Recently, I failed to survive my probation as a new hire at Metro Transit here in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. I felt just terrible in the aftermath. My prospects were good when I took this position as I'd a reasonable amount of success previously driving school bus and then metro mobility buses.
My training at Metro Transit was thorough. When I passed my initial written tests and road test, I felt confident as I soloed on city streets doing route work in the morning and evening rush hours along Interstate 394 and Washington and University Avenues of Minneapolis and St. Paul. In the morning, the bus with slight exception was forty foot Gillig bus while in the afternoon it would be a much longer articulated bus. The articulated bus (looks like an accordion between front and rear sections) was especially snakelike to drive while the forty footer was like a big bread box.
As events unfolded, the split shift work proved my undoing. There was something like seven hours between shifts. When I came in the door at night, I'd have to be to bed by 9 P.M. and up by about 4:30 AM.
The first warning sign I had was the week after Memorial Day weekend, a three day weekend for me. I fell asleep in the evening on the couch without going to bed one of those nights. The dispatcher awakened me in the morning when I failed to report for duty on time. I was punished with loss of wages but it was clear I'd given my employer a dagger to hang over my head. As a probationary employee, the employer needed no reason to terminate my employment and the union which collected initiation fees and monthly dues had no legal response within its agreement were I to be terminated from employment.
About two months later, the second event was a pull-out accident from a bus stop. A single car cut-out in the sidewalk for commercial vehicles alongside of the bus stop presented no risk if I pulled out my vehicle my moving forward on the street with a gradual lane change if needed. However, the bus ahead of me deployed its wheel chair ramp and I made a sharp turn into the driving lane to my right. This caused my bus to invade the space occupied by a parked vehicle. I did not know I had struck this vehicle, but subsequently I had to admit that I did not look to see in my right hand mirror that I was clearing the vehicle parked in the cut out. As a professional driver, I was not allowed any excuse for my mistake (which I accept). I had been educated by all of my previous employers about tailswing on buses (especially school buses).
In the week following the accident, I fell asleep a second time without setting the alarm clocks (after the first incident I'd bought a second alarm clock and would set both of them). The decision of management was to terminate my employment with this latest infraction.
Of course I felt devastated. Fortunate for me, I behaved honorably in taking responsibility for both my accident damaging another's property and my failure to report to work on time on two different occasions.
I had feelings about the way I'd been treated. I was treated harshly by a system which believes elimination of probationary employees sets the standard for what comes after probation. Of course this is not true. The treatment of non-probationary employees provides for remediation by the union and management for the same errors I'd made (not termination). I know I felt shame at my personal failure as I have a strong work ethic and the last thing I'd wanted to do was to fail at making my job change a success. My employer's consequence is it lost a professional and professionally trained bus operator.
My whole effort was to behave professionally and as a gentleman, but I had not owned the price I was paying to make it through probation. In reality I put much stress upon myself in addition to employer supplied threats and requirements. My behavior had its price. I suffered an anxiety attack shortly after the termination which presented itself as a heart attack.
The good news is that I turned to God for support in dealing with the anxiety and the job loss. I was the beneficiary of prayers for me and my loving family provided some self-employment income to me and gifted gas money to help with the transition.
The reason I'm sharing this episode of my life with my readers is that I'm grateful that God took me out of a situation in which I could not succeed and put me into a better situation (but this better situation is a story for another day). I have always believed that for an ethical employee God is the real employer and God alone provides us with our daily bread.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
Reflections on the Water
I do not want my previously stated positions found in earlier blogs on the non-existence of God and God's coming into existence to redeem humankind or to reclaim humankind as his own children to be misconstrued as a denial of the sciences which focus on this universe.
It is in this universe that we live and die and for that matter have our experience of God. I have a deep respect for science and only remind my readers that "science" means knowledge. The limited use of the word science for the inductive and deductive sequence of reproducible occurrences and prediction of outcomes in nature is not to be messed with by me (although many true believers in God think God is undermined by the success of science).
I obviously do not accept that the modern scientific community has any business concluding that atheism is anymore scientifically based than deism is so based.
The greater dimension than physics and chemistry can ever come to know is the larger than existence dimension of God. It is in concluding that a personal relationship with God is procurable by we so ordinary human beings that the spiritual domain has efficacy for we the living. This experience is well founded in human history and the personal experience of saints and mystics. I love the fact that Adam in the creation mythology of the Fertile Crescent walked and talked with God. I absolutely adore the notion that we are intended by God to be conversant with God on our good days and our bad. I also love the fact that Mother Theresa struggled with the non-existence of God, but wildly lived the life of one who permitted the God of Love to move through her into service to the outcasts of India.
The scurrilous remark of a Christian pastor was that God does not hear the prayers of the Jewish people. I know the humorous retort of God upon hearing the remark goes something like this: "Why listen to the prayers of someone who talks to me all the time?" So much for the self-righteous view of salvation.
It is in this universe that we live and die and for that matter have our experience of God. I have a deep respect for science and only remind my readers that "science" means knowledge. The limited use of the word science for the inductive and deductive sequence of reproducible occurrences and prediction of outcomes in nature is not to be messed with by me (although many true believers in God think God is undermined by the success of science).
I obviously do not accept that the modern scientific community has any business concluding that atheism is anymore scientifically based than deism is so based.
The greater dimension than physics and chemistry can ever come to know is the larger than existence dimension of God. It is in concluding that a personal relationship with God is procurable by we so ordinary human beings that the spiritual domain has efficacy for we the living. This experience is well founded in human history and the personal experience of saints and mystics. I love the fact that Adam in the creation mythology of the Fertile Crescent walked and talked with God. I absolutely adore the notion that we are intended by God to be conversant with God on our good days and our bad. I also love the fact that Mother Theresa struggled with the non-existence of God, but wildly lived the life of one who permitted the God of Love to move through her into service to the outcasts of India.
