Tuesday, April 26, 2022

The Truth of Ourselves

 


We have to see our own faults,

our own shortcomings 

and complicity with evil


before the full weight of truth

can inhabit our minds and we

truly see what is to be seen.


Until that happens the truth 

about ourselves and the society

we inhabit is intolerable.


It can only be experienced

with denial as an intermediary,

a filter, a fudge, to protect us 


from the truth of ourselves and

what we (mis)perceive 

of the world around us.  


Until that happens there is only justification, not truth.





Monday, April 25, 2022

Kindergarten in Knightstown

 





My younger sister’s kindergarten teacher sent me a Facebook friend request today.  Funny thing is, we moved to Orleans, Indiana in the summer before my first grade year so she was never my kindergarten teacher.  That doesn’t mean we can’t be friends, but it does kind of violate my loose and unspoken rule to not friend anyone I do not know directly or have not known long enough to feel some connection to.


***


I went to kindergarten in Knightstown, Indiana.  My teacher’s name was Mrs. Stroop.  She had  medium-length brown hair pulled back in some fashion with a part down the center of her head and large glasses.  I don’t remember her being either mean or particularly nice.


Our tables were close to the ground and rectangular shaped.  I would guess there were about six of them with six kids each, three to a side, though that is likely an overestimation.  They were color coded via a round construction paper circle taped at one end.  I sat at the purple table with a kid who had a reputation for being the smartest kid in the class.


I remembered his name well into adulthood but now in my 50’s I can no longer recall it.  He looked like a little man with his hair neatly parted on the side and a kind of quiet gravitas.  I had not yet become acquainted with Mr. Rogers, but in retrospect this boy looked like the child version.  His presence at my table was somehow reassuring, like having our own teacher’s aid if the assignment proved too difficult or inscrutable.  


***


Memories at this point are random.  I built a cool extended drag racer with some pieces from a tube-shaped can and then put the finished product back in carefully and put the lid on it thinking I could preserve it indefinitely that way.  Another kid tried to open the can and I prevented him from doing so by saying “No!” in no uncertain terms which got me in trouble with the teacher.  I was preserving my artistic creation for future use but she reframed it as a problem with “sharing”.  It was very un-Mr. Rogers-like of me and simply the beginning of a long and illustrious career of mischievousness in school that put me at odds with many of my teachers.


***


That particular school had an old gymnasium attached to it.  On rainy days during recess we ran around pell-mell on the basketball floor and scurried up on the stage with teachers constantly imploring us to get off the stage, slow down, and not shove each other.  There was a Christmas program there that year and I sat in the dark on a chair facing the stage with a few hundred other people.  There was a huge calendar of December on the back wall of the stage.  It was decorated like a winter wonderland that I found strangely comforting and being there at night with my parents only intensified the feeling.  My older sister was in the program wearing an outfit that matched everyone else's that I seem to recollect was a white top and black skirt for the girls and black slacks for the boys.


Sitting a few seats over in the dark was a neighbor of ours.  She was what I would refer to as “rough around the edges”.  She was poor and talked in a way that was full of slang and bad grammar that I found disquieting coming from an adult.  Once when I was at her house her young son was eating peanut butter from the jar and began choking on something.  She became loud and panicky and when the obstruction in his throat was dislodged he vomited.  It might have been a marble.  I did not return to that house and I have not liked peanut butter since.  At the Christmas program her daughter was prancing out on stage behind my sister when suddenly her mother’s voice rang out in the darkness, “Pull up your skirt, Boo Boo!”


***


Twelve years later that small gym would become famous.  It was preserved so well over the years without any significant updates that they used it in the movie “Hoosiers” which is set in the 50’s.  I don’t have to tell you how surreal it was to watch that movie as a high school senior and see the gym that I hadn’t been in since kindergarten in 1974.  It continues to this day to be preserved for its historical significance and can be visited if you are ever in Knightstown.  


