July 5, 2010

Drumbeat blisters my ears,
Delivers a belly punch.
Eyes closed, I count my thoughts,
My concentration misfires—I wince.

Oh, let me be cradled at evening,
Saved from clamor.
Noise-free, I long
To be carried away.

June 30, 2010

I have misunderstood,
I have heard what you did not say.
How easy, how natural,
How perfectly normal,
To assume your words were clear.
How luxurious to hear your explanation,
How blissful then to understand.
How peaceful to have no reply.

R. Harold Hollis (Santa Fe, New Mexico)

On the Go

“Hey, I’m retired. What’s all this craziness?” So I reminded myself yesterday afternoon, following a 1500-mile round trip to my home in Texas—in the throes of summer—a trip that was about work. Sure, it was by choice. By choice I had once again overwhelmed myself and my tiny condo here at the foot of the mountains with stuff, and so I chose to make a run to Texas to remove some of this stuff to my Texas barn home. There it waits an opportunity to belong to someone else this fall when I trek to Texas again for the fall antiques market.

For the better part of seven years, I have fretted over the small portico on the west side of the barn. The portico was put up in haste by someone I had hired. It was part of a larger project, and it came at the tail end of three weeks of working against an unrealistic deadline. As is often the case with contractors, he had underestimated the time required by the project, and he had his two sons half ass the portico at the last minute. Finally, on this recent trip to Texas, a friend accepted my invitation to go along—and work—in the Texas summer—to make this portico right and lovely.

Even if you’re smart by braving the humidity in the early morning before the day begins to take its toll, Texas summers are tough, especially for folks who have escaped to the high and dry of 7000 feet, even if these folks grew up in Texas or have spent long years near the Gulf coast. Once again, I puzzle over how my forbears tolerated the heat and the mosquitoes—and without air conditioning. And again, I remind myself that I didn’t grow up with air conditioning in the 1950s. That luxury came when I, the youngest of three, was in college.

My friend, who had apparently forgotten what 98 degrees and humidity feels like, discovered quickly on day one of our efforts to make right this terribly wrong portico. Actually he was doing the making. It was his design, his plan. I just bought the materials, provided the tools, and served as helper and questioner. “Shouldn’t we fasten all of the old two by sixes with screws?” “Shouldn’t we wait until early tomorrow morning to work?”

But I remind myself that I’m retired. Each time I go away from Texas—usually for at least two months at a time—during what I also remind myself is the growing season—I come back to one of two things. Either Texas has had rain and the place is a jungle, lush with the blooms that can prosper in heat beating away each day. Or, Texas hasn’t had rain, and only the weeds are prospering nonetheless. Regardless of the circumstance, it all spells work. Our part of Texas had close to 10 inches of rain in early June. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around the reality. Yet I remind myself that blooms and weeds are far easier on the eye and soul than an untended garden that has suffered the Texas summer without water.

As I finally sat down yesterday in my tiny living room here in New Mexico—following the return leg of the trip to Texas, portico repaired and stained, garden untended though flourishing right now, and following a day of tending to matters that just needed taking care of—I thought, “What’s all this craziness?” “I am retired!” Even the things that feed my spirit, which right then were just one more chore, had little appeal.

All I had done for over a week is go. I needed a second wind. I needed to make a different choice or two, right then. The dusty county road that leads to my place was already a 14-hour drive behind me, and the chores of choice biding their time until my return to Texas in late summer. As soon as I cross something off the list of that place, at least two new things make their way onto the list. They all require time, energy, and most often, money. I give thanks for a willing, capable friend.

This morning I’m back to my routine here. Road weary still, I headed to the little gym in our condo community at 5:50 a.m. Last night I chose to go to the weekly practice session of the drum choir I joined in January. This morning I go to my volunteer work in the visitor center of the Audubon center. Right now just about everything seems like drudgery, even though I know that all of these choices add meaning to my life. The monthly spiritual guide that I read most mornings went unnoticed on my trip to Texas. I thought I was too busy to take time each morning. So this morning, after my trip to the gym, I opened the guide to the reading that I would have read 10 days ago, if I had taken the time. “Give me the strength to be free,” it begins. “What pictures come to your mind when you see or hear the word ‘freedom’?...Are you ready to jump in your car and get on an open road under the blue sky?...Or is there some kind of change or reordering that you feel compelled to do?” (Science of Mind for June 12, 2010)

