Evening Dispatch from Washington, DC

At 63, I'm looking back and forward

A bit ago, I worked on an alchemical explanation of what I am about:

It’s amusing to me to put things in these frameworks. It’s not too far afield from my work in Enterprise Architecture which took me from 2005 through 2024 - a trajectory that has provided me with a foundation from which to do the current work here on Harrowings, as well as the luxury of not being too worried about taking a job as “Front of House” Staff at Daily Provisions. I invite any and all to pay me a visit there sometime, or just to drop by. It’s a great “third space” right in the heart of things in Washington, DC.

So, that said, let’s get on with this evening’s dispatch. As I raise myself up above the planet and regard it from a place in space, mentally speaking, I see what Michael Chabon did in his recent note:

The whole work should be experienced. It is the second and first of two albums made by the classic lineup of Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe, and Squire. The next was Close the Edge, which was inspired in large part by Anderson’s reading of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.

I have a great deal to say about Hesse and his influence on my own life. Reading Within and Without to my friend from Copenhagen before bed one summer evening of the year 2000 led to a radical shift in my life, for example. This alone is a significant “rabbit-hole” into which I am tempted now to descend. It meant a lot to us both. She had brought it with her as one of several vacation reads. Another was Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.

I’ve been so lucky in the lives with whom I’ve had contact! I really would like to dig into each of these but it seems to me that it is still too early in the unfolding of life to say these things.

This evening, as I’ve been looking back over the past 43 years or so, since my first awakening in 1983, I thought about how I’m likely moving into the final few decades of life. My financial advisor has suggested that I cannot expect to live another 30 reasonably. I have my doubts about that.

Then again, I found myself overcome with a dizziness and discomfort that made it hard to walk home yeasterday. One never knows when the maintenance of homeostasis might come to an end. We are such complicated creatures - or I should say compounds of creatures since we are inhabited by more critters than we know!

Mortality is often my theme. Time-Binding too is often there in my “Great Work” if that is indeed what it is. I’ve apparently written about this as recently as April 11:

This was followed by:

It is what it is, I suppose. I simply know how all this seems to me to be of vital importance.
Another thing that is of vital importance is conversation. I am grateful to see that conversation that I had last Friday on Harrowings Podcast is getting quite a bit of traffic:

Harrowings Podcast - Sue Cawthorne

We have both been drawn into the circle of Meher Baba; in Sue Cawthorne’s case, very directly! In mine, not so directly, but I had the good fortune to have contact with Charles Haynes when he was Director of Religious Life at Randolph-Macon College.

While these encounters were mere brushes with those who were intimately involved, it has remained a continual interest of mine and has formed a guiding star in my navigation through what we call life. I’m what I call a gnostic theist in that I know that gods and goddesses exist as concepts in human minds. I am aware that they may not exist in any other form. I am still hopeful that this brief flash of existence on the surface of eternity will remain in tune with the infinite:

I could go on and often do, but for now, this will suffice.
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