Interestingly enough my wife went to Butler University and we’ve been to Hinkle Fieldhouse for a basketball game.  That gym was also featured in “Hoosiers” because it was used for years as the venue for the Indiana high school basketball championship game.


***


So, Mrs. E, you may have never been my kindergarten teacher but your friend request sent me running down memory lane.  I now anticipate waking up in the middle of the night in the near future with that kid’s name from the purple table made evident to my conscious mind.  I imagine these days he is probably a NASA scientist or CEO of a company… and I am still mischievous.  

Sunday, April 24, 2022

Archbishop Paul has Passed

 



The cardinal sings 

sweetly from the tree.


Breezes blow and 

choir the chimes.


White flower petals 

fall like snow.


It is Pascha morning and 

Archbishop Paul has passed. 


Christ is Risen, indeed!


***

Saturday, April 23, 2022

The Fairies have Moved On

 


The fairies have moved on 

and left me with a daughter 

who is old beyond her years.  


There are still hints of an 

effortless innocence but

it is lessening by the hour.  


She wants to attain some 

better command of her life 

and of her wider world, 


but at such a cost!  

The fairies have moved on 

and they are not coming back.



***



I have such sweet memories of her fairy door at the house where we lived until she was 8 years old.  When we moved to our current house 3 years ago we bought a second fairy door and I secretly attached it to a tree in our back yard.


We were playing back there soon thereafter and I “ stumbled upon it”.  She looked at me sideways and accused me of orchestrating the discovery.  Regardless, she did make some decorations for it during the pandemic with all of that time at home and bought some accoutrements for it as well for imaginative play.


But today I mowed the yard for the first time this year and I saw the door without its decorations looking sad and abandoned.  The fairies have moved on and so has my little girl.

Thursday, April 21, 2022

“Visual Writing” a la KVJ


When you seemingly run out of things to write about sometimes you end up writing about writing.


***


My recent explorations into the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (KVJ) have been uncovering some startling similarities in outlook and style that I was hitherto unaware of.  I am not saying I am in the same league as KVJ as a writer (Heavens, no!) but maybe he is a grown man and I am a kind of baby brother.  Maybe we share some DNA but I am significantly smaller in size and lacking in the ability to fully function as an adult (read: “write”) but I keep crawling nonetheless.


***


In continuing to read Suzanne McConnell’s “Pity the Reader: on writing with style” I stumbled upon something this morning that was revelatory.  She pointed out that KVJ would doodle during class at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop where she was a student of his.  This was connected to the fact his father and grandfather were architects, his sister was an artist, and his three children were all painters to some degree or other.  All this to say that “Vonnegut was tuned and trained to the visual, as well as the audial.”  This is followed by the key paragraph which is a KVJ quote:


“The people who were senior to me at the Sun [Cornell University’s newspaper] were full of advice. . . . The theory was that large, sprawling paragraphs tended to discourage readers and make the paper appear ugly.  Their strategy was primarily visual—that is, short paragraphs, often one-sentence paragraphs.  It seems to work very well, seemed to serve both me and the readers, so I stayed with it when I decided to make a living as a fiction writer.”


These ideas are revelatory to me because over the past 10 years that I’ve attempted to grow as a writer I’ve used photographs/creative images along with short almost poem-like paragraphs to convey what I want to convey to my (mostly imaginary) readers.  I keep these writings in my blog and you can scroll through hundreds of entries without finding one that lacks an image or has an unwieldy paragraph in it (never mind the preponderance of poems).  


I used to think this approach might be a crutch, but now that I’m reading this about KVJ I feel I can embrace it freely as my particular way of communicating what is inside me.  As an added bonus, the doodles I’ve made in countless classes and meetings over the years no longer need to be a source of shame or embarrassment. 


