seemed to make sense. Feel free to fill in any gaps.

• November 29, 2010
• 14:55

  Aspen

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  I played Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, for Rose (and the lit­tle astro­naut) over the week­end. I was try­ing to explain to myself why this music is so spe­cial, why it runs so deep in me. I have read before that Miles Davis was as con­cerned with the silence between notes as he was with the notes. Every note gets its place on this album, every space gets its place. The music between the tones is super rich. The Lon­don tube sys­tem has a lit­tle reminder sign above you when you cross from train to plat­form: Mind the Gap. That says it per­fectly I think.

• November 27, 2010
• 14:39

  The Corral

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  Lots of things are chang­ing in my world…my busi­ness is not what I thought it was and it may be even less of that soon, a baby is float­ing in a very small ocean right next to me and soon that ocean will float that baby into my life–like Moses in the bull­rushes. So I have the oppor­tu­nity to ask a ques­tion: what do I want my life to look like now? Inside me there are the voices of “no” that sim­ply stand like trees all around me. They have always been there. I don‘t know how else to describe them. I would like to say they are silent but they are not. They have the one word. I think I feel them as real and all around me but they are not. They are made up, in my head, not what I thought they were. I can, like this lit­tle sea­horse, sim­ply swim through the gate of his coral cor­ral, and away.

  I have lived so long with the Trees of No that I actu­ally behave as if they are real and that they can keep me here/doing this or that/unhappy/resentful/stuck. They can­not. It helps me to have other voices talk to me about Yes. Rose does this. Anita, Will, Phil, Bar­bara, Claire, Kim, Sean, Mary, Brian, Pam, Pre­ston, Kelly, Tim, Blake, Chelsea, and many more. Hmmm. There are lots of yes peo­ple in my world. They are my friends. With all these other voices, I still find myself hang­ing out in the same famil­iar, dark and dank reaches in my head.

  It‘s not one of the other, I know. It‘s not all yes or all no. I also know that I have not led a life of paral­y­sis. I have had great adven­tures in all kinds of ways. My last post on this blog called for me to look for the cir­cle of peo­ple who make up my vil­lage, who are already there. It is time to look at them and not for them, to know and believe and act as if  I am not alone. The voices in my head–those old voices–are just not right and although they are me, they are not all of me, truly me, and they are not my best me. The other voices (my voice, really) tell a dif­fer­ent story, and they are waiting.

• November 25, 2010
• 14:06

  One Prayer

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  These knees bend and fall to the earth under the weight of lone­li­ness though my brother and my sis­ter are a step away, they bend and they fall, the knees. It is an hon­est weight, the aloneness.

  These clasped hands hold each other until they might touch the untouch­able. These open and raised hands describe in the air, bounty fill­ing my heart, com­ing to me through the upraised fun­nel of these arms.  They rep­re­sent the hope of bounty, the upraised hands, even though my unknow­ing heart was full already.

  This offer­ing, the money, is the dim reflec­tion of my brim­ming and golden heart of love.

  This build­ing, altars and golden win­dows and rows of us, unlook­ing at one another, stands for a vil­lage we dream of cre­at­ing: a place in the round to see each other as we are, in the muck of a Tues­day, for instance.  It is as sim­ple as a cir­cle, the village.

  These flags snap in the wind in place of words unsayable
  These flags snap in the wind in place of words unsayable

• November 24, 2010
• 14:44

  Last Left Hand Turn

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  In winter the lights that float through the car as I drive under street lamps is crisper, more defined, bluer.  I make the turn on to the road home and the light in the car changes with the direction, silently raking across my arms, the wheel, the seat in back, and out across the rear fender.  The last moments of that quiet ride interrupted as the sound of the crunch of snow comes into my conscious hearing.  I have been lost in dreams–the early falling of night brings early dreaming it seems.  The moon through the trees seems premature too, like the dreaming–a month ago the sun was still high in the sky at this time of day.  It was a month ago, right?  The lights dim as the engine is off and the stark shadows in the snow soften as the moon’s diffuser makes a bath of light instead of the stream from the headlights.  It’s better, and the quiet is complete for a moment:  end of the day.

• November 22, 2010
• 14:51

  Strawberries in Winter

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  Those little white flecks are snow flakes falling all around the strawberry sugar smacks. These two things are not supposed to go together.  Here is the typical internet site on strawberry cultivation:

  Cover your strawberry plants with 5 – 6” of straw just when the ground begins to freeze and temperatures dip down into the low 20’s to high teens. Be sure to leave the mulch on all winter and donít be tempted to pull it off on the first warm day in March or April. The tender flower buds are very susceptible to late spring frosts.

  I think we can now safely say that we are in a strawberry bumper crop, officially.

  A little surprise, a little gift from nature.  Strawberries for you in November…have a nice Fall.  It is good for me to remember that the world brings me abundance just like it brings scarcity.  It brings and brings.  My job is about receiving.

• November 20, 2010
• 22:36

  Pollo

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  I spent the summers of my 11th and 12th years in La Romana, Dominican Republic as the guest of my neighborhood friend Danny’s abuelo and abeulita.  I learned how to dance the merengue in open air squares with his cousins.  It was 1976, and I was 12.  I took a pair of platform heels for the dancing nights.  Of course I did.  We ate street food, arroz con pollo (chicken and rice), paper dunce cap cups of shaved ice with treacle-sweet ”flavors”, mangos.  We swam in the ocean.  We chased chickens around the streets.  We went to matinees and watched crazy Cantiflas movies (the Mexican Jerry Lewis) and I howled even though I spoke almost no Spanish. I met amazing friendly people who kissed me and hugged me a lot.  His grandparents were well off relatively, which meant that we stayed in a 1200 square foot house and slept in tiny rooms with fans blowing all night.

  My friend Danny brought over his two best of Beatles albums:  The Beatles 1962–1966 (red album jacket) and The Beatles 1967–1970 (blue jacket) with the four looking over a balcony at the camera.  I listened to those records until I could sing every word.  One of my first memories of rock and roll is the tiny record player in La Romana and ”You’e Got to Hide Your Love Away” teaching me that it was not ok for a man to show the pain of losing. ”While My Guitar Gently Weeps”– I look at the world and I notice it’s turning…so beautiful.  I felt all the songs like they were poignant treasures and I was an expatriot (didn’t know that word, but it is the feeling, you know?) preserving an American (British, but who is going to rob a 12 year old of heroism?) treasure while overseas.  I was melancholy, and I knew this music would be the soundtrack for love in my life, but I didn’t know any girls yet.  Something was waking in me–”All My Loving” had a meaning I was started to get a handle on, for instance.

  Today I bought some Beatles music on iTunes (finally available there this week), and hit play and let it run all day.  I wrote to a friend that the Beatles are the alphabet that makes up the language of pop music.  Everything references them.  This is not news.  For me, the listening took me all through my growing up years, but especially those two great summers in the Dominican Republic, eating chicken and rice, dancing the merengue, and falling in love with a girl who did not yet exist.

• November 18, 2010
• 22:39

  It\'s Real

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  I thought they were all out.  I thought I had taken the last one out weeks ago.  I had thought this before, and had been wrong, of course, every time.  They come in batches of three when they come and they come often, like sets on the North Shore, regular (but not predictable) and menacing. The appendix.  What is it?  Why do we have one?  I have answered this question many times, but really I have asked it to myself and asked it of the gods, just as many times. Bleary, I pulled my scrubs on last night and did the routine. It was 1:30 when the ER doctor called me.  It is so frequent that the conversation can literally be as short as this (and this one was just this short–this may actually be an exact transcript)…

  ”Stephen, hey sorry to wake…” ”Uh-huh, thanks, whaddya got”  ”45 year old man, appendicits”  ”Antibiotics yet?” ”Ordered”  ”See you in a few.”  Click.  Me:  ”Damn.”  ER doctor (I imagine) ”He was his usual sweet self.”

  Based on that stellar history and my insightful questions, I call in an OR crew, an anesthesiologist and my assistant.  Key in ignition, stereo loud or soft or I don’t even hear it.  I see the patient, rally my sense of decency to be a real person with him (and I am) and do paperwork, 30 minutes.  I answer the question I asked on the drive over:  It’s a small little appendage on your colon.  No, we don’t know what its for.  Odd isn’t it? Maybe it is there to keep surgeons busy.  Hahaha…ugh.  Then I wait.  The wires get crossed somewhere in the basement of the hospital and the wrong instruments get pulled and we wait.  Or the antibiotics don’t come up or the pregnancy test isn’t done or I forgot to do some piece of the paperwork puzzle.  It is a real, human endeavor.  This is not TV time surgery.  This is 3 am , everyone has been working for 18 hours or 4 hours or not at all.  The key component is the 3am part.  No matter what else has happened, 3am makes everything turn to mortar and watching a hospital try to turn a corner at this time of day is excruciating.  Not always, of course and especially not if the stakes are critical as in a true this-person-might-die-this-instant scenario.  But for the routine appy, we are all tired, including the patient, who, in spite of finding himself in a scene reminiscent of a very slow motion keystone cops scene, is at a life threatening crossroads.  Literally.  Its funny and not,  I know.

  Finally everything arrives, patient asleep, family members curled like a team of nautilus on the waiting room couch.  Usually this operation takes about 30 minutes.  It is kind of like waiting on the tarmac forever for the fog to clear in Portland to make a 30 minute flight over the Cascades.  No matter how routine that flight is, every part of everything has to fall in to place, no matter how slowly.

  The next morning, which in this case came an hour and half after I got home, brings the elusive silver lining.  I walk in to the patient’s room and he is alive and the miracle of him healing is already beginning.  He is asking for something to drink, looking for his wife, half watching the tv while I tell him all the fascinating little tiny details.  In short, he is moving on and getting back to the living of his life, and not really looking in the rear view at the menace he just swerved past.  I like that part, but the longer I do this…wait.  Let’s just stop and really know that:  I do like that part and that is real.

  Still I feel the long hours of the night paint themselves on the walls of my interior through the next day.  It affects me.  It is not like staying up to watch a movie, these operations in the middle of the night.  They truly bring clarity to the definition of toll. They take one.  I don’t want to complain, but sometimes I do.  I do.  I admit it.  I know this job is a privilege, rare and wonderful.  I get tired though.  I am tired now.  I want to write more and make photographs and talk to you and engage but I am just tired and I am going to sleep now.  And that has been the work day for today.