The writer of the meditation quotes Howard Thurman (1899-1981). According to my favorite Internet friend, Wikipedia, Thurman was an influential American author, philosopher, theologian, educator and civil rights leader. He was Dean of Theology and the chapels at Howard University and Boston University for more than two decades. He authored 20 books and in 1944 helped found the first racially integrated, multicultural church in the United States. Thurman “spoke of freedom as the ability to deal with the realities of one’s situation so as not to be overcome by them.”

The writer continues, “I found that…freedom and I are often having a tug-of-war about that very thing. Initially I feel free to choose to get involved in this or that, but when I have taken on a large chunk of ‘to-dos,’ I feel so overwhelmed that it is difficult to think, sleep, or even eat. In a sense, this can be like self-sabotage because I become so overwhelmed that I give up everything.” She closes with the affirmation, “I am free to be, for the Power within me can handle it all.”

Over the years I’ve been reminded that “it’s all about choices.” My habit is not to wrap my mind around this—what do we call it: truth, premise—even though more and more I know it to be so. I get to choose, even something as simple as opening my little magazine to the meditation I didn’t read 10 days ago—a message that was spot on for just how I’ve been feeling for a few days. And I get to choose to pay attention to the message. I give thanks. And so it is.

On the Go—Santa Fe, New Mexico (June 22, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis

Spare Me

To all of the trash talking and divisiveness that happens right before our eyes, right where live, I say “No”. Yesterday I received a welcome message from a sojourner I don’t even know reminding me that efforts to spread misinformation meant to enflame and divide don’t have to go unchallenged.

It is sometimes hard for me to wrap my mind and heart around the teachings most of us learn as we grow up. We are all loved equally by God, regardless of how we imagine and define god. We are all worthy, regardless of how well we are taught to believe in our unworthiness. When we judge ourselves and others unworthy, we do so out of fear that we fail to recognize as just that. We are all equal and perfect in God’s eyes, all equally deserving in God’s eyes. God’s abundance is right here, now, not in some distant, hoped-for heaven. In God’s eyes, none of us has a birthright or earned right to more than someone else, especially at the expense of someone else.

We are all in this together. We succeed and fail together. I read this, I am told this, and I believe it. I give thanks for the reminder that you and I are not at war, regardless of what you mistakenly believe. To the notion that we gain courage and strength at someone else’s expense, I say to myself, “No”. Sometimes I have the courage to say to the messenger, “No.” Spare me your lies and hate. Spare me your fear masquerading as truth. Spare me your dissatisfaction. Spare me your belief in failure. If hate feeds you and you think that is how I’m nurtured, spare me, please. And so it is.

Spare Me—Santa Fe, New Mexico (June 10, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis

Thank You

It’s been over 30 years since a friend in Austin Texas gave me some of the best advice a still-young sojourner can get. We had been talking about parent-child relationships—really the complications of my own relationship with my mother and my friend's tapestry of experiences as a divorced mother of three bright, independent-spirited children. As I told the same story again—one that I had revisited over and over and woefully continued to revisit for another three decades—my friend said, “Harold, parents do the best they can. They don’t look at a child in the crib and say, ‘I’m going to f--k you up.’” I don’t ever want to forget that wisdom, even though I am not a parent. My mother is dead three years now, and I still mourn at times that we never made a complete peace, even though she was a wonderful and loyal friend until the very end of her life here. It is what it is.

Relationships of any kind are complicated—friends, siblings, professional, romantic—and we all too easily forget that on any given day we are most likely doing the best we can. On the continuum of our behaviors—if such a model is appropriate for talking about the good and the ugly that we are capable of as human beings—we are making our way in the way that seems to work for us at the time. What any of us does on any given day—how we relate to one another, the peace or joy that we bring to ourselves or that we offer as gifts to others, regardless how small the offering might seem, the “hell on earth” that manifests in similar measure—the sounding of our lives is all part of the journey, the journey home to our center, to the Divine of which we are all expressions, as I was reminded in reading from “Science of Mind” magazine this morning.