***


Maybe my job has something to do with it as well or there has been some cross-pollination going on.  I am a Consultation Liaison Psychiatrist at a hospital and I see patients who are primarily there for medical reasons but with a significant psychiatric overlap.  Other services consult me to have patients evaluated for a variety of reasons to include psychosis, mania, suicidality, delirium, dementia, withdrawal, depression, anxiety… and the list goes on.


It is important that my documentation is accessible and easily understood.  I accomplish this in part by utilizing short pithy paragraphs that are easy on the eyes and do not bog you down in a mass of words on the screen.  It is a common pitfall when I have medical students or residents working with me that they will try and submit a complex Borg-box of dense writing that no one will bother to read or if they have to read it they will become irritated in the process.  No one enjoys being forced to be “assimilated”.  


***


It is in this context that I can better understand what I’ve been trying to do with a peculiar structural style that began with a writing experiment from 2016.  It started as a writing exercise where I was meandering with an idea but keeping all the paragraphs small and of uniform size, almost like a poem.  At some point I realized it was actually helpful in moving the story along and forcing me to be more deliberate in what I was trying to say and what images were being conveyed.  Instead of a diarrhea of words I was dropping rabbit pellets along a path to an ending.  


After I finished this first experiment (The Hovel) I assumed it was a one-off and just an exercise of sorts, but the second time I tried it the flow returned and carried me along in a way that was unlike the struggles of “free” writing.  And now I have about six or seven of these type stories in my blog.  They are visually peculiar, like bricks stacked one on top of the other.  Maybe this is not exactly what KVJ had in mind but I enjoy it and hopefully it can “serve both me and the readers” whomever they may be.  




Friday, April 15, 2022

Time Traveling with my Son

 


I dreamed this morning that I was with my 17 year old son on a hill overlooking a high school.  He was a bit despondent and said he would like to turn back time 7 years.  Somehow this was possible and I asked if he was sure about such a momentous decision.  He assured me that he was and I agreed to come with him and share the experience.


My thoughts ran along the lines of what he and I could do differently with this added time and foreknowledge that would be ours.  I mentioned something to him offhandedly about being more aggressive on the basketball court in order to gain more success.  I really didn’t think about myself and what I might do as 7 years didn’t seem like much at my age.


So the decision was made and in the distance beyond the high school the sky began to blossom into what appeared to be a pink and red energy field with crackling tendrils.  I wondered if it might be radioactive or harmful to us in some way and I suggested we run into the high school for some protection.  Elias refused and it enveloped us.


I found myself standing over him in his old room in our old house.  He was now 10 and no longer taller than me.  In a kind of dazed disbelief I tried to tousle his hair with an aggressive rub but it was too short for that.  He looked up at me with a smile but there was a sadness in his eyes.  We had done the unimaginable and there was no going back.



***

Wednesday, April 06, 2022

Above the City




I am looking at an image from the Looney Tunes catalog that has wrangled me out of reality and into a dream.  This is being facilitated by listening to something on Apple Music called “Ambient Chill” through ear buds.  Follow me if you can.

I will float here for just a bit.  There is no fear, no vertigo, only a pregnant-now that swells with the sound of wind and rain.  Round dots of color are blooming on the street below as pedestrians open their umbrellas.  


They scurry along not knowing that I am watching them as God must from up above.  “Hello!  I love you!”  There is a strong smell of ozone and water on hot concrete all around, but then the whiff of a flower wafts through on a breeze.


How long will I stay in this state?  As long as I can.  As long as the image stays clear in my mind and the flow of formless music continues through my thoughts.  I believe the cottage on the roof of the building is mine.  I gladly claim it.


I descend to its door and stand on the flagstone path.  The smells now are of wet wooden shingles and a mild moldiness.  My heart expands and contracts in my chest, my body a bellows of melancholy memories.  “Mom?  Are you home?”


It is empty but there is a kettle steaming on a wood burning stove.  I find a cup in a cupboard and blow out the dust.  Further foraging reveals dried tea leaves in a tin that I dump into the kettle and allow it to steep while I explore the space.