• November 16, 2010
• 22:21

  Six Volt

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  7, 6, 5, 4,

  She was walking now, stepping 3 steps to the mic, 2 breaths, a sheet of now crumpled paper–1, and no thoughts, zero.  Her bangs fell forward, bothering her lashes.  She wanted a haircut.  She refrained from tossing her head.  Not going to be that grrl, the hair flipper.  Her hands dropped to her sides and the paper floated to the floor. Her chin found itself and she spoke.

  She spit the lines she had written, a psychotic snare cadence with high hat volleys, unintelligible, all rhythm and anger and tuneless rock and roll, original punk.  It came from her like gangs roiling before a rumble, the words sounding the way graffiti text looks–unreadable, beautiful.

  Her feet spread to hip width and she raised her palms hip high, fingers down.  Her forearms flexed and she finished her poem.  She felt like she had finished a puzzle, complete and still held one piece in her hand.  Silence, a breath.

  I heard the rain on the roof now, black penny nails on tin.  It must have just started, the rain.  She took a step sideways and down to her seat, head bowed, but not meek.

  In me, the cynicism that had been rising for a week from

  listening to the news

  doing the job

  quelling the rage

  paying the bill

  being the ”man”

  avoiding the truth

  voting

  from consuming

  from being eaten alive from the inside and out

  all that cynicism that is more poisonous than any conservatism, liberalism, demorepublicanism, more lethal than a bad diagnosis–all that fell away when I saw the slightest corner of her mouth turn to a smile as her bowed head led her back to her chair.

• November 14, 2010
• 22:39

  Orchid

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  I am wondering what it means to take something personally.  I do that.  I believe I am slighted, disregarded and within me a little crack appears on the surface of the ice.  I keep skating and soon enough I am swimming. I create a whole world of make believe scenarios that, above all, do not help.

  ”You don’t like me, they think I do sloppy work,” etc.  Even weirder is that part of me that can be slighted by myself!  No one ”out there” has to say a word, and I can convince myself that I have burned the whole place down, that I am the core problem–even if there does not need to be a problem at all.  Again, etc.  What is that part of me that levels these accusations at my self?  Ego, sentinel?  Or maybe it is some other part and the ego is the one being bruised. Is it possible there are three voices (any friendly psychiatrist or psychologist or sage of any kind please feel free to weigh in) in me?  1..Some weird, harmful voice of self-loathing, 2..the ego that is bruised and feeling sorry for itself, and 3..the other little part that knows the truth.  That little third part shows up here to write, and that little third part is my ticket out of the swamps of self pity.

  Like the subway track’s third rail, that third part in me carries the juice.  Touch it at your peril.  It has always been there, just like the other two parts, but I have mostly not known.  It has believed in me, and it has been me, when I was lost in a game of pong between the other two parts.  I know all this sounds crazy, but as I get closer to my truest self the real weirdo parts of me come out of the woodwork.  I have to write blog posts in which I invoke three parts of my own self in order to explain who I am, and I wonder if I am the only one who thinks like this.  Seriously.

  So, for holding the line and maintaining some semblance of my fundamental worth, I have brought myself some digital flowers…(were you wondering how that would all come together?)

• November 12, 2010
• 15:32

  Early Dark

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  The winter, the light fails                                                                                                              early in the day, before I am finished.                                                                                Finished with what?

  I have things to do that need the light.                                                                                            I need to see the sharp summer relief against                                                                          my doubt, my indecision.

  The snows muffle the clatter of these realities                                                                              I believe I must face.  Can I just make an angel                                                                  here by the sidewalk?

  I am torn between my desire to hide in these early                                                            dusky shadows and my need to, need to                                                                                  need to get things done.

  Yes, I am being vague, its the nature of anxiety                                                                          to not know where the battle is.  I know these velvety                                                        nights are trying to hide something I need.  I know that.

  The autumn is over, the leaves are down mostly,                                                                      its that time of year                                                                                                                    when the leaves are down mostly.

  I am running out of this work                                                                                                            to home to try to beat the sun,                                                                                                  trying to beat (back) the dark.

  Which is it? Beat the dark                                                                                                              or beat the light?  Can I hang in the middle                                                                              spaces between the two, in that moment between?

  Is there a calm in that tiny tween?                                                                                              Can the sun rest and the moon rise with me (and with you)                                                    as the fulcrum of no movement in the middle of worlds?

  I will stop running home, stop leaving this and                                                                  leaving that and arriving and rushing.                                                                                            I will stop and be my own middle place

  in this place.  That is the thought                                                                                               that drums through me as I pile in to a cold hard line                                                               of five o’clock November traffic.

• November 11, 2010
• 12:11

  A Little News

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  Bend Light was featured on www.tinybuddha.com yesterday.  The post was called Better Together: We are Not Alone.  This is a national site with over 100,00 followers on Twitter, etc.  In the (self) interest of thanking you, my regular readers, I would encourage you to check out tiny buddha in general, and also my post.  That post was the reason I did not put a new post on for a day or two.  I will be getting back to the usual routine.  Also, please note you can find me on Twitter (Bend Light) and on facebook on the Bend Light fan page.  You can also subscribe to the blog by RSS readers and by email.  The email option will deliver it to you everyday there is a new post at about 3pm.

  Thank you to you all who are supporting this blog by reading it and sharing it.  In spite of my most recent post questioning the cyber connection, I also feel its value and I feel myself growing as a person in a good way because of Bend Light, both in its production and in its consumption (for lack of a better word) and especially in the feedback and thoughts.

  Be well

  stephen

  

• November 08, 2010
• 19:08

  Jacked In

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  ”The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”         William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1986

  Gibson’s first novel, considered by many in the sci-fi world as one of the best in the genre, (I am have not read enough to make this claim, but I can say it blew my mind from the opening line above [one of the best I have ever read] all the way to the end) foretold of a vast technology and information grid that a person could access by jacking in.  It was the web before the web.

  Now we are all jacked in, but I am not sure I feel connected to you.  I am also not sure I don’t.  I feel something, but I am not sure if it is connection.  I feel jacked in.  I know little bits of this and that of you, but I don’t know that I am friends with you.  Through social networks (does not rhyme with ”friend”) I am allowed to see little bits of whatever you consider your best for the day.  And you get to see what I have to offer–after hair and make up have finished.

  Being friends though, is something different.  David Whyte talked about this at a reading this weekend here in Bend.  He said friendships are the result of acts of serial forgiveness. The people I stay in contact with after I have hurt them and after they have hurt me have the potential to become real friends. These are people who I have released from the hurt I think they caused me. In order for this to happen, this serial forgiveness, we need to be in some proximity.  FB and Tweets don’t let you see my gnarly, selfish side enough for you to love me.  I am eas(y)(ier) to love on line, and so are you.  I want the other parts.  I want the parts of a relationship that show up after we take the chance of blowing each other off at a critical moment and then circling back and admitting that I was not ready to participate and saying that now, yes, it’s me and I am here.

  I am not looking to be hurtful for its own sake, only human, which includes the very human traits of unreliability, sloth, deception, etc as well as the other, sexier stuff.   Putting roots into a person requires the pain and the pleasure.  We need, I need, both.  I need room to screw up and be forgiven.  I need to get out of me long enough to see your side of something and let you off the hook.   I need that.

  That part of relationships is at risk by the use of infinitely editable snippets–like, uh, blogs, for instance. Jacking in is very different than showing up.  Even the act of being in each other’s presence is a kind of very personal intimacy. I often trade it for the dead tv-colored light that glows through your features, lifeless and beautiful and really perfect, on my 15” screen.

  Let’s go get some tea.

• November 07, 2010
• 17:55

  Two Ways

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  Inside me, in here, it feels,

  the fear, like

  a glove worn on the inside,

  sized one size too small.

  
  

  The effect keeps me from moving.

  I can move, and I don’t

  move.  I stay.  The pinch is a little worse

  when I move, at first.

  
  

  Still, the tension ebbs, or

  I forget for a minute the tightness.

  I think this is how normal feels, in

  my forgetting.  My stomach hurts.

  
  

  Or, I move. I don’t think.  It

  is sudden and beyond me.

  I am moving and it is

  as simple as that.

  
  

  A noiseless shift in me

  and the hard yellow line of fear,

  the cage of it, dissolves, shatters, falls away

  leaving harmless scattered, yellow Autumn leaves.

• November 05, 2010
• 22:55

  Raw

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  When I take stitches out, the question is always, ”Will it hurt.”  When these things that are holding me together get taken away, will that process cause pain?  The deeper question starts to look like this…When I fall apart and am left with a raw wound, how will I live with that pain?  How will I tolerate seeing my insides exposed, even if it is just the inside of a little length of my skin?  Will this hurt?  Can I trust that the healing you talked about is done?  Can I trust myself to heal?  Can I find a way to live with being exposed?  Are you trustworthy?  Am I the one kind of person who just can’t heal, who stubbornly refuses to knit back together?  Will I stay raveled?   Will become unraveled?

  And me, glibly, even patronizingly, paternally, ”Yes.  I mean No.  You will, you have, it won’t, stay still.”

  I hurt people for a living.  The gift of the pain I bring, I hope, is healing.  The healing is not my territory.  I am on the hurting side of it–use the knife, put holes in things, take things out. The knitting, healing, rejuvenating, the miracle part, happens later and is not my business. It happens while you are sleeping.  I show up again at the end and take out stitches, and maybe I act as if I was the wizard behind the curtain who made the edges of the skin find each other.  Maybe I remember my real place in the process.  Know this:  it wasn’t me.  You paid me to traumatize this tissue, hopefully in a way that somehow results in something you wanted.  After that it is all you, your body, G..d, nature.  By the time you heal I might as well be in that vacuum that nature abhors.

  Surgery is like a controlled burn.  It is good for you, really, it is.  But there are days when my impact is not surgical, when decisions I make bring pain that burns for real.  Today was that day for me.  The fires were sweeping through my life and the lives of people I care about deeply.  I had to lay off people from jobs they do well, willingly and with love. I had to serve some other purpose, and I question that at my deepest level.  I feel like my own skin is off, muscle exposed, tattered.  I feel so sad.

  It is a human experience, the healing that follows the pain.  The pain protects us from continuing to injure ourselves.  It forces us to ask for help, to rest, to get water and food. I can only trust that the fiery pain out there in my world of influence today is followed by a miraculous, drenching, soothing rain and that the peaceful waters will bring  the same kind of healing I have nothing to do with in the operations I do.