The scurrilous remark of a Christian pastor was that God does not hear the prayers of the Jewish people. I know the humorous retort of God upon hearing the remark goes something like this: "Why listen to the prayers of someone who talks to me all the time?" So much for the self-righteous view of salvation.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Why Christians must condemn burning the Koran
I believe madness and idiocy should not be confused with belief in a loving God. Regardless of the packaging we try to place God into, we must let God be the God of all, not just some of us. Extremism is usually the height of selfishness, fear, and paranoia.
In the news of the day is a Florida pastor of a small evangelical Christian congregation who plans to burn copies of the Koran on September 11, 2010, while many Christian and national leaders protest his planned conduct and request that he desist. See Damien Caves article in the New York Times of September 7, 2010: In Florida, Many Lay Plans to Counter a Pastor’s Message.
Where is the confidence in God in behaving like this minister who puts himself in contempt of the great commandment's second condition that we love our neighbors as ourselves?
The historical record of intolerance, bigotry, and repression is our human history. So too is the tolerance of Moors of Spain who tolerated Jewish synagogues and were enriched by multi-culturism. So too the chance at greatness for our country is respect for minorities who are able to benefit from the protection of our laws and extend that benefit to other minorities as they come into wealth, prosperity, and political power.
The problem all too often is when individuals and groups are not to be limited in their conduct by respectfulness of others. The kind word "fringe" is used for any group which is not limited in its rhetoric or conduct by the law of love and would do evil in the name of justice or righteousness. The unkind phrase is "lunatic fringe" which is apt if the conduct of a fringe group spirals out of control into murder, mayhem, and war.
The true human pathway is to act in justice and mercy as we would be treated in our weakness or failure.
In the news of the day is a Florida pastor of a small evangelical Christian congregation who plans to burn copies of the Koran on September 11, 2010, while many Christian and national leaders protest his planned conduct and request that he desist. See Damien Caves article in the New York Times of September 7, 2010: In Florida, Many Lay Plans to Counter a Pastor’s Message.
Where is the confidence in God in behaving like this minister who puts himself in contempt of the great commandment's second condition that we love our neighbors as ourselves?
The historical record of intolerance, bigotry, and repression is our human history. So too is the tolerance of Moors of Spain who tolerated Jewish synagogues and were enriched by multi-culturism. So too the chance at greatness for our country is respect for minorities who are able to benefit from the protection of our laws and extend that benefit to other minorities as they come into wealth, prosperity, and political power.
The problem all too often is when individuals and groups are not to be limited in their conduct by respectfulness of others. The kind word "fringe" is used for any group which is not limited in its rhetoric or conduct by the law of love and would do evil in the name of justice or righteousness. The unkind phrase is "lunatic fringe" which is apt if the conduct of a fringe group spirals out of control into murder, mayhem, and war.
The true human pathway is to act in justice and mercy as we would be treated in our weakness or failure.
Monday, August 16, 2010
A Preface to the Quest for Completion
I wrote recently a personal collection of essays which are meant to be an explication of my spiritual beliefs. I would gladly share these essays with any of my blog readers. Just send me an email to ricklaw5@msn.com for an electronic copy. The collection is called The Quest for Completion.
A Preface to The Quest for Completion.
Time has passed since I composed segments of The Quest for Completion. I have to say at this juncture (Thursday, August 12, 2010), I am not discontent with the effort and result of my efforts at personal remediation of the human condition and its relationship with a loving God in the Universe (or outside of the universe). While I am the first reader of my writing, I am still too close to my writings to conclude the essays are quality work or not. I can only say that the writings are helpful to me personally on my faith journey.
Since I am not a trained theologian, philosopher, or savant, I can only say I do not as yet worry too much about an audience for this book written by me, a lay person. I am an individual who wanted to write a street view of God and personal morality that would be a help to others who perhaps in transit like myself would receive encouragement from me. Essentially, I wrote these essays because I needed clarity in my personal beliefs as I live in a world fraught with disbelief, cynicism, and despair.
This preface is actually prompted by a recent rereading of a favorite book rather than by my own essays. This is a book extremely helpful to me in its discourse on reality and idealism, what is unknown and known, how we know it and how we come to know it.
What I came across today in rereading a recent edition of this book, Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, is interesting to note in relationship to my efforts. In tackling the "quality" perspective on art and rhetoric and even mechanical or architectural efforts, author Robert M. Pirsig had to settle on a duality aspect of quality and the resolution of what is successful as art, rhetoric, or even scientific theorem. If we just know what is quality but are unschooled in the elements or characteristics of great art, rhetoric, architecture, science, et cetera, then is our finding of quality valid? He concludes that it is.
I think so too, but our ability to discuss the quality of something reflects only on our lack of schooling. A person's subjective and perhaps pre-verbal response to something is not invalid but itself a measurement on the effectiveness of some effort.
In a classical education of the artist, if one has precursors in a domain, one has to meet, match, and transcend the masters to make something truly new and different. However, that classic understanding of art education, is confounded by the making of something of quality when one is unschooled (romantic notion and "no school for geniuses" required concept).
The really good news in Pirsig's novel/essay is that which is successful can not be wholly captured by formal education on any topic. The frontiers of science and art are by definition outside of schooling. Albert Einstein in his evolution as a profound thinker was lucky to have survived formal education such as it was in his youth and locale.
I am reminded of Einstein's resolution of models for light which to me represent a way of reconciling seemingly irreconciliable opposites. Particle theory explained in part the behavior of light and so did wave theory explain the behavior of light and neither theory wholly encompassed what was known of the behavior of light. To close the loop here, the non-existence of God and the existence of God theories are seemingly incompatible except for the explanation each makes.
If I have settled on the existence of God, it is because for me it covers the most ground. The fact I can not resolve the God question on merely rational grounds, means I ultimately have to resort to my innate sense of incompletion (1) as an individual, (2) as a human community. Hence the growth in awareness that I am not God (Hitler needed this realization before all the evil he dealt) and We are not God (Nazi Germany rhapsodized by its leaders as the Master Race fell into sorry ruin). Which is to say we are in quest of completion in unity with God to whom we must answer to be whole and at one with him. That's it in a nutshell.
