I sometimes feel like a log floating in a current on a river downstream toward a sawmill. Often the current moves fast and at other times… slow. I can’t control the current as it moves inexorably in that one direction… relentless… occasionally rushing in turmoil and then meandering in eddies of calm, but always moving onward… never backward and never ceasing.
As I continue to move on my ride through time and space, I struggle through the rough water and enjoy the calm water, but always fully aware of what lies before me. I’m not the only log in this river and like most of the others I speculate… I wonder what awaits me after the sawmill… will I end up as a piece of fine furniture in a beautiful mansion… maybe a museum… or perhaps merely a heap of pallets to be used to move things… or worse… woodchips on someone’s lawn? I don’t know and though some of the other logs convince themselves that they know what lies ahead, as much as I’d like to do that, I know that I’d only be creating a false sense of security for myself in spite of all my constructs and logical syllogisms. My fate, like theirs, is unknowable and their faith in what lies ahead will not alter the actual fate that awaits them… and me at river’s end.
We were driving in a Warsaw cab about an hour ago. The cabbie spoke no English and none of us speak Polish. The no-meter fair from the Uprising Museum to the Sofitel Hotel was three zlotys a person for a total of twelve zlotys. The Zloty currently trades at about twenty nine American cents so ten Zlotys equals about three bucks, maybe less… maybe more…People
When we arrived at the hotel, one of our party gave the cabbie a ten zloty note and two American dollars, an equivalent total around sixteen zlotys. The cabbie started protesting so I pulled out a twenty zloty note to give him. He gestured that he had no change and proceeded to take my twenty, my friend’s ten and the two American dollars.
I started gesturing at the money and he started to make a gesture indicating that he was going to make change out of the money we had given him. I got our money back and he kept the twenty.
So for the equivalent of six bucks we got ourselves back to our hotel, and we learned that cabbies in Poland’s capitol are the same as many others of their brethren around the world.
Let me tell you sometime about our cab ride to Penn Station in New York City.
Yesterday we were at Jasna Góra Poland, the monastery that houses the Black Madonna, a place of pilgrimage for millions of people.
This afternoon we were at Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, places of death for millions of people, places of Zyklon gas and ovens.
One place for people to worship their god, the other for people to despair of their god.
The question continues to present itself as to why would an all-loving, all-powerful God, worshiped in one place, allow,… or cause… the horror of evil to occur in the other.
Logically, the answer that presents itself. Is that our god is either not all-loving or not all-powerful.
Is our god like a two faced coin, good on one side and evil on the other? Maybe our god is not as loving as we think or not as powerful as we think.
Walking through an exhibit of hundreds of pounds of human hair shorn from the heads of Nazi victims before they were murdered, you have to ask yourself whether our god loved the girl who wore the long tight braid in the front of the pile before she was crammed into a former ammunition bunker and suffocated by Zyklon B gas.
What was her life like? What we’re her hopes and aspirations.
More than likely, she was Jewish.
Did she have a boyfriend? Was she looking to get married before she was ignominiously carted off to a ghetto on her way to this place of her death
And, what did her life mean beyond that tight braid serving as a witness to the inhumanity and abject cruelty of man?
Does her braided hair call to us now… to our god? Where is our god now and where was that god when this evil ran rampant on the earth?
Yesterday we walked through a Mass, of people worshiping their god. Today, we walked through a mass of people at a place where that god was not present.
Sept 21, 2018 I just left Auchwitz about an hour ago. As horrid as the documentary films are, standing on the ground, walking into a gas chamber, starvation cells and suffocating cells lets you visualize what it might have felt like to be brought to those places… the fear of helplessness and despair with the realization of your impending death.
We drove the short distance from Auchwitz to Birkinau by bus. My wife and I stayed at the Birkinau snack shop while the others went ahead to enter the gates of the camp. One death camp a day is enough. Besides, my wife has a brace on her leg and it was a long walk in the sun from the parking lot to get into the camp.
In Auchwitz they display the horrors of the place as you go through the former Polish army barracks… barracks each of which held between 700 and 1000 inmates instead of a couple of platoons of soldiers.
Frankly, I’m at a loss of to describe the depravity… the psychological stench… the horror of this place. It is testimony to the inhumanity of the human species… the embrace of horror… of death as a positive exercise, one carried out with relish by Gestapo personnel
On the bus back to Kracow we just passed a playground with a young family enjoying one of the dying days of summer, alive and celebrating their own humanity, their own freedom and joy for life
The contrast could not be more stark.
Sometimes they reflect the artistry and precision of their creator, while others are merely piles of rocks, thrown out of the way by a farmer, undoubtedly worn down from the exhaustion of trying to grow enough food to support his family.
