Perhaps Freud was right when he said “A man with a toothache cannot be in love.” But I suspect that he was talking about romantic love, not the type of love that is able to bear all things, including one’s own children when they get on our nerves.

Parental love calls us to be tolerant and forgiving, to be patient and not self-centered, even when one of our nerves–or a child who’s on our nerves–refuses to stop screaming, as happened to me when a wisdom tooth got nervy and I got a little wiser.

I’d reached, and passed, 50, the age of wisdom, the time when elders are called upon to mentor the young, to pass on the skills and insights they’ve accumulated over the years.  Yet, I had never been acquainted with pain so deep that refused to go away. It didn’t help that my wife was attending a class that night, leaving me alone in my misery to deal by myself with my annoying, misery-increasing children.

Since it was in my wisdom tooth, I decided that I would learn what I could about its pain until either 800 mg of Motrin kicked in or the nerve gave up in disgust and left me in peace. From what I’ve learned about spirituality, the wisest way to view this experience is not as an adversarial relationship but as an opportunity to learn something of value. “OK,wisdom tooth,” I said. “Teach me something from having to live with this pain.”

My first response to the pain was to “take my medicine,” which I got from my dentist earlier that afternoon. Instruction:  take as needed until a root canal procedure can be scheduled. Stoicism is a fine philosophy in theory; in practice (especially when practice involves acute pain) it falls pretty short. Hedonism was totally beyond reach since the “as needed” medication was not nearly meeting the “as needed” criterion.

My next response was to “count the minutes” until the drug took effect. I was told that this would be 45 minutes; so much for medical predictions. This rationale, scientific approach to pain management didn’t do it for me either.

Then, I tried “go about my business,” picking my kids up from school at the appointed time to drive them home. As usual, it seemed they had their own special way of “getting on my nerves” with their bickering and petty concerns, which in my self-pity I viewed as ploys for attention.

The pragmatic “just live with it” approach to pain management also didn’t last long;  I quickly started wishing to die from my pain rather than have to live with it any longer.

Feeling sorry for myself and becoming intolerant of my children (yes, I know it’s hard to imagine any parent becoming intolerant, but it does happen), I shooed my kids away in no uncertain terms. Translation: I yelled, “Go away and leave me alone!”

I took to bed, huddling under the covers, shivering, knotted up, angry that I had to loudly “demand this space for myself.” If you’re a parent reading this, so far we’re in familiar territory, even if you aren’t dealing with physical pain but with the common parental psychic or spiritual pain of just trying to raise kids without raising the roof.

How many times have you wanted to run away, to lock yourself in your bedroom, to curl up and just have a few minutes to deal with your own stuff, to perhaps hug your pain, claiming it as your right? You worked for it, you earned it, you deserve to “enjoy” it in a masochistic sort of way. So far, my “wisdom” teacher was doing a pretty rotten job of instilling wisdom. Thankfully, conscience kicked me in the butt: I was acting like cad, a mean, uncaring parent.

If your kids are young, as mine were when I went through depression after a job loss, it must be frightening when someone you count on as a rock and from whom you expect a hug and human warmth when you need it turns to stone and shouts, “leave me alone,” as I did  that night. It must be baffling after shouting this for so many years when a parent hears the echo of that hurtful rejection return to us from our grown children. No doubt, we will have conveniently forgotten that it had started with us; we had sewn it, and now we are reaping.

As Buddha teaches, the karmic seeds of what we sow bear fruit when conditions are right. As Jesus teaches, heartfelt forgiveness washes away many “sins,” the seeds of wrongdoing can uprooted before they ripen. In simpler terms, a heartfelt hug can heal a lot of hurt.

At such times of feeling sorry for ourselves, when the last thing we want to do is sacrifice our “need,” this is precisely the thing we must do. In such times, recalling that one is in a covenant relationship can be a lifesaver, perhaps a love saver. This is the point where I started being a little wiser.

I remembered that, in the first minutes after my children were born, I had made a vow, a covenant promise like the one that my wife and I had exchanged on our wedding day: I would give my children what they really needed no matter what sacrifice I was called to make.

As you might have done on your wedding day, my wife and I pledged to stick together in sickness and in health; I suppose that “sickness” includes when your spouse is away at a night class, your wisdom tooth insists on shooting your mouth full of agonizing pain, and your kids won’t get off your nerves. Now that children had become part of the bargain; our pledge to stick it out and make our marriage work  included sticking it out and working through all the trials of being a parent.

I’m sure that most new parents and new married couples start out meaning well, but if Bible stories tell us anything, it’s that when the going gets tough, and we feel that we’re in the battle by ourselves, the temptation to run, to dig in, to self indulge, and to break promises can overwhelm us. To stand strong and be true to our own best selves, we need someone in our life that understands and cares.

I can succeed in being that someone for my children despite my own pain.

I know that I’m not in this alone; most of the times I have the support of my wife.

But in those times when there’s a gap between us, we both have a Comforter, a Gap Closer, the spirit of peace that “passeth understanding” and surpasseth physical pain. This is where reading the Bible pays off, where belonging to a church, a body of believers or a Songha as the Buddhists call it, comes through. It confers the ability to be peaceful in the midst of pain and confusion, and when a covenant relationship is tested and tried in fire, that Comfort proves stronger than “death.” Meditation and prayer are good ways for calling back to mind that this peace is always right there if we just call on it. So that night, I prayed and–don’t try this at home if you can avoid it–meditated as best I could with pain clamoring to still be the center, my only point of focus.

I realize that returning to the matter of my still painful wisdom tooth nerve seems a little self-involved and even petty, but I’ll risk your disapproval just to tie this story up and not leave you hanging.

My wife returned home from her class and called my dentist who said that we could safely increase the drug dosage, which I lost no time in doing. Blissed out on drugs to a point approaching Nirvana (in my case, Nervana) I was finally able to sleep and not be a wreck for the next day of work.

Since parents sometimes mess up, as I had when I yelled at my kids, we are also called on to fix our messes, which can mean fessing up to messing up, and asking our children for forgiveness. An amazing thing you learn from parenting is that children forgive spontaneously; it’s grown-ups who hold onto hurts and harbor grudges, start and prolong feuds and let relationships wither and unravel and be torn to pieces, a lot of times over petty things. Kids are too wise about love to harbor hurt; all they need is one real, warm hug and everything is fine again.

This story has a happy ending, despite my very unhappy nerve ending. The danger of wrecking the sanctity of a peaceful home was narrowly averted, and Freud was, this time at least, proven wrong. A man with a toothache can still be in love, but not with himself and with his pain. Despite a toothache, a man can be, and must be, in love with things beyond himself that are what love is really all about.

So, as much as you may be lost in pain, don’t hug misery to your heart any longer than you must. Instead, let yourself be totally absorbed in love. Then you can bear all things and not be unbearable to be around.

Do you like the sound of your writing? Are you working hard to get something out that you can be happy with?

In the art of writing, as with all arts, the hallmark of mastery is apparent effortlessness, which, of course, belies years and years of study and practice, of imitating and learning from other artists, and finally, of finding and refining one’s true voice.

Prose writing that reaches this pinnacle is called “elegant” (from Latin eligere, to select or choose). What you’ll read here may encourage you to set out toward such a mountain and to work hard to reach its pinnacle.

Shown below, starting with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain attempts four times to describe nearly identical scenes. His prose becomes more elegant as brushstrokes of word selection become simpler, more precise, more effective—and more affecting.

Michael Patrick Hearn, author of The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, The Annotated Wizard of Oz, and The Annotated Christmas Carol, offered these examples as part of Lesson 6 in the Barnes & Noble Online University Course based on The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, © 1997-2002 Barnesandnoble.com llc

From Tom Sawyer, Chapter 14

“It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature’s meditation. Beaded dew-drops stood upon the leaves and grasses . . . Now, far away in the woods a bird called; another answered; presently the hammering of a woodpecker was heard. Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy . . . [Soon] all Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.”

This is embarrassingly ornate and overwritten; it’s painfully artful stuff, close to deserving the disparaging label “purple prose.” Some diction is clumsy, such as “obtruded” and “beaded dew-drops stood upon” and “long lances.” We can almost picture Twain thumbing through a thesaurus, working up a sweat with every new sentence, laboring as hard as “the hammering of a woodpecker.”Perhaps you’ve been there and done that. Or you’re there now, doing that.