A small cast iron bed sits against the wall under two windows with a green wool blanket tucked in and finished out with a white sheet folded over its lip.  A threadbare rug covers a good bit of the plank floor.  The tea is ready and I pour myself a cup.


Outside the cottage there is a side table and chair underneath a large umbrella.  I sit in its shade with my tea and look to the horizon from my high perch.  A bird lights on the edge of a window box full of flowers and fixes me with its gaze.


I sense the bird is a conduit of sorts and I open myself to communicate to and through it.  I feel myself surrendering to a deep flow of affection that is timeless and impossibly light.  As the bird launches into flight I follow it into the yielding air.


And land on this padded seat in a corner of the Physician’s Dining Room, my fingers tapping out these words as the dream recedes and others nearby talk boisterously about sports and politics.  It is a place of respite, but only in my mind.  




***

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

ABID - Incantation of the Ego

 


Ancient Beast of Impossible Derivation

we call to your bones and lost sinews

to reassemble into woeful vengeance. 


Strike down our enemies but not be-

fore sowing terror and painful discord.

We have suffered enough in dishonor.


Our humiliation has reached its nadir.

The time for mercy has passed us by.

Empty mouths now cry out for blood.


ABID, we bid you to undo what is done.


***


Thursday, March 24, 2022

The Benefits of Writing

 


I’d like to put in a plug for writing.  It has been a lifesaver for me through some pretty dark times, especially in the past few years of this pandemic.  It’s been a way to connect with others in a world where isolation can be crushing.  In the past decade it has even been a dialogue through time and space between me and my younger self who exists only in memories but influences so much of what I say and do in the here and now.


Maybe the form of writing at hand is a poem because they are short and “easy”.  I didn’t say “good”, just easy in the sense they can be written down quickly and concisely.  I leave iambic pentameter and the outpouring of cantos to other more skilled practitioners.  And rhyming is fun, but I do not use it very often.  I mostly settle for micro-bits of emotion and glimmers of insight that pop out from time to time, like when heat transforms a kernel of corn into popcorn.  If I can capture these burst kernels on paper the benefits are more filling and longer lasting. 


Memories of younger years generate a fair amount of what I’ve written, but the other major source is photographs I’ve taken.  I highly recommend this strategy for generating words because for me it has inspired the lion’s share of what I have written in the past decade and been a well of ideas to draw from.  It is typically something peculiar that catches my eye and suggests a story of some kind, like a Rorschach test. 


I’ve also benefited from books that give advice and/or ideas for writing prompts.  These include “Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg, “On Writing” by Stephen King, and “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron among others.  I used these mostly in my early to mid-40’s when I was trying to get started writing before transitioning to using childhood memories and photographs as the major sources for inspiration and writing ideas.  And speaking of childhood, my kids have done their fair share of heavy lifting in regards to being my muses.


Most of the writing advice I’ve come across emphasizes the importance of reading and reading a lot.  This is especially true of Stephen King who follows his own advice and has written book reviews for books that I’ve ended up reading due to his enthusiasms.  I have to say I don’t read a lot nowadays but when I was a kid I read all the time to escape the mundaneness of small town life.  I had a penchant for Fantasy with Science Fiction as a close second (and then Roger Zelazny blew my mind by mixing the two).


Most recently I’ve gotten on a Kurt Vonnegut kick and I’m watching the documentary “Unstuck in Time” on Hulu.  I’m also reading “PITY THE READER - on writing with style” by Suzanne McConnell who uses KV as her touchstone for writing and writing advice.  I’ve learned a lot from his brevity of style that he attributes to his early writing years when he was doing a lot of journalistic work which requires one to get to the point quickly and distill things down to their essence as much as possible.  His literary journal “So It Goes” has become a home for some of my poems and photographs and something I look forward to submitting to every year.


All that to say, whatever your motivation or life experiences, writing may very well be the “easiest” and most accessible way of engaging in a therapeutic process.  I highly recommend it.


