Channeling Margie....excerpts

Channeling Marjorie is an attempt, (an admittedly rough and untutored attempt), to search for meaning in the journey that took Marjorie Rawlings to the isolated and rural community that was Cross Creek.  It is now a place of solitude, a fitting memorial for one who treasured the natural beauty of the region and captured it so well in her writing.

Note: The following represents just a few excerpts from the Channeling Margie Journals in "My Grandmother's Shakespeare"...AS


My Grandmother's Shakespeare

Creatures

 “It is impossible to be among the woods animals on their own ground without a feeling of expanding one’s own world.” —Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

 

The Woods Are Lovely

Robert Frost says

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep

 

The woods where the animals live and play are out of touch with the reality I face. No one wants to know about the animals that live in the woods anymore. And the people who visit the area go to museums to look at grasslands and marshes and woody areas. They don’t actually go out to look at a piece of land without a zoo or a restaurant or an amusement park attached.

There are some people, very few among us actually, who do like to live in the woods. Those kinds of people can be very peculiar. But there is a certain purity of spirit found in those who are attracted to the road less traveled and the road not taken. The type of pushback against the corporate powers that be is the type of back-to-nature movement that has existed earlier, in this country, but this time it does feel like the people have caught up to the message.

People are tired of bullshit. And it is so prevalent in our society that it creeps up your leg, fills your shoes, and overflows from every countertop in your home. That is why the kinds of animals that exist in nature—the cows and the birds, the wolves and dogs and pigs—are the only ones left with any kind of “street cred” concerning the purity of spirit of living in the woods. They are as one with the forest dwellers, and we must look to the land for our answers. The answers are given up in only the purist of spirits, and we cannot be trusted to see through the filters and lens provided by man. That is the answer to the question, “Why does a bear live in the woods?” Because it can.

“He lay with his head against its side. Its ribs lifted and fell with its breathing. It rested its chin on his hand. It had a few short hairs that prickled him. He had been cudgeling his wits for an excuse to bring the fawn inside at night to sleep with him.” —Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

There’s something about an animal laying its head on you. It’s like a baby, so soft and innocent. Animals that lay their heads on us are trusting of us, those of us who feel shame that we can live such lives of deception and sin and sorrow, yet how is it that our animals still love us unconditionally? That is the charm and allure of the animal kingdom, I think. The promise is one of unconditional love in the face of our overwhelmingly flawed personalities.

Margie said this: “We know only that as human beings we are very stupid.” That line says it all, because most of the time we don’t know what the hell we are talking about, yet we blabber on anyway. Now why is that?

That line is, in fact, one of my favorite quotes from Ms. Marjorie. The line that states that all we know as human beings is that we are very stupid. “Little brains” is what we’re called in the fantasy by Albert Brooks, a movie called Defending Your Life.  We are all little brains at some point in our lives. We are victims of small thinking and small minds, of small-mindedness, small visions, and smallness in general, so it goes.

 

 

 

The Crust of the Pie

Now tell me, what is the usual Cracker Christmas dinner?” Whatever we can git, Ma’am…Whatever we can git.” —Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

That quotation really speaks to the nature of the crisis where you’ve got your haves and your have-nots. We have been living since the Great Depression in a microcosm of Cross Creek, a place where the little people who hunt and slave and serve are segregated from the upper crust who is paying the salaries. They have snookered us little people, however, into somehow believing we are hovering on the brink. Meanwhile we are perceived as the cruel plantation owners to the rest of the world. To paraphrase Animal House, fat, dumb, and bigoted is no way to go through life.  And coming at it from the outside in, we can see that the crust of the pie who are the haves of the Creek are at odds with the simple folk. In society it is and always has been the common man who is the backbone and center of the country and the hope-filled heart and soul of all rising societies.

 

THE FORGOTTEN MAN

Still in the twenty-first century, we are dealing with poverty. There was a short film I remember from my eighth grade class that depicted a future world with no poverty. There were people living the lives of “beautiful people” with electric air cars and jet-set lifestyles of the rich and famous. Nothing was said about poverty. Agelessly beautiful women and glamorous lives featured prominently. This was the promise of the Future that Never Was—it was a jet-set, Jetsons-style future where the Depression was far behind us.

