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A Little Bird Talk
Who’s knocking?
Sometimes you just have to stop what you are doing and stare in wonder. Not many things can make me stop on a run and just stand for five minutes, but one morning in June I was jogging through the cemetery and heard a distinctive knock knock knock. Then quiet. Then knock knock knock. Was this Fate, the Grim Reaper, the Sweet Chariot coming to carry me home?
Whoa, good morning to you, sir!No. It was a very large, red-crested woodpecker affixed to a large Douglas Fir snag, his talons dug into it maybe eight feet off the ground, whaling away at it, chiseling off large chunks of bark and wood. I had to stop. He paid no attention to me and I eased closer. This kind of woodpecker I would have called a redheaded woodpecker, but I would have been wrong. That species lives all over the U.S. east of the Rockies is Melanerpes erythrocephalus, and they only grow to half the size, say 9 inches stem to stern, of the creature I was looking at. My morning encounter was much bigger, in fact, it is the largest thriving woodpecker in North America with a range wherever there are forests to support it (so, none in the plains states or the southwest), the Pileated Woodpecker. You pronounce it, “Pie-lee-ated.” Dryocopus pileatus.
The smaller, redheaded woodpecker of the eastern U.S.“Pileated” means having a crest which covers the pileum, the pileum being the top of a bird’s head, from bill to the back of the head (nape). Or wearing a pileus, which is simply a cap. In this case a fancy red cap, and a terrific white blaze down both sides of his neck, to match his foppish white wing tips. (I never wore hats or caps as a kid but when I lived in Spain I bought a Basque beret, a boina, which was stolen a few years later. I suppose I was a Pileated Student during my sojourn at the Universidad Complutense.) My friend the pielated woodpecker wore beautiful wing tips, real ones and not the kind of shoe my grandfather and father wore.
A Basque boina, in navy (mine was black)This pileated woodpecker was huge, and robust. I’m going to give my friend stem to stern measures of a foot and a half, as big as most big crows and ravens I’ve seen, although I know some ravens, particularly up north, can grow huge. But my friend could do something no raven could; he arched his mighty neck and hammered his beak into the Douglas fir snag with a force that should have knocked him senseless, like some karate guy trying to break a stone with his forehead. It had no effect on him at all. Knock knock knock. Chips and bark flew all around, reminding me of the PBS show about woodworking with 19th century tools, and my friend cocked his pielated head, examined his work, and decided it needed a few more hammer blows. Hammer time.
Hammer time, can anyone forget?The next moment though, he was corkscrewing that very same neck and auguring his way up and into the rotten wood, looking for the breakfast special. He didn’t seem to care that I had closed to within about twelve feet of his workshop. There are probably enough early morning joggers in our town—after all our nickname is Tracktown USA— that my friend knew he had nothing to fear from me or anyone else wearing the bright colors of Nike, Sporthill, Saucony and Columbia. He might have pitied my useless and outlandish plumage, but felt no alarm.
Nice wingtips!What a creature, going about his business. I could have watched longer, but I had my own business to go about. I had seen this bird or his twin before in this little remnant of the forest. Sometimes he was over in our neighborhood, too, but as surburbanites we rarely suffer stumps or snags to remain on our manicured properties. We sometimes get woodpeckers, the smaller ones, the ones they call flickers in these parts. The species, Northern Flickers, or Colaptes auratus, aren’t the smartest birds on the planet though, since the way we know they are visiting is they hammer away at the metal gutters and downspouts, often an hour or so before we were planning on rising. The early bird dents the metal. I suppose they hear something echoing inside, but even their beaks won’t penetrate the metal, although I have seen their dentition on some houses.
A Flicker, colaptes auratusYesterday I saw a juvenile pielated woodpecker at my neighbors and then at my own house, landing and surveying a very healthy Douglas Fir near my garage. He did not linger long, he was literally quite flighty. Was he the scion, the heir to my friend’s noble estate? Did my friend gaze on his child as I sometimes do at my own children and marvel at their fine stature, their robust youth and wonderful futures?
Manderley, from Rebecca …Was he the lord of an estate of stumps and snags, his domain? I might have been in the presence of baron or an earl, I might actually be trespassing on his Manderley or Wuthering Heights. Like a wise rancher, was he rotating crops/snags, leaving some to fill up with multi-legged protein while he pecked and hacked away in other fields, the north forty, as it were? I don’t know, but it was fun to think about.
Another version of ranching …I returned to the cemetery this morning on my constitutional, but the pielated woodpecker was not at his snag, nor anywhere to be seen. I listened but only heard the songs of birds, no hammering. The damage was there for all to see, and I began to wonder if he was going to leave that snag—his ranch, his hacienda—with its gaping holes and bare wood, so inviting to the crawlers and bugs of the forest. Was my friend actually practicing a little bit of animal husbandry—bug husbandry, I suppose, creating a bug farm habitat to invite his future dinner?Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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In the Beauty of the Trail Ferns
Morning has broken …Any time I tell someone about trail running, unless that person is also a trail runner, too, the response is almost always the same. “What you are doing is insane,” or “What you are doing sounds crazy.” Of course, to a trail runner, slouching in front of a TV, wearing official NFL or NBA or NCAA licensed gear, shoveling down a mountain of nachos smothered in re-fried beans and salsa while sucking on a can of beer sounds insane.
… like the first morning …I can’t speak for everyone, or even for anyone else, but I’m comfortable enough in my averageness on so many levels that my experience is probably close to universal in many ways. If you don’t run but start running on trails, this is likely to be your experience after a short period of introduction and orientation. When I set out on a run on a Saturday morning, rain or shine, cold or warm or downright hot, the experience presents itself for analysis in two broad ways: the physical and the aesthetic.
The woods are lovely, dark and deepIn some ways, the physical experience is a bit more complex than the aesthetic, in that it starts from a bit of lethargy and works through stiffness and resistance, and goes through several, by now predictable, stages. I count five stages, but you might find one or two more, or one less. I always—always—start out easy, especially since every trail I use regularly starts out going up hill, and normally at a pretty stiff angle, and since this is what my body is requesting of me: no fast starts. This is Stage One, incompetence and resistance. If I have any doubts about what I’m doing, the doubts come now. I feel wooden and heavy, my hips and pelvis do not seem to be properly lubricated. Ankles feel a little wobbly and knees are at least a little creaky, cold. The same thought crosses my mind each time that I am too old, too slow, but I know that if I push on I can exit Stage One and get to the other, much more pleasant stages. Silly thoughts: of course I am too old and too slow. And, although I may be able to better my speed, it is certain that I can’t do anything about my age. Time does not go backward, and you can’t go back and run anything at age 45 if you are already 57. I either run it now at this age, or wait for tomorrow and run it in an older body.
