“I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life.”
-Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
“The great mistake of my life was taking a military education."
-Robert E. Lee
Wavering between newsy and philosophical this morning.
It was a great weekend. We had another couple over for food, drink, and great conversation on Saturday night. He's a CPA, she's a yoga instructor. Both spent the better part of their adult lives in Seattle, but came home as the pandemic began. Not a perspective we much encounter down in the panhandle.
Then Sunday we trudged down the hill for a service on the lawn at Christ Church, clouds giving way to brilliant blue skies as if on cue for the Eucharist, a harpist transporting us all to a rapturous place as church bells rang from the belfry of the Presbyterian Church down the street.
After a late breakfast it was time to tackle the lawn. In a spasm of nostalgia that overcame common sense, I had purchased a manual push mower at Lowe's, just like the one my grandfather used to mow his grass in southern California. This is not, however, southern California, and grass finer than frog's hair was merely brushed aside by the blades. I had combed our yard rather than mowing it. Peg figured she could improve on my performance, and in bare feet and bright red toenails matching her Georgia Bulldogs jersey she in turn combed the yard with the push mower.
Later when we took our evening walk, ascending the hill to visit the graves of the Sinclaires who built the mansion where we once lived, we noted that everyone else had achieved the same result with their patchy, wild yards, even with power mowers. I felt better about my purchase.
This morning after P left for work I read the paper, and then a little of my book by a retired Army officer and West Point professor's regarding his struggles over his lifelong relationship with the Lost Cause. All hits home for me, all has me questioning the moorings of my sense of self, a descendant of Confederate soldiers.
Jo Jo, being fascinated with the light and movement on my iPad, sat in my lap purring and flatulating. Her world is safe and happy.
Finally growing bored with the scrolling text, she hopped down and descended the steps into the yard.
A few moments later I heard howling below me, terrified screams of a kitten who sounded like she was being eaten by a badger. I scrambled down into the front yard and encountered a scene that just made me laugh.
See those little triangles at the bottom of the skirting below the porch? Jo Jo had tried to jump through one, but did not factor in her distended belly after a big breakfast. All I could see was a cat's hindquarters flailing wildly, legs kicking and tail fluffed in terror. She was more determined than ever to make it through the opening, and ever more stuck. I grabbed some shoes off the porch so I could trudge through the landscaping and rescue her, just as she came to the realization that she could back out of the wedge and make her escape. The way to safety isn't always forward.
Maybe there's a lesson hiding in all this somewhere. Metanoia.
This morning's struggle for me again involves home and the virus. Maybe a month ago I scheduled an in-person mediation in Panama City for a week from today. The pandemic appeared to be ebbing, photos on Facebook showed happy families on Florida's beaches and at Disneyworld, and life seemed normal down there. Since then the delta variant has swept across the South like a flash fire, and I've known two men younger than me who've died of Covid in the last week. One of my oldest and best friends in PC came down with Covid although he was fully vaccinated, and complained on a Zoom call of being muddy-headed and forgetful even after he'd supposedly recovered. And all this was caused, in large measure, by one political strain that insisted on foregoing vaccinations and masks that might have given the virus fewer vectors, that might have made the summer's return to normalcy sustainable.
Now, here we are again. And without knowing for sure, I have a sense that one of the parties to this mediation scheduled for next week will likely be both maskless and unvaccinated, a part of the death cult that has taken hold over a huge swath of the population.
So, this morning I'll call the lawyers and probably lose a couple friends by telling them I'm not going down there, not right now, not in the midst of a plague that means every encounter with a person from the time I open the door of the Columbia at ECP means a potential infection with Covid. I don't owe them that, even if it means they never hire me for another mediation.
Last night we watched another episode of the Power of Myth, the series of interviews between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell that examine how we find meaning in life and express what we've learned through metaphors, through myth. Last night touched on a lot of things, but Campbell's focus was on the quest for which he invented the phrase, "follow your bliss". That doesn't mean having fun, although fun is not excluded. Campbell suggests, with reference to myths spanning the globe, that "bliss" comes from carving out of our lives of duty and responsibility a place and time to hear the song of the world, to free our imaginations. If one is of my religious tradition, perhaps a liminal space to hear that still, small voice.
If you are like me, you've always held people who live this way with a certain amount of bemusement and contempt. Life is work. Life is responsibility. We are measured by our accomplishments. For Pete's sake, have you seen my curriculum vitae? It's something else.
But it's also a sign of an existence that has epically missed something. Like the real value of life. In Nietzsche's allegory, man begins as a camel, kneeling and saying "put a load on me." Then once he's loaded he rises and becomes a lion, who grows stronger as the load grows heavier. The lion then fights a dragon whose name is "Thou Shalt", ultimately killing the dragon at which point the lion is transformed into a child. He lives into himself, is fully actualized by freeing himself from duty for duty's sake.
It's no coincidence that my childhood hero, Robert E. Lee, built a life around duty. "Duty is the sublimest word in the language; you can never do more than your duty; you shall never wish to do less." I memorized that line, and tried to live it.
But the sentiment is completely wrong. I had to get old to figure this out, much like Lee apparently as he looked back on his life with the reflection that began this essay. Lee was the "marble man", the consummate soldier and gentleman who allowed a sense of duty to lead him into the tragic mistake of resigning his commission and taking up arms against his own country. A tragedy not just for him, but for the entire nation. And although the generations that followed gave him a free pass, made him into a sort of deity in fact, all that is changing now as we reflect on the legacy of the Confederacy and the principles it represented. A life of duty is vulnerable to a single bad choice.
And we don't have forever to get it right. This morning there was an essay in the New York Times on the end of summer in middle Tennessee, the author reflecting on how things change as we transition from miles of road ahead to miles left behind, and how we need to rest and appreciate this moment in time and space.
I feel my jaw clench as I think of the parade of duties that lie ahead today, but look down at Jo Jo back asleep in my lap, purring softly and not a care in the world, and remember there needs to be time in there to follow my bliss.
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