The future now feels like the Depression-era of the thirties. The Forgotten Man is a whole new generation of young people and older workers who have lost their jobs and their lives.

The following question remains: “What is to be done about it?”

 “Christmas is celebrated quietly at the Creek. None of the holidays has the festive air of the north…We have no need of the emotional outlet of specified gala occasions. Thanksgiving is only a name.”  —Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

What does Margie mean, talking about the “specified gala occasions?” The festive air of the North sounds like the moneyed air of the North (or South). Thanksgiving is only a name because that is what the day is called to give thanks for having so much stuff! We are all supposed to be thankful as Americans for being so fat and jolly and stuffed and educated and well-read and free to protest and free to speak and to vote and to sing crappy country songs about how wonderful it is to be so dang free all the time.

 

THE SOUNDS OF CHRISTMAS IN DAYS OF YORE

Ah, yes, the sound of music—the sounds of Christmas and the poetry and little plays and games of charade that we play as we sit by the Victorian Fire and mull over the years past. As we contemplate the twelve days and then ice skate and play and go to house parties and church and feast and laugh and play and sing, whatever happened to those days of yore?

The days of yore are ours no more because those days never existed. This Victorian fantasy was some illusion that was woven into the life of the suburban dweller.  To be used, I suppose, to support the notion of some beacon of capitalistic nirvana where the good folk who live in the white house at the top of the hill dwell. And the workers and the city people are all going to smile benignly as they sit and watch others having fun.

No wonder the people of this country rise up from time to time. We are a nation of dreamers, and we are all at the end of the rope. We are ready to awaken, yet this is no dream, but instead a nightmare of sorts that we were all forced to live in and accept as reality. And it ends with the Victorian novels of the last century when we close the book on this fanciful dream.

The life that we lead now bears no resemblance to that Victorian life that we were all urged to aspire to. We had been living with blinkers attached as we go forward looking into the past, Mr. McLuhan.  No more.  The future is not Victoriana, and it’s not Wall Street.  Like Lawrence O’Toole of Arabia said with painstaking clarity, “Nothing is written.” We write our own destinies.

 

WHAT CAN I DO TO HELP?

Money is always a problem. It comes between thee and me. The way of the Lord is strewn with pathways of festering bodies that have been felled by the nasty specter of easy money.

But money is the root of all evil only when it is prefixed with greed. There is nothing wrong with having money. It’s what you do with it that counts. Gold chains and 10,000-square-foot homes with custom-made dollhouses built simply for collections of dolls are but a few of the problems in our society. The problem is not simply making money, but in spending money in ways that seem not only fruitless and wasteful but downright silly.

Here is where we need to realistically veer into the land of truly poor people. When people who worry from paycheck to paycheck about basic needs like rent and food see a landed class of gilded rich people behaving like Thurston Howell III, then we will have a festering problem within our society. My thought is this: People who are happy don’t go out into the streets and pitch tents and protest. The answer is not “Get a job, you dirty hippie.” It’s “What can I do to help? How can I become part of the solution?”

I know there is no easy answer, but here I am, Lord, ready, willing, and able to chip off a small piece of the larger problem and do my part. That is not the thinking man’s mentality that we are hearing.  Instead we get more of the attitude of “I got mine, so what’s the problem?”

 “There had been nothing special for Christmas the year before except a wild turkey for dinner, because there had been no money.” —Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

 

THERE HAD BEEN NO MONEY

This statement says it all. There had been no money. There had been no money for iPads and iPods, for twizzlers and trinkets and ga-zoozlers and Ka-Klinkers and BoBoozlers and Wee-winkers. Whatever the product that is the “it” thing to buy this year, that is what we have to have. That is part of the problem, not part of the solution. But the simple statement boils it down to the basics and brings it home. There is nothing special on the table because there had been no money.