Resistible, not!Stage Two, competence, normally begins to arrive about fifteen minutes into the run. Usually it comes when the trail either flattens out a little or begins to do some little rollers. Earlier doubts vanish and I begin to feel at least functional. And warm.
Growing competence, and warmth.Stage Three, exhilaration, often arrives at the end of the first hour. I don’t quite understand how people who run for less than an hour get much real pleasure out of it. T o me, that would be like going out to a winery on a beautiful day, walking around indoors, buying a bottle of wine for self and guests, and then leaving. The whole pleasant winery thing with the sun and the sky and the outdoor tables and the breeze and the light illuminating the wine itself, not to mention the delightful taste of the wine, and the pithy or witty commentary at the table, and the sense of Time pausing for a moment and all being Correct in the World—all that would be missing if you just arrive, walk around, order and then leave. The same with running, until the heat, the sweat, the total body warmth and those internal chemicals release, I’m just working hard without much reward, and stopping before Stage Three is just turning away from pleasure.
After physical ecstasy, time to be carefulStage Four is something I call “increasing fatigue, increasing care.” Sometime in the third or fourth hour I still have the physical buzz, life is still wonderful, but it strikes me that I had better up my focus or I could take a nasty fall and maybe spoil my day or something worse. Stage Four is a slight subtraction from the exhilaration of Stage Three. This stage continues until the end of the run, and increasingly saps away every last vestige of Stage Three exhilaration.
Horse heading for the barnStage Five—satisfaction—arrives when the end is clearly in sight and continues after running through whatever that “finish line” is. Now breathing slowly returns to a normal, low cadence, I seem to perspire a bit more but that is mostly because, without my running to help evaporate the moisture, the sweat will just sit a longer time on my skin. But now, able to relax my focus and with no further stress on the body, I can feel those wonderful chemicals coursing through my veins. This is an addict’s high, coupled now with a psychosomatic sense of well being and morality—which is a little hard to explain, but which every longer distance runner knows.
And the crowd (of one) goes wild (sort of).The aesthetic experience is, surprisingly, simpler than the five-stage physical experience. It only has two parts, ebbing and flowing.
AestheticsThe woods and trail look inviting, dark and deep, but my aesthetic appreciation of Nature in its most regal design first recedes and disappears in Part One, mostly because the beginning stiffness and resistance from the physical side will, in the first fifteen minutes or so, overwhelm the aesthetic. When the aesthetic reappears it is a sort of awakening. No matter how mysterious the shrouded dark mist or beautiful the forest or magnificent the sunrise, when my heart rate is rising fast and I’m sucking for breath, I cannot appreciate it. In Part One, my body short-circuits my aesthetic appreciation. I try to maintain my perceptual “connection”, of course, tasting, smelling, feeling, but most importantly hearing and seeing, since those two perceptions are the main guardians of my safety, but the “beauty” of the moment is lost to me in the first ten or twenty minutes of the run.
The Daily Masterpiece, revealedIt is only when the trail flattens out a bit or dips and my breathing and pace return to a continuable “normal,” at that point where the physical experience goes from Stage One to Stage Two (competence) that my aesthetics can kick in again and I see in Part Two the dappled sunlight through the trees and the fractal beauty of the forest and ridge line and sky for what it is: a masterpiece. Beauty simply flows.
Hallelujah Trail VistaI may be normal and mediocre in many regards, but I do have a more than passing acquaintance with masterpieces. I grew up frequenting the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which was only an hour by public transport from my home, and spent my twentieth year traveling around Europe and seeing all the museums and churches on everyone’s list: the Rijksmuseum and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Louvre, the Jeu de Paume, the museums and churches of Rome, the Uffizi and the galleries of Lisbon. When I lived in Madrid, the Prado was my Sunday destination on many Sundays, too many to recall, and when I lived in Boston again Sundays were days to go to the MFA and the Gardner Museum.
The Gardner Museum in Boston, my hangout back in the day …But never once, in the Uffizi or the MFA or the Gardner or the Rijksmuseum, did I see anything which compares with a rather obscure corner of the Ridgeline Trail here in town, a spot maybe half a mile above the Fox Hollow trail head rising toward the summit of Spencer Butte. The trail, having climbed, makes a sharp left-handed turn and flattens out just a little, still rising but it is a slight respite, and you look down the undulating trail you just ran up and it’s breathtaking in its detailed beauty. The best is when you pass a runner who is descending the trail at the right moment and you can pause, turn and watch him loping down through the trail ferns and ground cover, shaded in shimmering light coming through the canopy of Douglas fir. And, unlike, say, The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi in Florence, this masterpiece is never, not once, the same each time you see it. The light has changed, a tree has fallen, a thatch of ferns has overgrown one turn in the trail (and will be trimmed, later, but not today), and the runner, slowly plunging through the landscape a different person each time, creates a kind of cinematic once in a lifetime picture.
Venus ex-utero, is nice, but …This flowing appreciation of Nature continues now, unabated, until the end of the run and, if I have run it correctly, well beyond.Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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Consider the Humble Potter
I have always liked pottery, from the humble and purposefully rough (so-called wabi-sabi) tea bowl used in the Cha-no-Yu to over-sized pots and urns of ancient and modern China. My relationship with pottery would have stayed at this distance and this low level of understanding except for two things: one, I got married, and two, my wife became a potter. Once someone in your family is a potter you will get to know a lot about pottery and potters even if you never wedge a block of clay or play at a wheel. I’ve never done either. I limit myself (wisely, I think) to helping to unload still-warm kilns and wrapping and transporting the delightful bounty and largess of the kiln, and occasionally helping to set up displays and pots at a local show.
A Tang jar, liddedPotters and the pottery process constantly amaze me. For one thing, potters rarely refer to themselves as ceramicists or ceramic artists. They don’t seem to have any issue just being a potter, a fine if anonymous vocation which has roots going back for perhaps seventeen thousand or more years, a tad longer than, say, trash hauler (ahem, a sanitation engineer), a car salesman (oops, account executive) or software coder (sorry, software engineer). Pottery has a much lengthier pedigree than novelists (Cervantes,1613, Defoe, 1719), or any written record of any kind.