***

Saturday, March 19, 2022

The Power of Thin Mints

 


There is something undeniably powerful about a Girl Scout cookie thin mint.  Today I saw a nurse’s assistant come into the 6th floor work area with an armful of those lovely green boxes and I made comment about how much I love them.  She offered to sell me a box from her limited supply but when I told her I had no way to pay her she said I could pay for it when I see her next. 

That’s when the Nurse Manager swept in and bought a box for me despite my protestations.  It was an act of kindness that I wasn’t sure I deserved and it made me a bit verklempt.  It  became clear to me in that moment that I would be remiss if I did not share this windfall with others in this place that has been so good to me over the years.

I quickly took on the role of a thin mint street dealer by hiding the box in my inside jacket pocket and sidling up to people with a whisper, “Hey, you wanna thin mint?” and giving them only the slightest glimpse of the green box.  The smiles were worth a lifetime supply of thin mints and by the time I was headed out the door for the day I’d eaten about four and given the rest away.

To be honest, I don’t know what came over me when I was handed that box of cookies.  My inclination was to hurry back to my office and eat them in the dark like Gollum on his island in the cave with his “Precious”.  But there are few things more precious to me than my coworkers at Grant Medical Center.


***

Friday, March 18, 2022

The Beauty of Us


In the search for grand vistas 

or man-made wonders

let’s not forget the beauty of us.


Even if we wander through galleries of

priceless paintings and stunning sculptures

let’s not forget the beauty of us.


You know, there are two of us 

who made two more, doubling the love

that is the beauty of us.



***

Wednesday, March 09, 2022

Jesus Needs His Sandwich

 


Jesus needs His sandwich 

and I nearly forgot it in my haste

to leave the hospital today.


I got as far as the parking garage, 

my driver’s side door partially open,

when it hit me, “Jesus needs…”


So I sprinted back to the hospital

and snatched up a ham with 

muenster and a bottle of water.


Sure enough, he was standing 

in his typical spot at the bottom 

of the exit ramp with his sign.


He greeted me with a crooked 

smile and a pensive wave but 

I knew it was Him standing there.


The beard and longish hair was

a dead give away, frequenting 

the highways and the byways


as I’d read in the Good Book.

I didn’t want to be caught 

empty handed when I met Him.


So Jesus got his sandwich today

and He said “God bless you”.

Score!  What a lucky man I am!




***

What Kurt has to Say

 


Is there a more clear-sighted observer of our modern American experience than Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.?  That is a rhetorical question.


I couldn’t tolerate his stories when I was younger because I was trapped in the warm delusional embrace of the insulated American Midwest.  When it came to our historical and national consciousness it was all a Ra Ra self-congratulatory affair with flags flapping from poles and porches throughout my town.   It didn’t help that the Soviet Union was such a monstrous system as a point of comparison on the other side of the world.  We were pretty darn good in that light, right?  But we were human beings just like everyone else on the planet with similar foibles and outright repugnant behaviors mixed in with moments of selflessness and virtue.  


Our black and white way of seeing things outwardly had a tendency to turn inwardly creating a bind.  If we personally were either black or white, who can tolerate thinking of themselves as black?  So that left being white and therefore in a state of self-delusion and denial as a way to square that circle.  I’ll leave the implications for racism to your imagination as just one aspect of that phenomenon.


And KVJ ruthlessly destroyed all of this in his short stories and novels in the most humorous of ways.  He was honest enough about his approach to quote a British critic “who said that I put bitter coatings on sugar pills, and I consider that fair”.  His witnessing of the utter destruction and decimation of Dresden by the Allied Powers was the purifying event that opened his eyes, traumatic as it was, like a huge slap in the face.  Wake up!  


I was probably in my thirties before I had an “ear to hear” what KVJ was telling me.  It took at least a decade post-high school with stints in the Army, living overseas, medical school, and changing my childhood religion to open my eyes to what he had to show me.  Suffering was a key teacher in that regard.  I had to get past myself and the need for self-justification.  