From a “scenery letter” to his wife, Livy (1882)

“There was a just a faint whitish suggestion in the east–the rest of the sky and the great river were wrapped in a sombre gloom. It was fascinating to see the day steal gradually upon this vast silent world; and when the edge of the shorn sun pushed itself above the line of the forest, the marvels of shifting light and shade and color and dappled reflections, that followed, were bewitching to see. And the luxurious green walls of forest! and the jutting leafy capes! and the paling green of the far stretches! and the remote, shadowy, vanishing distances, away down the glistening highway under the horizon! and the riot of the singing birds!”

Granted, letter writing is more casual. Still he’s still struggling with “somber gloom” and “shorn sun” and even “marvels of shifting light and shade and color and dappled reflections.” And those exclamation points! Signs of flailing to convey something he can’t capture in words! But he’s a writer; we expect him to capture even the ineffable. Set high the bar high, then work to achieve that height. Anyone can do low hurdles.

From Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 9

“A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold . . . in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the on our left was densely wooded, and the sombre shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver . . . There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the while scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.”

The “marvels” are still there but not in “light and shade and color and shifting reflections.” He’s closer to elegance with the phrase “the dissolving lights drifted steadily.” The choice of “drifting” is a perfect fit for a passage alive with the shifting surfaces, shadows, and “tumbling rings” of a moving river that’s “turned to blood” by an undescribed sun casting light over the entire scene. Every now and then something you write will ring true. You may even wonder at yourself for being able to write it. You’re making progress, young grasshopper, or as James Joyce might call you in Finnegan’s Wake, “young grace hoper.”

From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapter 19

“Not a sound, anywheres–perfectly still–just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away from the water, was a kind of dull line–that was the woods t’other side–you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away–trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks–rafts . . . and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a wood-yard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres.”

Taking on the voice, sensibility, and limited diction of a school-averse, barely literate teenage boy, Twain’s stylistic hands are tied and yet his prose is more fluid and natural than in any of the previous passages in which he filtered description of the natural world through the lens of an adult’s sensibilities, vocabulary, and self-conscious posture as a writer.

As Huck, he simply marvels at stillness, at the river as it “softened up” under “a pale place in the sky,” at seeing “the mist curl up off of the water,” and at the east as it “reddens up.” Like a great painter, he finds an effect he likes in “away” and is not afraid to let it play over his composition: “away,” “away,” “away.” Like a master of Japanese brush painting, he captures something ethereal through elegant selection of simple words flowing smoothly, an unhurried, easy river of perfect prose.

If this American master of prose struggles to get to elegance, so will you.

Don’t get discouraged, just find writers worth imitating, learn their secrets.

After years of trial and error, the day will come when you’ll find your own “pale place in the sky.” You’ll pick up your Japanese brush and find, to your delight, that words simply flow.

The grace you’ve been hoping for—and the gracefulness for which you’ve worked so hard and long to enter your writing—has come into your life.

Authors, do you prefer readers coming to your work through paper or plastic?

Whether our work is being read right on the Net or as a downloaded e-book or e-article on one’s laptop or e-reader, authors hope that all readers will be as absorbed in our e-published writing as they would be in our paper-published writing.

But are they?

Do we read text on paper differently than we do when it’s on an e-page?

I’m throwing this question out to author friends, especially to those who e-publish (e-book authors, bloggers, web site maintainers, online columnists and editorial writers).

Skipping past e-writing pitfalls from the composition side of the equation (e.g., missing the right mix of brevity, meatiness, clarity from being both writer and editor; inadequate attention to e-page layout; perhaps top-of-the-head word choice), let’s look at it from an e-reader’s POV.

Do you think that readers approach a page of e-writing with less patience than they do when the writing’s on paper?

Do they skim more, pause less for thought, expect ideas to be fully expounded more quickly, guess at meaning instead of noting that they’ve failed to comprehend?

Are they more distracted (e.g., by a “you’ve got mail” alert) than if they were immersed in a page on paper?

Is the e-reader a tougher customer who loses touch more easily, grows more impatient?

What do you think about the question: paper or plastic? Is the reader scanning your creation through the lens of a laptop monitor or through the plastic screen of an e-book reading device less genial–and even less gentle–than the old fashioned “gentle” reader of a written paper page?

Have you noted any difference in how you paper-read vs. how you e-read?

One evening while preparing dinner and preoccupied with the fate of an American Idol hopeful on TV, I was summoned back to the kitchen by the clamor of the smoke alarm. Smoke was billowing out from all sides of the covered skillet in which I was heating cooking oil.  This was my first kitchen fire, so I had a lot to learn and no time to learn it in.

After reading this, you’ll have learned from my MANY mistakes how to properly respond to an oil- or grease-fueled kitchen fire.

I had learned one essential thing in my heretofore charmed life, namely, to listen to the warning voice in my head. Its “hey, dummy, don’t do that” has often held me back from toppling like a toddler into a nest of vipers as I stood on the brink of potential disaster. Like the proverbial  “stitch in time,” it’s kept my hide from going to the body repair shop, and perhaps to the morgue, more times than I can count. And it saved me again this time.

The voice told me quite plainly “dummy, you’re going to regret it if you lift the lid.” So I DIDN’T lift it. Not a bad first move.

Instead, I gingerly lifted the smoking skillet off the burner and quickly carried it outside and set it down on the concrete porch. These moves seemed right at the time but could have led to disaster.

Only then did I yield to curiosity and let myself be the dummy that the voice had warned me I’d regret becoming. I lifted the lid. A much worse move. In fact, an extremely rotten move. Don’t ever try this at home.

Whoosh! Instant Towering Inferno. The uncovered, no-longer-just-smoking skillet welcomed the new ample supply of oxygen with a predictable effect. I fled from now-erupting Mount Skillet. Great move, but my survival instinct gets the credit here.

Had you been walking by at the moment, you’d have seen a five-to-six foot pillar of flame ascending from the skillet and almost-six-foot me dropping the skillet lid and flying back through the door into the house like a movie stunt man flinging himself as far away from the exploding car, munitions factory, time bomb, or what-have-you as possible. Most likely, you’d have whipped out your cell phone and texted or Twittered it to all your friends, but you deal with these things your way and I’ll deal with it my way.

Noticing the arrival of my unscheduled flight and crash landing on our hallway floor prompted my wife, comfortably seated on the living room couch, to shift her attention from the TV to the bonfire raging behind me on our porch. Then she did the only sensible thing: she ran into the smoke-filled kitchen and got a large pitcher of water from the fridge, flung open the porch door, and threw the water onto the conflagration. Not such a good move on her part, either.

Luckily, the water did the trick and the fire immediately died. (However, please take note that the cascade of water caused hot, steam-enhanced oil to erupt violently onto the porch, over the walls of our house, and down the side of our car nearest to the scene of the action. Put THAT in your Tweeter and smoke it, pal.)

Aftermath of Many Dumb Moves

Finding that I was not a charred vestige of myself as I lay on the floor, I realized that I’d suffered first-degree burns over a large portion of my right forearm (the one still attached to the hand that had lifted the lid). Fortunately, considering the many foolish moves I was making that evening, I had rolled up my shirt sleeves before starting to make dinner.  Along with listening to the warning voice in my head and the execution of a life-saving leap, getting flammable cloth away from a hot stove top—and it turned out, an incendiary pool of molten cooking oil—is a good kitchen fire prevention measure.

Picking myself off the floor, I saw that part of my sweater vest had gotten de-pilled, most of its frizzies over my chest having been neatly fried off.

Continuing shakily with this self-examination, I found a nasty bruise over my left kneecap from landing on the hardwood floor. (Later, looking in the mirror, I discovered one singed eyebrow, the one over the eye closest to the conflagration, and one eyelash singed considerably shorter.)

After removing the clamorous smoke alarm to a relatively smoke-free room (where our two terrified Bichons had sought refuge), we opened doors and windows to expel the noxious fumes now filling the rest of house, and I dashed to the basement to round up a floor fan, a handful of extension cords, and three window fans, installing and activating the lot as best I could with one burned and one burn-free arm.  For good measure, I turned on the bathroom ceiling exhaust fan and the fans of the kitchen and living room ceilings and threw open the front door, although the storm door remained closed, but details such as this escape notice when a throbbing reddened arm is claiming most of one’s attention. While this was happening, we were hacking from inhaled smoke and swearing up a storm. But also thanking God.