The modernist, CervantesOne supposes that the only art forms hoarier than pottery (I make no brief as to usefulness) would be cave painting and story telling while gnawing on the bones of some deceased mega-fauna. Also, observed in their natural habitat, potters always look as if they came from centuries ago. Their clothing is more than a little ragged and always splattered with dots and blobs of dried mud, flecks of glaze and coated with a fine dust. Whatever is on their clothes repeats its motif in their hair and on the lenses of their spectacles. With their poor man’s apron and ruined shoes, these could be the very same potters who made earthenware implements for Caesar, Charlemagne, or the Yongle Emperor, or the potters exhibiting at Portland’s Ceramic Showcase each April.
Tea cups (Hank Murrow)Potters don’t seem to mind the various bad raps they have received. For example, the bad guy in “It’s a Wonderful Life” was Mr. Potter and, although today John or Jane Doe might be cremated by the city in a John Doe kiln (and a different kind of kiln altogether than a potter would use), it was traditionally in a potter’s field is where the poor or the unidentified were buried.
Our least favorite PotterAnd of course there are the minor epithets such as “going to pot,” or a “pothead.” A chamber pot is certainly not a pleasant image to hold in one’s mind, particularly if it is fulfilling its purpose on a cold evening. And who can forget (certainly not potters!) that it is the foolish pot who calls the kettle black. Potters could use a little more kindness and a little less disdain. Finally, while literature (quel upstart!) is rife with references to the social sciences and fine arts, to history, psychology, politics, economics, music, dance, literature itself, architecture and a host of other areas, where is pottery ever mentioned in any book other than a book on pottery? And, you can quickly name any number of painters, composers, sculptors, architects and probably even a glass artist (Cihuly), but who can name a single potter known beyond the world of clay? Although we make intimate contact with their production each day, kissing multiple times that ceramic mug full of delicious tea, they toil in darkness and obscurity.
Intimate contact, every dayWhenever I help my wife with unloading the myriad pots from her latest firing my mind wanders a bit; I ponder the magic process of ceramics. For example, some purists actually go out and dig their own clay out of hillsides and, like the terroirs of the wine industry, each clay has its unique mix of minerals and will produce a different clay body. Another interesting thing about ceramics is not only how ancient it is, but how fundamental it is in the most fundamental of ways. Remember how early Greek philosophers determined that the physical properties of the world were earth, fire, air and water? Turns out, pottery takes those Aristotelian elements and, using them and only them, creates permanent and incorruptible utilitarian and aesthetic works. Incorruptible? Yes, unlike the flesh of flora and fauna, there is no ashes to ashes and dust to dust with ceramics. As the museums and shard mountains prove, once you have transformed the clay into ceramic, unless someone smashes it, it’s there for eternity. In fact, even if you smash it, it’s still there, just in pieces.
Earth, Fire & Air, 3 of the 4 …Okay, the magic now. You take earth (clay)wedge it, add water and throw your pot on the wheel. Now is when the clay is at its most fictile, and that’s no fiction. Next you subtract the water by air drying the pot (at some point you trim its leather-hard substance into the final form) and then, using fire, bisque-fire it at low temperatures (using fire and air) so that all of the original and added water in the clay body is gone. Now you take more of the earth, in the form of a variety of mineral dusts. According to specific and demanding recipes and formulae, you dissolve them into water to make a glaze. You paint or spray or dip this emulsion on the bisque ware and set it out to dry in the—guess what? Air. A few days later, you stoke up the kiln using fire and air and bake the glazed clay until it glows blinding white hot. At some point when the kiln is blazing its hottest you cut off the excess air supply to the kiln, in a process called reduction (you are reducing the oxygen, which draws out some of the elements in the glaze and clay body, and gives the glaze its final texture and color). Finally, when you have reached your goal (usually indicated by a tiny ceramic obelisk called a “cone,” designed to collapse at a specific temperature), you subtract the fire and permit the air to slowly dissipate the persisting heat in the pieces. Once again you are left with only the earth (clay and minerals), but transformed through the serial addition and then subtraction of the elements of water, fire and air, into permanent, ineluctable shapes. Magic, ancient magic.(I suppose if you wanted to you could think of the ancient Chinese element of wood as the fuel source for the fire. Then you would have earth, fire, air, wood & water. Sounds like a good name for a rock band, if it hasn’t been taken already. My wife fires in a gas kiln, though.)
A model of sharingHowever, as interesting and basic as the modesty of potters and the ancient pedigree of the clay process are, perhaps more interesting is the generosity of the potters themselves. You might think that, having worked so hard to master wheel-throwing or hand-building techniques, they might hide their skills away, or teach them only in exchange for cash. Or, having dabbled in the alchemy of glaze recipes, they might wish to keep those glazes secret, in a vault. The reality of the potters I have met, though, is an incredible sharing of techniques and chemical formulas and know-how that would astonishing most “competitive advantage” types. They are simply the most generous people I know, by (a) vocation. They share it all, almost always for free. They give it all away.
Once I show you how, it’s so easy a caveman could do it …So, are potters simply better than most of the rest of us (say, law students and lawyers)? Or do they know something we don’t know (and ought to)? I do not know, but I believe it is the latter. They know that sharing information increases the total pie: if Potter X uses Potter Y’s glaze formula, Potter X will invariably be using it on his own forms and in his own way (dipping or spraying, or both). Potter X will like his glaze to be a different thickness and apply it differently. Finally, Potter X may make up larger or smaller batches of the glaze, stir it differently (or indifferently) and get a different result. It won’t matter a fig to Potter Y in the short or long run. The same is true of techniques, whether on the wheel or hand-building. Once the potter puts the clay on the wedging table, from hand size to pressure to strength, everything is different. So the detriment of sharing is fairly minima; actually it is non-existent! And the benefits? They are, in a word, maximal. All potters started from the same point: ignorance and incompetence. That is the starting point for everyone in everything, whether it’s finger-painting or dribbling a basketball or doing a simple chemistry experiment (lab) in eleventh grade. Once we share technology and wisdom and method and best practices, the path to excellence opens up for all. Ideas cross-fertilize and information and demonstrations inspire all. A cooperative of potters working together, sharing together, produces individually and as a group more and higher quality production than otherwise. They produce a shared excellence and an individual excellence which is wonderful to behold.
Ikebana vase with maple & fuchsia (courtesy of SookjaeArt)“I share my yellow salt glaze formula with you today, you show me how to make a fine foot on an over-sized pot tomorrow. I fire a few of your test glaze pieces in my firing today, and tomorrow you give me an extra stippling tool you’ve had at your studio.” It’s like mutually beneficial trade among nations, it makes everyone richer. So, consider the humble potter, she knows something the rest of us could profit from.Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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How to be Excellent
Never perfect, always excellent?Someone asked me about perfectionism, what I thought it was and, what I thought the oddest of all, whether I was a perfectionist.