Are we dealt a hand? Are we mostly choice makers? Are we victims? We work with life the best we can. Earlier today I saw a group arrive at the nature preserve where I volunteer one morning each week. I didn’t pay much attention, although I noticed that they sat at a picnic table near the visitor center and shared a meal. “Early in the day for lunch,” I thought, but went about my task of filling the feeders with seed and hummingbird nectar. Only later did I realize that the group was made up of three mentally challenged adults and their caregivers, when one of the caregivers brought her charge into the visitor center. With great tenderness, she shepherded the young man around the small visitor center, commenting when I asked if they had enjoyed the trail that it was nice, “but that Jeff was frightened coming back down” the steps that lead up to the trail. “Yes, those steps are challenging,” I remind myself aloud. I walked with them as they left the visitor center, where another of the caregivers waited outside the door, a young man, smiling as he gathered the flock.

Do the next right thing. That is a choice we sentient beings have all day long every day. Here in this sanctuary where some come to work, others to volunteer, and many to walk the trails and delight in the birds, evidence of other wildlife and the typography above 7000’, I am reminded as visitor after visitor comes into the center—most eager to talk about the experience of just being here—I am blessed, once again—in remembering the health I enjoy and the independence that I assume each day is my very right. One visitor this morning from Florida walked the lower trail while his wife, who wasn’t up to the challenge, waited in the car. He came into the center to thank me—“No, thank you,” I’m thinking—telling me that he had seen a Spotted Towhee on the trail, as if this had made his day. I noticed earlier in the morning a small group pushing two of their companions in wheelchairs up to the small landing that leads to the trailhead. One of them came into the center to say, “Thank you,” telling me that they were from one of the pueblos nearby. “No, thank you,” I’m thinking. And so it is.

Thank You--Santa Fe, New Mexico (May 18, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis

Mother's Day

I made my first hike of the year yesterday afternoon. I went alone, which is usually how I entertain myself, regardless of where I am. Although it makes me a little sad—to be reminded that I didn’t have a companion to join me on this outing—I realized a long time ago that there are harsher truths in life than spending much of my time in sole pursuit.

As I made my way up and down the trail, which to my surprise was still blanketed with heavy drifts of now-dirty snow in areas where the sun hasn’t yet done its work, I passed several families—perhaps on a mother’s day outing. The last, a young couple dragging a stroller up the trail, prompted me to say to the young woman, “I guess ‘Happy mother’s day’ is in order”. “Thank you,” she replied, smiling. It seemed a little strange to be saying that to someone young enough to be my granddaughter, especially on a day where I was thinking about my own mother.

Earlier in the afternoon I had received an email from a friend. “I wish you a good mother’s day, yes, I know you´re not a mother but think about it there might be a little of a mother in you. Let´s hope so….” In church on this Sunday morning, the minister wished all of us a happy mother’s day, then proceeded to talk about masculine/feminine archetypes and male/female qualities that characterize each of us. “Interesting,” I answered my friend’s email—that you should acknowledge my nurturing ways, especially since that was at the heart of the talk given by our minister just two hours earlier. With a smile, later in the day I wished the tattooed 20-something male sacker at the super market a happy mother’s day, but I think the whole notion of male/female qualities within each of us was lost on him. He smiled back, nonetheless.

I guess the point of all of this comes down to celebrating who we are. Eventually, we are all orphans. In the three years since our mother died, I have made peace with the truth that I can’t walk up the road to her house and fix her a bowl of Cream of Wheat or pick up the phone and say hello, without giving it a second thought, to anyone from our parents’ generation—not anymore. Only one aunt—our Aunt Edna by marriage—remains from that generation. And at 83, she is living with a terminal diagnosis. Living friendly with the news, it seems, she is taking each day for what it brings. I saw her a few weeks ago. Although I was a little frightened (What do you say to someone who is facing the inevitable news of our finality?), I realized quickly that day—as she sat in the passenger seat of her granddaughter’s pickup truck, ready for the return trip to her home some 200 miles away—that loving feelings trump whatever fears cause us to feel uncertain. We visited for only 15 minutes. I almost made it through without crying. But when I told her that I named her and all of her family in the list of blessings I speak each night, I couldn’t contain the emotion I felt at remembering, remembering. And one important truth sitting arms outstretched on the front of my brain is that we are all in this together.