• November 03, 2010
• 15:13

  Fashion

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  I love how, no matter what, teenagers do their job of finding a way to offend the rest of the world with fashion–and with many other things as well, but it starts with the clothes. It is one of my favorite traits.  They must do this or die.  I know, having been one, having done my job with hair down my back, with checkerboard Vans and with being part of a generation to use the word dude in every single sentence.

  A 17 year old boy/man is sitting on the exam table listening to me talk about how we have to clean out his colon before we do surgery.  He made the mistake of bringing his girlfriend who is looking blanker as the conversation gets real-er, if you know what I mean.

  Of course when I go to examine him he has the CK boxer briefs.  I know this because I see mostly all of them–the briefs.  Somewhere around mid-femur I encounter his pants which, if stood them next to him would look like weird hand me downs from a half-sized clown.  They are short but they hit correctly at the heel of the shoe because they are worn low, way low.  I am as hip as the next guy, probably more.  When the ipod plays in the OR I can name anyone from the Shins to the Beastie Boys.  I have a tattoo and I got it just over a year ago (my poor parents had to see that one).  I read Wired.  This lowboy pants thing though, I don’t get, even though I was part of the generation in the 70’s that wore low riding bell bottoms.  This is different, because of the addition of the of boxer briefs.  I guess without the underwear we would be getting a real look at twigs and berries so it is a mercy, but a weird one.  Still, in all things, something to be thankful for…

• 14:57

  Painted Hills

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• November 01, 2010
• 21:51

  Secrets

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  I have held many secrets in my life and have held them in spite of hurting people I love with the holding.  I have held them because of the fear I felt about revealing my dark side–for me this side shows up with anything less than perfect, which is ridiculous, but it is true.  But there are other reasons, more sinister.  If I hold the secret then I persist in holding myself in low regard and I don’t have to be decent to myself and then I can’t be decent or loving to you.  I get to stay stuck, victimized, anesthetized, etc.  I am, as the saying goes, as sick as my secrets.

  Irony…writers love finding it.  Makes ”us” (am I a writer?) feel smart, which is fun.  Here is some irony about secrets.  Even though the content of the secret can be very hurtful, the most damaging part of the secret is the separation of not sharing who I am with someone who I say I love.  The pain of the secret (and its apparent comfort for its holder) is not what it is, but that it is at all.  It turns out (and I am not being ironic in saying this–I really never believed it until recently) that people who love me want to know my truth, no matter how painful, and I have shared painful, embarrassing and even shameful truths about myself–usually when my back was to the wall, but sometimes not even then, I am truly sad to say.

  Example:  I work with groups of courageous people who are trying to understand themselves and their relationships to their bodies on a deeper level.  They want to know who they are and why.  It’s a hero’s journey.  They share with each other and with me all kinds of secrets–affairs, abuse, fantasies, self mutilation, lack of love for children.  They are brave for real.  No matter what secret a person in my groups shares, the group has always shown up, maybe felt shocked at first, but then loved the person more.  More?  Here is what I have learned about that.  The content of secrets almost never matters; the holding of the secret is where the energy is.  As one of my group members said today…Once you tell the secret, the shame has no place to be.  I love that.  The shame is not in the content, although that is the story we tell ourselves.  The shame is the mortar that binds us to the act of holding the secret.  Some of us, like me, use that mortar and bricks of secrets to create walls of separation which make me think I am safe in my little compartment.  Other people have their own reasons.  What are yours?

  The trickiest part about secrets, I think is that they rob of us esteem.  They put me in a one down position, and I use that place to avoid the responsibility of caring about and for myself.  It lets me continue to tell stories that sound good but are not true.  The stories allow me to abuse myself or anesthetize myself because those are the ways I learned to feel safe/loved/superior/inferior/etc.  The end motives are not ”bad”, they just are.

  When I out my secrets, I am creating room for my authentic self to show up.  More importantly, I am making room for the deepest secret of all, which I think i will save for another day.  I think I finally know what it is at least.  I will stop here and give you a chance to think about yours, if you are the secret holding type that is…

• October 31, 2010
• 11:18

  Below the Wave

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  Nature repeats itself, and makes extra.  We only need about 10-20% of most organs to get by.  May not be running marathons, but still it is amazing that we can get by with so little. If something works in nature, like a shape, it is brought back repeatedly.  Eggs are an example.  Sometimes things just look the same because something similar is happening. When I discover something like this I want to make a deep and broad connection, but maybe it is just the coincidence.  Likely that is it.

  Still, I see these clouds one night and feel a little fear, like a thrill, rise up in me.  I have been looking at this photo for a while and now I realize that the feeling is the same one I feel when I have been under a wave that is passing over me.  As the wave rolls, it enfolds scalloped-shaped bands of water, bubbles, sand into itself until it crashes and it all goes everywhere.  The underside of a wave looks like the caterpillar tracks of a tank rolling by. These clouds over the Three Sisters in the Cascades on a summer night, reminded me of that, and I wondered if a huge cloud wave was gently rolling over the firmament, looking to break somewhere.

  The closest I have ever been to dying, I think, is in big waves getting tossed around. I love body surfing, and I am a pretty strong swimmer, so I usually feel I am within my bounds when I am out there, but I have been thrown hard against the sand.  I have felt powerlessness, and that is a primal kind of fear.  I still get into the water and I still body surf but not with the same abandon as I did before getting thrown under.  I have learned the lessons of powerlessness many times, and each time I become stronger, smarter, more respectful of the world and I regain the childlike quality of awe.

• October 29, 2010
• 22:10

  Nautilus

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  My family lived in Salamanca, New York for  two or three years from when I was 3 to 5. I remember the leaves in huge piles and me being buoyant enough to land in them and not hit hard ground, and  the musty smell of the leaves and the final grass cutting of the year (with a push reel lawn mower) rising in a plume.  Me, itchy, running from pile to pile, the brittle, snappy October air burning cold in my lungs.

  Our house was on Front Avenue, across from the Alleghany River.  Front was paved in red brick, uneven and old.  The river ran brown and fast and I was not allowed over there or even on to the bricks at all.

  My brother and I shared a bedroom, bunk beds.  One night I drew a mural on the framed wall next to the bottom bunk.  Another night I cut my hair off–mostly all of it.

  When I think back on those days it feels like I am recalling a book I read and not really my life. Some families stay in the same place for long periods and maybe that the proximity to a place keeps the memory from being only that faded Ektachrome image that I have for much of my childhood.  Or maybe that is what memory is for everyone.

  The inevitability of the one way path of time is annoying, tiring.  I guess it is beyond obvious to say that it wears on me.  I need more…, to digest this moment.  They are stacking up, the moments, like the endless pile of New Yorkers on my desk.  So much good stuff in there and I can’t get to it.  I want to understand meanings and connections and nuance, but the relentless metronome clicks on.

  I said to Rose today that soon enough we will be thinking in terms of school years again, something I have not done in two decades.  I am hoping that adding more markers for the time will help slow it.  The coming of autumn and the passing of summer, even the exceptional and slow turn that it was this year, is not enough.  It is over before I have jumped in to its pile of leaves and smelled the grass and felt the cold air.  It moves over for winter which piles in like a busy shopper loaded with parcels getting on a bus. It is over, already.

• October 27, 2010
• 22:54

  Genna

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  Genna painted next to her brother Dakota, all afternoon.  I took pictures, they painted.  At the end of it she had a cool tie dyed paper towel of paint brush smudges and two or three cards–one to me and Rose which she mailed right back to the house, which was cool.  It was warm, summer outside and in, prayer flags fluttering and enticing little squares of paint framing a guileless Mona Lisa smile on my good friend Genna.

  Nothing moves faster than a photon, but photography plays the trick of freezing light. Sometimes, like on this summer day, it is worth more than anything in a burning house. Photographs are the visual scents that instantly (at the speed of light) take me back.  Like a scent does.  Like this…

  If I were to stroll pass the perfume counter at Rite-Aid and smell White Shoulders I would be back at the dance in the eighth grade at Tom Browne Jr. High slow dancing with Beth Williams, simultaneously dying and being born, a burning star of newly made hormones.  I would be at Padre Staples mall at the kiosk outside of Chess King buying her a Steve Miller Band Book of Dreams replica album cover mirror (!).  The replica album cover art mirror kiosk was next to the spin art kiosk where you could buy a square of cardboard that got attached to a spinning axle and you could take a mustard squeeze bottle of paint and drip paint on to the spinning cardboard and make cool designs.  I am there in the mall, walking carefully past Orange Julius with my drying paint cardboard, past the fun shop with the Farrah Fawcett poster–perfect chicklets smile, one piece bathing suit way better than any bikini and the hair–hanging in the window like a siren driving all teenage boys into the rocks of forgetting their new, first girlfriends, past the JC Penny’s entrance (mall anchor stores were Penny’s and Dillards) and out to the baking hot asphalt, five minutes late for my dad, waiting in the colorless green Ford Custom 500, and home.  Walking to Beth’s house, mirror and now birthday card-made-from-spin-art square, wrapped in the Sunday comics. Beth loving it and me and Steve Miller (we shared Jungle Love and Jet Airliner as favorite songs). Beth, my first girlfriend, my 7th grade love, smiling at me as we shuffle on to the dance floor, draping her arms around my shoulders like a high school cardigan, my hands, powerless vice grips on her hips and us, rocking back and forth while Heatwave crooned ”Always and Forever” over the PA system in the cafeteria, and that scent of White Shoulders weaving itself into the fabric of my memory forever.

• 0:58

  Corduroy

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  I like this picture the way I like to hear cliches in pop songs.  You may think I hate pop songs because I brand them with the word cliche, but I don’t.  Cliches are the air of language.  They are the jeans.  We all wear them, we all breathe.  Easy, cheap or expensive, always ok, never great, (sometimes great, actually–like a pair of jeans on the right person).  i wear jeans almost every day.  I try to rail in my head against cliches, and I will tell you that they are banned from my art, but I speak them, write them and make pictures about them.  Cliches are a comfort.  They are themselves like the cliche about the many truths  which are spoken in jest.

  We use them because there is some truth to them, and they don’t intrude much.  They tell a kind of truth that I don’t have to really commit to.  It is a truth that is out there for anyone, but maybe it isn’t my truth.  I am not telling you much about me when I use a cliche, but i am telling you something.  That is the safe, comforting part.  Its like the difference between real chocolate and flavoring.  You might say that you only love the real stuff, but someone is out there eating all those Twinkies, and I have had my share of them too.