A guide to perfect teeth?Today’s brief essay will address this question, but the short answer is perfectionism is an uninhabited island, lifeless and dead, while excellence is like a crowded bazaar, full of life and chatter and activity.
Perfection Isle, no one ever steps ashore …I don’t like perfectionists, I don’t like to be around them, and I have no interest in their opinions, as a general rule. I don’t know why anybody anywhere would ever target perfection as a goal, since perfectionism simply means: I have an ego I cannot control and I am planning to fail. It can’t mean anything else. Why? Just a moment’s review will tell you that if the goal is to do something (ski, swim, rock climb, write a book) perfectly, then 100 times out of 100 you will not do it. You will never write a perfect sentence, much less a perfect paragraph or a perfect book. Any poem or song you write will always need more rewriting to make it “perfect.” In fact, you will never do anything perfectly, unless you fudge the definition of “perfect,” dumb it down, to match what you managed to do. So, if perfectionism means that you will always fail at hitting the mark you set, then aiming at perfection in other words is failing purposefully each and every time. As I said, you are simply planning to fail. I suppose that the lure of perfectionism is that it seems easy to identify, since no one could ever ask for more, and you know which direction you need to be going. It places you and your goals above criticism, or so you think. Also, it exalts you, it sees you as somehow “great,” “better than the hoi polloi,” because you are aiming for the stars. You simply have to execute your plan to join the celestial firmament and leave the mundane rest of us—literally—behind. Unfortunately, perfectionism will never give you the joy of attainment and the thrill of victory, since every achievement and every victory, by definition, will always fall short of the goal, and end in failure.
The Bazaar of ExcellenceExcellentism, on the other hand, is wonderful, start to finish. It is my recommended practice for everyone and the one which I follow when I undertake anything at all. Excellentism requires a little bit of research and ongoing monitoring, but the good news is it is always 100% successful. Excellentism equals planning to succeed, and if carried out is always successful. And it is not planning to succeed by setting your goals so low that you are guaranteed to achieve them. You still have high goals, the highest realistic goal possible: true excellence. It is just now you have the means to achieve it. So, what exactly is excellentism?
When the Student is ready, the Master will appearExcellentism (this is ridiculously simple and obvious) means asking yourself what an excellent practitioner of the target activity does or would do and, as closely as you can, modelling that. If you are a high school student studying AP history, don’t bother with trying to know everything fact and date and movement and interpretation of the subject matter. Don’t worry about getting a 100 percent on each and every test. Stop thinking about grades and propelling yourself above the other students. Think instead about what a truly excellent student of history would do. Attend every lecture? Yes. Prepare all readings beforehand, perhaps with notes and questions, perhaps with some investigation into background and other interpretations? Yes. Review lecture notes and study notes on a timely basis? Yes. Sleep well? Yes. Eat well? Yes. Think critically during the lecture, take notes and ask pertinent questions? Yes. Develop a sincere and abiding interest in the subject matter? Yes.
An excellent place to excel.Think about the basic difference between perfectionism and excellentism. The perfectionist says, “I can be perfect, because I aim at perfection. When I am perfect I will be better than anyone who came before and anyone doing it now. All who see me perform my skill will know two things: first, that I am perfect and, second, that they will never match me. I will be recognized as the greatest of all time.”
Unreachable.Now, compare that to the excellentist, who says, “I am constantly searching for people who perform excellently so I can learn from them. I believe in teachers, mentors and masters, and I believe in reaching out as a student to them. I am constantly adapting and adopting various methods of practice and execution to see which ones best fit me. I model what others do and have done to achieve excellence, and I am becoming the model for those I know, and they model my actions and practices. Aiming for excellence is a cooperative venture, with a lot of sharing. I believe I can join the ranks of the excellent, and believe that many more can join as well. We can grow the pie much much bigger and have many people doing this particular skill excellently.”Perfection is a lonely island inhabited by no one. Excellentism is a big noisy bazaar, with room for everyone.
It’s your move …Think about anyone who is excellent or an expert at anything. Chess master, gymnast, rock climber, guitarist, opera singer, skier, endurance athlete, swimmer, tennis player—what does an excellent practitioner of these activities and skills do to learn them, to practice them, to advance one’s abilities in them? Think about what it is you wish to excel at, and now think about those who are excellent at it. If you know one or can meet one or more of them, ask them what they do, how they train. If you don’t know them, find out how they practice and train. If you do this, and only this, you will succeed always and in every endeavor. Even after just one week of executing excellent practices as a chess player or endurance athlete, you will have taken concrete steps towards excellence. After a few months or a year, you will be much much closer to excellence; in fact, you will be the model of excellence yourself.
This has a guaranteed return.Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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Conversations: Arteriogenesis, Angiogenesis and the Itch
Out there, literally …You can learn so many things just by putting yourself out there. It really is true.
The ConversationFor some reason in my sixth decade, I decided to train for and run long distances. Aside from a huge lesson in humility and human frailty, it is teaching me many interesting things. Perhaps the most interesting of all is that you can have a detailed and productive conversation with your own body. What you ask your body to do, provided you use the correct language, it will try to do. Amazing. It’s almost like a conversation with a friend, or some sort of business planning session, except that the participants are You and You. For less than two years now, I have been asking my body to run up and down trails and scramble up and down rocky paths which are too steep to safely run or jog on. My body simply responds by developing strength and flexiblity and balance I never had before.
This just in … from your bodyIn the last year I have noticed the prominence of blood vessels running the down the front of my shins. I think the scientific name for the enlargement of these arteries is arteriogenesis, where exercise causes an increase in flow velocity and the subsequent enlargement of the conduits. But that is not all. There’s also Angiogenesis. The increased flow (and velocity) actually changes your cardiovascular system in that it causes your capillaries (those end points of the arterial system and the beginning points of the venal—return—system) to multiply by both splitting the existing capillaries (intussusceptive angiogenesis) and “sprouting” new capillaries (sprouting angiogenesis). Why does your body do this? Simple. It’s because you asked it to. And the language you speak to your body is one of requesting, through stress, that it provide the answer you are looking for. It is as if you had sent a memo to your body, saying, “Please respond appropriately to this request for more stamina, endurance and strength to accomplish various ultra-marathons. Details below. Thank you very much.” But you must speak it in Stress. Your body will not answer in the language of Stress but rather by increasing the blood flow with enlarged arteries and veins and newly split and sprouted capillaries.