There are foreclosures and people in the streets because they have no money. What they had, they may have lost. They may have worked harder than anyone, and still they are homeless and starving. That is not part of the American Dream. That is a bleak landscape where people live from paycheck to paycheck.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a great speech at the beginning of his presidency about The Forgotten Man. That is the place we need to be coming from. There is no such thing in God’s Kingdom as The Forgotten Man. Everyone is precious to someone. That is the plan and that is the dream. To focus on the American story and remember it in the re-telling brings to mind the prescient language of FDR when he said the following:

 

ALTHOUGH I understand that I am talking under the auspices of the Democratic National Committee, I do not want to limit myself to politics. I do not want to feel that I am addressing an audience of Democrats or that I speak merely as a Democrat myself. The present condition of our national affairs is too serious to be viewed through partisan eyes for partisan purposes.

It is said that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo because he forgot his infantry—he staked too much upon the more spectacular but less substantial cavalry. The present administration in Washington provides a close parallel. It has either forgotten or it does not want to remember the infantry of our economic army.

These unhappy times call for the building of plans that rest upon the forgotten, the unorganized but the indispensable units of economic power, for plans like those of 1917 that build from the bottom up and not from the top down, that put their faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

 

Please God, help us to never forget the plight of The Forgotten Man. He is us and we are a part of him. We are supposed to remember that we are all in this fight for life together. There are no easy answers, but if you don’t ask the right questions and if you give up before you start, then you will have lost the still vague American Dream.

 

THE FICTIONS WE’VE INVENTED

 

 

 

THE COON STORY

How can anyone argue that the premise for the novel/movie, The Help doesn’t exist? I lived and grew up during a time in the South when maids still wore those starched white, special uniforms and had separate bathrooms, and they all helped out at my grandparents’ house on Christmas day.

I remember my grandmother living long enough to feel remorse for the times she chastised her maid for not sweeping the floor properly after dinner. That was after the maid had cooked the dinner and then cleaned the kitchen at the end of a long day, before she got on the bus to go home. The maid then would have to return early the next day and start over.

And there was “The Coons” story. Well, it was an old family tale we told and laughed about because my grandmother, or Gan-gan, as we called her, had not an ounce of malice in her, and one of her less enlightened friends asked her if she allowed coons in her kitchen. Gan-gan was horrified and confessed that she never allowed such animals as raccoons or wildlife into her kitchen. She had not a clue of what the other lady was talking about. As Vonnegut would say, “So it goes.”

http://www.amazon.com/My-Grandmothers-Shakespeare-Short-Stories/dp/148257599X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385478233&sr=1-1&keywords=my+grandmothers+shakespeare

My Grandmother's Shakespeare
 

Party at Sanditon by Anne Safka

Party at Sanditon began as the dialogue among a group of dead addicts at a party who had tried to live in recovery and failed. The letters I have from the real-life individual who was the model for this story were to be part of the dialogue.

Obviously this was a painful process, so after writing the introductory notes, this cathartic piece was the truest and clearest tribute that I could write to my dear friend who died.

 

Party at Sanditon

 

Leif died when he was thirty. This year he would have been thirty-six. I knew him as a baby. He was an adorable child.

He was an adorable adult. He was an addict and a liar, and his life was a mess. He was a beautiful spirit and a horrible object lesson. He was manipulative but not mean-spirited. He was as simple as a child at times, but you could never, and would never trust him to tell you the truth.

He was an angel. He loved fishing and dogs and simple pleasures. Actually, he was not an angel; he was as beautiful and talented as an archangel when he blew on his horn. He could also cook, and he was a whiz on computers, yet he blew it. He blew his life away for nothing, really.

That is the truth. Drugs lead nowhere, and life becomes meaningless. I tried to help him so many times. There were episodes at the methadone clinic that I remember as if they happened yesterday.

We spoke to the counselor at the clinic, and the counselor was honest and forthright. I was there when he was told to his face that he would never live past thirty if he didn’t change his ways. I also wrote to him in jail, when he was arrested for the second or third time, I don’t remember which.