In fact, as do many survivors of near catastrophe (including, I suspect, some who otherwise have little to say to God or not much nice to say if they imagine a God who might be listening), immediately upon
finding neither me nor our home engulfed in flames, we both repeatedly said, “Thank God!”

Counted Blessings

• We did NOT have a kitchen fire that within minutes could have engulfed half the room with the sudden height and intensity of the conflagration that my curiosity had created outside on our porch.
• When I crash landed in our hallway, I didn’t have to roll desperately to put out flaming clothing, hair, or flesh.
• My eyes weren’t injured.  Eye brows and eye lashes come back, vision doesn’t always get restored.
• Severe facial burns, which I also narrowly escaped from suffering, easily could have been a nasty consequence of my lapse in judgment.
• All burns were confined to one forearm. I had pure aloe vera gel on hand to immediately treat the area and reduce pain. Within about four hours the burns were almost entirely healed.
• Other than lingering, nasty-to-inhale smoke, the kitchen’s being  undamaged instead of enveloped in flame meant that we had escaped having fire trucks unload ax-wielders and water-hose haulers eager to spray our earthly goods into a sodden pile of rubbish, we escaped having to seek temporary shelter and a new place to live, and we escaped contending with our home insurance carrier for the cost of restoration and repair (which would have hiked our insurance rates through whatever still remained of the soot-blackened roof).
• I was spry enough to leap out of harm’s way instead of being hobbled by physical infirmity or by such paralyzing mental infirmities as fear and panic, and the leap had not broken any part of my body.
• The survival instinct that energized my movie-stuntman-like dive had demanded my mind and body to do one thing and I did it. Unlike the warning voice in my head that I had somewhat heeded and somewhat ignored, when commanded to leap away, I didn’t stop to ask, “How far into the house?” (And one hand was still holding the door open, giving me an immediate escape route.)

That’s a LOT to be thankful for. And most of all, I was thankful for that warning voice in my head. I’ve long believed that it’s the job of every good God, and by extension, every good parent, to make sure that the fools in their care get that fail-safe voice instilled as a standard backup operational system right off the bat—at birth if possible.

So, if you’re a parent or a teacher, a grandparent, or anyone who helps to care for and teach children, work on teaching them—by your example—the importance of always listening to that voice. I was fortunate that my parents taught me that ALWAYS means not ever ignoring it, explaining it away, or testing it out occasionally to see if it’s mistaken. It’s always right (or it wouldn’t be speaking), and its messages are always right on. (Even so, some of us are still going to half-listen and peek under the lid.)

Thanks for reading my confession. Don’t do as I did—except for the listening, leaping, sleeve-rolling, and God-thanking parts of this story. Please, if you hear a voice saying “hey, dummy, don’t lift that lid because you’ll regret it,” keep the damned lid on tight and, dude, NO peeking until you’re sure that the situation’s totally cool. Totally.

Here’s what you need to know about grease- and oil-fueled kitchen fires to help keep YOUR tush from becoming totally toast:

• Call 911 if you even suspect you might need help. Treat a kitchen fire like a heart attack or stroke and get help right away.
• Don’t heat cooking oil on the stove unattended. As a liquid fuel source it heats up fast.
• If grease or oil starts smoking, turn the stove off, but don’t move the smoking pot or skillet. The heated liquid, having become as easily combustible as gasoline, can easily spill over and splash out, spreading fuel for a potential fire.
• If uncovered, slide a lid on fast to cut off oxygen and keep it on until you’re sure it’s completely cooled. Note: Heat of an open flame can shatter a glass lid.
• Never try to carry the pot or skillet outside.
• Don’t use water to put out the fire. As could have happened in my encounter with Mount Skillet, water will violently erupt as steam, spraying hot oil to potentially strengthen and spread the fire.
• Baking soda will work to suffocate oil- or grease-fueled flames (but  act fast and use a large amount) as will wringing out a water-soaked dishtowel and throwing it over the pot or skillet, but these are risky measures.
• Class K fire extinguishers are superior to standard dry chemical ones, which contaminate your kitchen and food. Kitchens are the #1 place in the home where fire starts. Keep an extinguisher in yours.
• Listen to the voice BEFORE all else fails.

Want more shadenfreude (enjoyment derived from other’s misfortunes), Bunky? How about a day in the “waterpark” when sewage backed up in our basement or my narrowly escaping a noggin-crushing when our front door canopy collapsed after an ice storm?

A few sources

http://firstaid.about.com/od/hazardousmaterials/ht/06_greasefire.htm

http://www.firesafety.gov/citizens/firesafety/cooking.shtm

http://www.ehow.com/how_6086505_put-stove-top-oil-fire.html#ixzz1IZlalj5Q

Thanks to @GrouchyCanuck for sharing his professional experience in kitchen fire prevention and for pointing out in my first draft the many errors of my ways for dealing with a kitchen fire.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining about being almost crushed to death when our ice-sagging front door canopy crashed down on my head. And, although it’s no day in the waterpark to find your basement awash in sewage, this is also a survivable, if stinky and messy, disaster. The story below is only partly about my woes of buying and owning a home.

In hard times like these, it’s petty to complain about the roof over one’s head, even if the cost of ownership seems hard to bear. The collapse in the housing market has impoverished the lives and crushed the dreams of many families. And left far too many with no roof to shelter them at all.

It helps to keep perspective—and thereby, to hold fast to hope—by taking to heart the old Irish saying: “It’s in the shelter of each other that the people live.”

This afternoon, my wife and I met with our friendly local savings and loan person to complete an application. Slightly over an hour later, after notifying our present home mortgage holder that we were requesting that our mortgage be sold to our savings and loan, the paperwork was faxed over and the wheels were put in motion to drop our rate.

We’ve got years of mortgage payments still ahead, so we have lots of time left appreciate this bit of relief.

Not only did we get into home ownership late in life, we jumped in when competition was fast and fierce. Low home loan rates brought out frenetic buyers vying for a short supply of starter homes in our town. Trying to stay a step ahead of these gimme-shelter shoppers made it impossible for us to do more than cursory homework about any house we were even curious about buying.

Sometimes we didn’t even get a chance to have our agent show us a house before it was snapped up. Buying a home for the first time is frightening enough. I’m an extensive researcher by nature, so not being able to look closely and think it all out before leaping was way beyond my comfort zone. Then again, getting pushed out of the nest of one’s comfort seems to be a standard way that life works to keep us picking up and moving on.

After successfully purchasing our current home and moving in, we got hooked up with a home inspector who was new to the business and (I like be believe, ignorantly) gave a pass to many (now obvious) code violations. It didn’t help that the sellers lied through their teeth about changes that they not only knew were planned for the neighborhood but that they had actively fought against.

After all this running and shopping and putting in bids and uprooting and settling in, we were unpleasantly surprised one day to find that the charming woodland across the street was being razed to make way for construction. Not just an extensive lovely trees were being destroyed root and branch and the creatures there, including shy deer, made homeless;  our hearts, and our vision of what our home was to be like, was left in shreds as well.

All in all, although our Cape Cod’s grown a mite too cozy as our two children, both of them daughters–and their need for clothes storage–grew, we feel that we somehow settled in the right house in the right place. We would have liked “more house” (more than one bathroom immediately comes to mind) and a more charming neighborhood, but we’ve enjoyed living with enough house to meet our needs while staying within our means. We’ve especially enjoyed natural air-conditioning from the large maple in the backyard that looms over and shades our house from the sun in the east and the equally large tree in the front yard shading it on the west. Treeness and hominess just seem to go together.

We owe the front yard tree our thanks for more than shade, however. One summer, a few years back, its roots invaded and stopped up the outflow pipe, resulting in a half-flooded basement. It was grueling and a little gross to wade through (barely ankle deep) disturbingly brown water as I rapidly ripped out carpeting and lugged it in plastic bags up the stairs to the street, trying to rescue as many household items as possible by keeping the rapid growth of mold to a minimum.