ArteriogenesisAnyway, in my case, except for seeing the new blood vessels, all of this happens rather invisibly. I certainly can’t feel any of it, and I have to take it on faith that arteriogenesis and angiogenesis are actually happening.
AngiogenesisSpeaking of feelings, perhaps the most interesting physical phenomenon of all is how it feels to taper before an event. It gives me something I call the Itch. Above I talked about a conversation you initiate, in the language of Stress, with your body. Now we can talk about a conversation your body will initiate with you, in the language of Itch.
I’ve got … the ItchIt happens like this. I have cranked my body up through training so it can do quanitities of exercise you never dreamed of. Although I train an average of 35 to 50 miles a week, occasionally that gets ratcheted up to 60 or even 70 miles in a one-week period. Having done that, believe it or not, rather than recoiling from the ordeal, after just a day’s recovery, my body wants to do something similar or even more. How does it let me know it wants to get out and run more? It’s the most amazing thing, I get the “Itch.” The Itch is my body’s memo back to me. I just get an itch to run, a restlessness, and it is especially noticeable during the taper. Early in the morning I look at the clock and recall my obligations and I begin to try to find a two- or three-hour block of time in which to run. My incentive is some ultramarathon, but the Itch is physical—I just have to scratch it by running. Normally this Itch is easy to scratch, just lace up the shoes and go; by the end of two or three hours the Itch is gone.
… Still Got It …But with a big event looming, a 30- or 40-mile official run, I have to taper. To taper means to stop working out, almost completely, not only so the stressed parts of the body (muscles, tendons, ligaments) can heal, but also so the muscles can build up an excess of energy which will be used on the big day. But it feels like slamming on the brakes and I begin to go nuts. I start jumping out of my skin. Although I haven’t increased my intake of caffeine or other stimulants, I feel like I have. In my pseudo-caffeinated state, I have trouble getting to sleep, wake frequently and miraculously pop out of bed at 5:15 a.m., raring to go. Unfortunately, the only physical activities I am pemitted in these few days pre-race are a short walk and reading the morning paper. My mind wanders and I look at the clock and realize I can get out for a nice long run in the hills in about two hours. Then, crestfallen, I remember that I am not permitted that luxury. I am a prisoner of Sloth, and I begin to feel like my systems are backing up.
The dreaded … Taper AnxietyI still can’t do this tapering thing very well, but in talks with other, much better runners (well, almost everyone is a much better runner than I am), I find the situation and feelings are the same. I negotiate in advance what I’m going to do on my tapering week. I write it down and determine to stick to it. If I have an official 31.2 mile run on the coming Saturday, then previous Saturday will have to be my last two-hour run. On Sunday I compromise by going for a road bike ride for two hours, because the closed chain motion of bicycling is easy on my legs and the cardio workout will not only be good for me, but also relieve the Itch, at least for a day. I plot out light exercises for Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, promising myself to do nothing and completely veg out on Thursday and Friday. It may be vegging, but it’s no fun at all. I have the Itch, and only the event will scratch it now.
What to do?The last thing I feel, the day before and the day of the event, is a kind of couch potato lethargy. I feel fat and sluggish; in fact, I feel a sense of brotherhood with the slugs and snails of my garden as they creep along. But when the event finally starts I go out and feel really strong, for at least the first four hours, at which time I almost always wish I had tapered a bit more.
Mon semblable, — mon frère (before the run starts, that is)Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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Tape your nipples before going on LSD
“Before going on any LSD trip, be sure to tape your nipples.”
Wise manIt’s the best advice I can give to a guy. Of course, you can use band-aids if you want, but I just use regular medical tape, and I apply it vertically, not horizontally. In order to keep the tape from sticking to my sometimes sensitive nipples, I will take just a bit of tissue, a tiny square, and put it in the middle of the piece of tape, so it won’t stick there when I rip it off afterward. They’re kind of ad-hoc band-aids. I could use a dab of Vaseline there, in the center, but I have other uses for that; besides the tissue works fine.
Hurt so badWhy must you tape your nipples? Well, if you haven’t taped, then after your LSD trip when you enter the shower, the hot streaming water on your chafed and bleeding nipples will cause you excruciating pain. For the entire length of the shower. Make you cry like a little girl, as they say.
Step TwoWhat else should you do? This is a tad delicate, but I strongly suggest that you take a dollop (that’s right, a dollop) of anti-chafing gel or ointment, Body Glide or Bag Balm or good old Vaseline, and apply it liberally down there, underneath it all, in your nethermost region. Indelicate LSD travelers would go ahead and call it the “nut-sack” region, but I am a gentleman, so I will simply refer to the area as the nether-lands.Why must you Vaseline the nether-lands? Well, if you haven’t, then after the LSD trip when you enter the shower, once again your chafed and bleeding nether-lands upon contact with water will cause you excruciating pain. Grown men, tough men, manly men who have run through nettles and thorns without making a sound except perhaps a derisive, snorting laugh, have been known to scream in high-pitched voices for long times when this happens. Don’t let this be a post-LSD experience for you. It can turn a pleasant journey into a bum trip.
This man has nothing to do with your tripWhat exactly is an LSD trip? Well, it would be any run longer than, say, an hour and a half. That’s LSD? Yes, Long Slow Distance. You thought I meant the other one, the Timothy Leary stuff? Well, if I was talking about that stuff, then why in the world would you have to tape your nipples and Vaseline the nether-lands? Silly. (An aside: first, I have been told that the chafing occurs because the salt in perspiration eventually crystallizes and grows big enough crystals so that, as the fabric of the clothing rubs across it literally tens of thousands of times, the crystals act like little razors and slice into the skin—let me say for the record that I don’t know that this is true, but that it certainly FEELS like it is true; second, why is this advice for men? Because women wear appropriate clothing that keeps this chafing from occurring, at least on the upper torso. A sports bra eliminates the nipple chafe, I believe. If men wore the device popularized on Seinfeld, the “man-zere” then perhaps they could be spared the tape or band-aids.)
An LSD tripLong Slow Distance is part of the basic trinity of running. Elite runners, of course, probably have a quadrinity or perhaps even a sextagony of running, but the basic trinity applies to most runners and elite runners as well. One leg of the basic trinity is Long Slow Distance where you go out and simply run, very comfortably and at a pace where you can hold a conversation, for a long distance. Long. Slow. Distance. LSD. In addition to building up psychological and physical endurance, and building stronger bones and tendons and ligaments due to controlled but regular impact, LSD is a fat burning exercise par excellence. It is the speed at which your body accesses and burns fat from all over, frying it (a little) like bacon in a pan, from your hips, butt, waist, neck and from around your muscle sheaths and internal organs. How far is Long Slow Distance? That depends on the individual runner. For someone just starting out it could be as short as a couple of miles, including short walking breaks. For someone who’s done this for a little while, it could be 10, 15 or even 20 miles. For an elite runner, it might be 30 or even 40 miles.