Theology can be defined as the the knowable about God, a final science at the edge of and beyond the end of material world in which we live and have our being. I am as a "romantic" convinced that theology is not the ultimate resolution, while our rejoinder to God is. It is a delicate knowledge we pursue for in coming to know God we are in pursuit of our calling to transcend an animal nature and keep company with the angels whose sole purpose in not being in being is to glorify God. We have the marvelous task of coming to glorify God in all of our being.
In all humility, as a "classicist" I am respectful of those in science, philosophy, and theology who have given a lifetime of efforts in disciplined study, trial and error. I just have to accept that my efforts here in these essays benefitted from learned predecessors of whom I am so unschooled I could not properly attribute to them each his or her due.
RJH. Revised on Sunday, August 15, 2010 and again Friday, October 1, 2010.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Timely Recitals on Pathway to Adulthood
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Poet, authored a favorite saying for me:
There was a little girl who had a pretty little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead,
When she was good, she was very, very good,
[But] when she was bad, she was horrid!
My daughters and now my oldest grandchild have heard me recite it with an intent look in the eye. I learned it from my first wife who probably learned it from her mother. I like to substitute for "girl" with "boy" and the saying would be just as telling. It's a poem with a rhyme and dissonance. Not a sophisticated poem at all, but easily committed to memory. More importantly, recital of the poem is a timing issue. I know I wanted my daughter to whom I spoke to reflect on her conduct and its effect on other persons.
The child in all of us have reflected on our appearance: attractive, unattractive. Our loving parents were of course hoping we would grasp the concept that physical beauty is skin deep, and encourage us to work on the potential accomplishment in being good persons. Beauty of the physical type being skin deep is actually repulsive when the person in the skin is repulsive in conduct.
The point is that observant people see us as we actually are in our conduct and are attracted or repulsed. People we should want to be drawn towards are worthwhile in their pursuits and behavior.
Social snobbery sometimes is encapsulated in the question: Why would you associate yourself with such a person? The holier than thou posture of course is not the goal and is itself "horrid." I think a child who judges another child as not good enough to befriend may be judging on appearances or cultural conditioning about what types of people with whom "good" people associate as friends or companions.
The Christian Gospels reflect on a rabbi who consorted with sinners and tax collectors for the Romans and who roundly criticized the establishment, the wealthy and powerful. To be Christlike one hopefully can avoid moral snobbery. Which brings me to a final point: unconditional love for a child is as necessary as light and water to a plant; but that love only brings the child to the point at which the object of our love is the subject of his or her own conduct. We have to ask our youth: what kind of person do you want to be. Hopefully, the answer is loving and forgiving.
There was a little girl who had a pretty little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead,
When she was good, she was very, very good,
[But] when she was bad, she was horrid!
My daughters and now my oldest grandchild have heard me recite it with an intent look in the eye. I learned it from my first wife who probably learned it from her mother. I like to substitute for "girl" with "boy" and the saying would be just as telling. It's a poem with a rhyme and dissonance. Not a sophisticated poem at all, but easily committed to memory. More importantly, recital of the poem is a timing issue. I know I wanted my daughter to whom I spoke to reflect on her conduct and its effect on other persons.
The child in all of us have reflected on our appearance: attractive, unattractive. Our loving parents were of course hoping we would grasp the concept that physical beauty is skin deep, and encourage us to work on the potential accomplishment in being good persons. Beauty of the physical type being skin deep is actually repulsive when the person in the skin is repulsive in conduct.
The point is that observant people see us as we actually are in our conduct and are attracted or repulsed. People we should want to be drawn towards are worthwhile in their pursuits and behavior.
Social snobbery sometimes is encapsulated in the question: Why would you associate yourself with such a person? The holier than thou posture of course is not the goal and is itself "horrid." I think a child who judges another child as not good enough to befriend may be judging on appearances or cultural conditioning about what types of people with whom "good" people associate as friends or companions.
The Christian Gospels reflect on a rabbi who consorted with sinners and tax collectors for the Romans and who roundly criticized the establishment, the wealthy and powerful. To be Christlike one hopefully can avoid moral snobbery. Which brings me to a final point: unconditional love for a child is as necessary as light and water to a plant; but that love only brings the child to the point at which the object of our love is the subject of his or her own conduct. We have to ask our youth: what kind of person do you want to be. Hopefully, the answer is loving and forgiving.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
When Materialism is Not Enough for You . . .
There is a core truth to Christianity that is pendant on eternal life.
At a point in human history God became human, died on a cross, redeemed all who sought redemption from sin, and provided a life after death with Him in heaven. God's act of becoming human changes everything for us. By becoming human, God made possible a personal relationship with Him. Jesus Christ by his life, death, and resurrection provided spiritual sustenance to humankind bereft otherwise of what our spiritual side requires, hope.
Try living as I have done without hope. I have arrived at wanting something more than mortal life can provide. One can persist in living out his or her days believing that this material life is all. Or one can examine the promise of life eternal which God offers one when he or she should be ready (if ever).
The basic symbolism Jesus Christ chose to sustain us in faith in him was that of bread, ordinary bread. However, mere symbolism would be empty of spiritual gain. This is about feeding our spiritual selves. He who wants to share in God's promise of life eternal must eat his body and drink his blood. Through the words of institution, He provided us with consecrated bread and wine. He or she who takes the bread and wine accepts the gift of this God of Mercy, Himself, into his life. We communicants partake of the very feast of heaven that one day will be awarded a human who dies in Christ.