He was ostracized by many, but still managed to sound very chipper when you spoke with him on the phone. He was so interested and so interesting in so many ways. There were any number of sports that intrigued him, and there was a love of history. He loved the Civil War, and we spoke of it many times.

He loved to read, and he loved not to just cook, but to prepare food. He was quite a chef. There were so many interests and pastimes to reel him in. He loved movies, and we went together often. But in the end, are life’s small quandaries and sideshows ever enough for some?

A favorite quote of mine—I believe it was from a biography of Montgomery Clift—was this: “All we could do was hold his hand as he walked to the grave.” I am holding hands a lot these days. The older we get, the more hand-holding we do. I held Leif’s hand, too.

It’s not because you’ve “given up” on somebody—you never, never, never, never give up, to misquote Churchill. You keep fighting; you keep trying, but—

The older you get, not the wiser you get, but the wiser you get about not being fooled by human nature. History will repeat itself, the cycle will turn, yet you try and you try, and you know you will fail A LOT!

Sometimes you will fail in life. Sometimes you will fail big. That is something they don’t tell you as a child. And you need to know this fact even as a baby coming out of the womb. It is part of life.  Part of life is trying and failing, failing badly sometimes, yet we keep trying—always.                                      

There are those who are searching.  And there are those who are never satisfied with what they’ve found. He was one of those. Something drew him into that darker point on the horizon. I cannot see this point now, but I know it exists.

When someone dies, and death is not expected, there is always one word that pops up, why? That question is so cliché and so tres chic and so banal and so hard to answer. There is no why in death (death is the period), but there is always someone who is left on the other side of the question.

Why do I care so many years later? What draws any of us to a darker place during our time on earth? There is here, and there is now, and some have no God to latch onto.

My God is not a judgmental character, and he knows no reason or logic may comfort me. I thank him for that. He will comfort me at times, even against all reason.  But we two cannot expand the circle just yet.  I concede that there is a circle of love and trust and hope that is found within our family.

And then there is a circle of my life that is a wellspring, and it is found solely within me. I acknowledge after these many years that we cannot bring comfort to the dead, but only know the comfort we extend to the living. That is our curse and our blessing.

I find comfort in knowing him. There is something of our God in the dead that we love. We see things that we could never recognize before and appreciate the person, long gone, as a spirit that we never could truly know while they lived. That is our blessing and our curse.

      

The Old Man

 

How can I describe my father? He was unique; he could have been a famous actor. He was full of “self,” meaning simply that his love of self and his large ego needed stroking many times throughout the course of a day. He was in many ways the opposite of me.

I am quiet, deliberative, shy, and unassuming, yet there exists in me the writer’s need to feed off people and to love and be loved. This trait is inherited from my father more than any trifling legacy, such as an ingrown toenail. This stuff is what makes people all too human. The character flaws that I inherited were all on the old man’s side.

He didn’t like to be ignored. He talked loudly and yelled louder when he wanted to make a point. He had a loud, jarring laugh and complained frequently about a close friend of mine with self-same obnoxious laugh. That gift was another of his great gifts, the need for complete and total lack of self-awareness. Most philosophers agree that one should “know thyself.” The old man didn’t know himself, but he was okay with what he thought he did know, so he never questioned the need to be anything other than un-self-aware.

He was a pretty good judge of people, though. It came from his profession of choice. He was a lawyer and became angry if anyone dared to use the word attorney. It was way too highfalutin for him. He didn’t like it when lawyers started advertising either. He was old school in that regard. True to form, he was a walking contradiction. He loved to show off and be the center of attention, yet he didn’t want the profession of lawyers to live up to their bad name of ambulance chasers. He hated what the profession finally became. He used to say in his later years that he had wanted to be a journalist.

He served in WW II and broke his leg sliding into third base playing baseball while he was stationed overseas in England. This was his war, and that was his war injury. He often told stories in his later years of riding in his jeep between the two bases in England when he would try to decide where to eat depending upon which base had the better meal of the day. His stories often took on the character of a Sergeant Bilko episode. The horrors of war were often negated by the unintentionally funny and semi-serious way he spoke of his war years. He also spoke of the girls he dated and could remember their names. He spoke of those girls in his hospital bed a few days before he died.