  
  

  I

• October 25, 2010
• 22:47

  Iron on Iron

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  As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
  Proverbs

  Today I met a man for coffee, a man I had never met, to talk about writing, and you know, make friends or something.  As I drove to the meet I wondered about the butterflies I had.   What should be hard about this?  I want to write, and I respect this writer a lot and he seems like a nice enough fellow in the exchanges on email, etc.  But the butterflies are flitting, and I think it goes back a long way, beyond me and him by far.

  Men are trained to be wary of another man.  Maybe it is in the genes too.  The long bathing of our code in testosterone has trained us to sleep with an eye open, to hone our skills, be ready to fight–and be ready to kill. This is a unique part of the grain of being a man. There is PTSD, (post traumatic stress disorder), but this is more like Pre-TSD–it is already there, the vigilance, the hair trigger.  Women are not indoctrinated this way. You may say that women can be extremely dangerous to one another, way beyond catty.  True, but my experience of being a man is that men are born with a bent toward and then prepared for a life of battle with each other.  It is in us to kill one another, and the closer we are to one another,  the greater the risk.  Genetic closeness makes for the greatest risk.  Men make a big deal about the vital importance of the team, the platoon, etc.  It is a way to counter our tendency to make war with whoever is nearby.  It compensates if I can clearly remind myself that we are on the same side and so I should keep my sword in its scabbard.

  The first murder we read about in the Bible is a brother killing a brother. Jealousy is the usual reason given, but I think it was shame.  Cain could not tolerate his belief that Abel had shamed him, made him look bad.  God apparently did not like the fruit that Cain brought for a sacrifice and let him know it and although god makes no mistakes, maybe he also told Cain in front of Abel.  The last straw?  The book doesn’t say, but I think it could have been the only straw and it would have been enough. This story is not an accident. From as far back as we go, the threat is there.  Read East of Eden for the modern look at this dark side of manhood.

  So I meet my new friend, we share a table, we get through the initial blows of hellos and no one is dead yet. We find a common ground in the words, the writing.  Maybe I find the courage someday to tell him about the harder parts of my personality or the struggles I have with impending fatherhood, or the fight Rose and I had, or my fear of the past…and the future.  For now, I am, in a deep and archetypal way, thankful that we remained civil in spite of our genetic and cultural heritage.  Maybe too, I am proud of myself (and him, although he needs none of my pride) for reaching across the usual silence we men maintain in each other’s presence, holding out our hands, and saying, ”Hello.”

• October 24, 2010
• 0:01

  Home

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  The odds are not good.  It is unlikely that we make it to be born with everything even remotely intact.  I wonder if the number of correct things that have to happen to make a life, is known.  We talk as if two people loving each other is enough.  That is shorthand for the billions of algorithm checkpoints that have to be met, the untold numbers of ”decisions” (no one is making them) that have to be made correctly.  It is something we don’t understand.  By we, I mean science. I don’t understand it one bit.  I don’t understand the love really or the science, which proves you don’t have to know much to make something unbelievably complex.

  I saw our baby’s arm moving on an ultrasound yesterday, saw it flip over, saw the heartbeat.  I felt my heart beat in a way I have not felt before.  It is true, everything is different.  It is living an unlikely life already, calling home an unlikely place.  It drinks ”water” (its own urine really) and grows on that. Huh?  It is drawing sugar out of Rose’s blood to make all those metabolic decisions.  Etc.  The wonder of it is infinite, I guess.

  It is making its own home now.  Even before it really makes a brain, it makes a nest. Shelter, food.  These things are its work forever now.  We will help, but still.  Three times a day or more or less, we stop whatever we are doing are refuel, we stop to pee, we have to sleep, we stretch, move our bodies, get them clothed, wash them, groom them, tan them, operate on them, fill them with drugs, herbs, smoke.  We stroke them, and generally do whatever it takes to keep them running.  Between all that we do other things that we think are important.

  If I get real about what I am supposed to be doing, I think that taking care of this lonely vessel I call me should be the top of the list.   Rest.  Be. Experience this life in this body. Right this minute.  And also, who is that is looking back at this body of mine and wondering about the person living in it.  When does our baby get that part?  For now, its heart is clipping along at about 160 beats/minute and it is literally racing into life, inevitably, perfectly.

• October 22, 2010
• 11:09

  Pictures of Not Much

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  I feel like a foreigner in my world at work sometimes because this world–writing, art, etc. feels separate.  At least that is how it started.  As I write more and put up pictures and do things that feel uncomfortable like allowing myself to be known, I am noticing that I feel space opening up at work too.  It is like doing this makes doing that better. Bringing the world of surgery into the writing allows me to bring my creative self into the process of being a surgeon.  It feels like I become less compartmentalized.  I am more known to more parts of me.

  I know that sounds crazy, but there are parts of me that remain unknown to other parts. I keep them separate.  Writing this here makes the compartments dissolve a little, and allows a feeling of flowing.  It feels like water moving. Of course it brings fear with it, like every hand hold I had bolted in to life getting loose.  That is ok now that I have learned how to climb.  I also know that I don’t have far to fall if I do fall.

  What I mean by that is I don’t have to believe that I will crater if I make a mistake. For much of my life I believed I had to be perfect because I was so flawed and lost.  I am neither perfect, flawed or lost.  I just am.  I do some things well, I make mistakes, etc. I guess letting myself off the hook is called forgiveness.

• October 20, 2010
• 20:49

  Sliver

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  ”Above all, we are water, mostly. It’s a common fact, more than half. We are drops from silver clouds far, far above, clouds themselves that seem to have coalesced from nothingness. Bit by bit, day by day, through gutters and pipes and downspouts, we are collected in rain barrels to become rippled, stagnant, still, and unpotable. When the vessel ages and decays and its days are gone we will seep forth and seek again the lowest ground, the natural path of our inherent humility. With time, tenacity, and numbers, we will carve canyons and shape worlds through our casual passing. We will flow on, down and down, until the final drops of our egos join the vast and gleaming ocean, leaving us unmourned and unsung. At last.”

  William Akin, What A Fool Believes (Blog: Smoke Signals, [supercommon.wordpress.com]

  There I am, little, chewing my banana.  I am thinking, I wonder if everyone who eats a banana tastes it this way?  Maybe I am the only one?  I would think that the retarded kid in my school (political correctness had not retooled the vocabulary yet) probably tasted it different, and I would feel a little sick imagining what his banana tasted like.  I felt ashamed about it too, like I was forcing bad tasting food into his mouth.

  Riding my bike, passing under the boughs of overhanging trees, and the mottled light looking like the light that hits the bottom of the swimming pool at noon, looking like fishes of light swimming on the bottom, only this is on the road and it has a green quality, and it is beautiful.  And I think I am the only kid in the world who gets to see that and the only one who thinks these things.  I feel happy, exhilarated, and alone with the secret wonder of the world.

  Great writing or great photography or great art of any kinds brings these fleeting images to us all, so that we don’t feel so alone with the stunning beauty of life and the world.  Being alone with aching beauty is as hard as being alone with the dull pain of sadness.  It is the being alone part that I don’t do well with, no matter what the feeling is.  This is true in spite of my tendency to isolate.  When I read Will’s blog (quoted above:  by the way, you should probably stop reading this immediately and go read every entry on smoke signals. seriously, great), I had that moment of connecting, of knowing that my crazy little moments of ”knowing” something were like his moments.  He writes of our ”inherent humility”.  I know this is truth, because I feel it vibrate all through me the way I feel an open tuning D major on a guitar vibrate through me. Try it.  Read the words above and see if you feel the rightness of our inherent humility, our sameness in our passing and becoming the water that runs through the pipes, creates canyons, goes unnoticed.  If you don’t get what I mean here it is likely the result of my inability to bring the point to light.  Maybe try this…go for a bike ride, look for trees that span the road and clasp their hands over your head.  Look for the light that dances off your spinning spokes like sparklers at noon on the fourth of July.  Hold on to that feeling and come back and write about it or draw it so we all get it and so we have a reprieve from the gray loneliness of living in search of connection and so that we get up and dance and feel alive because we see each other, for real.

• October 18, 2010
• 20:16

  Perfect

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  ”Trauma Stat, GSW abdomen, 12 y.o. female, 5 min.”

  GSW: gun shot wound.

  This page shattered a quiet Sunday morning.  My guts turned to water.  That was the last emotion I had for hours.  Within moments my mind let fall the amazing partition that allows me (and most other surgeons) to enter purified chaos with the ability intact to think and to take extreme actions.  When I see this kind of message I know that I will match and surpass the brutal invasiveness of the injuring bullet.  It takes so much more trauma to repair these injuries.  I knew this then and I know it now, but in that moment, I don’t think in this way.  There is no reflection.  There is doing.

  I met Jess in the trauma bay, pale as rice, and almost as thin.  If a surgeon quietly turns to the person next to him and says, ”She is sick,” he is not talking the same language as the sickness that might describe what keeps a person from work.  It is understatement weighted with the gravitational pull of death.  Jess was sick, in shock, dying.  Her blood pressure was low, her pulse racing.  The accidental bullet hole was small.  It looked unassuming; not like on TV.  All the blood was on the inside.

  A world of activity was in play when I got to her bedside.  Dr. W, anesthesia, was actively saving Jess’ life–giving her iv fluid, warmed blood, placing big lines in veins and getting her ready to move to the OR.  Within minutes a team had scrambled and the room was ready, heated to prevent her temperature from falling too much which makes bleeding much worse.  There was little talking.  Everyone was working.  I would like to say that I never hold ambivalence about doing operations, but I sometimes do.  I could give examples of when this happens, but I don’t think I need to.  If you are human, like me, you get it.  When a 12 year old girl rolls in, all hearts beat together.  All hands work at separate jobs but the result is more than the sum of those jobs.  A healing environment is created.  It is honorable work.

  Once I was in her abdomen, I knew I needed more expertise.  I called in the vascular surgeon to repair her aorta and the vessel to her left leg.  I held a sponge on the vessel until he got there.  There were multiple holes in the intestines.  It was dire and it stayed dire.  We eventually got her to the intensive care unit and then on to the university, by plane. She stayed there weeks, almost dying several times. Eventually Jess made it home. I operated on her over the next few years several times for hernias, scars, pain.   She never lost her smile.