In youth, I believed that the world into which we were born was world enough and time enough. Now as I grow world weary at the failures, individual and societal, I conclude this life is not enough and want for more than what my materialistic life provides. Critics of Christianity would say that in hoping for life eternal, believers are grasping at an illusion. And of course I have to say that as a believer in life eternal I am deluded if I do not make the Lord of Life my everyday reality by both confirming God is Love and trying to live my life as one whose life is in the Lord's.
Communion is the very spiritual meal many who die each day lack. I am saddened for those who live in despair having tired of this life. With communion, death has no victory and my own personal failure is not relevant except that it be to the greater honor and glory of the God of Love.
To my brothers and sisters, I encourage you in your faith in this God. I also accept that if life has not served you up an empty plate, you may as yet not be ready to accept the peculiar belief in the Risen Lord. Then that is what makes this a faith question: if there is life eternal it is in God's hands, not mine nor yours. It is yours to accept or reject his gift of life eternal.
At a point in human history God became human, died on a cross, redeemed all who sought redemption from sin, and provided a life after death with Him in heaven. God's act of becoming human changes everything for us. By becoming human, God made possible a personal relationship with Him. Jesus Christ by his life, death, and resurrection provided spiritual sustenance to humankind bereft otherwise of what our spiritual side requires, hope.
Try living as I have done without hope. I have arrived at wanting something more than mortal life can provide. One can persist in living out his or her days believing that this material life is all. Or one can examine the promise of life eternal which God offers one when he or she should be ready (if ever).
The basic symbolism Jesus Christ chose to sustain us in faith in him was that of bread, ordinary bread. However, mere symbolism would be empty of spiritual gain. This is about feeding our spiritual selves. He who wants to share in God's promise of life eternal must eat his body and drink his blood. Through the words of institution, He provided us with consecrated bread and wine. He or she who takes the bread and wine accepts the gift of this God of Mercy, Himself, into his life. We communicants partake of the very feast of heaven that one day will be awarded a human who dies in Christ.
In youth, I believed that the world into which we were born was world enough and time enough. Now as I grow world weary at the failures, individual and societal, I conclude this life is not enough and want for more than what my materialistic life provides. Critics of Christianity would say that in hoping for life eternal, believers are grasping at an illusion. And of course I have to say that as a believer in life eternal I am deluded if I do not make the Lord of Life my everyday reality by both confirming God is Love and trying to live my life as one whose life is in the Lord's.
Communion is the very spiritual meal many who die each day lack. I am saddened for those who live in despair having tired of this life. With communion, death has no victory and my own personal failure is not relevant except that it be to the greater honor and glory of the God of Love.
To my brothers and sisters, I encourage you in your faith in this God. I also accept that if life has not served you up an empty plate, you may as yet not be ready to accept the peculiar belief in the Risen Lord. Then that is what makes this a faith question: if there is life eternal it is in God's hands, not mine nor yours. It is yours to accept or reject his gift of life eternal.
News from Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico
My daughter the marine biologist is back in from the Gulf. The State of Florida sent its specialists out into the gulf to survey the water quality before the inevitable degradation works its way into the gulf stream loop into the Florida Keys. She I understand is taking training on cleaning waterfowl and other sea creatures too which should be poisoned by the mess made by the greed of British Petroleum.
Sunday, May 16, 2010
Lida Greens GC
Over some twenty-six years, I've been able to share in the life and times of my father Jack Hilber and now my older brother Joe in a family business venture. Both of whom worked a farmstead into a lovely par 3 golf course with the more than capable assistance and partnership of the life partners of each, Clarissa (Lucier) Hilber and Nancy (Freed) Hilber. The landscape though changed by the golf course is much the same as it was in frontier days. The marshes are teeming with life whether it's the fox hunting eggs or the loons sounding a distant call. God bless this venture for ever!
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Oil Spill in The Gulf of Mexico, A Nail in the ...
Last fall I opined on the folly in our human conduct (see "A True Devotion to Progress for Mankind," Glebewise, September 25, 2009). I mentioned that building nuclear plants to generate energy without the viable means to store nuclear waste was folly. Well, the general concept is even more lost on us than I thought then.
The latest is a deep sea oil drilling operation has blown out, killed eleven employees, and is spewing countless thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico daily (potentially millions of gallons). The oil slick is coming ashore and destroying plant and animal ecosystems. The scope of the catastrophe is not yet known. The fear is that the oil will catch in the Gulf Stream and work its way into the Florida Keys and then up the Atlantic coastline.
Many are holding recriminations until the scope of the disaster are better appreciated, especially as a solution to cap the oil at the source on the ocean floor is attempted (see New York Times, May 6, 2010). The blame will come to rest on us all: (a) the government did not require working safeguards and (b) the industry did the drill's preventer on the cheap to maximize profits. Halliburton, the war profiteering corporation, is reportedly involved as a supplier for the Deep Sea Explorer project. With Halliburton involved the disaster has the smell of a skunk (when liability is denied by British Petroleum and others who will travel the pathway of Exxon in the aftermath of the Exxon-Valdez disaster).
What we do know is that the Exxon-Valdez tanker disaster of March 24, 1989, was never cleaned up in any meaningful sense. Tanker spill was in the neighborhood of 10 million gallons. Congress's response to the disaster was to cap oil company liability for oil spill clean-up at $75 million dollars. The Supreme Court disallowed meaningful compensation to those Alaskans who suffered economic loss due to the spill. The seeds of the current disaster have long been sown. Drill Baby Drill is a disaster for mindlessness and despoiliation of our planet.
The latest is a deep sea oil drilling operation has blown out, killed eleven employees, and is spewing countless thousands of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico daily (potentially millions of gallons). The oil slick is coming ashore and destroying plant and animal ecosystems. The scope of the catastrophe is not yet known. The fear is that the oil will catch in the Gulf Stream and work its way into the Florida Keys and then up the Atlantic coastline.