Climb ev’ry mountain …The second leg of the basic trinity is running up and down hills, hill training. This is strength and resistance training for your running muscles, a shorter, harder workout, this is like pumping iron for runners. Do this and you will build stronger quads and glutes and even strengthen your core, neck, biceps and deltoids to a certain degree. You generally don’t have to tape or oil anything to do this.
The torture trackThe third leg is track work, where you run intervals of (relatively) high speed on a track and cool down between the intervals. This is the most hateful of all running exercises, much more hateful than running hills, but it is the best way to improve and refine your oxygen delivery system, and to build runner’s stamina.If you are not satisfied with only a trinity and want, like an elite runner, to have more areas to focus on, then obviously you can do real strength and resistance training in a gym with machines and free weights. While you are there you can work to strengthen your core with crunches and planks and good-mornings and dead-lifts. You can also attend a yoga class for some extra elasticity and flexibility, focus and general well-being, and you can also enroll in some sort of explosive strength training class like plyometrics or Cross-fit.
If unprepared, this could make you go Psycho …As a general rule you won’t need extra tape or Vaseline for any of the trinity, quadrinity or sextagony members, EXCEPT, on threat of excruciation in the shower, NEVER FORGET to tape the nips and lather the nethers before taking any LSD trip. Your body will thank you for remembering, and it will surely punish you if you forget.Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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The Daily Bucket List, Proof of Life
Gray Jay contemplating his bucket listIt is amazing how quickly a concept can enter our minds and vocabulary become part of our everyday phraseology. One of the newest phrases to have become part of our lexicon is “bucket-list”. The concept is not new, of course, but the stand-alone phrase apparently dates back no earlier than about 2006. Your bucket list is the list of things you should do before you kick the bucket. Presumably, accomplishing this will be satisfying, this will somehow complete you. Presumably everyone should either have one or be constructing one. Now. Before it’s too late. Then, presumably, you will be at peace when you kick the bucket. You will have punched all of the various chads of life’s ticket, and you will have proof that you have really lived.
One of five items from a traditional bucket listOf course, the “bucket list” in concept if not in name is nothing new. In fact, it is nothing other than the millenia-old idea of a pilgrimage, the idea of a physical journey at least once during one’s life to a place of great spiritual or moral significance, beginning with the goddess Astarte (later to become Aphrodite and Venus) sometime around 1500 BCE, and moving forward through time to the Temple in Jerusalem (now the Wailing Wall), Christian pilgrimage points in the Holy Land, Santiago de Compostela, Lourdes and Canterbury, Buddhist pilgrimage points of Lumbini and Bodh Gaya in India and all over Asia, and the Hadj obligation for Muslims to visit Mecca once during a life. In our newly secular life, the pilgrimage to religious locations began to be supplanted as early as the time of Goethe who is said to have written around 1788, “Vedi Napoli e poi Muori,” or “See Naples and Die.” In the 1950s Americans took the grand and not so grand tours to Europe (11 countries in 8 days, if it’s Tuesday afternoon this must be Belgium!), or had a lifetime trip to Hawaii. Or they took the kids to Disneyland, or the National Parks. But these pilgrimages, whether sacred or secular, never were called a bucket list. In our growing wealth and mobility, however, we found that we could see ten things that amazed us and that would be good, so twenty must be twice as good, and one hundred would be ten times the pleasure. Since the spiritual and moral aspects of our world seem to have diminished lately, we are left with just a list of places to check off. Been there, done that, check it off the list and let’s move on to Item 79.
No commentSince that moment perhaps six years ago, the world media have given us a Jack Nicholson movie, “The Bucket List”, and a myriad of books, with titles like The Key West Bucket List, The Bucket List for Couples, Bucket List: If Fear Wasn’t a Factor . . ., The Ultimate Bucket List: Over 100 Things . . ., 500 things to Do Before you Kick the Bucket, My Christian Bucket List, The Naughty Bucket List: 369 Sexy Dares, The Ultimate Travel Bucket List: 50 Things . . ., and a digital photography bucket list, a special “bucket list journal/notebook,” a summer bucket list for kids, a backcountry bucket list, a Texas toastmaster’s bucket list, a book on living “the bucket list lifestyle,” a baseball fan’s bucket list (with 162 items), how-to guides and articles for making a bucket list, a doomsday survivor’s bucket list “for every conceivable apocalypse”, and even T-shirts which read, “I should be on your bucket list.”
Bucket list item?When I was a kid I dreamed of traveling to foreign lands. I thought, sitting in my suburban house, that somehow if I could travel far and wide I could expand myself, I could really live. Geography became Significance. I ended up traveling fairly far and fairly wide, and it was worthwhile and significant to me, at least. But those separate trips pale in comparison to the daily, hourly, second by second significance of participating through my senses to where I happen to be at any particularly moment.
Kyoto’s Kiyomizu Temple at NightThis is not to say that seeing Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion on a brilliant summer morning is not worthwhile. It is. As is climbing Mt. Fuji or the Grand Teton, hiking parts of the Appalachian and Pacific Crest trails, rambling through the gothic quarter of Barcelona or passing under the Bridge of Sighs in Venice in a vaporetto. These are nice things to do, worthwhile things. But the idea that you can make up a list of 50 things with famous names (climb Kilimanjaro, see the Sphinx, visit Angkor Wat) and somehow reach satisfaction or enlightenment is ludicrous. I have visited the Golden Pavilion (and the Silver Pavilion and the temple at Kiyomizu) three separate times, but none of those visits or trips to the Forbidden City or Crater Lake can compare with my daily bucket list.
From my Friday a.m. to do listYou see, there is a real bucket list you can check off each and every day, and this bucket list will lead you to satisfaction and enlightenment, and may eventually satisfy your moral and spiritual itch. Your travel guides will be your senses, and because of that, your bucket list every day can be as few as five items long and take no more than a few minutes. So, here it is. Today, really taste something. Don’t just ingest whatever it is you are eating, really taste it, feel how it sits on your tongue and releases its delightful flavors, whether it’s a cup of fresh brewed coffee, tea, or stir-fried vegetables or the slightly caramelized scent of toasted bread. Really taste it. And now, smell something, see something, hear something, feel something.
