On the shore

On a desolate island somewhere in the Pacific, a lone figure sits on the beach watching the waves undulate to, it seems, infinity. Is this the beginning of the story, the satisfying conclusion, or somewhere in the middle? Does she want to be in this desolate place, or is she lost — banished, or abandoned, or washed ashore after some catastrophe? Is her goal to be rescued, or is she content on this beach? Will welcome a rescuer with open arms, or resist? Or perhaps her predicament is not being sure if staying or going is the right course of action.

Some days, being stranded in a far-off place sounds like salvation from the buzz of stimulation overload — one yearns to sit somewhere and watch the waves, relieved of the hectic pace. Some days, the last thing you want is to be left alone.

Where am I going with this? What conclusions do I draw? Probably nothing more than recognizing we don’t know the whys and wherefores of the scenes we encounter moment to moment. It doesn’t hurt to ask, “Can I help?”

“‘Let me help.’ A hundred years or so from now, a great novelist will say those three words are the most important one can say to another, even more important than ‘I love you.’” 

There I go, quoting fiction again. (Star Trek, “The City on the Edge of Forever.”) It’s amazing how much truth can be drawn from make-believe stories.

This post is a waste of time

“I wish I didn’t waste a moment,” I said as I tucked the “smartphone” back into my pocket after a 20-minute drift through social media.

Which are the wasted moments? Well, surely the endless scrolling in search of random knowledge. Or … is doomscrolling or binging several episodes of a favorite television show a welcome respite from harsh reality?

With time, as with physical objects, I suppose “one person’s waste is another person’s treasure.” But there definitely are times when I emerge from a period of time ruefully thinking I could have spent it more wisely.

I advise myself, “Stop looking back, this is today,” because it feels like time is better spent focused on the present moment and moving forward rather than on regrets for past behavior. “Don’t beat yourself up, just resolve to do better next time.”

And sometimes we do need to “waste” time while our bodies or minds are recharging — resting from hard work or exercise, or processing a complicated work of art or situation. 

But we shouldn’t just shrug and say, “I don’t know why I wasted so much time,” and brush it off. It behooves us to answer that question: Why DID I waste that time? And was it really wasted, or did I learn a little something?

Edison, I think, said something to the effect of, “I did not fail 100 times in my attempt to create electric light, I successfully identified 100 ways it would not work.

The time was not wasted if we move on recognizing we have found another way of wasting time that we ought not repeat. 

A whisper in your ear

I can’t retrace my steps, so I am not sure how I found “Where angels dance,” the rerun I pulled from the archives after a frustrating day struggling with technology that refused to work for me, starting with my third internet outage of the month. That was strike 3, by the way, and I have scheduled installation of a better service in a couple of weeks.

On a night when the rift among the U.S. government’s supposed leaders was on full display on national TV, and I found myself with very strong opinions, my technological frustrations led me instead to a day when I wrote:

“Given a finite time to have any impact on this universe, spend every minute in love, in spirit-lifting, on big ideas, on generosity, on making every moment count for something positive.”

My past self — and I must believe the hand of God — reminded me that focusing on the squabbles among those who purport to run our lives is not going to lift spirits or spread love.

I am a broken record* but nothing is amiss that could not be solved by following the two greatest commandments, to love God and one another.

I post a link to my daily scrawl on Facebook because it’s the modern equivalent of the town square or the general store where people once gathered to discuss the affairs of the day, but it hurts my soul to go there anymore because so many people are there to call each other names and blame the other side for the hate that has infected the political class for decades.

I would rather avoid Facebook altogether, especially because I can’t seem to stop myself exploring what the latest outrage is about. But I feel a need to drop in among the shouters and whisper, “I love you,” in their ear.

The fruit of the Spirit that I have the most trouble with is self-control. I want to post and get on with my day without seeing what horrible things people are saying to each other, but it seems I refuse to control that impulse.

Let me just remind myself, and anyone willing to read this, that we are all children of God unworthy of his love, but he loves us anyway, and we would do well to follow his example. I don’t understand or share your rage, but I love you as a fellow human.

—

* If you are younger, let me know if I need to explain the “broken record” metaphor.

P.S. I am surprised to see I have not yet collected “Where angels dance” into one of my books, but if you would like to read more musings like it, may I suggest A Declaration of Peace or See the World! The links are to ebooks, but you can find the paper editions in the sidebar to your right or by scrolling down on your phone.

Where angels dance

The internet is down in my neighborhood for the third time this month, and typing with my phone is excruciating, and so I humbly offer this from the archives from July 27, 2021.

“Write only what you love, and love what you write,” Ray Bradbury wrote.

What would be the point of writing words of hate, or words that don’t speak love, no, shout love? What would be the point of wasting any moment of life on the mean, the small, the spirit-breaking nastiness?

Given a finite time to have any impact on this universe, spend every minute in love, in spirit-lifting, on big ideas, on generosity, on making every moment count for something positive.

Do you see why I do not write of politics if I can avoid it? Oh, I stumble sometimes and snap back at nasty minds, and I point out foolishness when instead I should laugh and turn another cheek, but in my most free moments I soar in love and remember those who lifted me, not those who dragged me into mud to wrestle with demons.

Angels walk among us (most of them on four loving paws), and I love to write about those angels and victory over those demons.