Many are holding recriminations until the scope of the disaster are better appreciated, especially as a solution to cap the oil at the source on the ocean floor is attempted (see New York Times, May 6, 2010). The blame will come to rest on us all: (a) the government did not require working safeguards and (b) the industry did the drill's preventer on the cheap to maximize profits. Halliburton, the war profiteering corporation, is reportedly involved as a supplier for the Deep Sea Explorer project. With Halliburton involved the disaster has the smell of a skunk (when liability is denied by British Petroleum and others who will travel the pathway of Exxon in the aftermath of the Exxon-Valdez disaster).
What we do know is that the Exxon-Valdez tanker disaster of March 24, 1989, was never cleaned up in any meaningful sense. Tanker spill was in the neighborhood of 10 million gallons. Congress's response to the disaster was to cap oil company liability for oil spill clean-up at $75 million dollars. The Supreme Court disallowed meaningful compensation to those Alaskans who suffered economic loss due to the spill. The seeds of the current disaster have long been sown. Drill Baby Drill is a disaster for mindlessness and despoiliation of our planet.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Psyche at Rest
Why a Poem should stay a while
I have nothing to say.
Words curl about me just the same.
Like that darn cat that couches
About my neck as if to say
I can just be for her.
As it doesn't matter,
I will just practice what the poem knows best, rest.
I will just put on my hooded sweater
And let her teach me composure and relaxation,
Just like a good cat
Needing no effort on my part to understand.
Author's Note. Poetry has been a living breathing companion for me for so many years. I hope it is not limited in duration (like a cat has a life lived in cat years) but will last me my life long. RJH
I have nothing to say.
Words curl about me just the same.
Like that darn cat that couches
About my neck as if to say
I can just be for her.
As it doesn't matter,
I will just practice what the poem knows best, rest.
I will just put on my hooded sweater
And let her teach me composure and relaxation,
Just like a good cat
Needing no effort on my part to understand.
Author's Note. Poetry has been a living breathing companion for me for so many years. I hope it is not limited in duration (like a cat has a life lived in cat years) but will last me my life long. RJH
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The Poet's Journey from the Beautiful to the Ethical
To a younger poet. Today in speaking of the art of writing poetry, I would like to lead my reader in a progression which starts in self-pity and ends in beauty and fellow feeling.
The journey from narcissism to compassion is an ethical journey which we poets hopefully are able to make as we struggle with poetic themes and forms (which efforts hopefully result in finished poems).
First I learned to be a reader of poems to learn what this struggle is about. Struggle if you must to understand the poem, but persist. You want to be a poet, then study poems, said the older poets.
As a teenager beginning to write poems, I stood in the way of the poems for I had limited experiences of life and language. Also, as a modern youth, aware and alert, I was tempted by an easy cynicism. However, what was required of this youth who would be a poet, was to slow down and pay attention to beauty. Cynicism is much like seeing a wart on a beauty queen's nose. Realism teaches us to see that perfect ear lobe on a rat. Eventually, I started seeing beauty in human and animal conduct (not just nature).
To write of of what I saw and felt did not come easy for me for a reason. I was self-absorbed. This self-absorption put another way was my attempt to make sense of my life. Now looking back I see I had a quest to give meaningfulness to my life.
How? For starters I sought meaning in poems I at first didn't understand but wanted to get. Later, I grasped I had to grapple with my art. I subjected "the self" that I was to a discipline, the discipline of making a poem. At first this discipline was about lucidity (learning grammar, diction, and rhetoric along the way, devices of sound, and then later about imagery and symbolism).
My discussion here is not so much about right and wrong options for the poet, but about arriving at a vibrant imagination for the poet as he or she lives life while surrounded by the absurd and ridiculous conditions of modernity. Out of chaos comes order if the poem and ultimately the poetry succeeds.
Some questions for reflection:
1. Must a poem escape the solipsism of its author? As a poet reflects on his subjective feeling, he knows it is not an end in itself. In our own little world, we might as well be a sovereign as a pauper. The monarch or the pauper are similar if they can not transcend the specific conditions that defines one. So, yes, a poem hopefully does escape the solipsism of its author. See additional content below.
2. How does poetry escape solipsism? Poetry can appeal to common experience and the human condition, When it does this, it may do it inspite of warped perceptions and half-truths embraced by the persona in the poem. Irony is a sure curative for solipsism.
3. Will a focus on objective reality (objectivism ) be the antithesis of the poetic in language and art? Unavoidably. Report writing is not poetry. A poet does what he can of course to exploit the physical world for his or her purposes. The creation of symbols and the making of fresh similes and metaphors are the products of attending to objective reality. Poets, whether sounding idealists or realists, most often wish to speak a common language known and accessible to readers, but they must harness word choice to the plow of a poetic purpose. Which is not to say poets do not bring unfamiliar words to bear and even invent words when called to do so by the context of a poem or passage.
The Poetic Goal is the Finished Poem
I am drawn to the hard nut of a poem but I am not enamored by a hard nut. A scientist should be more interested in the hard nut than I. I am a poet. There is for me only the apt comparison of a poem to a hard nut.
I expect a successful poem to be more than the sum of its parts, more than the words on the page or its images, more than the arrangement of words or the rhythm of the language. Organic verse or poetry is quite simply found where the language used is so successful that it has a life of its own free and clear of the poet or writer who wrote the verse.
The fact that a poem has rhythmical argument or consequential rhyme is a fact that argues for effective emphasis. Yet, neither rhythm nor rhyme is definitive in creating poetry. These techniques are merely circumstantial and hopefully effective in making the poetic argument of the specific poem itself.
In my maturity as a poet I came to write some poems which I knew were finished. In some poems, I quickly channel poetic inspirations into words; in others I labored for a time as a fine tuner. A poem for me is finished because it now has a life of its own. Here is such a poem:
Aurora in her waking
Arise, arise, intercept him we can,
The winged herald with a morning song,
And put our feet with his in the narrow
Twilight of a soon to triumph Sun.
You, still abed, cradled rocked by sleep,
Soon to careen into the minions of the Sun,
Will you ever seek her of the unseen visage?