He also matter-of-factly stated without a bit of irony, “You know, we really were the greatest generation.” I just looked at him painfully and tried to figure if it was possible to interject the thought of humility into what he said, but I decided against it. After all, he was old, and that attitude was his way of getting something back for all the hardships and the pain that was wrapped up in the memory of the Great War. Let the old man have his due.

Once, he became irate about some neighborhood kids that he alleged had rolled the yard in toilet paper. When the mother of one of the boys came to the door, equally irate and demanding an apology from the old man, I had to reason with her. “Look, he’s old, and he says things he doesn’t mean. A lot.” This explanation placated her somewhat.

He used to go to his grandson’s baseball games and curse at some of the small children and the parents. Apparently it got bad enough for one of my brothers to employ the same reasoning. “Look, he’s old, just ignore him.”

The truth is the old man was pretty much like that his whole life. I remember a commercial some years back where a disgruntled looking actor puts a chip on his shoulder and says, “Go ahead, knock this chip off.” That was the old man. He walked around with a perpetual chip on his shoulder waiting for it to be knocked off.

He used to get copies of Sports Illustrated and we’d find the annual swimsuit edition with a huge stamp of his law office emblazoned across the model’s lovely features. “Why?” one would ask. “Because,” he said, “she was posing.”

The old man didn’t like people to be too showy. It was too “New York.” Another great pronouncement from him was “corny.” Anything that was overly sentimental to him was corny. That pronouncement summed up pretty much the entire latter part of the twentieth century for the old man.

He took quiet pride in his habit of walking down the street and slamming into people who didn’t get out of the way. I think he felt it was his due by virtue of his age and that people needed to get out of the way for him. I never really wanted to be with him when he was walking in a crowded downtown area. At times it was better to hear the stories rather than to be in the action with my father.

The other thing about him was that he had been a hard drinker. But he also stopped cold turkey when I was about sixteen years old. He was what you would call a “dry drunk” because he never acknowledged the problem, only embraced the solution and he never looked back. That was his greatest strength.

He loved life, and he loved the things in life that were fun, such as ice cream. We had a running joke in our family about one of the ads where the “man on the street” was interviewed after an ice cream parlor had supposedly replaced the ice cream with a well-known grocery store brand. Everyone in the commercial is surprised, but pleasantly so, and no one, of course, guesses the truth until he or she is told. Even then, everyone laughed about it and seemed content.

My brothers immediately came up with the “Dad” version of the same ad, where they stick a microphone in his face as he takes one bite and immediately says, “Wait a minute! This is store-bought!”

The hands-down favorite story my brother liked to tell was the one where Dad peed in a cup and threw it out the window while they were driving to an exclusive Florida resort. My brother was driving and my mom was in the back seat. Dad rolled down the window and threw the pee in my mom’s face as the wind picked it up and swept it over her. Thirty minutes later, he followed the same routine. My mom tried to duck, but she was sideswiped with a face full of piss as my Dad whisked it out of the window and onto her. My brother swears that it happened a third time and that by then he was laughing so hard that he drove the car off the road.

The stories of the old man are legion. They exist in time, and the memories are so vivid that as they say, “You are there!” I am still there, present in mind and spirit with the old man and his larger-than-life spirit that can never really die.

 

Author: Anne Safka

Florida Beach Cottages

This autobiographical piece was a series of journal notes that were a long time in the making. Because I am a native Floridian and a true Florida “cracker,” these notes were compiled from visits to the beach over a series of several years. The impressions of the old versus new surrounding a way of life and cottage industry led me to create some kind of arc to this story.  Because I am a devout fan of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts from the Sea, this was an attempt to bring her very salient musings and creative prose into the realm of the beachgoer living in the twenty-first century.