It was a relief to call in a disaster-recovery team. For days and then weeks, they dried out and disinfected the basement, discarded what had become junk, repainted the walls and floor of the entire basement, laid down carpeting in the half that had been carpeted, and installed wood paneling in that half that exceeded in looks and quality what had been ruined. As for lost household items and clothing lost (an old couch, boxes of old toys and Christmas decorations, clothing in the laundry area that had gotten dirtier, not cleaner), we compiled a list for the insurance company with estimated costs and got a handsome check that financed all of our basement remodeling plus a nice shopping spree.

All things considered, not much of great value (including sentimental) got tossed into the dumpster, which by the way, you can see today parked in our driveway since Google maps snapped a picture of our home that very summer. The few things whose loss I was so ready to mourn for, I hardly remember–much less miss– now. What I gained far replaced that little bit of stuff; I understand a little better the deep loss that hurricanes and tornados, floods and fires, tsunamis and earthquakes force upon so many who are far less fortunate than me.

The following winter, our home insurance carrier grudgingly helped us remodel our home’s exterior as well. Following a heavy snowfall compounded by rain that froze everything into place, I was attempted to remove about 300 to 400 pounds of accumulated precipitation making the canopy over our side and front doors to sag dangerously to the point where neither door could be fully opened.

Swelled with a sense of mastery after I had used a push broom to free the encrusted white weight from top of the side door canopy, I was working on the front one when it collapsed with me under it. I threw myself against the front door and escaped–I firmly believe, not just serious injury but sudden death or serious, perhaps even crippling, brain injury. In its collapse, the canopy ripped off a goodly piece of aluminum siding. The upshot was that we had this siding replaced, the siding on the entire house scrubbed clean and repainted to match it, and two door canopies installed in a color that matched the new paint on the house.

We’re blessed to have a home, but even more blessed to have others in our lives who shelter us and whom we can shelter in return. Having a home in lean times when others are losing theirs, some families living in tents in city parks or in their cars on side streets and store parking lots, is a blessing whose richness is suddenly realized in the face of potential rooflessness and in the witnessing in news broadcasts of homes being torn away from others by natural disaster, by man-made meanness or simple miscalculation, or by sheer bad luck.

Truly, “It’s in the shelter of each other that the people live.” And it helps with the feeling of blessedness to have a home insurance company standing at the ready to help out with a bit of home remodeling.

So, may your roof in 2011 shelter you well. May your roof and your life not give you too much to bear. And may any collapse under the weight of an ungodly amount of snow not crush your skull into smithereens leaving grey matter, blood, and cerebral fluid in gross splotches all over your front porch. And if this does befall you, may you not have your messy demise documented for all to see by a roving Google Maps street photo van.

Enjoy your home, be it humble or palatial, a temporary bane or a long-time blessing. And remember, people, we’re here to be shelters for each other. If you’ve had a hand, however small, in taking that shelter from someone else, please do what you can, while you can, to fix it.

It doesn’t have to be Christmas for malls to be too mauling, for your to-do list to leave you lis

In times like these we need something to bring a smile to our frozen faces, something to warm our insides even better than some expensive drink from Starbucks, something that’ll get us dancing like Frosty through intersections to the consternation of the traffic cop.

I hope that something here will be that something for you—an unexpected, cockles-of-the-heart-warming gift: a little gold, some franknonsense, and mirth.

Santa’s Prayer
Author Unknown

The sleigh was all packed, the reindeer were fed,
but Santa still knelt by the side of the bed.
“Dear Father,” he prayed “Be with me tonight.
There’s much work to do and my schedule is tight.
I must jump in my sleigh and streak through the sky,
knowing full well that a reindeer can’t fly.
I’ll visit each household before the first light
to cover the world and all in one night.
With sleigh bells a-ringing, I’ll land on each roof,
amid the soft clatter of each little hoof.
to get in the house is the difficult part,
so I’ll slide down the chimney of each child’s heart.
My sack will hold toys to grant all their wishes.
The supply will be endless like loaves and the fishes.
I’ll fill all the stockings and not leave a track.
I’ll eat every cookie that’s left for my snack.
I can do all these things Lord, only through You,
I just need your blessing, then it’s easy to do.
All this is to honor the birth of the One,
that was sent to redeem us, Your most Holy Son.
So to all of my friends, least Your glory I rob,
please Lord, remind them who gave me this job.”

The Boy Who Laughed at Santa Claus
By Ogden Nash

In Baltimore there lived a boy.
He wasn’t anybody’s joy.
Although his name was Jabez Dawes,
his character was full of flaws.

In school he never led his classes,
he hid old ladies’ reading glasses,
his mouth was open when he chewed,
and elbows to the table glued.
He stole the milk of hungry kittens,
and walked through doors marked NO ADMITTANCE.
He said he acted thus because
there wasn’t any Santa Claus.

Another trick that tickled Jabez
was crying ‘Boo’ at little babies.
He brushed his teeth, they said in town,
sideways instead of up and down.
Yet people pardoned every sin,
and viewed his antics with a grin,
Till they were told by Jabez Dawes,
‘There isn’t any Santa Claus!’

Deploring how he did behave,
his parents swiftly sought their grave.
They hurried through the portals pearly,
and Jabez left the funeral early.

Like whooping cough, from child to child,
he sped to spread the rumor wild:
‘Sure as my name is Jabez Dawes
there isn’t any Santa Claus!’
Slunk like a weasel of a marten
through nursery and kindergarten,
whispering low to every tot,
‘There isn’t any, no there’s not!’

The children wept all Christmas eve
and Jabez chortled up his sleeve.
No infant dared hang up his stocking
for fear of Jabez’ ribald mocking.
He sprawled on his untidy bed,
fresh malice dancing in his head,
when presently with scalp-a-tingling,
Jabez heard a distant jingling;
he heard the crunch of sleigh and hoof
crisply alighting on the roof.
What good to rise and bar the door?
A shower of soot was on the floor.
What was beheld by Jabez Dawes?

The fireplace full of Santa Claus!
Then Jabez fell upon his knees
with cries of ‘Don’t,’ and ‘Pretty Please.’
He howled, ‘I don’t know where you read it,
but anyhow, I never said it!’
‘Jabez’ replied the angry saint,
‘It isn’t I, it’s you that ain’t.
Although there is a Santa Claus,
there isn’t any Jabez Dawes!’

Said Jabez then with impudent vim,
‘Oh, yes there is, and I am him!
Your magic don’t scare me, it doesn’t’
and suddenly he found he wasn’t!
From grimy feet to grimy locks,
Jabez became a Jack-in-the-box,
and ugly toy with springs unsprung,
forever sticking out his tongue.

The neighbors heard his mournful squeal;
they searched for him, but not with zeal.
No trace was found of Jabez Dawes,
which led to thunderous applause,
and people drank a loving cup
and went and hung their stockings up.

All you who sneer at Santa Claus,
beware the fate of Jabez Dawes,
the saucy boy who mocked the saint.
Donner and Blitzen licked off his paint.

The Little Shepherd

Written for children from the perspective of a child, this poem provided the narrative for our homemade Christmas pageant in my religious education class of pre-schoolers, which included my daughter.

We acted out the story with hand-made props, a stable fashioned from a cardboard box, a tinfoil star pasted onto a stick, paper doll-like sheep, camels, Wise Men and sheperds, angels, and the Holy Family, all cut out and pasted onto cardboard backing, which the children decorated at home with cotton balls for wool and for beards, using scraps of cloth, bright ribbon, yarn, and string.

When I finished reading the poem, we sang “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger,” then shared a meal of cookies and juice, all of us sitting in our little chairs at the Round Table. No grownups attended our performance. The “theater” was just for little butts and big imaginations. But now you can attend through the theater of the mind.

Too young to comprehend such abstract things as salvation, redemption, or incarnation, the children knew what it feels like to be alone and afraid in the dark only to find Someone who makes everything better. Too young to take Communion, they could enjoy being a welcomed member of a loving group by sharing a meal of celebration and remembrance.

The Little Shepherd
It’s the night before Christmas; the whole world’s asleep.
But I am a shepherd out guarding my sheep.
All day I’ve made sure they have what they need:
quiet water to drink, sweet grass where they feed.
I’ve kept them in safety, with my rod shown the way;
with my staff saved them when they went astray.
Now they need rest and a safe place to sleep.
so they know I am near, I sing to my sheep.