No! Then slip back to repose. I’ll go
Catch the advance, her rosy invasion,
Which always in a quickening retreat,
Precedes the return of her sender,
And receive what she freely dispenses.
In the above poem, the persona is singular and addresses another but is not heard. The persona is left to experience the dawn on his or her own. The sacred is quite often encountered in isolation and without the trappings of court and counsel. I consider this poem neo-classical in its ageless rendition of how one is stirred by the transitions prior to, during, and after sunrise or sunset. As the poet I knew the feelings of the persona in this poem and wholely relate to the common experience the poem encapsulates.
The Experience Giving Rise to a Poem
As a young poet, I quite often created poems that were not of my experience. I had an active imagination. Living day to day dealing with actual human conflict changed me. In fairness to my younger self, poems can certainly be premised on an fictional narration of events. However, a fiction is satisfying because it is reflective of reality and insightful of the human condition. I know that the art of creation does give rise to imagined experiences the poet himself or herself never actually has had or even dreamed necessarily. I want to share a poem with you and speak a little of how the poem did grow out of my experience but came to take on a life of its own (once I allowed this to happen in my poetic maturity).
Inland, a child burial
Little girl, as full
As this the soil sea,
Holds a starfish shell
And reasons she died.
Why had we unearthed
Her ancient village?
Had we learned anything
About origin?
What I can only
Surmise of her grasp
Is that star she holds
Was to guide her way.
This uncommon find,
This shell, lends insight:
We’re wave washed
Into an afterlife.
This particular poem, a panegyric, has a persona that is not me in any biographical sense as I am not an archeologist or paleontologist. There is not known to me any such skeletal find as this poem reports. Regardless, I believe that the symbols of an afterlife are pervasive across human experience.
I do not consider this a false poem. It captures the persistant archetypes of life before this life we now live and life after this life we now live. Is it a romantic notion that life is persistant and ultimately can not be rubbed out by death? Yes. Does that truth of the human psyche define us as human? I believe it does.
In objective reality the scientist would look at that starfish encrusted in the remains of the skeleton and not conclude any spiritual or transcendental reality. The human experience though is to celebrate our kinship with those who go before us. They may be dead, but they are with us yet. It remains for us to determine in what ways that is true. This poem for me celebrates our common humanity across the generations.
The Narcissism of the Human Condition
One of the things for which I am grateful, is the awareness of my place in the human comedy. I for one have taken my self and at times my misfortunes too seriously. In poetry I found a release for inflation of the self's troubles (commonly known as self pity). I believe that solipsism (subjective reality) is the very root of lyrical poetry. However, humor or some other disposition such as irony is required to make the lyric more than some report of a self-immolation. I for one as this poem hopefully demonstrates to you am the beneficiary of the very poems I have written and ultimately let go of as finished poems, for example this one in which beauty in nature provides the curative for an isolated adolescent:
Island shadows of noon
Now is my time to be a still watcher
Beneath the cottonwoods
While the people of this city
Are about each other’s business.
I am the king of my world and
Lord of all I survey; and round
About me the sun is spinning
A royal cloak of whitest cotton.
You can see me, majestically
Reclining on my park bench,
With squirrels around and about me
Acting as if I were invisible to them.
Now is the summertime sure
When can be seen a stray
Digging apart the clover
To rub its body in the loam.
Lovers behind the war memorial,
Not too concerned with being seen,
Make passersby blush or scold and
Been yet about their fierce grappling.
Now, as the clouds pass by in parade,
The stamen souls of leaves
Sail on breezes; fall like snow
In my island shadows of noon.
Here the persona is able to able to accept relation to small animals even if alienated from his human community and detached towards the lovers. The relief for the persona from his feigned self-importance is in nature's own celebration of life itself from which the persona can not ultimately remain alienated. This poem is not philosophical but I believe it does persist in providing the reader with the context of a home for all of us even in our most isolated moments in the natural world that surrounds us. Poetry remarkably can provide us solace and comfort too as a reminder of the natural world in which we are nested and upon which we must rely to live. That is the source of beauty or what we humans recognize as the beautiful.
Richard J. Hilber.
The journey from narcissism to compassion is an ethical journey which we poets hopefully are able to make as we struggle with poetic themes and forms (which efforts hopefully result in finished poems).
First I learned to be a reader of poems to learn what this struggle is about. Struggle if you must to understand the poem, but persist. You want to be a poet, then study poems, said the older poets.
As a teenager beginning to write poems, I stood in the way of the poems for I had limited experiences of life and language. Also, as a modern youth, aware and alert, I was tempted by an easy cynicism. However, what was required of this youth who would be a poet, was to slow down and pay attention to beauty. Cynicism is much like seeing a wart on a beauty queen's nose. Realism teaches us to see that perfect ear lobe on a rat. Eventually, I started seeing beauty in human and animal conduct (not just nature).
To write of of what I saw and felt did not come easy for me for a reason. I was self-absorbed. This self-absorption put another way was my attempt to make sense of my life. Now looking back I see I had a quest to give meaningfulness to my life.
How? For starters I sought meaning in poems I at first didn't understand but wanted to get. Later, I grasped I had to grapple with my art. I subjected "the self" that I was to a discipline, the discipline of making a poem. At first this discipline was about lucidity (learning grammar, diction, and rhetoric along the way, devices of sound, and then later about imagery and symbolism).
My discussion here is not so much about right and wrong options for the poet, but about arriving at a vibrant imagination for the poet as he or she lives life while surrounded by the absurd and ridiculous conditions of modernity. Out of chaos comes order if the poem and ultimately the poetry succeeds.
Some questions for reflection:
1. Must a poem escape the solipsism of its author? As a poet reflects on his subjective feeling, he knows it is not an end in itself. In our own little world, we might as well be a sovereign as a pauper. The monarch or the pauper are similar if they can not transcend the specific conditions that defines one. So, yes, a poem hopefully does escape the solipsism of its author. See additional content below.