I chose to live in this place where I have no blood connections—not that any such connections guarantee anything at all. There are no Sunday family dinners here, at least not for me, and not of the kind that I recall from all of the years of living around family. But somehow that seemed all right when I stood where Big Tesuque stream crosses the road that leads to almost 12,000 feet. With the water rushing behind me and in front of me, I fixed my eyes on that tumbling water making it way around a fallen aspen and down, down, how far I don’t really know. I stood there, legs akimbo of sorts, my hands resting on my hiking pole, and I breathed and counted, trying to stay focused on the sounds of the wind and the water and the cool afternoon air, wrapping itself around my legs, in short pants for the first time this season. I made it to 10 times 20, breathing in and exhaling my emptiness, and I found a lovely peace. Alone I was, in one sense, but somehow it didn’t seem so lonely, as I made my way back down, greeting families and even one sole sojourner such as I. I am reminded in all that I choose to read that we are never alone. Sometimes we long for quiet times, sometimes we long for the company of others. Sometimes we long for something we know not. And so it is.

Mother’s Day—Santa Fe, New Mexico (May 10, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis

On a Sunday Afternoon

We all have those experiences where on recalling the joy we felt, we for some reason have to visit the notion of not having had the experience. Surely it’s not just me who has to tantalize himself by imagining some disappointment. Such was Sunday afternoon.

My first taste of music from the hearts of a mostly octogenarian group was the British documentary, “Young at Heart”, which tells the story of a group of elders in Massachusetts. The film focuses on the process of these men and women coming together and then preparing for performance—the frustrations of the director who formed the group, the tenacity of the performers, many of whom struggle with health problems, and the health roller coaster that ultimately leads to the performance being dedicated to two of the men who died before the group finally took the stage. It is the story of triumph, loss, and celebration.

Had I not picked up the Friday arts magazine from the local newspaper and read about “Lifesongs,” had I not convinced myself to head downtown to the performing arts center in spite of a cold, overcast early May afternoon with temperatures hovering around 40, had I been put off by the innocent challenge of free tickets with no reservations—how many people will show up, how early do I have to get there, and will I have to stand in the cold waiting for the theater to open—had I not understood somewhere deep inside that a potentially heartfelt experience awaited me, I wouldn’t know what I had missed. But I showed up and I found myself wiping away tears throughout two hours, until I finally just gave up on the finale.

I know, of course, that the memory of loved one’s lost tugged at me throughout the event, though one of the story tellers was only in his 50s—a handsome Hispanic man battling Parkinson’s disease—and an elegant woman poet I assumed to be in her 70s or 80s, even though her hair was colored jet black, turned out to be my age, a mere 66 years. Many stories from many men and women were set to music, a collaboration of the story tellers and the talented artists who translated these stories to instrument and voice and body motion. Photographs taken by some of the storytellers were projected onto a large screen at the back of the stage while their words were spoken against a lyrical backdrop of music.

Four of the storytellers were on stage—a part of the performance, each in a wheelchair—while others were in the audience, including one man who had asked that he not be pointed out. I don’t remember ever before witnessing such a rich coming together of community—nursing home residents, hospice patients, nurses and other caregivers, artists young and not as young, and so much honesty. Musical and performance perfection was not the purpose, and yet, the afternoon couldn’t have been more perfect—for me.

“Step by step that’s the way that we started
Step by step under the Stars
Not too fast, kinda slowly
That’s the way that I like to dance
That’s the way that I like to dance”

Dancing by the Moonlight—by Bits and Pieces

So on a gray, cold Sunday afternoon, as I walked briskly back to my car parked several blocks away from the theater, I smiled and remembered and I gave thanks for the groups and individuals who gave themselves to a process that had culminated in an afternoon—something that couldn’t be repeated, even though a similar performance had been given the night before in a neighboring city 60 miles to the south. I smiled and remembered and gave thanks for the love—love that was obvious in the faces and love spoken. It is in giving that we receive. And so it is.

On a Sunday Afternoon—Santa Fe, New Mexico (May 3, 2010)
R. Harold Hollis