When the Air Tastes Sweet: Darkness Can Make the Light Brighter

My first three years of life were lived not far from a chocolate chip cookie factory. It was a great place to spend my primal years. The scent of the cookies made breathing itself a sweet experience. Ever since then, I’ve loved such cookies⎼ and breathing.

 

After college, I served in the Peace Corps in a rural village of the West African nation of Sierra Leone. At one point, I became very sick from a combination of illnesses. There was little food in the village and what was available I couldn’t tolerate. I needed medical care, but the only Doctor I knew of was hours away in the capitol, Freetown.  When I arrived in the capitol, I ate the sole food I could even imagine being near, let alone eating, namely a few chocolate chip cookies which my mom had sent.

 

Maybe it was because of the memory of the chocolate scented air, or maybe because they were from my mom⎼ and maybe they weren’t very nutritious⎼ but I always imagined the cookies, not the medications from the doctor, saved me from starvation. The cookies had such a healing effect on me that the next day, I was able to eat another familiar food, a hamburger. I was lucky I was in Freetown because that was the only city in the country at that time to have a restaurant that served them. After that, my appetite returned. The dark, painful memory lives in my body even now reminding me how much I love eating.

 

Dark times can often make any bit of light seem brighter. I’ve written before about how, lately, I wake up 3, 4, 5 times a night. And I’ve come to feel the physical dark not as a deprivation of light, or as something frightening, but as a comfort and friend. When I get up, and it’s still dark, I look out the window to see what beauty the night had created. For example, in late fall and winter, the moonlight or distant city lights turn tree branches into dramatic sculptures, bare fingers stretched out to the sky.

 

Several years ago, when I was leading an improvisational theater workshop, we tried an experiment. Some of the people in the group said darkness was frightening. Others disagreed. So, we planned an experiment. Our next meeting would take place in a large college classroom with no windows and where we could turn off every light, even the exit signs. The darkness in the room was total.

 

Beforehand, I moved most of the chairs together, in groups, so distinct, twisting paths to the center of the room were created. People were allowed to enter almost ceremoniously, one by one, with about a minute between them. The object was, without talking or making noise, to see how hard it would be to find each other in the center of the room.

 

And we did find each other, more easily than anticipated. I entered last, to find the whole group gathered closely together. Once I arrived, I asked if we should turn on the lights. The unanimous reply was “no.” No one wanted light, or to leave.

 

Now the physically darkest time of the year is before us….

 

*Please go to the Good Men Project to read the whole post.

To Enjoy Life When Young, Honor What It Means to Get Older: To Value Aging Is to Value Life, To Value Ourselves, and Human Life In All Its Stages

Yesterday, I was going to a local movie theatre and a younger person held the door for me. I was surprised. I had the same questioning response when someone gave up a seat for me on a bus or called me “Sir.” I am in my mid-seventies and in apparently good physical shape. Were these gestures just politeness? Or was it an assumption or a stereotype of the physical capabilities of those with gray hair and wrinkles?

 

Or was it respect? How do people see me? Do younger people see me in any way like I see myself? Does my age make me seem dignified? Knowledgeable? Or fragile?

 

It’s difficult to believe, to really feel and acknowledge, we’re getting old or older. In my mind, like almost everyone I know who’s near my age, I’m 30 or 40 years younger than I am. Our psyche hasn’t caught up with our body. To ourselves, on the inside, we might feel young. Vibrant. But others see us from the outside.

 

We’re always aging, and we’re always aging together. So, if we don’t value all phases of life, even being old, even being sick, we cut ourselves off from ourselves and others.

 

In the 1960s, I remember the talk about not trusting anyone over thirty. As a sixteen to twenty-year-old, I couldn’t imagine being thirty, let alone sixty. Sixty was a time of frailty. I’m constantly astonished that I’m now not anything like I once imagined a person of seventy-plus years to be.

 

And it’s not because we’re boring that older people talk so frequently about their medical conditions, pains, and doctor visits. It’s partly a way of us saying, “Can you believe I’m going through this? Me?” We might suddenly feel we’re becoming the parents we’ve lost.

 

And we don’t want to waste time faking the reality of our lives. We want to speak of meaningful things. We want to share and feel in sync with others. And one thing most of us share is pain and wanting to know how to deal with it. How to deal with life and face change and dying.

 

As we get older, we realize the deep meaning of change and impermanence, but it’s a difficult lesson and can be hard to accept. After a heart procedure, I was told I had to temporarily stop intense or long periods of exercise. So, I did. I cut back drastically, taking only moderate walks on flatter ground. That lasted one day. Then I started counting steps again, or imagining long walks up steep hills and the views I could get. Or imagining exercises I could do.