2. How does poetry escape solipsism? Poetry can appeal to common experience and the human condition, When it does this, it may do it inspite of warped perceptions and half-truths embraced by the persona in the poem. Irony is a sure curative for solipsism.
3. Will a focus on objective reality (objectivism ) be the antithesis of the poetic in language and art? Unavoidably. Report writing is not poetry. A poet does what he can of course to exploit the physical world for his or her purposes. The creation of symbols and the making of fresh similes and metaphors are the products of attending to objective reality. Poets, whether sounding idealists or realists, most often wish to speak a common language known and accessible to readers, but they must harness word choice to the plow of a poetic purpose. Which is not to say poets do not bring unfamiliar words to bear and even invent words when called to do so by the context of a poem or passage.
The Poetic Goal is the Finished Poem
I am drawn to the hard nut of a poem but I am not enamored by a hard nut. A scientist should be more interested in the hard nut than I. I am a poet. There is for me only the apt comparison of a poem to a hard nut.
I expect a successful poem to be more than the sum of its parts, more than the words on the page or its images, more than the arrangement of words or the rhythm of the language. Organic verse or poetry is quite simply found where the language used is so successful that it has a life of its own free and clear of the poet or writer who wrote the verse.
The fact that a poem has rhythmical argument or consequential rhyme is a fact that argues for effective emphasis. Yet, neither rhythm nor rhyme is definitive in creating poetry. These techniques are merely circumstantial and hopefully effective in making the poetic argument of the specific poem itself.
In my maturity as a poet I came to write some poems which I knew were finished. In some poems, I quickly channel poetic inspirations into words; in others I labored for a time as a fine tuner. A poem for me is finished because it now has a life of its own. Here is such a poem:
Aurora in her waking
Arise, arise, intercept him we can,
The winged herald with a morning song,
And put our feet with his in the narrow
Twilight of a soon to triumph Sun.
You, still abed, cradled rocked by sleep,
Soon to careen into the minions of the Sun,
Will you ever seek her of the unseen visage?
No! Then slip back to repose. I’ll go
Catch the advance, her rosy invasion,
Which always in a quickening retreat,
Precedes the return of her sender,
And receive what she freely dispenses.
In the above poem, the persona is singular and addresses another but is not heard. The persona is left to experience the dawn on his or her own. The sacred is quite often encountered in isolation and without the trappings of court and counsel. I consider this poem neo-classical in its ageless rendition of how one is stirred by the transitions prior to, during, and after sunrise or sunset. As the poet I knew the feelings of the persona in this poem and wholely relate to the common experience the poem encapsulates.
The Experience Giving Rise to a Poem
As a young poet, I quite often created poems that were not of my experience. I had an active imagination. Living day to day dealing with actual human conflict changed me. In fairness to my younger self, poems can certainly be premised on an fictional narration of events. However, a fiction is satisfying because it is reflective of reality and insightful of the human condition. I know that the art of creation does give rise to imagined experiences the poet himself or herself never actually has had or even dreamed necessarily. I want to share a poem with you and speak a little of how the poem did grow out of my experience but came to take on a life of its own (once I allowed this to happen in my poetic maturity).
Inland, a child burial
Little girl, as full
As this the soil sea,
Holds a starfish shell
And reasons she died.
Why had we unearthed
Her ancient village?
Had we learned anything
About origin?
What I can only
Surmise of her grasp
Is that star she holds
Was to guide her way.
This uncommon find,
This shell, lends insight:
We’re wave washed
Into an afterlife.
This particular poem, a panegyric, has a persona that is not me in any biographical sense as I am not an archeologist or paleontologist. There is not known to me any such skeletal find as this poem reports. Regardless, I believe that the symbols of an afterlife are pervasive across human experience.
I do not consider this a false poem. It captures the persistant archetypes of life before this life we now live and life after this life we now live. Is it a romantic notion that life is persistant and ultimately can not be rubbed out by death? Yes. Does that truth of the human psyche define us as human? I believe it does.
In objective reality the scientist would look at that starfish encrusted in the remains of the skeleton and not conclude any spiritual or transcendental reality. The human experience though is to celebrate our kinship with those who go before us. They may be dead, but they are with us yet. It remains for us to determine in what ways that is true. This poem for me celebrates our common humanity across the generations.
The Narcissism of the Human Condition
One of the things for which I am grateful, is the awareness of my place in the human comedy. I for one have taken my self and at times my misfortunes too seriously. In poetry I found a release for inflation of the self's troubles (commonly known as self pity). I believe that solipsism (subjective reality) is the very root of lyrical poetry. However, humor or some other disposition such as irony is required to make the lyric more than some report of a self-immolation. I for one as this poem hopefully demonstrates to you am the beneficiary of the very poems I have written and ultimately let go of as finished poems, for example this one in which beauty in nature provides the curative for an isolated adolescent:
Island shadows of noon
Now is my time to be a still watcher
Beneath the cottonwoods
While the people of this city
Are about each other’s business.
I am the king of my world and
Lord of all I survey; and round
About me the sun is spinning
A royal cloak of whitest cotton.
You can see me, majestically
Reclining on my park bench,
With squirrels around and about me
Acting as if I were invisible to them.
Now is the summertime sure
When can be seen a stray
Digging apart the clover
To rub its body in the loam.
Lovers behind the war memorial,
Not too concerned with being seen,
Make passersby blush or scold and
Been yet about their fierce grappling.
Now, as the clouds pass by in parade,
The stamen souls of leaves
Sail on breezes; fall like snow
In my island shadows of noon.
Here the persona is able to able to accept relation to small animals even if alienated from his human community and detached towards the lovers. The relief for the persona from his feigned self-importance is in nature's own celebration of life itself from which the persona can not ultimately remain alienated. This poem is not philosophical but I believe it does persist in providing the reader with the context of a home for all of us even in our most isolated moments in the natural world that surrounds us. Poetry remarkably can provide us solace and comfort too as a reminder of the natural world in which we are nested and upon which we must rely to live. That is the source of beauty or what we humans recognize as the beautiful.