  When I walked out of the operating room to the waiting room on that Sunday morning, I was met by a throng.  It was like a hive, all gathered around the one injured member.   There is no time like the endless minutes survived by a parent in the waiting room of a dying child.  Their faces change, the lines deepen.  All the emotions (and many more) I held at bay, they were swimming in, drowning in.  I don’t remember the conversation really.  She is sick, this is as serious as it gets, we are minute to minute, she is fighting, we are working–I probably said all these things.  She is a wonder, a beauty, the morning light, my heart is breaking, this is wrong on every level–I said none of these things, but, as I was starting to reunite my heart and body with my mind, I was starting to feel them. I was affected.  Her parents turned and got ready to go to Portland, to the university.  They finally had something to do.  How to balance the truth of the desperation of the situation with the need for hope?  There were no words for it.  My hand on her mom’s shaking hands, her father standing by, drawn and withering.

  Not only did Jess survive, she thrived. It did take a while, but one of the gifts of youth is the almost unstoppable tendency to heal.  I have taken care of many children who don’t end up healing, who are devastated and who die.  But even in these cases, the child’s physiology yearns for life in a way that the adult just doesn’t.  I don’t know how else to describe it.

  It is rare to hear from people after surgery and the healing is in process (and the bill has arrived).  I don’t expect it, but when a thank you comes, it is great.  It reminds me I should be thanking my mechanic, my farmer, my dentist, better than I do.  This family made me a part of their lives.  I was getting miraculous invitations to dance recitals, updates from softball games.  We went.  I cried to see her dance.  The wreckage of her injuries had been transformed into a lithe, normal teenager.  I got invitaitons to volleyball games.  Jess and her mom would drop by the office to introduce her boyfriend, and we joked about my approving or not.  I got the invitation to graduation from high school.  She walked across that stage, a poised, assured, lovely and most of all, alive, young woman.

  Today I got another page about Jess.  ”Jess has had a baby and wants to know if you can see her today.”  Meet Benton Archer DeVore (italics mine).  !!

  So there is the story: this perfect 8 day old boy in my arms and already wrapped around my heart.  When someone dies we sometimes say that the wheel has turned.  In this case, I am deeply happy (seriously, happy) to say that the circle is unbroken, my soul is clapping, I love my job, and I am so profoundly grateful to be Jess’ friend.

  Photo credit:  Kim Glaspie–nice work, grandma!

• October 17, 2010
• 20:23

  Know, Don’t Know

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  Drawn by a jealous moon and tethered to an unconscious coastline,

  this undefined place in me rolls like a twisted tide.

  The joke: the place is between my head and my heart, my voice.  I speak

  to draw the two together, like a bugling elk looking for its mate,

  like a hawker at the fairgrounds selling nothing for something,

  like a mime.

  My brain, immoveable in its surety, bored as a rock.

  My heart, flooding, looking like a silly pool of cream,

  stirring,

  slowly,

  constantly,

  eventually changing, my very mind.

  And still my voice, its constant chatter, keeping me awake or asleep or whatever…

  While the disconnected parts of me work overtime to find each other,

  and make me whole.

• October 15, 2010
• 19:01

  Curvy Things

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  I stayed up late last night, but not for fun.  Staying up to work makes staying up for fun lose its luster.  Once the emergency was dealt with and the case was over–at 8 this morning, I felt myself collapsing.  I was up on adrenaline only for the last several hours. We only get so many heartbeats in a life.  Between those beats, we get rest.  Spreading out the beats is a good idea.  The best thing to do for a long life, therefore, is rest.   I am not sure if this logic is right, but it is making lots of sense to me in this moment.

  I know when Rose and I walked this path last week, the pace of my beats was measured and easy. No right angles to distract my eyes, no traffic to jangle my ears. No phone to force me to hear my own voice. Curvy things, paths, limbs, grass.  Maybe the second ingredient to a long life is curvy things.

  Keeping it simple might be the third ingredient.  The whole universe is unwinding–the second law of thermodynamics says that we move toward entropy.  Entropy may not be simpler, but it is a lower energy state.  Doesn’t matter if it is easier or not, because it is where this bus is going.  Believing that and somehow incorporating that truth in to my decisions seems like it would simplify things too.  Like an acceptance that the whole carnival comes to an end eventually.  It lets me off the hook from thinking anything I am doing is too important. It simplifies things.

  I am curious and I want to be here to see what happens, so doing things that help me be here longer are good.  I am feeling the need to nod to my own mortality tonight, and, you know, keep moving.

• October 13, 2010
• 22:53

  A Fast Fading

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  Rubber meets the road

  My past rolls through this present

  Hope, like rain pelts me.

• 0:07

  Keeping Time

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  The rocks don’t move, the water moves.  Eventually the rock gives way, moves.  Its a race. I don’t know who is winning or whether I am the water or the rock.  I feel like I am unmoored.  The tides flow with unquestioning purpose.  I don’t.  The rock are decided.  I’m not.  I feel more like the fog flowing over the rocks and the water, at the mercy of the wind, the water, the rock: generalized and thin.

• October 11, 2010
• 17:25

  3, 2, 1

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  There is a space between what feels inevitable and what is.  The space is called choice. When I forget I have one of those, a choice, I start the process of going mad.  No matter how tight the spot, there is room for me to show up.  Sometimes I get bowled over, sometimes my choice changes things, sometimes it doesn’t really matter.  Where I feel fused with you, feel inevitable in our interaction, there is the same space, and the same potential.  It helps if I wait and get more information, see where you are in the space, see who you are instead of assuming it is as it always is/was/couldbe/shouldbe/etc/exhausting.  Wait, listen, think, feel, speak, act, and listen some more.

• October 10, 2010
• 23:07

  Sunday Morning Motel, Oregon Coast

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  My memory is a wreck, like my hair the morning after yesterday.

  Cracker colored light wades through the thick curtains; shrapnel shards

  of it on the floor, strewn like highlights cut from a beauty school mistake.

  I am rolling away from it: memory, yesterday’s tomorrow, the light.  I am tucking

  the badly used motel foam pillow between my knees, hugging my elbows.  I am ignoring

  my thirst, the clock, the tightness coiled like a spring in my heart, the tightness

  that keeps it beating only half way, a tick without the tock,

  a metronome stuck on the downbeat.

  I only sleep a little these days and my dreams are short, shocked trailers.

  Their story lines have no arc.  They move from a to b along a brief line and

  they leave no myths, no lessons in their wakes.  The cast is a bored crew of wraiths,

  same as today’s yesterday’s night.

  My eyes are blurry.  The lack of focus feels like comfort, like what comfort

  might feel like.  Like my imagination of that.

  The 50/50 sheets crackle.  These sheets don’t rustle.  More like a fire’s crackle

  and less like a wind’s rustle.  Mercifully I feel the mangy bedspread is just about

  off the end of the bed.  The alarm blinks at me, and in me, the alarm blinks.

  And then your arm…

  along the back of my head, through my hair, your fingers.

  I remember the time, it was 3am, we made it to an awkward forgiveness

  before we passed out.

  I am feeling for you across the empty space I wake up with. I am feeling for you

  behind me on a soggy Sunday morning, feeling for you in my disjointed awakening.

  Feeling you touch me, imperfect, awakening tired, both of us still half mad, still bruised.

  Feeling you turn me, turn to me, hold me.

• October 09, 2010
• 0:16

  Open Door

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  Once I became aware of what the world was asking of me in my life as a working man, I also understood that I had lost the unconscious, experience-only joy of my youth. Ironically, I did not understand the critical importance of this innocent part of my life until I was looking back on it.  One of its features is that reflection and self inquiry are less important.  It is all about innocent (pure) experience.  It is a bliss that takes on the quality of loneliness and melancholy once I signed on to become a worker bee and was looking at my earlier life in the rearview.

  I am learning that I can’t go back to that innocent joyous state, but I do miss it.  The trick now is to have my awareness of the world and of its meaninglessness and still recover the joy.  It is to be conscious, not innocent and to be in acceptance.  The drugs we all took were about trying to erase the consciousness and generate joy–to recreate what I had as a child.  They turned out to be childish, rather than childlike.  The benefit of using the drugs was that they pointed me in the direction of the prize.  Being high, however, misses the necessary component of being here. I want to be here, earthed.  Toes on the ground. And I want to be ok. I don’t know what this will mean for me yet, but I do know it isn’t what I thought it was 10 years ago.

• October 06, 2010
• 22:32

  Keep it Up

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  The no for art.  The no for a mess.  The no for a wrong answer.  The no for less than great.  The no for maybe not genius, clever, smart, uncanny.  The no for average.  The no for not even starting.  The no for being laughed at.  The no for being too sexy, too naked, too raw, for skirting the flirting of an addiction.  The sink hole of the no.

  Where did I learn that I could not draw?  From the youngest age I remember knowing (no-ing) that I could not draw.  My houses were little boxes, my faces were circles and triangles.  Like, you know, Picasso.

  I heard so many no’s as a child.  I remember so many more of those than yes.  I do not remember any “make a mess and let’s play in it.”  So why isn’t a clean little orderly corner a value that I hold the way they did?  Why am in discordance with everything they told me?  It is because there is a lie running down the spine of all that stuff.  The me that knows that still hears the voice.  The me that shows up to paint is my hero.  The me that fails at a photograph is my hero.  The me that is waiting for a completely lost day with no food or water because I have to do this useless, make no money, this apparently mindless thing, this art.

  If I sink into the passion of this art I might not emerge for a long while.  I might be late for something, for dinner, for nothing–and nothing can somehow be enough?  What am I afraid of?  What are the lead boots about?  Procrastination is a kind of sideways anger.  Fear.  Who is behind that curtain?  Judgment at every turn in my mind.  Are these excuses or lies?  What is the difference?  They told me lies.  I tell myself excuses.  The talking has me paralyzed and doing nothing.  A loving silence to the voices.  A loving hug and a knowing glance to the no.  I am not fighting the no today.  I am holding it and giving it a chance to take a nap.  It is ok.  Truth is, I am not paralyzed because I wrote this, because I took this picture.  Because I told you.