The night is so silent; it’s dark like a cave.
I call out to God to help me be brave.
When up in the sky with a flash blinding bright,
I see angels on high surrounded by light.
Like the sun that shines down giving life to the earth,
night turns to daytime with a song of new birth.
“Fear not, little shepherd, for not far from here
a baby’s been born so that God may appear.”

“He’ll be called Christ, Messiah, and King of the Jews,
but beneath all the glory, He’s a shepherd, like you.
He knows that like sheep you get frightened and stray
and now sends you Jesus to show you the way.”
So, led by a star that shone high above,
I come to a stable that God filled with love.
There in a manger where animals feed,
lay Jesus, my Shepherd, the Gift that I need.

Copyright 1992 Robert “Rapierpen” Henderson
Director and producer of “The Little Shepherd”

From GK Chesterton’s poem “Christmas House”

This world is wild as an old wife’s tale,
and strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
for our wonder and our war;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings
and our peace is put in impossible things
where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
round an incredible star.

To an open house in the evening
home shall all men come,
to an older place than Eden
and a taller town than Rome.

To the end of the way of the wandering star,
to the things that cannot be and that are,
to the place where God was homeless
and all men are at home.

To be told that the Creator of the world took on human form as an infant is a mind boggling claim, full of wildness and invention, like an old wive’s tale. Sure, there might be some grain of truth in there somewhere, but we can hardly believe every word. It’s just too fantastic for anyone to believe.

For CS Lewis, the crux of the matter that convinced him of the reality of the story that begins in Bethlehem and ends in Jerusalem was that it was so much like how reality truly is. In Mere Christianity, his classic work of Christian apology (from apologetics, meaning “the branch of theology concerned with the defense or proof of Christianity”), Lewis has this to say about reality:

What appears to be plain and simple [for example, seeing a table] is all about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and do what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain [which] lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of. . . .

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing that anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.”

And so The Birth, “wild as an old wive’s tale” was as strange as plain things in the real world turn out to be. That Birth transformed a cave into an “open house” and a “home,” and all who believed found welcome there, and still do.

Doesn’t that make you feel like dancing through intersections and laughing at roadblocks and traffic jams, smiling despite everything, even when the malls are too mauling?

Good writers take great care in how they start stories. We become better readers (and writers), when we learn to look carefully at the way that a writer begins and think about why the writer chose to begin this way and not some other way, as we’ll do here with JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

Even children in the early grades of elementary school can be invited to think about the skills of good writing, foremost of which is an effective beginning that hooks the reader.

Before there were books, and well before theatrical movies and home videos, long long before there was a printed page of any kind, storytelling was a performance art, something experienced vividly and personally in the moment. The spell of a well-told story was sufficient for storytellers to capture an audience and enchant them. Those listeners had well developed imaginations and a capacity for sustained attention, both of which our culture seems to have diminished in children. Listeners shared and appreciated a storyteller’s ability to memorize. In addition to memory, a good storyteller needed to be expressive and intuitive as well as have the mental liveliness to improvise in the midst of their storytelling (by compressing, elaborating, explaining, simplifying) according to the needs and mood of a particular audience.

Storytellers had little need to invent a story. Stories came mostly pre-assembled and highly refined over time by countless others who had told these stories before, so that only the most entertaining and essential elements remained, like a pebble that’s been polished and smoothed by the action of moving water in a stream or ocean. The listener, comfortable with staging action in the theater of the mind, needed little explicit stage direction or setting from the story teller.

Today, a novelist like JK Rowling has not only to invent and polish a story without much help, but also has to imagine a story’s bare bones and all the detail to flesh it out and bring it to life. As all good writers do, a novelist must imagine the possible reaction of an unseen audience and to structure the story so that the reader’s interest is hooked immediately and then hooked repeatedly thereafter from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, episode to episode, the way that Velcro uses many small hooks, successively applied, to create a quick, firm bond.

With books, stories no longer needed to be stored in a listener’s memory but became experiences that could be repeated at will and studied closely at leisure. Books opened to readers the pleasure of studying a storyteller’s craftsmanship and careful planning, to gain insight into the process of following intuition while consciously staging action, to judge a write’s skillfulness in introducing characters in a setting, setting tone through dialogue and description, and handling all the other elements of story–always with a keen sense of an unseen audience.

Until the Harry Potter novels came along, many believed that young contemporary readers were neither skillful in their reading nor patient. They are not used to stories that demand that they pay attention to and remember detail, perceive a developing pattern, or think more than superficially about was being presented. Not only is their life experience limited, but young readers have little exposure to art in general and very little understanding of literary art in particular.

These shortcomings proved to be of little consequence for the young reader for whom a story’s spell is sufficient and for whom analyzing a beloved story would be as invasive and unsettling as it would be if an adult analyzed a child’s dream. Young children have no need to have such material made conscious, and doing so would only confuse and perhaps frighten them. If a child is happy on the shore where the ocean waves tickle his or her toes, what point is there before they’re ready in taking that child by the hand into deep water?

Thus, for those who have matured enough to be capable of some degree of critical thinking and analysis, the way to help young readers understand a particular literary work, whether it’s a novel, short story, play, or poem, is to teach them to look carefully at the way that the artist begins and to think carefully about the reasons the artist might have for beginning this way and not some other way.

Here’s what Rowling tells us in slightly more than two paragraphs on page one of her story:

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four [an important number], Privet Drive [connotation: enjoyment of privacy], were proud [pride and prejudice is a key theme] to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

A careful reader and an insightful teacher of literature will note the tone of self-satisfaction and exaggerated politeness. More thought will lead one to speculate: why would perfectly normal people declare that they are, indeed, perfectly normal?

They were the last people you would suspect [careful here, we're soon to learn that being the last one to suspect is a s

ure tip-off from Rowling to begin suspecting that person] to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they

just didn’t hold with such nonsense.”

Like playing a jazz piece that builds on variations on a musical theme, Rowling repeats the note of self-satisfaction and the

Dursley’s strident insistence on presenting themselves as normal in every possible respect. We are soon to learn that we should suspect the Dursleys of being involved in more than the strange and mysterious. They are involved in child abuse and in raising an abusive, bullying child. The reason behind their insistence and their façade of normalcy is paranoid fear of being found out.

Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills.”

Character is being established: Mr. Dursley is used to running things and giving orders.

He was a big , beefy man [a physically intimidating man, we'll see shortly, who dominates Harry by force] with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual [synomym for normal] amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors.”

The theme of hypervigilance repeats, underlining the Dursleys’ fear of being spied upon and found out, a fear turned outward, manifested as uncovering the secrets of others. Mrs. Dursley’s spying is also an indication of the meaninglessness of her own life; she seems to need to live vicariously, the way that bored housewives enhance their sense of social connection and take secret pleasure in trials, betrayals, jealousies, and loves of others in romance novels and soap operas.

The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.”

Again, a note of pride and self-satisfaction, perhaps a pride in ownership (note the word “had” instead of “were parents of”]

added to which is a delusion cloaked in exaggeration. There is a much finer boy, Harry Potter.

The Dursleys had everything they wanted [very untrue; only Dumbledore truly has everything he wants. W

hat do you think that the Dursleys would see if they looked into the Mirror of Erised? Not socks, surely], but [a major transitional word] they also had a secret, and their greatest fear [naming one's greatest fear and facing it are a major theme in Harry Potter] was that somebody [or perhaps just No One] would discover it.”

The Dursley’s greatest fear is being exposed, seen for what they are: prideful and prejudicial, small-minded (perhaps evil) people. As the story develops, they will be call to task for how they have chosen to treat Harry, to raise their own son, and for manyother hidden sins of commission [what has Mr. Dursley done to others, what shortcuts has he taken on his way to the top?] and omission [what have they failed to do that as parents they are obligated to do?]

At the end of this first novel, Rowling introduces the Dursleys to Harry’s new friends, whose perspective on his foster family is radically different from the façade that the Durselys erect around themselves like a natural [herbaceous] privacy fence:

“.. . Hermione, looking uncertainly after Uncle Vernon, shocked that anyone could be so unpleasant.”

What else are we to learn about the Dursleys that will shock us by its unpleasantness?

This blog is MY sandbox, not yours.

If you’ve ever eaten the gelatinous-mystery-meat-in-a-can marketed commercially as Spam, you know why not many people like it.