A drop in the bucket ?Connect with your immediate environment, your unique piece of the globe, and start from the smallest space possible and work your way out, connect with the closest possible life forms and work your way out, connect with the closest people—family and neighbors—and work your way out. See a bug or a slug, then see a junco, a scrub jay, a crow, a hawk or a turkey vulture. See a blade of grass, a leaf on a bush, a tree, a ridge-line full of trees. Smell the tea, smell the breeze, ingest the morning. This is a daily bucket list, this is proof of life, today.
Oregon juncoCopyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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Personal Records
John, gasping for air finishes the mile, setting a personal record.How does this make you feel? Do you need to know his time? What if the time is ten minutes and thirty five seconds? Does that make you smile at such a pitiful result?
Does anybody really know what time it is?Would it make a difference if you knew that John has recently lost 95 pounds and gone from morbidly obese (6 feet, 290 pounds) to slightly overweight at 195 pounds with a little more work to do? Would that make you congratulate him on his 10:35 mile? What if you thought John was 36 but then heard that he was actually 63 (a little numerical dyslexia, Dyslexics of the World, Untie!) ?
The Halcyon Days of High SchoolWhat if, back in high school, John had set the record for the mile, running it in four minutes and twenty three seconds? Then came the passing of decades, the weight gain, etc., so his personal record is really an adult personal record, and he will never actually run a true PR in the mile, since he will never break even six minutes, let alone five minutes. What is your reaction to that?
Content is King, and Context is the King’s ConsortContent must be taken in context, and for runners, context is all, and the personal experience is everything. In any race, ninety-nine percent of all the outside interest will be paid to the person who comes in first. Who won, who was the winner? Among elite athletes, some might make note of the top ten finishers. But individually, across the vast horde of runners in the local 5K and 10K, half-marathons and full marathons, the personal experience is everything. Who won? Well, among runners, very few people really care, because they are focused on their own race, their own context. How did you feel running a 5K? Are you ready to push yourself to a 10K, to a half marathon? What would it mean to you to run a full marathon, or beyond? Are you happy just to be active and running at a time when your age cohort is sinking deeper and deeper into family room couches, sucking on Big Gulps and Buds and watching other people engage in sports?
Don’t be this guyEverything starts with a personal record, of course. You set one some time during your first twelve months or so on the planet, with your baby steps. Everything since then has been a variation on a theme.
The Local Practice Arena /Torture CircleDuring my first ultra-marathon (not having trained for it, by the way), when I hit the aid station at the fifteen-mile mark (of 31.2 miles total) I realized that I had never run that far before. Ever. In my life. And I started to laugh, thinking of Samwise Gamgee in the Fellowship of the Ring, coming to a spot in the Shire beyond which he had never been. He pauses, noting that if he took one more step, it would be the farthest he had ever been. So I took another step, then another and headed on to the next aid station. When I attempted a 100-kilometer ultra-marathon I thought I had trained enough, but later I realized that I was not the one to set those standards; the course was setting those standards and they were different, and higher, than the ones I had trained with. So I gassed out at the 60 kilometer mark, roughly 37 miles. It was a PR, though; I had never gone 37 miles before. It was, and still is, the farthest I have ever been. Afterward I regretted that I had not pushed on, walking, staggering or even crawling to the next aid station at the 44 mile mark. Then my PR would have been 44 miles and not just 37 miles. Funny the way your mind works.
Get a gold medal in contextGo out and establish some norms, establish a few “modern” personal records. If you are really out of shape, then walk out a mile, turn around and return. Now you have a modern PR: two miles without stopping. Find a way before the month is out to better that PR . Maybe you will walk two miles and return, maybe you will jog a mile and return. It doesn’t matter. Set a PR. Then look for a way to better it. You’ll find a better you at that location.Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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The Yes and No of It All
Apollo and his chariotWe live in a digital world, the switch is either on or it’s off, the only numbers we have are Zero and One. It’s a world of Yes or No.
Digital WorldThe sun says Yes. The sun rises and radiates warmth to the atmosphere, the oceans and the earth, and draws water up into the air. The sun’s heat creates thermal updrafts which draw the now wet offshore air onshore. The wet clouds are wrung like sponges as they fly landward and higher over the headlands and capes on the ocean edge, up the contours of the hills and ranges of mountains, and the water falls as either snow or rain on the mountains and in the valleys. This is bright, this is the day, this is filling your lungs with the big breath, this is the big warm Yes.
The big inhalation …The night says No. At night the thermals collapse, the air cools as the cycle is reversed and the breezes blow back offshore. The land, the air and the waters cool and await the next rising of the sun. This is dark, this is the night, this is the big cool No.
Now, exhale, slowlyDay and Night, Sun and Moon, Helios and Selene, Apollo and Dionysus,Yang and Yin, the drawing forth and the returning on a daily cycle. This is the respiration cycle of the earth, the great Yes and No of it all. All day you have taken an immense breath in, now it’s time to breathe it all out.
A shortage looming?Some of us, like me, have trouble saying Yes. It’s congenital, I was born with it, or I was born into it. I was raised with four brothers, hand-me-down jackets and coats, shared bedrooms and limited resources. Given what I know now about the wide world, it was more a world of psychological shortage than actual material dearth—in fact we grew up with the normal suburban excesses of the 1950s and 60s, but perceived shortage is the way of a largish brood, whether people or puppies. You feel there is little, you’ve seen things—desserts, soda pop in the downstairs refrigerator, side dishes—vanish, so you hoard what you have. The truth is, perception is truer than reality, most of the time. And, saying No is fine, it can keep you out of trouble and keep people from constantly wasting your time. But you can’t be ruled by No, you have to learn how to say Yes, too, and I have spent the greater part of the last four decades learning how to say Yes. Yes to adventure, Yes to love, Yes to family, Yes to struggle, Yes to thoughtfulness and inner peace. Yes to life. It’s a hard struggle to say Yes when you have been at least partly programmed to say No, so it is my daily and weekly discipline. Learn to say Yes. And because I am not wired to say Yes, it makes saying Yes all the sweeter. The opening in Genesis is the most stirring Yes I know, this is the Gold Medal Yes:In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
The Gold Medal for Yes goes to …
Let there be sun, Helios, Apollo, Yang. Let there be warmth and light and Yes. Instead of nothing, let there be Yes.