  You know, I do know what the voice of the no is:  It is all these things I have written about here. It is 5 more pages of these kinds of things and who represents them.  It is not them.  It is me.  Finally, that is the truth.  There is no one else keeping score, watching or judging.  What a relief.   How about holding this little part of me that is the artist and being that and seeing who loves that part, the part that is my hero…There is no requirement for dissecting the whole ghost of that shame, that not-an-artist-worker bee. The part that got in line and that does real and good work, but that is now rest-less. I don’t have to know all the why of how I got here or what happened.  Who cares?  I know it well and I have asked for help in facing it and at times I will go back to see what is up with it.  Now maybe is not that time.

  Less talk, more touch.  Less fear, more wonder. Don’t ask what I think.  My little brain gets hopped up on that like it is crack.  Be. Dwell in a puddle of muck, and not know why. Not care.  Sing—at least sing on the inside. Dance a little.  Empty the containers and let the waters flow—make one me.  Create this, intend this.

  For me these words on my banner today:

  Experience

  No

  Thinking

  Do.

• October 05, 2010
• 20:23

  Turn to Gold

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  There is the saying that one won’t be on his deathbed wishing he had worked more.  I agree with this, but I am wondering about work and rest and what lies between the two.  I work lots.  Most people do.  I spend more time working than I spend doing any other thing.  My mom would say if you don’t work you don’t eat. Might be true, but not definitely true. When I would ask if she had fun at the medical conference she traveled to she would not say if she had fun. She would say it was just work.  I would dance around her and try to get her to admit that it was fun to travel.  It became a joke between us.  I would like to not work…until I couldn’t work. Then I would miss it, I think.  The trick is to be involved in work that is a consuming (and regenerating, more importantly) passion.

  This is not news, but I would say that in my schooling I was not taught this.  I was not taught that if I am working at my heart’s work, at the stuff that pulls me out of bed, then I will be rich whether I have money or not.  Or maybe someone tried to tell me that, but I was unable to understand.

  The second half of my life is upon me (I hope).  I wish it were the first third, but I will not likely live to be 120. I am grateful for the work I have in my life as a physician, but I am also not wed to the idea that it is all I will ever do.  When going through medical school, residency, fellowship (17 years for me after high school) one gets the message that this is not a path taken lightly.  Lots of delayed gratification, taking the long view, etc. Not many doctors change once they are in the cattle chute of their careers.  (Cattle chutes usually do not lead the cow to green pastures by the way).  The US Department of Labor states that the average worker changes careers (not jobs) 3-5 times.

  So I am giving myself permission to change my mind.  In fact, I have already done this and my writing it here is just another way to remind myself that doors open when I push on them. I do things that most surgeons don’t do.  I run two small therapy groups.  I do this writing and photography project (not a big money maker at present).  These changes in my careers have been amazing for me.  Also, I am giving myself permission to work less and rest more.  Work less and rest more, as in do no work for more of the time in my day, week, life.  I am not lazy and I never will be.  I could die however from blindly working without pausing.  So I take a day off each week unless I am on call that day (and then I try to make up the lost day off).  I bring in less money as a result of this.  I love it that I do this.  I feel alive when I work less and I also like work, the less of it I do.   If I got to zero work, maybe I would be in bliss, maybe even turn to gold.

  If you want to read about another doctor who is changing her life, check out my new blogging friend at [www.findingmeinfrance.com] .  She is on my blog roll–look over to the column on the right…it’s a great story.  I have loved reading her stories of her life outside of medicine as she takes a year to live in Burgundy.

• October 04, 2010
• 22:11

  Swing

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  Doing this is better than doing most things.

• 7:41

  Prayer

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  Who is listening

  When I empty my broke heart

  And wait in silence?

  I close my tired eyes.

  The geese fly and squawk above

  And I wait again.

• October 02, 2010
• 11:51

  The Fabric

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  I was at Ignite Bend this week.  Brad Ward was one of the speakers.  He took us on a 5 minute tour of the music we grew up with.  He is about my age so his music was my music.  When he got to Elton John, I was taken instantly to the skating rink on Padre Island Drive in Corpus Christi, circa 1976.  I heard the words, ”Couples Skate!” echo in me as Philadelphia Freedom rattled through the corrugated metal rink.    The blood rose in me, flushed me, because I could not skate well enough to hold a girl’s hand and skate. Actually I would have appreciated a hand to hold…for the balance.  I had trouble starting out from a stop (imagine a giraffe startled while drinking water) and even more trouble once I got going. I was one of the unfortunate ones at the skating rink who ended up stopping by unabashedly slamming in to the three-runged red steel pipe guard rail that surrounded the rink.  You would find me doubled over the top rung as my momentum tried to throw me in to the snack bar.  I had to stop this way because if I ever used the crazy brake on the toe of the skate my forehead would hit the cement immediately. Potentially sacrificing my spleen felt safer than the head injury. Simple math.

  Besides my lack of skillz I was petrified (literally, and in more ways than one) to ask a girl much of anything.  I think the testosterone riot going on in me definitely went to my head.  It changed my balance.  There were so many girls and all of them perfect, all having fun!, and all had somehow learned to skate expertly.  When did all these people learn to skate?  Did my parents deprive me of mandatory skating instruction in elementary school?  I suspected that it was a public school class.  I didn’t learn it since I went to Trinity Lutheran.  How could those Lutherans legally shut us out from skating?  I really did think this–still not sure I wasn’t right.

  Then, of course, the guys who could skate.  Bastards!  Backwards and gazing at their chicks, holding hands in that graceful way where you hold both hands across the front of each other’s body ready to do a spin at any moment.  Their own skates.  Ugh.  I did not have my own skates and I was growing about three inches a month so my pants would be a little short with shoes on.  With skates on they were the original koolats.  I would end up taking the skates off sulking off to the arcade with the other Nonskaters, blowing my allowance on Asteroids, and hoping I would someday find a way to talk to a girl.

  And Elton John,  voice as smooth as silk, weaving itself as the thread in the fabric of my memory, a fabric which I can feel in me now, as familiar as the blue plaid blanket I wrapped up in for safety for the first twelve years of my life.

  Painting by Les Lyden

• October 01, 2010
• 0:33

  Untitled 17

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  I miss the ocean.

• September 29, 2010
• 22:38

  A Path

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  Fantasy is better than reality, sometimes.  I have spent a lot of time getting to be comfortable with reality, but I realize that my brain needs the break. All this stinking reality can be a drag.  I don’t have to use the dreaded drugs it turns out, because my brain works really well and it has always has.  I used fantasy as a kid to find relief in terrible situations. The drugs came in when I thought I needed more than what my brain provided, but I don’t.

  All I need is permission.  Done!

  In my head, my particular kink is my kink and no one gets hurt; my particular relief is my relief and it is endless.  I find sometimes as I drift off that I return to crazy, luscious, silly scenarios and situations that don’t/won’t exist and I inhabit them to just to give my mind a break from the rot of the moment. Not just sex either, although I am sure that is where your mind has drifted–mine does too.  I am tired of running from fantasy.  I want to embrace it, own it, use it, share it…maybe.

  By the way, the painting in this series is by Les Lyden.  He deserves major credit and I am honored to own one of his works and to be silently (and I hope not illegally) collaborating with him–after all I did buy the painting.

  Secondly, Friday, The Park, ”reopens” downtown Bend at TBD Lofts for First Friday.

• September 28, 2010
• 20:39

  Untitled 17

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  The events that raise a welt in my experience of life are sometimes seemingly trivial. Being a parent seems impossible because it is a necessary part of life that one’s child gets hurt and that the parent will be the cause and that the cause might be seemingly trivial and that the child might remember it forever.  The big, nontrivial injuries are what I am sure parents try to avoid and still they happen too.  Bad things happen.  Rents in the fabric.  Often the little things take a turn for the worse…

  Eventually a terminally bad thing happens.  Today one of my patients died.  He was very sick and was sick from the moment I met him.  The little aching in his gut, the stomach ache, took on a life of its own.  It changed from an annoyance to being his only sensory input, within hours.  Before he could really understand what was happening, he fell out, collapsed.  He had perforated an ulcer in stomach and leaked out liters of dilute acid into his abdominal cavity.  We operated on him twice in 24 hours, an entire team of physicians and nurses came to his aid, to help.  His kidneys shut down and we gave him emergency dialysis; his lungs stopped exhaling and we placed him on a ventilator; his heart gave out and we gave him epinephrine in his IV; etc.  We never got him even close to coming back around.  The shock took him.

  One definition of shock, penned in the 1800’s by Samuel Gross, is ”the rude unhinging of the machinery of life”.  I read that when I was a third year medical student and I have thought of it often.  It is the best definition of shock I know.  All the processes come unglued, the wheels are off.  If we catch shock early it is often reversible, but there comes a point at which the rent is too deep, the unhinging.  At that point, nothing works.

  Standing at the bedside of a patient in this place is lonely business even though I have never stood alone at this kind of bedside.  There are always many people around.  We are all working, but I know that we are also all feeling the pull of the drain as the patient circles.  We know what is coming and we remain silent in the knowing, we keep doing. In those moments, just being is too hard.  We cling to our own lives while we helplessly watch another’s simply end.  For the first decade or two of a career in medicine, this also happens unconsciously.

  As I have gained experience as a surgeon and as a person, I see my role differently in these moments.  As soon as I have that tug of the rope’s end in my own gut, I stop.  I find the family and I tell them everything.  Earlier we have talked and they already know that things are grim and I have told them about the possibilities, options etc.  That is one conversation. The conversation I am talking about now has far fewer words.  This conversation involves walking with them to the edge of a cliff and holding their belt while they lean over.  The family is cursed with the same blood as the dying person.  The vibration of the unhinging is rattling in them palpably.  I can feel it.  My job is to be. there. with them. I must have enough of me to be at their side, not talk them out of it and stop giving them hope of a different reality.  If I don’t let them honestly have the feeling of that moment, they don’t get the understanding they need to let the person go in peace.  If I help them look over the cliff, they find a way to say goodbye and even more miraculously, they usually find a way to not jump.

  painting: Les Lyden

• September 27, 2010
• 20:39

  What I Want

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  ”Too much of everything is just enough.”  Jerry Garcia

  I pictured a rainbow
  You held in your hands
  I had flashes
  But you saw then plan
  I wondered out in the world for years
  While you just stayed in your room
  I saw the crescent
  You saw the whole of the moon!
  The whole of the moon!

  You were there at the turnstiles
  With the wind at your heels
  You stretched for the stars
  And you know how it feels
  To reach too high
  Too far
  Too soon
  You saw the whole of the moon!