  

The oddest thing about the beach cottages of my youth is that some of the old ones are still there. They still exist by the seashore as you drive down the beach and look at high-rises that float above the horizon. As you are driving by, the impersonal landscapes and gated areas tend to make you feel very small and insignificant, especially when you think about the number of people sandwiched into an average condominium at the beach.

But the beach cottage of the fifties was unique and individual and existed as a stand-alone that was your very own beach getaway.  It was created to be unique and accessible.  The cottages were not like the indifferent cookie-cutter condo sets that you now see littered down the highway just as far as the untrained eye can see.

The beach cottage was a place where it was hot and there was sand and grime.  The grittiness of the sand was felt beneath your feet, and you never cared about being too clean while staying at the cottage.  It was meant for you to crunch in sand as you walked and ate and slept and read.

The weird thing was that no one seemed to mind the fact that there was the crunch of sand in your sandwiches as you stayed at the cottage, perhaps because the food was something that you could not get at a fast food joint, but instead was fixed as you stayed right there on the beach.

You would make your sandwich while the overhead fan blew everything about and the jalousie windows were open, and they conspired to announce to all and sundry what you were fixing.  You came to stay on the beach when you went to the beach in those days.

Now when we go, we look out a window from an air-conditioned view. Air conditioning has changed the landscape.  It has changed the fabric of our lives, and it has changed us, not always for the better, I might add.

The beach cottage did have units with air conditioners, but they didn’t control our lives. There were usually one or two wall units small enough to fit in the windows.  They rattled like mad, and one could switch them on or off at will.  We controlled the units then, but automatic air can control us at a constant rate now. Oh, we talk a good game, and everyone will admit to loving the air-conditioned way of life, but we are the ones who are “conditioned,” not the air, and that’s a sad fact.

I have an uncle who used to swear he hated air conditioning.  I didn’t know what he meant and couldn’t possibly fathom anyone hating a/c, but now that I am older, I know what he meant. I, too, would love to be able to say I hate air conditioning, but I am as much a slave as are we all to that unit that blows through our lives and controls and conditions our every waking moment.

We have seen the enemy, and it is us.  We are doing this to ourselves when we live in the splendid isolation of the bubble.  We are all losing bits and pieces of our lives when we live indoors to the extent that we do now. The a/c and the confining nature of our surroundings have changed us into something other than primal man.  What then do you suppose will evolve from all this cozy nesting that we are doing?

Bears hibernate in winter and come out for the spring air, but we simply cocoon our lives away.  Video games, I suppose, are going to be our legacy.  But in a different era, beach cottages were open to the elements of earth and wind and sun and water.  Something happened along the way, but at one time, we could return to nature by the seashore.

The truth is sad that we cannot go home again, a least not back to the simpler lives that we lived when we were young.  Now every portion of our lives is lived in the fast lane. Everything is accelerated and sped up to the extent that no one is ever alone, and one is always isolated at the same time. How did that happen?

How did we begin to live in such a bubble of isolation? We seem trapped in the room that Stanley Kubrick isolates his spaceman in at the end of 2001.  Our lives seem to parallel a movie, where we hurtle through space and time in an exciting vortex of events that all converge on one single point of remembrance to find us back in an isolated room that is completely quiet and devoid of life and filled with antiseptic white colors.  That has become the existence of “future man,” if we are not careful. Perhaps, like Scrooge, we may avoid such a fate if we learn to live outside the ever-expanding vortex of isolation that cocoons us.

Recent trips to the beach are reminiscent of when I was growing up and loving the beach condo—not a bungalow—that my family owned for many years. Although it wasn’t satisfactory in every way, it served its purpose and was a throwback to the past, as it was built in the fifties. In some ways its very nature was that of a simple and un-fussy old-time beach bungalow. The downsides were many. We couldn’t bring our dogs along—no dogs were allowed—and we had to travel downstairs to sink our toes in the sand.