If you’ve ever played in a sandbox only to find to your dismay and disgust that a cat has pooped in it, thinking it’s a litter box, you may understand why I don’t welcome finding your spam in my sandbox and why I shovel it out as soon as I find it.

Maybe you’ve posted spam or I’m-gonna-just-pretend-it’s-not-spam spam in the Comments section on my Bob the Bard web site or on this blog. Then you should know that your spam is like popup ads or a burning bag of dog poop left on the front porch.

I don’t like finding it, and I don’t appreciate your leaving it.

It’s obviously unpleasant to discover dog feces inside a burning paper bag on one’s front porch, so we’ll skip that one and move on to popup ads.

My former web site was an EZboard, The Classrooms of Hogwarts. I worked hard to make it as welcoming and interesting to visit as I possibly could. Popup ad makers probably hoped that my visitors would find their popup ads to be welcome, interesting little discoveries. They weren’t, especially when these ads started jabbering away in my visitor’s ear. It’s kind of like trying to read a good book at Starbucks while someone’s holding a loud, one-way cell phone conversation. No one wants to hear it. It’s not just unwelcome and bothersome, it’s a rude intrusion in a peaceful space.

As the creator of that space, I couldn’t shut the popup ad makers up, and so I decided I needed to move, which is how I got to WordPress (actually, I’m not entirely moved out of Classrooms). No more pop-up ads jibber jabbering in my or anyone else’s ear.

But you know the old saying, “when one door closes, another one opens.” Well, for some reason spammers never intruded on my Classrooms site, but they’re leaving burning dog feces on the front porch here.

WordPress has not left me defenseless, as I was on my EZboard. I have a Spam Zapper, and I’m not afraid to use it.

In “Manage Comments,” I can label visitor’s comments as spam, then trash or delete. If something spammy slips by those defenses, I can unapprove and zap it out of existence or edit it so what sees daylight no longer smacks of spamminess and you, gentle reader, need never be bothered by any of it. You can read in peace, and think and reflect and enjoy, and then make your own spamless comments, resting assured that what you find in the “Comments” for a blog entry here or a web posing at Bob the Bard is genuine and, hopefully, of genuine interest to you and to others who stop by to visit.

Now, you may have wondered when I used the term at the beginning of this posting, what in the world is a “I’m-gonna-just-pretend-it’s-not-spam” spam? That’s the point, to keep you unsure, guessing whether it is or is not spam and maybe letting it actually get posted as a genuine comment.

Sometimes I let some spam get posted here as a genuine comment—until I see it for what it and zap it—because I like to believe that everyone has good, if not noble, intentions and that everyone deserves the benefit of the doubt. So here’s how “I’m-gonna-just-pretend-it’s-not-spam” spam appears to work: first, make some kind of general positive comment based on feigned interest or perhaps even actual interest, then add a written popup ad as a side note. Other spammers slip in a link to a commercial site. Some are more subtle, skipping the side note and the clickable links and letting their “ID” do the linking and selling.

Why do these folks spend time trying to plant unwelcome leavings on my quiet front porch? Well, we could guess that like the practical jokesters packaging dog feces, they’re doing it for fun, for the challenge of leaving it, and then getting a laugh out of accomplishing it. But they seem to work so hard at it that I suspect that it is their work.

I imagine that they’ve encountered someone in cyberspace with something to sell who’s willing to pay them a pittance for each time they plant dog poop on a virtual porch.

Maybe these poop planters have set up a real bricks-and-mortar enterprise, a kind of Flaming-Dog-Feces-R-Us, and have hired workers, and they pay into Social Security, and they help support vital civil services with their taxes. Or maybe they just work from home in their underwear and don’t report any earnings and bilk the government. Maybe they enjoy running little virtual con games. Maybe they can’t get an honorable job making some kind of worthwhile contribution to the greater good. Maybe they’re reading this right now and feeling a little ashamed.

I mean, how good can you feel about the worth of your work if that work is to see someone coming to their front porch door, discovering a paper bag on fire there, and then having to stamp on it in order to protect their quiet space against invasion and damage? If you have any respect for yourself, the answer is, not very good at all, right?

Spam. I don’t like it, don’t eat it, and I sure as hell am not going to soil my feet stamping it out. I have a Spam Zapper that does that quite nicely.

Why do we yearn to be happy in our own skins, to be at peace with ourselves and our environment, to experience joy? It’s because human beings are designed for holiness, to be discontent until we become the most authentically unique person we can be. We’re most alive when we discover our unique life purpose.

Holiness, health, a satisfying career,  happiness in being ourselves, comfort in being connected to others, peacefulness, finding meaning in our lives, having faith. How can we find our own path through life and dance joyfully on it?

Is Vocation a Law of God?
The essential questions of life path and purpose, freedom to choose, the necessity to live within the confines of one’s “web of destiny.” and the duty of the soul are summarized in the following mythological depiction of how each of us begins human life.

“When all souls had chosen their lives, they went before Lachesis. And she sent with each, as the guardian of [that unique soul’s human] life, and the fulfiller of [that unique soul’s life path or vocational] choice, the daimon that [the soul] had chosen, and this divinity led the soul first to Clotho, under her hand and her turning of the spindle to ratify the destiny of [that soul’s particular human] lot and choice, and after contact with [Clotho], the daimon again led the soul to the spinning of Atropos to make a web of its destiny, and then without a backward look [the soul] passed beneath the throne of Necessity [to undergo human birth].” Plato, Republic X, 620e

Perhaps psychologist Carl Jung had the “throne of Necessity” in mind when he stated that “vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape.”

Some see the act of repentance, the turning back toward and willing surrender to God, as somehow forced on one who’s utterly discouraged and hopeless after having been so battered and tormented by life’s trials that they’ve given up trying to manage it on their own. Plato’s myth—and my own life experience—confirms something different: it’s the joy of finally finding the way back home, returning to the soul’s inner knowing that its happiness lies in alignment with the direction and purpose of the very Source of its being. The soul may leave this Source “without a backward look,” but the memory of its home stays alive as a wellspring of hope, fortitude, and certainty despite all it encounters on its earthly journey.

Vocation (in Latin, vocatio, from vocare, to call) is therefore not just the job you choose so you can make a living but the path you’ve determined as a soul that you would take as a manifestation of your own true nature—your unique combination of experiences, interests, talents, and passions. The myth also suggests that each of us will be guarded and watched over and helped along because the Source of our being is intensely interested and invested in our following that path and fulfilling our vocation, the “law of God” of our own true nature that we have willingly given obedience to from the beginning “from which there is no escape.” As if any soul would ever desire or imagine “escape” from its own essential being!

In his book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, psychologist James Hillman calls this true nature, which Plato called our daimon, that manifests uniquely in each person “the acorn.” Just as brain development follows a purposeful pattern and timetable, one’s daimon does as well, and this daimon is clearly evident early in childhood.

In fact, says Hillman,” insistence on being attended do is a clear sign of its presence.” Those who nurture, guide, and teach children need to listen to and learn from the child’s inner knowing of what interests and activities accord with the child’s true nature and which do not. They have a duty to be alert when the child tries to resist whatever does not accord with his or her own true nature.

Some children may give in and submit, out of love and obedience, pretending to let their daimon be contorted and pruned like a Japanese bonsai tree. Other children will fight, showing “insistence of being attended to” when a parent or teacher or authority figure uses their power to force “choices” that are foreign to the child’s daimon and threaten to divert it from its destiny.

Losing Our Way: Diverted But Never Converted
“College entrance examinations, intellectual training, social conventions have crowded out the other issues [finding one’s own way in the world], which are, after all, the essential ones.”~Frances Wickes, The Inner World of Childhood

Having a hard time figuring out “what I want to be when I grow up”—even well into adulthood—is often blamed on our culture’s having created a problem of choice and of long preparation. While it’s true that we have wider and more varied vocational choices and that many now can enjoy being a child for many years before gradually moving through adolescence into the workaday world of being a grownup with a career and family, this is not where the problem lies.

The problem is that so much can divert us from finding that authentic, uniqueness that makes us happy in our skins. Perhaps the most destructive diversion—prevalent even in biblical times and perhaps in caveman days—is the cultural ethos that outward signs of success prove one’s worth and that achieving these tokens is necessary to “earn” both self-worth and social approval.