When I write what I love, it’s easier to stay in the glow of that love and dismiss the baser senses, and it’s easier to rest at night knowing I reached for stars where angels dance.

How can I hold onto this thought and speak or write only in love? That may be the biggest challenge of a life — or indeed, of an age.

I revisit the early days

Monday afternoon I opened my ancient songwriting drawer for the first time in a very long time and discovered that I have kept just about everything, going back to my earliest days of trying to unite words and music with my own two hands.

I once was able to play “Stairway to Heaven” on solo classical guitar and did so in public two or three times — I am mostly a chord-strumming kind of player and so the only thing fancy about my version was that I could, indeed, pick the familiar opening chords to introduce the song — it has literally been more than 50 years since I attempted it, so I had long forgotten the sequence, but I found the sheet where I wrote it all down way back when, and so I (very slowly) gave it a whirl.

And here were some of my early songwriting “triumphs” — defined as my friends actually saying something nice, not just polite, about my compositions. Songs with names like “Emerald” and “Because of You” and my first “hit,” titled “Bacon in the Jello.” Yes, one day while in line at the Ripon College cafeteria, a friend said, “Ewww, I think there’s bacon in this jello,” and I became inspired.

As I paged through these forgotten treasures, I saw that I was a little more adventurous in those days, tossing less-familiar chords into the mix to stretch myself as I learned. Most of my recent compositions rely on old familiar chords as I settled into the “three chords and the truth” school of songwriting.

I preserved those early songs with a primitive system of multitracking involving first cassette recorders and later reel-to-reel tape. Nowadays digital apps perform the same task much more efficiently, as I found when I played with multitracking and produced an album of songs I’ve dubbed Crimson Sky on New Year’s Morn, coming to streaming and downloading platforms this spring (stay tuned).

The success (if I may say so myself) of that project got me wondering if any of my long-ago songs stand the test of time well enough to be re-recorded using the modern tech. I think, like everything, some of them do stand up and some, not so much.

It was fun to plunk around like old times. We shall see if it leads anywhere or if this was just a way to while away a winter’s afternoon.

Another analog observation

I used to carry a notepad, pen and iPhone in my shirt pocket until I traded my iPhone 7 in for a slightly larger iPhone 14, which is not THAT much larger but larger enough to crowd out the notepad.

At Sunday morning brunch, I grabbed a napkin to make a note and Mary asked, “Why don’t you use the Notes app on your iPhone?”

“I forget that app is there. I never look back at my notes,” I replied, and to demonstrate I opened the Notes app for the first time in a very long time.

I read:

World without cats
Death on the Shore Michael P

Y3

I had no idea what those notes meant. Piecing them together with the help of DuckDuckGo, I must assume that at some point someone must have recommended the books World Without Cats by Bonham Richards and Death Along the Shore (sic) by Michael Pritzkow, but I have no memory of it.

And Y3? What could that have been? Adidas has a line of clothes and shoes called Y-3, but I would not have written a note to myself about a brand of clothes. That’s just not me.

In contrast, over the years I took hundreds if not thousands of notes to myself on my paper pad that I stuck in a pile under a paperweight, and in most cases I could still tell you what I was thinking when I wrote them.

I think there’s something about the tactile act of writing with pen on paper that helps etch the memory into the brain. Why this does not work when touching a finger to a screen to type the same note, I can’t say.

Our lives are magic

BACK TO THE ARCHIVES: When I look for something I wrote awhile ago to make up for the fact that I don’t have anything new to serve up, I usually go back to what I was thinking five or 10 or 15 years ago — so today I randomly went back seven years to see what I was writing about then. This is from Feb. 15, 2019.

I study Ray Bradbury because I wish to convey joy and wonder the way he does with his words … or Paul Harvey.

I’ll always remember Paul Harvey describing the amazing car of the future, rhapsodizing about its many features and technological wonders for three or four minutes, and then revealing he had just described his new 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado.

Ray Bradbury and Paul Harvey were so good at using words to create that excitement in your chest as you breathe more rapidly because what you’re seeing is so wondrous … to call the reader or listener’s attention to the miraculous right before your eyes …

On the other side of this pane of glass, the wind howls. And the air is so cold that my flesh would freeze in minutes.

Yet here I am, barefoot, wrapped in a big comfortable easy chair, a bright light over my shoulder and springlike temperatures as I calmly write in a journal.

This is not the grateful warmth of a fire built in a cave or crude shelter. It’s a cushioned bubble of comfort that my ancestors would consider luxury.

Like Bradbury and Harvey, I want to pick up the ordinary, hold it up and proclaim, “Look! See! Isn’t this fine?”

So much we take for granted would have looked like magic not so long ago, and but for the hard work of mind and muscle to make it so, it would all still be possible only by magic. But the idea was conceived and the work was done, and today we reap the benefits of a better life where comfort and warmth through bitter winter is possible after all.

If we want a life even better than this, we need to conceive it and do the work. If we wish to maintain this life, we need to do the maintenance work.

While you’re busy working, there’s little-to-no time to squabble over what someone else has earned … or whether someone else has squandered … or other petty quarrels. You just work, and the world gets better for your efforts.

Imagine a better world and get down to making it. That’s all there is to it …

Make no mistake: It’s simple to say and so hard to accomplish.

But still: Do the work.