 

Imagining I could die from exercise (or at all) was just too difficult. I mean, I could feel all this life around me⎼ the crickets, birds, wind, friends⎼ things, and places I enjoy. I mean, consciousness, except for when sleep (and somewhat even then), has always been there; luckily, no pain or illness has dimmed it for me. Slowed, maybe. But how do we imagine it ceasing, permanently?

 

We all need to learn, and schools to teach, the psychology of human development and aging. Larger public schools especially are islands of youth and as such are highly artificial and developmentally problematical. Children need to be around people of various ages, who can serve as models and provide care and support. It’s so easy for them, or anyone, when so isolated from other age groups to over-value youth, the example of their peers, and of what’s new and popular. And we can carry this isolation over to our later years….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

A Strange Illness: Reflecting on What Plagues Us and What Links Us to Everything

Since COVID, it’s clearer than ever that illness is a lot stranger than we might think. Illness isn’t just a matter of catching a bug or being a victim of a pandemic or exposure to environmental pests or pollution, or of aging⎼ although pandemics, bugs, aging, and the environment are certainly involved. So much seems to be involved.

 

When I was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, West Africa, I caught a bug, or a few bugs of different kinds. And when I became ill and had to leave the village and country where I lived, I found out the people I left behind felt responsible for my illness. Not that they thought they should have taken better care of me. They believed someone in the village had caused me to get sick. For them, the germ of all illness was bad thoughts and intentions spread from one villager to another.

 

And in the U. S. many feel illness is a sign of weakness; that we or the sick person is somehow deficient, not strong enough to fight it. At work, we might denigrate someone who stays home to treat an illness ⎼ or we used to before COVID. Now, we hopefully just wish them to get well.

 

Ill can have several meanings and connotations, most are relative or comparative. To be ill is to be in an abnormal, unfavorable, undesirable state, and that we’re hurting, threatened, suffering, or have some defined condition called a disease.

 

In Buddhism, the word for suffering is Dukkha, although the translation is debated. Zen teacher Steve Hagen, in his wonderful book Buddhism Plain and Simple: The Practice of Being Aware, Right Now, Every Day, says Dukkha is in opposition to Sukkha, or satisfaction, so instead of suffering we get unsatisfactory. But more accurately, he says, imagine a bicycle wheel out of kilter. Every time the wheel spins around to the “off” spot, there’s a bounce or wobble that’s bothersome, produces pain, and makes us unhappy. Suffering is being out of kilter. Another Zen teacher, David Loy, analyzes suffering as the sense of something  missing, lacking, in ourselves, in life.

 

We can see suffering all around us. In Buddhism, the first of the four noble truths Buddha realized in his enlightenment was Dukkha, recognizing suffering, being out of kilter is just part of life. The other three are that there’s a cause of suffering, a way to let go of or cease suffering, and a path to that cessation. So, is all life tied to illness? Is suffering the same as illness? Or a response to it?

 

Part of me says, “you know what it is to be ill.” But do I? I know when I hurt and something in my body is off.  But when I try to define illness, I can get lost in the complexity. And sometimes I am ill or in pain, but I’m not suffering. The pain sort of reassures me I’m alive.

 

There are conspiracy theories, exaggerations, lies about illness, especially the pandemic⎼ but there’s also science. The mind and body, despite having separate labels are never separate; they are two words for ways to view one reality. When we feel powerless, or depressed emotionally, for example, we’re depressed physically. Likewise, when we do things like mindfulness meditation, we improve immune response, digestion, heart rate, etc. and the breadth of our awareness. We don’t suffer as much, depending not on what’s happening but on our response to it….

 

 

*To read the whole piece, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

We Need More Creative Drama in Our Lives: Arts Education Might Not Cure Society, but It Can Help Heal Students

Even before the COVID pandemic, arts education was being cut in school districts throughout the country. This was extremely shortsighted then, even worse now.

 

Our children are suffering. According to a report by the American Psychological Association, 71% of parents said the pandemic has taken a toll on their children. Nearly half of LGBTQ+ teens and over 25% of girls have recently contemplated suicide. Many feel hopeless. Anxiety levels are skyrocketing.

 

According to MedicalNewsToday, 75% of youth feel the future is frightening. Although the American Rescue Plan passed by the Biden Administration was a great first step, providing $170 Billion for mental health services for school children, more is needed.

 

And it’s not just the pandemic, not just children missing in-person instruction. It’s our response to the pandemic in the past and the lack of a coherent cultural response now to the environmental emergency, to mass shootings, to injustice and the threat of hate, autocracy and what DJT represents. It’s the GOP attacks on education itself.

 

For many children, the arts could provide motivation to get to school and a doorway into learning itself. It can make school something more than mere work, but a place where they can come alive and see their concerns reflected in the curriculum. They can feel a sense of meaning when so much of the reality around them seems hopeless.