Another diversion is that societies give a hearty thumbs-up to certain careers, lifestyles, and even personal appearances and characteristics so that some are rewarded with higher grades, bigger salaries, recognition and social esteem while others are snubbed, sneered at, and devalued.

The pressure to compete is a powerful diversion in highly populated, industrialized countries where establishing a “brand” and striving to build a mousetrap that’s better than the next guy’s can turn into the proverbial rat race. And sometimes, schoolyard or at-home bullies try to beat your gifts and talents out of you.

Pain & Gain
When we have been diverted, devalued, pressured into paths not our own, lost touch with our inner world and the dreams of our childhood, blessings can come in the form of crisis. Whether its job loss, divorce, the death of a child, a severe injury or illness, depression, a losing fight with drugs or alcohol, every major crisis in one’s adulthood is essentially a spiritual call, a message from the gods, say Carl Jung. Indeed, he says, “The Gods have become diseases.”

Do bad things have to happen to good people? Do the Gods have to take the form of profound suffering before we attend to their voices? The question why there’s suffering, the sages all say, is not one we can answer. Nonetheless, when it comes, we’re somehow held responsible for how we respond to it.

Perhaps if we stay in touch with our spiritual pains and problems before they become symptomatic and pay attention to the direction and proper timing of our inner development, we can save ourselves from needless pain and not experience inner transformation as a major outer crisis. Perhaps sickness and other dis-eases that force us deeper inside to see “the angel in the malady” are natural ways for human beings to become open to divine influences and thus to become a profound teacher for others. The many wounded healers, the many earth-bound angels who have walked through and been tempered by fire might say this is so.

Tribal shamans, seers, oracles, priests traditionally describe disease as dis-harmony of body, mind, and soul. They maintain that vitality and vocation are intimately connected. The care given to the proper naming of infants and the communal rite of holding an infant up in acknowledgment of its belonging to the gods (which Christians do through baptism) has long been a way of community’s pledging to safeguard, nourish, divine, and help grow the inner divinity of the child so that it can fulfill its true nature.

When Nature Overrules Nurture
Like those in other times and other cultures cultures, on some level we know that entry into adolescence is each person’s first conscious step toward one’s own “lot and choice.” Prompted by changes that feel like “the law of God,” regardless of cultural environment or how they’ve been raised during childhood, teenagers cannot escape passing beneath the “throne of Necessity” that says that now is the time to find ways to become “their own person.”

Like all sacred times, all times of crisis, the passage through adolescence is one of danger and opportunity. Symbolized by the biblical story of the Jesus amazing the priest in the temple with the depth of spiritual understanding shown by a mere 12-year-old boy, the child’s “acorn” wants out of its shell, its daimon is eager to get on with its vocation. Accelerated brain development in adolescence is suddenly triggering a host of changes—physically, emotionally, intellectually, academically, socially, and spiritually. Christians recognize the sacredness of this time—and this need in adolescence for guidance and help in finding a deep sense of purpose, for being heard and “attended to,” by inviting teenagers to undergo the rite of Confirmation. Jewish teens to step up to recite the Torah to declare their obedience to God and declare their new identity as adults in the worship community.

Older rites for boys during this passage to adulthood have included formally separating them from the community and then welcoming them back with new name that the boy earns through acts of prowess as a warrior or through spiritual experience during a period of isolation. Ritual and social support are critical needs during this time of heightened spirituality, but our culture largely abandons teens to find their own way without the help of adults and, worse, diverts them from their way by forcing them to cope with countless pressures–popularity and celebrity, consumerism and fashion, premature sexual exposure, violence as a means of asserting one’s needs and asserting one’s identity.

Roadmaps & Travel Guides
Each of our daimons is different; yours will need and seek out travel guides and roadmaps that differ from mine. Aside from the Bible and other sacred texts, I have found no greater guidebook than the multi-cultural anthology of psychological, religious, philosophical, poetical, and biographical writings edited by Phillips, Howes, and Nixon, The Choice is Always Ours. As for the profession of assisting others with vocational and life planning, to the best of my knowledge, the pioneer in this field is a former minister, Richard Nelson Bolles, author of the now classic book for job seekers and career changers, What Color is Your Parachute? and The Three Boxes of Life.

A Life That’s Full Enough
No matter how our passage through life has been evaluated by others—whether that means valued or devalued, the Big Question at the end of it all seems to be about how well we’ve grown our “acorn,” how much we’ve attended to and grown into our “daimon.” Have we lived our life so that it’s been full enough?

Many reports of near death experiences include some kind of instantaneous movie-in-the-mind that shows every moment of our sojourn on earth. Some who experience it determine that they have important unfinished business and need to resume their life of earth. I imagine that others experience simultaneous feelings like those of baptism, graduation, confirmation, marriage, and last rites: they’ve passed through some door and left one world of experience behind and are about  to venture into the next.

A mythological depiction, this time from the Egyptians, gives us an idea of what happens when the soul, which has been given or has chosen its unique life-mission, returns to its Source. The ancient Egyptians envisioned that on Judgment Day human hearts are placed into a scale to determine which weighs the most, the soul’s sins or its virtues. I suspect that the heaviest and most painful sins will be those of omission. We can be forgiven the pain we cause others because almost all the time we’re making the best choices we can and are ignorant of so much that might change those choices. However, being faced to confront our unlived potential will be like the painful reminder of an unkept promise, a gift that was entrusted to us that we were expected to share freely.

“My life has been a reasonably full life; but my chief regret is that it has not been full enough. What I regret is not the occasions on which I have suffered, or made a fool of myself, or made choices which led to trouble; I regret rather the occasions on which I could have said ‘Yes’ to life, and in fact said ‘No.’

“The same is true in my relationships to other people. I repent not so much of the damage I have caused them by doing something, but the damage I have caused by not doing something: it is the missed opportunities of helping people, of enlarging their experience, of loving them, that worry my conscience – the sins of omission rather than of commission.

“The most tragic thing in life would be to lie on one’s death-bed thinking of all the things one had not done, the experiences one had not had, but would have liked to.

“So if I had to push people at all, I should try to push them into fuller lives, to persuade them to say ‘Yes’ to life and not to say ‘No.’ On this earth, at least, we only have one life; and we might as well make the most of it.“~John Wilson

Louise Bogan’s poem, “Song for the Last Act,” discussed in this post, grew out of a childhood where love was only “real” when mixed with rage, guilt, and betrayal. This poem testifies to her courage in facing her past, breaking free from her self-destructive role of helpless, abused child.*

Whether reading a new poem or entering a new love relationship, the basic signs warning that “this is bad” are the same:

1. Deeper involvement fails to fulfill initial expectations and
   
2. Questions arise about our sympathetic contract.

Whether reading a poem or a person, when we begin to sense a sham, a show, a betrayal of trust, we can quickly—or reluctantly—conclude, ‘I’m not buying this,” break our attraction to and identification with the lover and leave.

But Louise Bogan’s poem, “Song for the Last Act,” shows that the human heart is often slow to act on a decision to break off a relationship. The heart often doesn’t look—even very early in a relationship—at what’s there to be seen, nor read what’s clearly written on the page as involvement deepens, nor see its inevitable end. Even if Simon and Garfunkel are wrong and there not just 50 ways to leave a lover but 200, the human heart can have a hell of a time acting on even just one way.

Once caught in a bad romance, things can quickly become dream-like as the abuser increasingly dictates not just what is acceptable but what is real and what is not real. The deceived come to believe that they deserve nothing better than what they’re getting. Believing the lies of their abuser, they may sign onto the abuser’s new version of the sympathetic contract. They may “reason” that the dangers of staying in the relationship are somehow less than dangers if they leave and accept that they are powerless to change their captor (who, ironically, often promises to change) but are also too worthless and weak to make an escape, reasons that, in the words of the speaker in the poem below, can make a person “loath to go.”

Good Poems Stay True to Two Contracts
A poem invites a reader to establish a relationship, to enter someone’s experience, and perhaps to be transformed by it. A poem’s first lines create two kinds of contracts with the reader: a sympathetic contract and a metrical contract.

“Every poem . . . by its choice of tone and attitude is a mask the poet assumes. . . but whatever the mask, the poet must make the role resound winningly with the reader [who] wills himself vicariously into the role. Such identification is the essence of the sympathetic contract.”~John Ciardi from How Does a Poem Mean?