But there was the view. And there were rushing waves at night as you sat on the enclosed balcony. And there was a pool and lots of privacy and exclusivity from the run-of-the-mill machinations involved in parking our steaming car and carrying loads of debris to run up to a sandy spot on the beach and park ourselves for hours on end. This was far superior. And there were the long walks in the sand. We were located next to a strip of houses where wealthy residents dwelled in big beach houses, which meant that for long stretches of the year, no crowds of people resided there, and large pockets of tourists were not forcing you to run the gauntlet through the crowds on the beach. It was exclusive in that respect.

Now we are going to the beach less and less. There is not even a beach condo, and my last trip found me bumped to a penthouse suite for reason of faulty plumbing in the lesser room with a view. We were sent up high to gaze down amid the clouds and an occasional bird as it floated past. The sunsets were beautiful, and the people were like small dolls. Oddly, I could still feel connected by the music that floated up on a wave of beer and reggae as I sat and looked out at night on the old familiar views of sea and lights turning on.

We were too remote and removed in this place, though. It seemed too high up, and there were too many people on the beach as we walked among the crowds. So there is no satisfaction in a return trip to the sea. The sea is for gazing and for reflection. It is not for crowds, nor is it for far-removed ocean views high above the clouds. There is less pleasure mixed with some satisfaction from gazing so far down onto the beach.  Is this where we will be? Looking down on creation from the world of Metropolis, far removed in a bubble where there are two classes of people in the world?

Someone recently predicted that we will live in a world where only wealthy elites will be able to have the privilege of ownership of houses. The rest of us will rent, I suppose. There is this thought: The ownership class of elites will be composed of those owning houses as opposed to homes, and the rest of the world will be lesser for that.

If you have ever read Gift from the Sea, you come to it first of all simply absorbing the beautiful writing. The second impression is one of isolation of class and wealth and beauty. A woman with time on her hands can contemplate the many days it takes to unwind on vacation at the beach. The gift of the sea is the chance to unwind.

One of our society’s ways of unwinding these days is through meditation. Moments of time that stretched out days and weeks for Anne Morrow Lindbergh now become just seconds and hours stolen away in our world. The modern world often doesn’t translate to the beach life, but then we are so far away from our past that time sometimes turns a circle in our modern minds, and we are back to childhood. In fact it’s only a moment away, and there one can picture the type of life that has slipped away from us.  In our instantaneous world of electronic gizmos and jing tinglers and flu floopers and all the other imagined things we propose to need so badly, we cannot fathom the life Lindbergh led for weeks on end. She sat and wrote and contemplated—perhaps her navel or other things—but she allowed herself to simply exist. That luxury is not afforded us.

We can’t live without our things, yet we can’t live in the same old way when we use all our things. A young girl I knew scrambled frantically for her cell phone in the car one day the same way our dog roots for its bone. The cell phone had slipped through a crack in the seat, and she was pathetically desperate to recover her lifeline. We are hunter-gatherers, and we are hunting and gathering the wrong things, the result of the modern age of information. Almost all of us are armed for intelligent conversation, yet hardly any of that intelligence is on display. It is all going to be information stored away and available at our fingertips, yet none of it is ever questioned or needed.

We need to begin asking the right questions. Take for example Watson, the super computer that played his heart out on Jeopardy.  Let’s ask Watson this:  Is mankind capable of continued existence on this planet? For how much longer are we going to be able to subsist, and what is out future going to be like? Are we ever going to be happy?

What is the meaning of life? Were we sent here to help each other and advance in science and technology to the point where we don’t need each other? What about God? How do we find our true selves, and how do we advance our existence to a higher plane?

How can we truly learn to love one another? To be continued for another space and time, I think Watson would say. And then we may decide it’s time to return to the sea.

 

 

Do Dogs Have a Soul?

Excerpt from My Grandmother's Shakespeare
by Anne Safka



Why do people think they have to “rescue” animals? We spend our lives trying to figure out a purpose for human emotions, and then we wonder what our responses to other creatures should be, but then we never come up with good answers, just more questions. Why do we do what we do?
I can’t figure it out. I heard an old song on the radio that out of the blue sent chills down my spine. “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” Does anyone know…? You can stop right there, because the correct question is, “Does anyone know?”
There are those among us who love dogs. There are those among us who love animals and all things great and small. There are those who don’t love anyone but themselves.