The ubiquitous stone walls of New England evoke questions about the men and women who built them, removing stones from their fields one at a time so that they could plow the land and feed themselves and their children. It must have been a brutish life they lived in a very stark struggle for survival.
Driving out Massachusetts Route 30 the other day, a road that parallels the Massachusetts Turnpike, I passed many of these walls, some disrupted by later construction while others in the same pristine condition as when they were built two or three hundred years ago, still marking property boundaries or what once was the edge of a farmer’s field. It’s doubtful that their creators could have envisioned the fate of their handiwork and their homesteads two or three centuries in the future, carved up and divided by roads and suburban or rural development.
There was no dichotomy between rural and suburban in their era; their basic geographic distinction was between rural and wilderness. Development for them didn’t involve teams of organized construction specialists. True, there were probably carpenters and masons, but the men and women who built these walls were likely responsible for doing all of that type of work for themselves.
As more and more people took up residence in this uncharted space, they developed a way of conducting their social relations, from a system of land titles that recognized the ownership of their homesteads to a division of labor that rewarded individuals and craftsmen who possessed particular skills.
Throughout this evolution to the complex society of today, many of those stone walls continue to bear mute witness to the struggles of the men and women who, stone by stone, had built them so very long ago.
As we make our way through life we tend to focus on the immediacy of the tasks before us. Developing a relationship; nurturing careers; raising a family etc.
We focus on these things, often to the exclusion of anything else.
At some point were able look at life through the rearview mirror with most of those things behind us: married; retired from the workforce; children hatched and out of the nest. It’s then that we have the luxury of time and the gift of perspective to weigh and measure our life’s worth.
This is one of the blessings of age, being able to synthesize our life’s experiences, to total, amalgamate and analyze those experiences and to reflect on their meaning.
And, it is in this totaling and summation of our lives experiences that we can see, illustrated before us, clear and unambiguous, the impact and meaning of our lives.
The greater impact and meaning has arisen out of our relationships, especially with our spouses and children. Being able to share your life with the person you love and growing old together is perhaps the greatest experience in life, while at the same time one of the saddest knowing that at some point in the not distant future death will shatter that union and one of you will be left with the memories of what you both once had.
Relationships with your children and grandchildren come close behind on the fulfillment and satisfaction index/scale. Putting time into developing a loving relationship with your children as they developed to maturity pays untold dividends as we age in the company of grown adults with whom we have a reciprocal relationship of respect, one grounded in love and affection.
Your children’s children are, as my mother used to say, “the bonus in life,” the cherry on top of the chocolate sundae, saved till the end, savored and appreciated
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To a large extent our reality is shaped by our imagination… not a particularly great insight and an area that is the stomping ground of psychiatrists and psychologists, rather than a lawyer, but this awareness explains a lot of what goes on in the world.
Take the institution of “war” for example. On a retail level, historically, the practice of war is controlled by perception: two men confront each other in combat with the goal each has to kill the other. Now both of these individuals were presumably brought up as children, more than likely by a family that loved and nurtured them, as most families do. For whatever reason, each of them is led to believe that some other group has committed a grievous wrong against their group that must be corrected by waging war with the “other.” Of course in each group member’s mind the other is caricatured and demonized.
I remember reading a book about the Normandy Invasion in. World War II. In it was a picture of a young German soldier in a fighting position, a “foxhole” carved out of the cliffs looking out over the Atlantic. What did his imagination tell him on June 7, 1944 as he looked out on the armada of warships facing him that morning?
“This will be the day that I die?”
That entire scenario was the culmination of human imagination that motivated individuals all over the world to mobilize on one side or the other, to leave their families and go off to kill other individuals who had left their families… all in the name of their perception growing out of their individual and collective imaginations. (Though, certainly, the horrors of genocide… also growing out of a distorted and demented collective imagination… made the perception of one side more justifiable than the other.)
Religion is based totally on the imagination of each group’s followers who collectively “buy into” the stories of their leaders and forbears, in many cases in spite of the cognitive dissonance associated with the actions of these leaders, seemingly in contrast to the “faith” they profess. From fundamental pastors saying that the Lord wants them to have a high powered jet plane to the pedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, what they say is in direct confrontation with what they do, yet in the perception… in the imagination of their believers, the circle is squared, the aberration is dismissed, put out of mind. “Move on folks… nothing to see here. Jesus loves you and there’ll be a second collection next Sunday.”
Cognitive dissonance grows out of the imagination, by ironing out the inconvenient facts that don’t support the narrative in our minds: “I’m not an alcoholic… I just have a problem when I start drinking “
Imagination often tends to be gentle toward the self and hostilely aggressive toward the “other,” the perceived cause of the individual’s perceived malady.