“The reader’s response is determined and governed by the first lines of any poem [After those first few lines, which establish a “metrical contract”] the mind . . . prepares itself ahead for any number of possible sequences, at the same time negatively incapacitating itself for others.”~ John Hollander from Poetic Meter and Poetic Form

Ciardi adds this about a poem’s metrical pattern:

In poetry, the mechanical pattern may be thought of as expectation. The metric performance of any line happens in the way it works its variations against the established expectation.

Maintaining the sympathetic contract is so important that Ciardi calls its violation the only clear sign that we are reading a bad poem. The poem may be technically polished and rhythmically enticing. It may deal with an intriguing and exciting subject. But if the poet sings falsely so that something doesn’t ring true to the mask that the poet wears, he or she loses the reader.

The speaker in “Song for the Last Act,” caught in a bad romance, has long been taken in by appearances but has finally seen her lover’s true face, heard her lover’s real voice, and truly knows her lover’s heart.

Song for the Last Act
By Louise Bogan

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
less at its features than its darkening frame
where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
the lead and marble figures watch the show
of yet another summer loath to go
although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
in the black chords upon a dulling page
music that is not meant for music’s cage,
whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
the wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
on a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

The poem’s first lines establish a sympathetic and metrical contract. Bogan hooks our interest, sets the tone, shows us her mask (her persona or role of the sadder but wiser lover who is finally ready to break free and leave). We willingly buy into and identify with her situation.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look
Less at its features than its darkening frame
Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,
Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.
Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease
The lead and marble figures watch the show
Of yet another summer loath to go
Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

What kind of autumnal garden scene is this, where sharp harvesting tools are hanging in apple trees and “lead and marble figures watch the show” of summer unwilling to leave?

In this first 8-line stanza (or octet), which is somewhat like the first act in a three-part play, are images of strange pairings: yellow fruit mixed with flowers (quilled dahlia and shepherd’s crook, an invasive, weed-like flower, also known as gooseneck loosestrife); a shepherd’s staff and a harvesting scythe. Although both of these instruments have one curved end, the crook on the shepherd’s staff is for protection of helpless sheep and lambs, but the crook-like blade on the harvesting scythe is for cutting down growing things. Scythes being large and sharp, scythes can be dangerous if accidentally stepped on. The poet shows them harmlessly lodged in the crotch of the apple trees. Strange pairings and dangerous things close at hand were the “darkening frame” that the speaker almost berates herself for not really seeing.

What expectations are set up by the metrical contract?

• Just past the 4th line, there’s a deliberate break in the rhythm, which poets call a mid-line caesura: “Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease” We’ll find this same metric break in nearly the same place in the next 2 octets.
• “l” sounds abound (there are 13) in the first octet; in the next octet there will be only 9; in the last, just 5. The sensual quality to saying “ell,” that seems to fit with the pastoral scene of things lying together, diminishes as we go further into the poem.
• The abbacdeed rhyme scheme creates two Petrarchian, enveloped rhymes: “frame-flame” (a-a) that are surrounded by “look” and “crook” (b-b) and “show-go” (c-c_ that are surrounded by “ease” and “trees” (d-d) Fussell that “the rhyming of two contiguous lines demands a tighter logical unity between them than between two noncontiguous lines which rhyme.” In other words, “frame-flame” are meaningfully paired and deserve special notice (by looking too much at the “young flame” the speaker was distracted from seeing the “darkening frame.”

In hindsight, these subtly false notes, strange pairings and hints of things broken or off kilter, and the hints of danger that were overlooked are now seen very clearly. “Now that I have your face by heart, I look.”

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read
In the black chords upon a dulling page
Music that is not meant for music’s cage,
Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.
The staves are shuttled over with a stark
Unprinted silence. In a double dream
I must spell out the storm, the running stream.
The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

In the second octet or act, things grow darker, more stormy, violent (“words that shake and bleed”). The imagery is nightmarish yet is shared by two people in “a double dream.” In the first octet a “darkening frame” was linked to “young flame.” This is now replaced by a voice whose chords are “a dulling page” of music “not meant for music’s cage.” The intimacy and enveloping and holding in of juxtaposed rhyming pairs continues. Now “page-cage” is surrounded by “read” and “bleed,” and “dream-stream” is surrounded by “stark” and “dark.” The stream doesn’t flow or meander; it’s “running,” and the line describing the franticly leaving stream comes exactly where the poet placed “summer loath to go” in the first octet.

Other imagery in this octet is that of parallel lines: music “staves” are prison bar-like horizontal lines that are drawn alongside each other, which reinforces the image of “music’s cage.” As with the harmless shepherd’s crook and the dangerous harvesting scythe, black chords can refer to the notes by which music is composed and read and to black ropes used to bind prisoners and deny them freedom.

The mid-line caesura is now: “Unprinted silence. In a double dream.” It is followed by the desperate or perhaps resigned, imperative line “I must spell out the storm.” In hindsight, the speaker has heard clearly and can now read the music in what was in the “dulling page” and “black chords,” the “notes shifting in the dark” and the musical beat that was “too swift.” The silence is no longer unprinted; she can “spell out” what happened in the storm. “Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.”

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see
The wharves with their great ships and architraves;
The rigging and the cargo and the slaves
On a strange beach under a broken sky.
O not departure, but a voyage done!
The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps
Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps
Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

The storm has passed by, the sky has been “broken” with scattered bits of departing clouds lit by a sun that’s “lengthening” (perhaps rising). Having looked and read, we and the poet now “see” a morning vision of men on an alien shore, deprived of freedom, made into objects or “cargo” to be bought and sold. The scene is framed by “architraves,” the spanning section atop stone columns (recalling the watching figures in the garden) or a door or window molding. There is weeping, a suggestion of blood flowing slowsly from a wound in “red rust,” and the strange pairing of “salt herb” and “long vine.” All that was rushed and stormy and in chaotic movement in act two or the second stanza now stands still or moves slowly downward. With a clear sigh of relief, the poet exclaims that the long nightmarish voyage of the slave ship is over, not starting: “not departure, but a voyage done!”

Having kept her sympathetic and metrical contract, Louise Bogan has taken us from a garden through a stormy night to this exhausted, although perhaps hopeful, harbor scene with its lengthening sun and clearing sky. We’ve identified with the speaker’s plight and known her experience more deeply and more truly than when she was living it. Hers is a story not of love gone wrong, but of trust violated, and of violence holding the loved one in bondage. The speaker never tells us what she was feeling when she was captive in this contract with the Devil; all we know of her inner life is in the details she picks out for us to see–and most importantly, in the language she chooses.

The “show” that was witnessed by the watching garden statuary turns out to have been a sham and a performance put on by the one she loved. It turned into a “double dream” that they both lived through, sustained in part by illusion, in part by nightmarish violence.

But the lines are no longer staves with black chords caging in music; they have become “rigging.” The shrouds and stays that hold up and control the sails of the slave ships are “rigging” but so also are the lies and fraudulent manipulation that eventually broke the speaker’s love and trust. When she entered into her contract, she never bargained to be deceived, intimidated, and controlled. Visual-metrical brokenness throughout the poem (commas and caesuras) underscores the brokenness of the speaker, and the final act or stanza begins with a broken rhyme or off-rhyme (“see-sky”).

As the “anchor weeps” we feel that we have watched a Greek tragedy unfold. Like a theater-goer who has witnessed the tragedy of Oedipus or Hamlet, the reader is left with the classic emotions of catharsis: awe and pity. But there is also new, hard-won wisdom: “Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.”

*About the poet:

Louise Bogan’s mother was unhappy in marriage, perhaps because she was reckless, violent, and undependable. Louise and her brother were frequently uprooted, living in rooming houses and witnessing a procession of their mother’s lovers. Louise grew up believing that love was somehow tied in with rage, guilt, and betrayal.

Before she was 8 years old, she describes herself as having become ” the semblance of a girl, in which some desires and illusions had been early assassinated: shot dead.” As an adult, she repeated the family pattern of lust and betrayal, unconsciously repeating her role as a helpless, violated child until she conquered this cycle through psychoanalysis.

On her death, famous fellow poet W.H. Auden eulogized Louise Bogan:

“aside from their technical excellence, [what] is most impressive about her poems is the unflinching courage with which she faced her problems, and her determination never to surrender to self-pity, but to wrest beauty and joy out of dark places.”