 

According to a study called Champions of Change, arts education can level the playing field, and improve student performance in all areas of learning. This was particularly true with students from low-income backgrounds.

 

The arts provide a more direct entrance into understanding and caring about the experience of others than any other discipline. As such, they provide one of the best ways to embed compassion into the curriculum and to empower young people to take action in all areas of life. This won’t cure society but might heal a student.

 

In 1969, I was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, and got a chance to witness a ceremony of spirit beings emerging from the jungle to dance a story about the responsibilities of adulthood. The spirits were villagers wearing carved wood masks and raffia from their neck to their feet. After the dance, spirits walked amongst us and then returned to the jungle. I didn’t realize then that I was seeing an early form of theatre.

 

In Ancient Greece, the poet Thespis was supposedly the first to have an actor step on a stage and turn choral recitation into drama. Their culture was amazingly social and public. Unlike us, who view our emotions as individual, personal, and essentially hidden, Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly claim that for the Greeks, “moods were public and shared.” Emotions were visitations by gods. This was not like movies and tv today, not something to view isolated on a home computer, but shared, in a group, with each spectator knowing the lines so they could join in the recitation…

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.

Memories Are More Like Stories or Myths than Numbers or Files

It is easy to think our memories are simple and accurate representations of reality, that they are like files that we put away in our mind for times when we need them, or like a bank for safekeeping the past moments of our lives. If we want memories to be a resource to utilize, we have to trust them.

 

But in fact, memories can change. Research shows that every time we access them, they are influenced by or adapt to the situation in which they appear. They are somewhat fluid. So how do we trust them if they change?

 

As we age, it’s not just our memories that change, but everything else about us, our bodies, thoughts, emotions. Memory is complex and there are many different types, mostly depending on how we “store” and “retrieve” them.  I am thinking of long term, autobiographical or declarative (meaning facts or episodes of past events that can be ‘declared,’ spoken about or replayed) memory.

 

Maybe memories are more like myths or stories than numbers or files and they guide us in both obvious and more subtle ways.  One memory I have is from 1970, but I am not sure about anything from this time except the broad details.  I hitch-hiked from New York City to Berkeley, California, and  back. It was soon after I returned from the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone and was trying to figure out what to do with my life.

 

Sometime early in the trip I met a yoga instructor in Berkeley. I thought of him as almost a mythical being who seemed to flow through life in tune with the world, and I started to pick this up from him. Synchronous events or meaningful coincidences happened frequently while I was there. By chance, I ran into someone from college, who had been in the theatre group I was once part of, and we spent a wonderful afternoon together. I met and stayed with one cousin and by chance ran into another. Whatever I needed, I found.

 

One day, I decided to hitch-hike to Mendocino to find a woman who I had grown up with. All I knew about where she lived was that she was living in a commune and that there were communes in Mendocino. I got a ride to a small town most of the way to my destination. But then nothing. No cars, no rides.

 

I was beginning to think my whole plan was crazy. How could I imagine I could just set off without knowing my destination and just arrive there? Then a car stopped on the opposite side of the road. A woman emerged from the car with a small backpack and soon put out her thumb. After maybe a half hour, we looked at and smiled to each other. I crossed the road and we started to chat.

 

She asked where I was going, and I told her I was looking for a friend named Susi (not her real name) who was living in a commune somewhere in or near Mendocino. She said she lived in a commune in the area. A housemate of hers, named Susi, had just left for New York to meet up with a friend who had just returned from the Peace Corps. Me.

 

Just then a car stopped for her. She told me the name and location of the commune and then left with her ride. I eventually got to the commune, stayed for a few days, and then returned to Berkeley. It took a few months before Susi and I got together….

 

To read the whole post, go to The Good Men Project.

How Can We Determine What to do with Our Lives?

We just don’t know. We live surrounded by so many unknowns that if we think about it, we might never do anything. When we’re in high school or college, for example, we might not know what we’ll do after we graduate, or if we’ll get a good job. We might not even know what we want to happen. But in reality, that is the lesson. We don’t know. Yet we have to act nevertheless.

 

Some deal with this by selecting a theory, belief or desire for what will happen and treat it as a fact. We tell ourselves and anyone who will listen how we will do on the next exam or who will win the next election or baseball game. Facing something or someone you know is usually easier to do than facing the unknown, (think about driving your car in some place you don’t know without GPS or google maps) especially if the known is shaped in our favor. Thinking positively is helpful. It makes us feel stronger. If we are taking a test or going on a job interview, we are more likely to succeed if we feel we can succeed.

 

Some of us perpetually do the reverse. We fear failure so much we don’t even try to succeed. Or we try to win by labeling ourselves as losers before anyone else can do so.

