Day: August 16, 2014

For most, if not all of my life, I have embraced the short view of things. I am a live-in-the-moment human, the prince of now. Tomorrow is eeons away for me, waiting a week is akin to torture, my faith has always been impatience, intolerance and frustration. If anything can save me, it is that I am open to change, and life has beaten the short view out of me lately, and helped me see, or perhaps stunned me into understanding the long view of life. Or life.

Many people are stunned, even outraged,  when their dogs and cats die, when their mothers and fathers die, when they get old and sick, when their flowers fade, when storms come. Like me, they embrace the short view of life, the great spiritualists all know better, they are never surprised by life, they embrace every bit of it, the light always follows the darkness.

I am in my sixth decade to begin with, and there is much more time behind me than ahead of me, sometimes that makes me practice the short view of life even more. On one of the creative groups I help administer, eruptions of rebelliousness, politicking and angst sometimes erupt – the long view understands that this will happen whenever more than two human beings gather to try and accomplish anything – but I literally can’t bear it, my mind screams out to me: “you don’t have time for this, life is too short for this, you cannot afford to waste a single moment on this, get to work.”

I think my open heart surgery has challenged my short view of life, much like a bomb challenges the tree it falls on. You walk around in a post-surgical stupor, wondering just what the hell happened to your body and your life, there is smoke and debris everywhere, and you feel confused and disoriented. Did this really happen to me?

The short view was this:  My surgery was great, my heart undamaged, I got out of the hospital in record-breaking time, I am an open heart surgery superstar, everywhere I go, people tell me how good I look, how well I appear to be doing. I’m working on my book, my blog, my photos, every single day, when I am not walking up one hill or another.  By Labor Day, I concluded I will be done with this and moving on with renewed energy and focus to expand the boundaries of my life.

I love the short view, I always have, but the problem with the short view is that it is a short view, and thus rarely wise or true, it does not follow the true path of life. The last few weeks have opened my eyes and my heart to the long view, which goes more like this:

Heart disease is chronic, life-threatening and not cureable, just like diabetes. So I have two chronic diseases that cannot be cured, but can sometimes be treated and controlled with much work and care. I had a heart attack, not just some chest pains and shortness of breath, I could have another one, and around Labor Day I will just be beginning months of cardiac re-habitation, learning many new movements and exercises and begin what will be a life-long undertaking to get well and stay well. Pills and procedures, the very thing I shunned in the short view, are her to stay for the duration, that is the long view.

My doctor and I have some major differences to discuss – he wants to keep me alive forever, and I have no desire to stay alive forever. We have to work it out. But you can see that the long view is different than the short view, which I have always favored and which no longer makes much sense to me, and, in fact, nearly killed me.

This is a big change,  one’s worldview, and so I am right back on the hero journey, where your adventure with me began some years ago, right her on this blog, my voice to the world, my great work, my living memoir. I have heard the call to adventure and heeded it, death was nipping at my heels like a hungry puppy. In the world of mythology, this is known as moving into the great beyond, crossing the threshold from the conscious into the unconscious world. It might be a plunge into the ocean, it might be getting lost walking in the dark forest, it might mean floating adrift in the ocean, it might mean finding your heart is sick and having it opened up and taken apart.

The idea of the hero journey is to walk bodily through the door and into the mystery of life. This is where I now am. This is the long view writ large. This is the rest of my life, there is really no short view of that.

It is all there, the encounter with the dark counterpart, the shadow, where the hero leaves the shining light and steps into the darkness. In myth, you are either dismembered or resurrected. This, I understand now, is also where I am, both dismembered and perhaps, resurrected. It is, I imagine, what I make of it.

I have crossed a threshold, and once I have crossed, it really is my adventure and no one else’s – not even the many other people who have been dismembered and returned to life, or the many other people who rush to tell me they have suffered too. I know this, it is the foundation of the long view.

But this is my journey, it iis now a journey that reflects my own individual spiritual need and strength and readiness to live meaningfully. These are my challenges then, this is my work. Self-realization, the glorious process of initiation into the mysteries of life.

This is the long view I have always hidden from, and never fully grasped. It is true, I believe, that everything is a gift, grace is our response to the darkness, not denying it all of our lives. I do not have time to waste. I will not waste it. The long view is closer to grace, to wisdom, to awakening and self-realization.

All of my life, I ran from the long view, and now it is upon me and I think it holds the key to awakening, the secret to life.

 

 

“You put your camera around your neck in the morning along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you.”

— The Photographer Dorothea Lange

Tyler is a young neighbor and a friend, he goes back to school in a few weeks. This summer, as I recovered from my open heart surgery, Tyler has come by to help out – he’s stacked four cords of wood for the winter, moved hay around, mowed the lawn every week. Today he came by to help out and he brought an apple for the donkeys. Then he brushed them. Lulu and Fanny love him already.

Tyler is raised differently than many kids in urban America. He rides his bike to his jobs – he’s always eager to find things to do – he takes responsibility, he makes decisions, he earns the money for the things he buys and needs. He doesn’t say much and he doesn’t waste much time. He is never late and he takes very few breaks. He loves animals, I suspect he may be one of those kids who stays in the country, it seems to suit him.

I brought my wide angle lens to Hubbard Hall to capture the sense of intimacy, even during an opera. The orchestra is to the left, just behind the set, an actor was already in place in bed as the audience filed in, we were all about 25 feet from the set at the other end of the hall. Experiencing opera in this way is a completely different experience than I have encountered before, you can get a sense of it from the photo (see story below.)

It felt like a small miracle to me, Maria and I drove into town and parked on Main Street and walked across the street to Hubbard Hall, the beautiful old opera house preserved by good samaritans decades ago and we saw a modernized opera, or a mix of operas – “Le Nozze Di Figaro and Gianni Schicchi,” music by Giacomo Puccini and set in Florence in 1299 with some modern touches – Playboy Magazine. It is a comedic story of a nasty and feuding family and a wily outsider who outsmarts them at their own game – greed.

What is miraculous about this opera was that we went to see it in our little town at 2 p.m. – about 2,000 people live here – in this gorgeous old mostly restored vaudeville house (they called them opera houses to keep the ministers off their back). Hubbard Hall is a couple of miles down the road, and we were back home by 3:30 doing the farm chores. It was easier than going to the market for groceries. I used to love opera, but eventually found opera productions too elaborate, lengthy, expensive and cumbersome, I came to see opera as the private cultural preserve of the rich. I just drifted away from it. To me, Lincoln Center became a monument to dying and subsidized culture.

In Hubbard Hall, though, it felt like I was experiencing opera in my own living room – this small company turned out a full orchestra and a large and polished cast of terrific singers and voices. I loved the music, I was closing my eyes and tamping my feet, you could cry sometimes, it felt so beautiful.

This experience of opera was extraordinarily intimate and comfortable, it fit so well into the ethos of a small town, it was beautifully produced and presented, yet it was about as far as one could get from the Met in New York City in tone, feeling and informality. The singers were practically in our laps, we could see the sweat forming on their brows. The orchestra and conductor were right behind the small set, I could see the conductor peering out at the singers to get her cues.

A miracle, I said to Maria, that this was a few minutes from our house, and that this community arts center – I am a proud faculty member, I teach writing and blog  workshops there – could put on such a production and already have sold out two performances (three, I think, counting tonight.) In rural America, or almost anywhere in America, that is a miracle. This is a nice place to live, creativity matters here, and we have a beautiful old opera house that keeps it alive.