Additional notes on the writing:
Right and left brain: Going with conventional wisdom, I find it useful to distinguish between the right and left brain to explain how people process experience from globally dissimilar orientations: Those who are right-brained tend to be intuitive, creative, hence unpredictable, thinkers. They are qualitatively oriented, big-picture thinkers who experience the world in terms that are descriptive, subjective, analogical, metaphoric and symbolic. Left-brained people tend to be more quantitative and analytical. They pay close attention to details, are guided by logic and prefer to take things literally. This schematic, based on a hypothetical inborn bias (the favoring of one cerebral hemisphere over the other), is simplistic but it is close enough to how the brain actually functions to serve as a device for facilitating the telling of my story.
(What follows is the text, minus footnotes, in sections separated by Roman numerals I - LIX.)
I
I have a heater trained on my feet. It is April, 2018. The temperature is low for April. Snow lingers here and there in the landscape. I am sitting here listening to the aggressive whispering of my tinnitus above the other background white noise, the rushing of the heater. My eyes are tired. Every time I change my focus, a floater, like a dead spider, slides out of view. When I refocus, it slides back. I have learned to live with it.
When I am sitting (as I am sitting now in my over-stuffed chair), legs crossed, body at rest, head slightly forward like one of those desk lamps with a flexible neck, trained on my notebook, I don't have to think of my neuropathy because I'm not asking my feet or legs to do anything. Only my hands and wrists are busy and my eyes and my brain. My living being is reduced to some very simple functions, simple compared to what I could be doing.
I just made myself breakfast, an egg from our neighbor's chickens, scrambled in onion finely chopped and fried in butter in an iron skillet, and two pieces of sourdough toast.
Shirley (my wife of 14 years) is at yoga at our neighbors who own the chickens, a short walk through the woods. Our life is good here and most of the time I am happy, happy with my situation and how things turned out. Fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago I see how tenuous my way into the future was. I was figuring things out. I guess you might say I was getting closer to articulating what I didn't want my life to look like. I was engaged in a high-stakes process of elimination. And I can say something similar about my life right now, but is that how I want to approach the rest of my life?
I feel a little like Santiago in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, when he gets to the oasis. We have been teaching that book as an example of the hero's journey. Santiago, the shepherd, is living in the ordinary world of Andalusia. Once he crosses to Tangier in Africa, he is on the threshold of the nonordinary world and he is on his way to becoming the alchemist, living the heroic life, stepping into his personal legend. The oasis is where he encounters Fatima at the well, his soul-mate, but he doesn't stop there. If he did, so explains the old alchemist (his desert mentor) when Santiago is losing heart and considers returning to marry Fatima, his life would be good for a while; influence and wealth would be his, but little by little he would lose his ability to communicate with the Soul of the World. His life would become routine and he would forget about his personal legend. The oasis would become his world, his life a loop.
This place, that we call Rocks and Trees (a neighborhood that began thirty years ago as an intentional community), because it meets so many of my needs, has become my oasis. (Lucky for me, I have found my desert mentor in my dreaming, which I credit for not letting me abandon my personal legend.)
To be continued. . .
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