And now I must circle back to the idea of "love of country".  I love my friends, family, and community as concrete points of interaction.  This is my “USA”.  What I don’t love so much are the abstractions created by the powers that be to manipulate me for their own purposes.  


And Kurt, God bless him, asserted in Breakfast of Champions that “at the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.”  I believe it is a light that dispels the darkness of hatred and ignorance if we let it.


***

Monday, February 28, 2022

Somewhere near Whitehall

 


Somewhere near Whitehall

I saw an empty can crushed

by the side of the road next to

car-bought carrion for crows.


And a colorful sign welcoming

a carcass of a man dead to

a world in which he does not

feel he has a place to pause.


But a cross towers above it all

looking like a telephone poll

signaling the way from death to life 

somewhere near Whitehall.


***


Sunday, February 27, 2022

Living with War

 


I saw the cover of Neil Young’s 

“Living with War” on a FB post

yesterday.  The letters were 

stenciled black on a paper sack.


I bought my copy at the BX on

COB Speicher in 2006 just out-

side of Tikrit, Iraq where I was

deployed as a medical officer.


I was a reluctant participant in

an unjustified war seemingly

created out of whole cloth by

the Vice President of the USA.


When I returned from the war

my two year old son took a

liking to the music that this

strange man had brought.


He would dance defiantly

to its driving beats, feeling it

as a child is prone to do in the

immediacy of their experience.


I was living with war but dying

to see my son too long

separated by the artifice of

one man’s maladjusted ego.


***


Thursday, February 10, 2022

God’s Garden

 


My four year old daughter asked

if I would listen to her heart and 

so I flattened my large ear to 

her chest and listened to it beat.


She then asked if she could hear mine 

and placed her small ear on my chest.

She observed it was “slow” and then 

shared something that shook me,


“Maybe God is digging up his yard to plant a garden.”


It was as if Keats himself had 

materialized in her mini-mind

and gave a little push to create 

something bordering on pure poetry.



***


Saturday, January 29, 2022

Imagination vs Reality


Imagination for a child

is his intuitive grasp

that what he sees

and what he is told he sees

is not all that there is

and in this sense

what is considered "real"

may actually be a distraction

from what is essential.


***

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

STATION ELEVEN Hits Home

 


I will sorely miss seeing STATION ELEVEN for the first time.  

After watching 9 of the 10 episodes alone I hooked my son into watching it with me and re-watched all of them with the same degree of joy and wonder as the first time.  The finale came and went last week but I refused to watch it or visit the Facebook fan page in order to experience it in its fullness with him.  I was surprised more than once when he picked up on some early clues and made connections that had taken significantly longer to register for me.  And this series is thoroughly interconnected like a beautiful tapestry weaving together the lives of its characters over the expanse of 10 episodes created with a mosaic of flashbacks and cathartic moments.

I was astounded to find there were some specific touching points in what was unfolding in regards to things that have happened in my own life.  The best example of this is when Clark is talking with Arthur about Arthur’s attempt to regain relevance and/or legitimacy as an actor by taking on the role of King Lear in a Shakespeare production.  Arthur is a movie star whose fame stems from superficial action films and it is his face on the poster that is a draw for people to watch Shakespeare who might not otherwise do so.  It seems to be a win-win for Arthur and the theater he is performing for but then he dies on stage on opening night and the story is set in motion.

The relevance to me has to do with the time I saw the movie version of Hamlet in early 1991 starring Mel Gibson.  It was ostensibly the same scenario as Arthur’s attempt at Shakespeare, ie, a famous Hollywood actor attempting some “serious” acting.  I was in the midst of Basic Training at an infantry training center in Georgia after impulsively dropping out of college at the start of the first Gulf War.  Over a period of several months I sustained daily attacks on my humanity meant to mold me into a compliant soldier.  There did not appear to be any respite from this dehumanizing process due to our near total isolation from the wider world or access to personal items that might remind us of who we once were.  I always describe that time as the days feeling like weeks, the weeks like months, and the months like years.