  Mike Scott, The Waterboys, The Whole of the Moon

  Even though I am a big guy–6’4” (viking build, etc. !) I can disappear into a small space.  I minimize myself and my wants.  When I was a kid I would not pick up my medals at swim meets.  I feel the need to save things that don’t need saving.  I don’t mean like save the whales, I mean crazy things.  Like I won’t want to use a lens on my camera because something in me wants to save it.  I will keep the one that is on there to have this weird sense of something to fall back on.  The colors in this photo are lush.  When I saw them on the screen I thought, ”hmmm, maybe too much, better save that”  You think I am kidding–saving the awesome green and yellow pixels for a rainy day–but the thought went sailing through me.  I had to tell myself it was ok to put all that color out there.  I will let you extrapolate this to other areas of my life.  You may imagine how it might play out and you will likely not be far off.  Fun, huh?

  Anyway, today I want all the colors, and all the texture and all the feelings they bring.  I want all the leaves of autumn and I want the whole of the moon.

  painting: Les Lyden

• September 26, 2010
• 21:48

  Flow

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  I know that time is linear.  One second follows another.  They don’t bunch up and tumble down all at once, although that is how love feels to me.  They (the seconds) don’t lose sight of each other around the bend, although that is how being sick feels to me.  One second kicks the next in the pants and they take a step and then another.  Linear.

  The relationship of one generation to another though, brings the straight line in to question.  A friend told me of her mother’s dream of needing to buy her daughter undershirts.  My friend was taken to that moment for herself her mother and her own daughter, all at once. Simple and beautiful story and moving because of the connection through time like connected dots in a fourth dimension.  Dreams move in this quantum space: here/not here now/not now. Two places at once.  Time starts to feel like the tide coming in these moments–all of it rises to meet me in a rush and then recedes away, dissolving in the sand the way the waves do.  When I was little I thought that the receding water just melted into the sand instead of being drawn back out to sea.  In these all/now/past/present moments it feels like the time melts in to me this way from then and now and now to come.

  My photo essay, The Park, is (kindly) being held over at TBD Lofts in downtown Bend for another month.  It will be up for first Friday on October 1st.  You can see the photos any time the building is open.  Corner of Minnesota and Bond.

  painting: Les Lyden

• September 25, 2010
• 20:42

  Consequences

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  If my heart freezes

  Like creeping ice on a pond

  Will you stay til Spring?

  painting: Les Lyden

• September 23, 2010
• 15:15

  Today is a Day

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  Is it a good day, a bad day?  I am wondering how much of my opinion of my day is pinned to an expectation that something should or should not happen.  I can generalize this to my life.  I get all hung up on a belief that what I do is important either in this moment or in the long run.  I really don’t think the long run holds any importance for what I do in this moment.  No one is watching my long run.  This moment is the moment I am actually in and you might be in that moment as well and I can affect you. I want to be aware of that and be decent about that.  The good news about getting unattached to the long run is that I can be more free in the world.  I am not going to get in trouble or (Trouble) for something I do today as long as I pay attention to your right to do your thing as well.  I have spent a lot of my life in fear of the future, and I just want to say that all the future I know is happening right now.  Living in the past means living in shame of some sort and living in the future means living in fear of some sort.  I’m over it and whether I am over it or not does not change it at all.  That truth is still my reality.

  Greta, my muse, looks at me on a national day of mourning the same longing and unaffected and honest way as she always did.  She had one or two questions involving walks, pets on the tummy and food.  Everyday held no judgement.  The story go on right behind her holds nothing for her and I want to be more like that.  So for me, this day holds no judgement.  This day holds its usual series of seconds and minutes.  I am here, in it and free in this moment to make some choices and to live with the fallout.  That is all I know for sure.

  
  

• September 22, 2010
• 10:41

  The Way Ahead

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  Wish I could see the world the way I see an ant hill.  All the swarming lines of people milling over the planet.   I see those ants by chance and I don’t have an impact on their swirling.  They are doing their thing, and I am doing my thing.  I am looking but not really looking at any one particular ant.  Really, just passing by.  The pattern of their milling is interesting, like a kaleidoscope.  I am sure our pattern is also kind of cool to see. We are doing our thing and the world is spinning and that is about it.

  Right now I am worn, tired.  I would like to be traveling, looking, being somewhere else.  I like the getting on a plane and then walking off and literally being on a different spot on the curving earth.  Would like to wake up and write and make pictures and eat food and walk around and sit and then swim and eat and sleep long enough to dream all the way through a dream and wake up slowly and walk hand in hand and dawdle and ignore something ”important” and draw a picture and run into water and take night pictures and eat a mango at midnight in a warm place.

• September 20, 2010
• 22:17

  Hidden

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  Sometimes I don’t know what I think/believe/feel until I start speaking.  I don’t know why this happens, but I like it when it does.  If feels like someone else is inside me coming up with an idea and I say it like I am speaking a foreign language that I understand only after the words are out.  Surprise!  This is your belief!

  Just me on this one?  Maybe so.

• September 19, 2010
• 22:57

  The World I Know

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  Once the photos of earth came back from the Apollo missions, the penny started to drop for us all that this little blue marble was not so big after all.  This message was delivered to my generation in our preteen years when we were learning what the world outside our square back yards was shaped like.  Turns out it was small.  The whole thing fit on a TV screen.  All of it.

  Little blue marble, worlds likely beyond this one, and truly vast amounts of space which were apparently not full of much.  Even when I was a kid, I thought the world, earth, looked small.  The message that the photos also taught me, which I was unaware of, was that the world also looked kind of lonely spinning out there like a little disco ball.

  I forget this most of the time now.  I think my life/work/problems/triumphs are a big deal.  I make up stories, convincing ones, about this.  It gives me the get up and go, (like Tang, the astronaut drink!) to haul out of bed and get busy. When I am swimming in the thimble of milk I call my reality, it all seems so Important. Endless.  Meaningful.  But really, not so much. My worries are threaded to fears of losing something I think I have or not getting something I think I want/need.  I attach to those worries and start to huddle around them, and I invite you to join me.  We join each other in these huddles.

  It is useful to look at either really big things, like a galaxy (or a million of them) or a really small thing, like the barnacles on the edge of rock, to remember that being right sized has little to do with what I want.  It is more about turning out from the huddle and getting some perspective, taking a deep breath, and accepting my spot on the little blue ball.

  Oregon Coast, 2006

  check out a blog new to me, written with heart and courage:  www.marshapincus.com

• September 18, 2010
• 19:33

  One Thing

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  In surgery there are moments that call for focus in the face of literal carnage and destruction.  In the emergency room when a critical trauma patient arrives it is not unusual for 15 people to surround the gurney.  Most have a job; all are supposed to have a job if they are in there.  But it is so exciting, dramatic.  They can’t help themselves.  Pretty quickly, once the questions get answered (what happened, how sick is this person, etc), the crowd dissipates.  Sometimes though the physical chaos of the injuries or the craziness of the mechanism of the injury will draw more and more people.  The surgeon stands at the foot of this bed, the ER doctor at the head.  I usually don’t do too much–an exam: feel the belly, touch the foot, look at the chest wall move with the breath. Think.  The roiling around me doesn’t change, but I change.  I have one thing to do.  One at a time.  I do them. Check the airway, check the breathing, check the circulation.  ABC.  The algorithms that I learned all those years ago as a student, pop up in my brain like a slideshow, and, in the quiet of my mind, in the frenetic noise of that room, I walk through, step by step, with the patient.  I make decisions, sometimes right, sometimes not.  I am not, however, paralyzed.  I am in action.

  In the rest of my life I am not so good at this.  Maybe it is a lack of practice, or that there are not algorithms.  Maybe it is because it is my own life that I trying to figure out.  Even though I am acutely aware of the life in the balance in the ER, it is still not my life.  While the noise of my own life and the the decisions I need to make are not life/death, they involve me.  Harder to get perspective.  What to do with that?

  Another set of eyes, ask for help, step away.  Learn the lesson of one thing at a time.  ABC. I am currently feeling overwhelmed–way more than I can make sense of.  I am deciding to wake up each day, look at the plate of things/people/events in front of me and do my best.  The noise never stops.  I don’t have the luxury of distance from myself.  I am in it. This is why I need help in my life:  I cannot see myself.  I need the perspective you might have.  It is better when I remember this, but I often don’t.  Today I am remembering to remember that.

• September 17, 2010
• 14:02

  Fits

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  Hard decisions are rewarded with the feeling of fitting if I can find my truth in them.  By fitting, I mean the ku-chunk that happens inside when I release the truth into the world. The process of getting to the truth is riddled with compromises that steer me away. These compromises are based in fear.  Not the fear of telling someone something they don’t want to hear, but the fear that I don’t deserve what is right for me.  The fear of being greedy, etc.  blah blah.  I get the feeling of things falling into place, the fit, when I act on the fact that I am allowed to have my truth, that I am worth having it.  I have earned it simply by being here. My hesitation to say what I need is founded in the fear that I don’t deserve what I need, or what I want.  Again, blah blah.  I am not a victim.  Not only do I deserve my truth, but I am solely responsible for making it happen.  There is not going to be someone to swoop in and make happen what needs to happen for me.  I get the joy of that and the responsibility of that. This latter thing about the responsibility is as, or more, important to me than the right to have my say.  When I give up my responsibility to myself, I have truly abdicated freedom itself.

  Today a friend shared with me a difficult truth for her, a truth that ends a long relationship with me–or at least fundamentally changes it.  I could feel the pent up worry flow away with the simple telling of what she wanted.  It was so good to see, so good to feel that fear melt away, to be in her courageous presence.   Felt clean and right.  She stood on her own piece of ground and claimed what she needed in that moment.  Great example for me, even though it was hard to hear.

  Every time it is worth it when I act on my right to be here.

  Bend, OR 2010

• September 16, 2010
• 14:10

  The Approach

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  I am sitting here at work.  Patients are canceling.  The phone is ringing.  People are describing aches and pains to my medical assistant.  She is triaging those calls.  Which ones go to a scheduler, to me, my assistant, to a pharmacy.  Filters.  What rises to the level of critical…is your pain at a ”10”?  Are you bleeding?  How many pills did your dog eat? Come in now.  Wait until tomorrow.  Go to the ER.  I am grateful for my patients.  I am also sometimes overwhelmed with the constancy of the work.  Never ends.