The most delightful Yes—let’s call it the Silver Medal Yes—has to be the one that closes Ulysses, as Molly Bloom is falling asleep and she remembers her seduction in Gibraltar:I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes
The Silver Medal for Yes goes to …There is also a power of No, or better said, a power in No. You’re not saying No to Life, you’re just filtering out what you’re going to say Yes to. But Yes and No are not the same magnitude. In this sense, No must be smaller than Yes, No must be a subset of Yes. From Earth, the moon appears to be the same size as the sun, but that is the optical illusion we are blessed with. In reality, the moon is not even a grain of sand in the sun’s shoe, it’s just that the moon is close and the sun is far. You say the big Yes once and for all and completely to Life and all it has to offer you, and you say the little No from time to time, selectively.
This seems simpleSome people have trouble saying No and end up hopelessly committed to committees, task forces, work groups and volunteer organizations. No matter how worthy any or all of these projects may be, always go back to one of the most important filters for an enlightened life. Is it robust and authentic to you? If not, say No. Just say No. There are so many people and groups asking for our time and money that a good life requires you to be selective. No matter how much money you have, each of us only has twenty four hours in each day. Ask yourself not only if you can help out a worthy cause (there are many worthy causes) but also, and very selfishly, what are you actually going to get out of it? Think long and hard about this basic truth: Time is All You Have. So, is this committee really you, are you really adding value to the process, as opposed to just attending and spending your time, and is it the highest and best use of your time? If not, say No. Think of the moon at night, think of the Earth exhaling after the long, hot inhalation of the day and just say No. Will spending a year on the board of a local charity make you a better you. If not, politely but firmly bow out. Use whatever excuses you feel you must, and don’t feel guilty. Even if you take the time you were spending in endless task force meetings for the local Red Cross or the Haitian Orphans Fund and use it to read that book or take that trip you’ve always wanted to take, don’t for one minute feel guilty. You never know where the chain of chance will take you, and that book or that trip may open up a new avenue of inquiry and adventure that will complete your life.
On task … ?But most of all, don’t be bullied into joining or continuing some activity which is not authentic and robust to you because of how you perceive others may think of you. If you find yourself saying, “I’ve always been part of the United Way, it’s part of my civic identity,” then forget about your civic identity for a few minutes and focus on your real identity. Life is precious, life is short, and your short and precious life needs to be authentic, robust and the highest and best use of your time. These are the hard No’s. The easy, or easier, No’s are saying No to bad habits, No to sitting on the couch eating sugary foods and drinks, No to lolling around an entire Sunday with nothing to show for it except watching three professional football games on your flat screen TV, No to being a fan of something instead of being a participant in something. There are a lot of things you will have to say No to in order to be whole enough, to have enough time and energy, to say Yes to life.
The Ten No-No’sThere is a dearth of quotes about No, other than the Ten Commandments. No does not lend itself to words, actually. No is the sudden cooling of the afternoon, No is the way trees and buildings turn indigo and then jet black after the sun has vanished and while the sky darkens to night, No is the first star at night and then the moonrise, and No is the wheeling of the stars across the night sky.
Selene, Moon GoddessLet there be moon, Selene, Dionysus, Yin. After the heat of the day and the sunny Yes, let there be cool and dark and No.So, as the sun rises and as the sun sets, as the moon rises and as the moon sets, say Yes, and say No, exactly when you are supposed to.Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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Life’s Threshing Floor
Linville Gorge Wilderness, North CarolinaOne morning after breakfast, forty-two years ago I was sitting in a small clearing, high in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina. It was the custom after breakfast for one of the Outward Bound instructors to read something important. They probably doubted that the teenagers in their care were listening, but two readings made an indelible impression on me. The first was Thoreau’s explanation from Walden of how to live, couched in an explanation of why he went to the woods:
Walden Pond todayI went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.
Worth remembering …The second one was a reading from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, which explains the only deal we are offered about love:
But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floorInto the seasonless world where you shall laugh,but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.So far, these two statements about life and love are the best I have ever found.First, live deliberately, take all that life has to give, and do not at the end of life discover that you have not lived. Filter out that which is not “life” (what I generally refer to as “not robust and not authentic”) and make sure that, during your time on the earth, you can claim to live fully, at least by your own working model of what that means. And second, heed the warning not to opt for the cheap and happy version of love and life, the situation-comedy version of existence. If you want the easy way, then you might as well take your exit now out of something called “love’s threshing floor” and content yourself with living a pale copy of the full emotional journey that is life.
Love’s threshing floor. Seldom seen today, a threshing floor is a smooth surface in agrarian cultures where sheaves of grain are brought and then literally crushed underfoot (oxen or donkeys) until the straw, the chaff and the grain are separated. The crushed crop is now pitched into the air where the wind blows away the chaff, and even the straw, and leaves the heavy grain on the floor. The chaff is gone, the straw is raked together for use as animal bedding and eventually fertilizer for the next crop, and the grain is collected and stored for winter and beyond. For this reason, threshing floors are often located on a rise so that the wind’s work is more easily accomplished. But love’s threshing floor, what could that mean? The threshing floor is where the crop is beaten and sorted, it is not where the rubber hits the road but where the grain hits the floor, is collected and your very survival is assured. Put another way, threshing is the crux of the agricultural process, the final and crucial step where man’s and nature’s work is stored up for another year of life. If something goes wrong with the crop or the threshing, then suffering and perhaps even death lie ahead. The threshing floor is the place and moment when life gets the chance to continue.
I remembered these words a few weeks ago when a friend wrote to me of her distress; a friend’s young child was dying of cancer and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The older I get the sadder any suffering anywhere makes me. And nothing can be as sad as when a child has to suffer.Sometimes we learn from the youngest of us what’s really important, and where surprising courage can come from. I guess the one thing I have noticed when dealing with any sort of real sadness is that the pain we feel is in line, or commensurate, with our ability to feel pain. The Beatles said the love you take is equal to the love you make, and its corollary will be that the suffering you endure will be roughly equal to the love you extend. If we feel deeply sad, it’s because we feel deeply, and if we feel deeply it means we’ve made a brave connection to others. As Gibran warned, if you only want love’s peace and pleasure, you are missing the whole point and will never really know love. Love’s ecstasy and joy means that you will, at some time, endure love’s bitter loss.And I thought of how wonderfully serendipitous English is, to have the verbs “live” and “love” separated by only a single letter. Orthographically speaking, live and love are three-quarters the same, almost synonyms. In a sense they are completely the same. Maybe if I reworked Gibran’s words about love for life:
Life’s pathBut if in your fear you would seek only life’s peace and life’s pleasure,then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of life’s threshing-floor,Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.I think that is true. So it’s our choice: is it to be the sit-com version of life and love, or the threshing floor?Copyright © 2012 Douglas Wilson McCarty
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Practicing a miraculous life each and every day