At one of my lowest points we marched past the Post movie theater and I saw Mel Gibson’s “Hamlet” was being shown.  It struck me that I needed to see this movie, like needing a sip of water while lost in the desert.  I found a way to sneak out from the barracks and slip into that theater where there were only one or two other people present.  As I watched Hamlet unfold in front of my eyes the miserable existence of Basic Training dissolved from my consciousness like waking up from a bad dream.  I was transfixed by what was happening on that screen.  Every emotion was felt at peak intensity to the point at times of tears streaming down my cheeks.  I was so caught up in the moment I lost track of time.  

When I did glance down at my watch I was stunned to see that it was 5 minutes until lights out and head count.  I leapt from my seat, sped walked up the aisle, and then broke into a dead run through the parking lot, through the darkness of two grassy fields, and onto the concrete pad at the back of my barracks complex where I transitioned again to speed walking to not look too suspicious if spied by a Drill Sergeant.  I took the stairs two at a time to the second floor and lit in my barracks bay like a bird returning to its cage.  I immediately laid down in bed and pulled the covers over my BDU’s and boots trying to pant as quietly as possible.  The Drill Sergeant came through the door right on cue.

I can’t help but make the connection that in Station Eleven this was the experience of the isolated survivors in the airport when the Traveling Symphony arrived and put on their production of Hamlet.  When I told my son the story of younger me sneaking out and almost not making it back for headcount he said I was “savage” but for me at the time it was about survival or, better yet, reaching past just surviving.  “Survival is insufficient” is the motto of the Traveling Symphony in Station Eleven.  I don’t think I truly understood the power of art to humanize us and reveal our interconnectedness prior to that experience as a young man.

***

Sunday, January 23, 2022

Lucky Ones

 


Snow falls from unfathomable heights

filling the sky with white points of light

floating and flitting at the wind’s whim.


Here in the sad city it is something to see,

nature’s invasion of stone and steel,

we lucky ones watching from windows.



***





Friday, January 14, 2022

Jim Forest, Memory Eternal

 


I was heart broken to learn last night that Jim Forest has passed away.  Like my recent post about the passing of Dr. Sheila Hafter Gray I considered Jim a friend and mentor.  Our correspondence began prior to my time in Iraq in 2006 but picked up in earnest after my deployment there and continued with few interruptions up until just this past year.  


He encouraged my writing and photography in its infancy, even buying me a professional account on flickr.com when Elias was first born and I was only able to post a few photos a month on my limited account.  It opened up a wider world of creativity and inquiry that set the mold for me in using these outlets to cope with the stress and struggles of life, to find hope and meaning.


We shared a love of photography but it was his writing life that sung most sweetly.  Like Forest Gump he was involved in some form or manner with many of the people and events that helped shape our modern era, but on the positive side of things.  He was close friends with many of the spiritual giants of the 20th century to include Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Thich Nhat Hanh.  He wrote biographies for each of them and more than one in some cases, but I was most influenced by his spiritual writings to include “Praying with Icons” and “Loving Your Enemies”.  


He founded the Orthodox Peace Fellowship whose periodical and active online community was a refuge for me during my time in the Army.  I was conflicted in my life choices at the time and Jim was a source of encouragement and love without judgment.  When he was planning to come to the US (from the Netherlands) for a speaking tour during a politically fraught time I suggested we spirit him from house to house and region to region in the “Forest Underground”, tongue firmly in cheek.  He loved that sentiment and the playful idea I floated of creating t-shirts from a doodle I made for the “occasion”.  


And thank the good Lord he was able to recently publish a memoir for us to share in his adventures over the  course of his 80 years here, “Writing Straight with Crooked Lines”.  May his memory be eternal.