The Continuing Saga
History is created one moment at a time
Now; that’s all any of us have; this moment. So many thoughts crash in as the fingers make their way around the QWERTY keyboard. Why QWERTY? It’s the standard. I remember a moment in typing class; tenth grade at Lafayette High School. It was my first “public school” experience and I arrived there just at the moment of truth, so to speak. I wasn’t expecting to revisit that moment but here we are!
History. We are creating it a moment at a time. Our life at any particular moment is the culmination of choices we have made. Should I go left or should I go right? Should I take these stairs up or go down. I made choices that were, as it turned out, fateful. I was terrified much of the time. How about you? Did you come through moments of terror.
I was talking yesterday with Melanie Sumner. I touched upon “terror management” as a topic. It came up in reference to the work by Ernest Becker called “The Denial of Death.”
This is…and now, I want to drop in a link to an essay that resurfaced after lingering for nine years to this day: https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/02/14/insomniac-city-bill-hayes
If you are a fan of Maria Popova, you’ll understand. If you’re not, maybe just click this link: The Marginalian and plunge down the myriad rabbit holes that offer themselves.
My writing is somehow not satisfying me. The sentences though are short. They are loaded. I am not loaded. I am tired. I am wondering. I am not long for this world, I fear, or - rather - I fear that I am. Yesterday I was talking at length with Melanie Sumner, as mentioned, and she’s found that it’s important to do the things that scare her. She’s taken the plunge. Skiing can do it. We witness what it is to ski at the most challenging levels in the winter Olympics. I don’t know. I simply watch the passing show and have Eris process what we perceive to be the case. My shadow lurks and can be seen by others, perhaps. We project onto one another, you know.
So it goes. So I go. I go on. Onward.
Is there more to be said?
Yes, comes the answer. I’m grateful to be breathing still. That’s the essence of this experience of life….breathing in. Breathing out, I know this is a wonderful moment. Breathing in, the miracle of life and breathing out, knowing that my continuation depends upon reinflating, reinspiring and, if you are willing, conspiring. ORIGIN reminds me that conspiring is all about breathing together. We are.
So, here we are on Substack; pouring out our precious words in hopes that they arrive in the retinas of those who can feel what we feel; relate to what we are relating. Dr. William Stanton (Bill) Noe used to start his lectures on whatever topic by telling us that we only find meaning in relationship with one another. An Episcopal priest, hypnotist, and chairman of the two person German Department at Randolph-Macon College, Dr. Noe was an exceptional human being. He owned controlling-interest in a wine-importing company and was also restoring an old place out in Highland County called “Blackthorn Hall.” He lived with his artist wife in a gorgeous house called Stonecliff that hung over the North Anna River. I recall him grilling bratwurst for us there while we were attending a special part of his course on German Civilization. A cat purred around his legs and he noted that he loathed cats but they seemed to love him all the more because of it. I suppose everyone has something. A retired Air Force captain once based in Greenland, he got his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia before assuming his post in Ashland, VA in 1963. I’m grateful for having had the opportunity to earn my B.A. from him and Dr. Robert H.P. Baehrent. Both of these gentlemen have merged with eternity. My gratitude is immense, even though I probably didn’t have the words to convey it at the time.
I didn’t know that this was going to emerge from the Pleroma but there it is.
Sagas. That was where this started. Now my mind goes back to Egil’s Saga. Somewhere in my collections, I must have a copy. It could be, however, that it was lost when I left behind the things I left behind when my late father died. I hope I’m wrong. There are so many things here to mine. One thing is certain, and that is that I am currently exhausted.
So, I slept for about 16 hours after that last paragraph above. Waking a bit after four AM, I began reading this:
It’s an important work, I think. I know that I have thrown money at a few of the people mentioned. I’ve been highly skeptical of others and I feel that voices like that of Lissa Rankin, MD deserve to be amplified. Belief is one thing. Humans believe all kinds of things. Taking advantage of each other for personal gain is callous and predatory. We are omnivores however and we don’t just eat food. We consume each other at so many different levels. We are both predator and prey. Knowing this, knowing that we could easily be dinner for someone else, is something that that gnaws at the back of our consciousness whenever we interact.
So back to “Terror Management.” Getting comfortable with the danger of existence while celebrating our survival, against the odds; that is something that is accessible.
How?
Embracing reality, we can say “yes” and “amen” to it all. “Be as it may,” the most important mantra of Upasni Maharaj, is a path toward this goal. I often share this clip put up a few years ago in hopes that it might help someone else as much as it helped me:
Six minutes of time is all that must be expended to receive this gift in full. I don’t know if anyone will benefit from it in the way that I feel that I have, but I give it away freely in hopes that someone might.
The swamp of “information” in which we find ourselves immersed, both here and everywhere we go, seems to overwhelm us as a species. It leaves us feeling traumatized. We are numb. We have a very difficult time seeing each other. We can only swim in the blur of faces streaming by in “The Passing Show” - how can it be anything but that? We are such brief flashes on the surface of eternity.
Meanwhile, we have at our fingertips gifts like this one: Open Culture which I opened this morning to see an article on the Chelsea Hotel which includes this 1981 documentary:
This was made in the year that I graduated from high school. A young Jim Jarmusch was the soundman. We’ve both traveled quite a ways from that point in history. There are more than a few films back in history in which Jim has either been involved or directed. Is there a point to this digression? It is the same theme, we are woven into each other’s lives in ways that are hard to comprehend. We cannot take any action without making an impact on everything else. If we don’t think about that, we are missing something. We are missing an opportunity to be amazed. I offer these words as a gift, again, in hopes that they resonate sufficiently to help someone else who might be feeling isolated in society.
Back before I was born; on the day my great-grandfather expired, William Griffith Wilson wrote a letter to Carl Gustav Jung:
We do thirst, don’t we? I hope that this can reach more than a few of you, as I stated above. I fear that it won’t, of course, but I know it won’t if I don’t post this. It’s a drop-in-the-bucket of what I have within me to pour out to the world.
This brings me to reflect upon the 22 of my over 800 subscribers who are supporting my work. I am so grateful for that. I hope, in some small measure, to be worthy of their support. It’s my belief that we are all worthy of support who are taking the time to share something of ourselves with others as we all move between dawn and dusk. Dawn is coming on so I think I’ll put this set of fragments out there for folks to enjoy or endure as the case may be.
Onward!
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