 

But if we delude ourselves into thinking we know what we don’t, we close our mind. This might serve as a temporary comfort or rest from something that frightens or stresses us, which can be helpful. But if we pretend we are finished learning when we’re just beginning, then we stop learning.

 

After I graduated from college, I went into the Peace Corps. When I returned, I was a bit lost. I tried traveling, writing, acting, psychology, teaching and decided to get a MAT in teaching English. After graduate school and a few years in education, I got lost once again, and tried out a few more areas of interest, like the martial arts and meditation.

 

At that time in my life, it was difficult to separate fantasy and desire from legitimate paths to a career. It was difficult to face a fear of failure and fully commit to any possible job. For example, I made a far-out proposal to a university that they introduce a new class in their education program.  The class would teach theatre improvisation techniques to teachers, both to improve their skills and to use with students to teach course material. However, I never expected a reply to my proposal. But I got one. A Professor wrote to me. There was no job opening at the moment, but he would like to talk with me about my idea. Because he said there was no job opening, I never went to speak with him. Later, I realized that was a legitimate opportunity lost.

 

But emerging from each moment of being lost was a clarity about one thing: I wanted to do something meaningful, steady, and creative….

 

To read the whole post, go to The Good Men Project.

My Roommate Was A Totem

We all have things we fear. For several people I know, spiders are high on their list. For me, it was only big, hairy ones. There is something so primal about them.

In 1969, I served in the Peace Corps in a small village in the jungle of Sierra Leone, which is on the equator in West Africa. My home was the guesthouse of the local paramount chief, one of the more powerful men in the country. It was a large cement block structure, one of the few in the village that wasn’t made of mud. He preferred the traditional mud hut to a cement building. And I grew to understand his reasoning. On the many days the temperature reached 120 degrees Fahrenheit or more, his mud home was much cooler than mine made of cement. And my roommate was a Mende spider.

To see the rest of the story, go to Open Thought Vortex Literary Magazine.

 

Why Teach? Why Do Anything?

“Why become a teacher? Why chose one profession or job over another? Why do anything? I have to admit that after high school, I told myself I would never teach in a public school. I found education valuable, but the school I had attended was too big and restrictive. I wanted to do something with my life that was meaningful, alive, creative, like write novels, plays or poetry or do something adventurous….

I think teaching is … is one of the most meaningful things you can do. After a day of teaching is over, you don’t have to find other ways to make the world a better place—you do it daily….”

 

To read the rest of this blog, please go to the Good Men Project, which just published it today. It is a re-write of one of my earlier posts.

 

Honoring Differences

In 1969, I was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, teaching in a village in the bush. One day, I left the village and went to visit a fellow Peace Corps volunteer. At that time, there was little public transport. If you wanted to go somewhere and couldn’t walk, you flagged down a lorry and rode in the back with other people and goats, chickens, and who knows what else.

 

On this day, we stopped at a crossroad and people got out to buy food. I was surprised to see a middle aged man standing at the edge of a group of people, looking out at a field. He had on a tie, and nothing else but a loincloth. I walked up to him, greeted him in Krio, a sort of universal language in the country, a combination of English, Portuguese and several African languages from the country. The greeting was leisurely and took about 5 or 10 minutes.

 

I then asked him as best I could, in Krio: “Why are you wearing a tie?”

 

He responded: “Don’t white men wear ties for dignity and power?’

 

I answered: “Yes, but they usually wear shirts to go with it.”

 

He continued: “White men’s shirts stink.”

 

And in Sierra Leone, which sits on the equator, the artificial fabrics manufactured in the west, at that time anyway, did not do well in the heat of the jungle.

 

I was reminded of this incident in school last week, when I noticed a male staff member, who years ago never wore a tie, was wearing one. Almost no one wore a tie in our school. He said students treated him differently, with more respect, since he started wearing a tie and a more formal shirt. Even in the supermarket, he said, people address him now as “Sir.” Most of the people who called him “Sir” would, if you asked them, say that wearing a tie, or any formal clothing, was just a superficial act, a remnant of classist symbolism, or something like that. But their behavior was still affected by the symbol.

 

The man in Sierra Leone was living life in his own way, telling the world with his tie and naked dignity that “I matter.” He was adapting social symbols to speak his own unique speech. And in his society, at that time, political speech was even more restrictive, and more dangerous, than the US was. He had to find his own voice. Our own country, which prides it self on free speech, or maybe did so until recently, and whose predominant religion speaks of “loving your neighbor as yourself,” is often intolerant of differences.

 

I hope we all find our own voice and learn to speak clearly in defense of honest, free speech⏤and the right to be different, or to be ourselves.

 

**Thank you, Cindy Nofziger, for the photo.