  What is important?  What questions need an answer right now in my life?  What time do I have?  Same as yesterday. Same as tomorrow.  My calendar goes by in 15 minute increments.  Somehow that does not resonate with  a Mayan idea of time or a calendar that marks epochs.  But it is what I do.  I am busy. My highest productivity comes when I am already busy…talk to a busy person if you want something done.  My highest good comes in the moments of my stillness.    Talk to me when I am quiet if you want to know who I am.  My challenge is to remember to be a person even when I am busy.  I am flat out not good at that.  I am better than I used to be, but it is the rough edge of my growth, always.  It is humbling.  Do. Be.  (I don’t want to make the obvious joke here, but since I have already gone this far:  Do be do be do!…couldn’t help myself).

  Bend, OR 2010, Nikon D700

• September 14, 2010
• 22:05

  People and Trees

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  I photographed this tree and later in the day I wrapped my palm around the branch of a different tree–used it to help me swing around a corner.  It had a smooth bark, this second tree of the day, and it felt cool.  It worked perfectly for getting me around that left turn, sliding across my palm, sturdy, and right-sized.  Just a moment or two with trees in a day, pretty good.

  PDX, 2010 Nikon D700

• September 13, 2010
• 22:49

  Between Us

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  We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.  The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

  Lincoln

  
  

  A friend asked me to walk, and

  to look again at the scrim of our various vocabularies,

  and talk between our veils.  We walk, and are like two Eastern women

  scurrying along, muffled, worrying.  But, in good faith,

  we are trying: the codes of World War II, the original texts, the Gaelic, the

  amazing English, the Latin and Greek of our shared work–timeless and useless for

  this conversation, we use them all.  As long as we are talking, we are like a vapor; we are

  the words rubbed from the school boy’s paper,

  diverging like the two paths in the woods, like a million paths blown like smoke

  on the wind of a chaff-burned field.  There is maybe not a path long enough for our lines

  of words to reach our lingua franca, and this in spite of our mutual affection for them all,

  the words.

  But the walking…is good.  It is enough.  It is born in companionship, forgiveness, it is a

  long time coming and its chorus, silent and unwavering, runs like a river between

  our paths, a river whose name is only…love.

  for Les/D

• 0:20

  Corridor

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  This week, I operated on a woman who was bleeding, severely.  I stood beside her on the way down to surgery, and I told her things were serious.  There is a look that we (humans) get when facing down mortality.  It is a grim knowing, an adrenaline-surged fear, and also a strange and foreign resolve or even peace.  It is all there in a person who thinks they are going to die.  She said little, smiled a little, asked me to do my best.

  She awakened from surgery in the recovery room, and I was standing nearby and said: ”hello”.  She said: ”Am I dead?”  I was glad that she had not entered into a crazy loop in which the current world was the world shefound herself in, only having died.  I was also glad that I was not the one waiting for her at the end of the that shaft of light, the tunnel, that people always talk about.  I said: ”no, you are here”.  Probably not the most helpful answer, but she got the message.

  That look on the face of someone on the brink of the end is so amazing and brave.  It is noble. It always makes me proud to be one of us (humans).

  Portland, September 2010, Nikon D700

• September 09, 2010
• 22:48

  Behind the Hedge

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  In my life I have made normal, things that are clearly nuts, like a full grown tree made to dress up as a peace sign and stand there all day, naked.  Later I wonder how that happened, and other later times I realize that I had made it so normal that I didn’t even stop to wonder about it.

• 0:51

  Bead, String

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  i want to lurk around dark corners.

  i want to jump in a fast moving car, and speed away.

  i want to sell the goods in a pawn shop.

  i want to hold the knife to the neck and then back out of the room, slowly.

  i want to get away with it.

  Where does morality come from?  We agree with someone about some things that are either good or bad.  Some things seem to be known to me, in me.  I can’t talk my way out of the wrongness of murder…unless it is Hitler.  Then maybe.  I know not to lie and I don’t want to lie…unless the truth reveals where you are hiding for your life.  Murder is not good for the species, but maybe it is good for Hitler because murdering Hitler seems to be good for the species. We are encoded with the knowledge of good and bad, maybe, to protect the race.

  This kind of thinking gets tiring.  Having God define it all is easier, but then we have to wonder about God abandoning his son on an instrument of capital punishment, murdered.  This is our model of love: the blood had to flow.  But this is not a lesson we generally want to teach on playgrounds.  It is why it was so confusing for me as a kid. God left Jesus to die in agony so that I could go to heaven and live in paradise, and so that my sins would stop being offensive.  But wait, it is all made ok because Jesus beat death and so the suffering resulted in power over death.  I always, when I was little (and now again that I am older and thinking clearly), thought, that it was kind of cheating because God knew that Jesus would rise again, and so did Jesus.  I don’t know how we reap a morality out of this story.  Thomas is vilified for doubting the resurrection, but most parents, mine included, would have told me to stop fibbing if I said I saw a man walk out of the grave.  I think morality is like the flipping coin, the weather vane.  It is not nothing, but it is also not immovable.  Which side of the pool we swim in, deep or shallow, depends on where the rope is placed. At least that is how it was at the park where I grew up.  Whether it really was deep depended on how tall you were, but the rope made the rule and the lifeguard placed the rope.  This is a tiring topic.  I don’t know exactly what is right and wrong (and I honestly, kind of don’t care–jumping in the get away car sounds like a fully lived life in a way), but I know generally, and that works most of the time.

  Here is a morality to try:  Be real.  Do your best. Consider generosity.  Show up.  Break some rules some times.

  Morality is less important than love, and way less interesting.  I was telling my friend recently that love is the thin string that holds the balloon called me, here in this life. Without that connection, the hurt of the truth of our aloneness would lift me right away…and I would welcome the journey.

• September 07, 2010
• 21:37

  Abandon

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  This life of mine feels like a dream.  It is a dream.  So is yours.  Here are some definitions for this handy word…

  • series of thoughts, images, and sensations occurring in a person’s mind during sleep
  • a state of mind in which someone is or seems to be unaware of their immediate surroundings : he had been walking around in a dream all day. (or his whole life, yup…)
  • a cherished aspiration, ambition, or ideal
  • an unrealistic or self-deluding fantasy : maybe he could get a job and earn some money—but he knew this was just a dream.
  • a person or thing perceived as wonderful or perfect: she is a dream.  (I like dreamy, as in creamy)

  Wow.

  My dream: my reality, the thing I think I make by thinking of it, the cherished ideal, the thing I think my life is about, this one vaporous life.  Follow your dreams is what they told us on graduation day.  When you meet someone who is living her/his dream, they have stopped looking, they are in themselves, they are not fidgeting any more. Something sinks in to this person, a weight, and they become themselves, for real.  They return to the inner child, they ascend to adulthood, they run and they do not get weary.  They run like that dog up there under Broken Top.  They sleep (dreamlessly) when they are tired.  They awaken without the gnawing anxiety that was once there with their breakfast. They seamlessly inhabit their skin. This is a rare person.  They have time, and they don’t need it.  They are good to be around, but it is disconcerting to be around them. Gravity does not pull on them the same way as for me.

  It is important to live your dream. You can’t live anyone else’s, and it is also possible to not live your own.  Most people don’t. Most people don’t. Most people don’t. They end up walking around in a state, unaware of their personal surroundings, asleep for the only life, by chance, we have to live.

  I say by chance, because I have given up on destiny, fate and ultimate purposes or reasons.  I am not giving up on life, or on the connection between two willful people that is called love.  I am just understanding that I don’t even know what my very next thought will be and no one (I mean No One) does either.  If we don’t even know our very next thought, how do live toward a Purpose.  We are shifty, unpredictable and that is not a bad thing. How to reconcile this unpredictability with the dream and its living,  all that good stuff about knowing who I am and what I think I want (at least this very second).  I think the two states, living my dream and wandering around in dreamland are a coin that is flipping, even now, and we are living the flip.  Can you feel that?  It is the air rushing past a coin turning on itself over and over.  It is the rush of the feeling of your life being lived.

• September 06, 2010
• 10:53

  Still Me

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  Circle the wagons,

  My helix is undoing itself.  I am raveling,

  un-

  raveling.

  I feel thinner, down to one strand, unwinding.

  My code is is exposed, vulnerable, out there.

  The zipper of me is down, you see.

  I am marshaling my forces, calling for reinforcements, like I said,

  circling the wagons.

  But the riders never come.  No attack.  Just me and my wagons, vigilant,

  looking out over a wind swept plain and not a threat in sight.

• September 02, 2010
• 22:58

  I

   » ‎ Bend Light

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  ”I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

  And on a day we meet to walk the line

  And set the wall between us once again

  We keep the wall between us as we go.”

  Robert Frost, The Mending Wall

  Where I end and you begin, the space I have to be me, that you have to be you. These are boundaries:  they hold what I value.  They are made of honest, round stones…words like: yes.  And no.

  When I can’t find me, i usually have lost my edge, the boundary.  What I usually tell myself however is that there is too much of you.  Really there is just not quite enough of me.  When I lose the outline of me, my boundary, then…

  everything gets fuzzy,  i disappear.  i am rolled over,  i speak in the passive voice.  Things happen to me.  i wish.  (I love the line:  if wishes were horses, dreamers would ride–although originally it was beggars and not dreamers. John Ray, 1670.) i dream.  i mumble. i hide.  i make it all about me so i can try to create myself, like whipping up a batch of cookies. i make it all about you so that i can at least make up a story about where you are and believe i might be near by,  i get busy, make things happen, draw a picture of myself with action, but it is only lines, empty, a cartoon.  i fuse with you  and stick to you as close as i can so that you can tell me what my shape is. i pray for a divine intervention to be the third element, the miracle, the glue to hold me together and to hold me to you, i get desperate, unattractive, to put it mildly.  i get sneaky.

  I remember reading The Mending Wall all the way back in the sixth grade.  Now I know what it means.  It takes courage to walk the line with a friend, a neighbor and create the necessary difference between the two of us.

  I so wanted to know what the buzz about love was about when I was young (like within the last 6 months, you know?) We are all brain washed to believe love is an oceanic merging, the feeling at the end of a perfume commercial (in which I can’t even smell anything).  Reality: it is a negotiated settlement, a way to solve a problem if I am lucky. It is good; it is wide and deep like an ocean too, but not the big merge. It isn’t what I saw on tv, heard on the radio (and believe me I was listening), read in books…except maybe that sixth grade grammar book:  Good fences make good neighbors.  Count on it.