There also are those among us who don’t care enough about what happens to other people. We sometimes hear the excuse that they are doing “the best they can.” Is that true? Are we really doing the best we can?


Perhaps we are doing the best we can with our pea-sized brains. Are we using only a small portion of our brains? Remember the book by Iris Murdoch, The Floating Opera? In it, she compares life to a floating opera, and the only way we can view it is through the small portion that is performed before our eyes as the ship floats by the shoreline where we are seated. Very aptly put, Iris. Well done. At least that’s one explanation for some of the bizarre behavior of human animals, because we don’t have enough information to figure out what the hell is really going on.
I’ve asked many people if they believe that animals have a soul. Some people believe that animals are going to be on the other side of a “Rainbow Bridge” where we will reunite with all our dead animals, and, I suppose, our other beloved relatives. It reminded me of a pastoral Huck Finn type of world where all of our questions will be answered.


Are human beings meant to ask questions constantly? Is that to be our punishment and destiny after leaving the Garden? Perhaps God would have answered all our questions right away, if only Eve hadn’t taken a bite from the apple. Perhaps the evolution of man means our brains will expand along with the universe. We may someday learn the secrets of expanding the universe from the 95% of the brain that lies dormant, a change that will be the secret for everlasting happiness.
Perhaps it was not the fountain of youth that Ponce de Leon sought. One can only imagine the disappointment compounded in being eternally young and eternally ignorant. I suspect that happiness would still elude us.


Of ministers, veterinarians, and pet lovers everywhere, I’ve asked the question, “Do dogs have a soul?” You then begin to wonder why we ask the question. Why do we worry about rescuing animals, when there is still so much human suffering and abuse of children? Why do governments spend so much money on bombs and guns to blow people up? They say all politics is local, but does it matter?

My Grandmother's Shakespeare-Excerpt from the Book by Anne Safka

For years after her death, my grandfather kept her house the way it had always been during their years together. He lived alone amid her scratched recordings of opera plus two modest bookcases that held books of art, classic literature, and the prized Shakespeare collection. I was always curious about the books, but they were shelved in the room where my grandfather rocked as he sat sentinel with his wine and his TV. It was not until he died and the house was finally shut down and made ready for sale that the books were given to me, and for the first time, I really met my grandmother face to face. Even though I knew her modest collection was symbolic of a forgotten era, she suddenly came alive to me there amid those small, penned notes in the margins of Shakespeare’s dusty, tattered, leather-bound masterpieces.

For me, those books held a fascinating appeal. They begged questions I longed to ask of her. What was she like, my grandmother? What did she think about? Did she immerse herself in the classical world of Shakespeare to forget about her life? Did she ever draw parallels in the Shakespearean classics with the characters she knew and lived with?

I think she did. I believe that she would have needed to find a bolt-hole—a refuge from the drudgery of keeping house for four children and the uncertainty and pain of life with an alcoholic husband. Men or women imprisoned by life must find an outlet for their souls. That need for an outlet is part of an enduring and inescapable truth in human existence. We are not made up of flesh and liquid merely to exist here. We are meant for greater things.

We are souls in need of creative expression and immortal salvation. There are ways and ways to find salvation, and if my grandmother’s notes are correct, Shakespeare appears to be one of them.

I believe we are simpatico, my grandmother and I, and we share a bond that can never be broken. We are both part of the fragile lineage of humans who need to live outside ourselves for a time in a place where there are no boundaries, countries, races, genders, or meaningless platitudes. That place exists in a world apart. The creative mind invents this new world of art for all dreamers, lovers, and explorers. My grandmother’s Shakespeare taught me that boundaries are limitless in this brave new world. It is where the mind leads us when we are forced at times to work in a colorless void or to live in solitude. If my quest has taught me anything, it is the simple truth that our minds are windows to our souls. My grandmother’s Shakespeare has shown me that the only way true freedom is found in this world is when we open our hearts and find the courage to follow our dreams.   -Anne Safka