If we perceive the, admittedly poorly thought out decision, of a Secretary of State to use a private computer server instead of the government owned equipment … if we perceive this as a horrific crime engaged in for a devious motive, than we go to rallies, cheered on by a demagogue and chant “Lock her up!” This is all in spite of the fact that this act presumably taken for reasons of bureaucratic efficiency or control is in and if itself fairly innocuous, though in retrospect I’ll-advised.
If you believe that this same former Secretary of State, while a presidential candidate, was running a pedophile molestation ring in the basement of a Washington pizzeria (which apparently had no basement) you show up with a rifle with the intent to do frontier justice… all growing out of a creation in one’s mind.
One of the president’s advisors when boxed in during an interview by the facts of a particular situation, evaded the inescapable conclusion the facts would have resulted in by claiming that there were alternative facts… alternative facts… fictional facts… perceived facts… imagined facts… all the same; all created out of individual or collective imagination… all of them false… all of them feigned… all of them bogus and false.
To a very large extent, our view of reality is shaped by our preconditioned mindset. Whether religion or politics, the facts of a situation are filtered through and colored by our preexisting mindset and in this regard… for us, our perception is our reality.
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I have pictures of a whole bunch of dead people on my bureau; people, some of whom, were once a very big part of my life but who are no longer here. I was very close to my parents for a long time and to my grandson for far less than that.
Benjamin my grandson: you and I were very very close for a limited period of 18 days over your short lifespan.
There is one picture of Leo and Emily Snyder, my father’s parents with Emily’s sister, my great aunt Kit and her husband, Uncle Joe. My grandfather and his second wife Nora were a big part of my life growing up.
Emily my grandmother died before I was born so I never knew her. I have recollections as a child of meeting Aunt Kit and Uncle Joe, but I never really got to know them.
They and others are part of a constellation of people who were and are part of my life though not currently present. They live in time and in a space currently unknowable by me except through my memory and recollection. They are, though spanning my generation, all a part of who I am and for that I’m eternally grateful.
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As we move through life we’re absorbed in our “moment to moment” concerns, with little thought of our creation or our demise.
Though, as we age, we become more aware that some day we’ll run out of these “moments” to be concerned with.
What, if anything, comes next? When my time ends… when my breath stops… Is that it? Is there anything beyond this life… a spiritual existence of sorts?
My mind that articulates this question… what happens to it when my body stops functioning? Does it die with me and just stop existing?
The answer doesn’t really matter because I have no control over what, if anything, lies after my death; there’s no sense worrying about something beyond my control.
I remember visiting a Buddhist temple in Thailand, watching the worshipers totally encompassed in their devotion, much like our pilgrimage to Israel where some members of our group were totally absorbed, almost trance-like while dipping a foot into the Sea of Galilee or the Jordan River.
We do go deep within ourselves at times like these to open ourselves to our God, whatever our authentic religious practice.
Does this deep spiritual meditative state require a context in organized religion? Is it a form of self-delusion fostered by organized religions?
I don’t believe that this deep introspection needs grounding in an authentic religion. Nor, do I feel that we deceive ourselves through spiritual meditative practices whether they grow out of an organized religion or are sui generis.
“What, if anything, comes next?” is a question without an answer. There is a whole regimen of spiritual and religious belief and conjecture that try to fill this unfathomable void of infinite proportion.
Yet, in the last analysis the best we can do is to travel inward and to make our spiritual peace, this very moment, with the force of both our creation… and our demise, however we conceive that phenomenon.
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I’m lying down on one of the twin beds in our guest room. Nico our fourteen month old grandson is pacing around inside the crib in the corner practicing his cheerleading voice as I try to encourage him to lie down and rest “like Papa.” He’s not fussing… just babbling unintelligibly.
But when I implore him to rest like I’m doing he raises his arms above his head and says clearly and forcefully: “UP!”
He certainly can communicate his wishes. Earlier today when it became obvious that he needed a new diaper: “Do you want to come to Papa to get a new diaper?” “NO!”
When he does get upset though, in spite of usually being extraordinarily happy and outgoing, he’ll sometimes get into a “Downward Facing Dog” Yoga position and start bellowing his discontent.
I turn and we make eye contact: “I love you big guy,” and I get the widest toothy grin in response.
Now he’s starting to fade a little: sitting looking at one of the books in the crib and pulling at one of his socks.
No such luck… he’s shortly up again, holding on to the crib rail and bouncing. This does not seem to be heading towards a successful nap.
I think i’m getting close to throwing in the towel, picking him up and taking him downstairs to read some more books as he’s now rattling the slats of the crib.
Oh well you can’t win them all.
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