Richard J. Hilber.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Is Anyone Out There?
Are we lost in space? Are we alone in the Universe? Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe (by intelligent life, I mean conscious individuals that both think and feel as we do)? I for one believe it is supported as a statistical likelihood that there is such life out there. However, the likelihood we can communicate with others in the vastness of space seems unlikely in our life times. [See website of Dr. Stephen Hawkings: http://www.hawking.org.uk/; Dr. Hawkings a deep thinker to say the least has some interesting views on life in the universe; at his website see specifically his presentation on "Life in the Universe."]
Personally, I can not envision intelligent life lacking consciousness of a "self" and capacity not only to think, but to feel. However, that just starts the trouble. What if this intelligent life is self-centered and self-destructive. Cynically, all things being possible, let's say there is intelligent life but it's more bent on destruction than we humans of the planet Earth?
I'm thinking of the automobile manufacturers who destroyed electric cars which had been leased out in California in time to make a deadline. Turns out the battery providing greater distance driving had been bought up by an oil company! The cars were shredded over the protest of leaseholders who wanted to buy the cars and keep them running. See reviews of Who Killed the Electric Car at various websites.
Personally, I can not envision intelligent life lacking consciousness of a "self" and capacity not only to think, but to feel. However, that just starts the trouble. What if this intelligent life is self-centered and self-destructive. Cynically, all things being possible, let's say there is intelligent life but it's more bent on destruction than we humans of the planet Earth?
I'm thinking of the automobile manufacturers who destroyed electric cars which had been leased out in California in time to make a deadline. Turns out the battery providing greater distance driving had been bought up by an oil company! The cars were shredded over the protest of leaseholders who wanted to buy the cars and keep them running. See reviews of Who Killed the Electric Car at various websites.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Carpe Diem
So many times we put off doing the very thing we would do as if our days were countless.
Recently, I left behind a position driving metro mobility customers around the Twin Cities here in Minnesota for First Transit. It was not just a job as I really enjoyed my utilitarian role as driver for our seniors and differently enabled. They were just people with limited transportation options and good, bad, and indifferent days and dispositions.
The poem below is a gift of insight from one of my passengers who was not even laboring to look at the bright side, but moving on with life with a matter of fact and can do attitude. He was the flip side of the broken record titled "The only handicap is a bad attitude." This poem is the first in a series of poems I've begun to write on my experience driving for Metro Mobility.
Admiration, Poem 1.
Amputee plans his escape
From the nursing home
On the street that expires
(Disappears on the map too).
Asks me not to tell
Of his new digs:
Garden level with sidewalk
Slightly declining to the driveway.
He is hopeful he can travel,
See places he’s meant to see
Before now, before the saw
Saved his life, such as it is.
We plan our escape from life
To places we meant to visit
Before the saw saves our life
Such as it is, such as it has become.
Recently, I left behind a position driving metro mobility customers around the Twin Cities here in Minnesota for First Transit. It was not just a job as I really enjoyed my utilitarian role as driver for our seniors and differently enabled. They were just people with limited transportation options and good, bad, and indifferent days and dispositions.
The poem below is a gift of insight from one of my passengers who was not even laboring to look at the bright side, but moving on with life with a matter of fact and can do attitude. He was the flip side of the broken record titled "The only handicap is a bad attitude." This poem is the first in a series of poems I've begun to write on my experience driving for Metro Mobility.
Admiration, Poem 1.
Amputee plans his escape
From the nursing home
On the street that expires
(Disappears on the map too).
Asks me not to tell
Of his new digs:
Garden level with sidewalk
Slightly declining to the driveway.
He is hopeful he can travel,
See places he’s meant to see
Before now, before the saw
Saved his life, such as it is.
We plan our escape from life
To places we meant to visit
Before the saw saves our life
Such as it is, such as it has become.
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Gift of Celebrating Life as Lived
Poetry is my way of celebrating as I live it, life. Below is a poem in tribute to English language (or any human language really).
Two houses
There are two houses of this tongue I speak,
The upper house chock full of deals and ideals,
The lower one is not, but contrary and riven.
We love to think our speech a remedy
Consulting first the conditioning of one
And then the reconditioning of the other.
The higher order would have its verse
In chapters of iambic pentameter and
The lower rabel would have it course.
Folly it is to hold though that words
To no chapter in no system of worth
Will ever be so constrained or chained.
But admit as well the presence in our midst
Of broken speech and the newly born jibe,
Those who sing out phrases heard but not.
Let's remember this our language
Has no nobility if it be not live
And lift us off our arses one and all.
Two houses
There are two houses of this tongue I speak,
The upper house chock full of deals and ideals,
The lower one is not, but contrary and riven.
We love to think our speech a remedy
Consulting first the conditioning of one
And then the reconditioning of the other.
The higher order would have its verse
In chapters of iambic pentameter and
The lower rabel would have it course.
Folly it is to hold though that words
To no chapter in no system of worth
Will ever be so constrained or chained.
But admit as well the presence in our midst
Of broken speech and the newly born jibe,
Those who sing out phrases heard but not.
Let's remember this our language
Has no nobility if it be not live
And lift us off our arses one and all.
Sixty Years Young
Yesterday, I had a perfectly normal Wednesday. Up early for breakfast and early morning birthday greetings from loved ones and out the door to Caribou for newspaper and coffee (thanks to a birthday gift from my dear sister, Theresa) and then on to Metro Mobility for a great day driving in the ice and snow ruts of undermaintained city streets, then made it early to church choir, and a late night hot chocolate stop at Starbucks with Rev. Rich Johnson, who was so thoughtful to invite me out to mark my birthday. He's a sweet guy and let me talk about myself. Today I had time for facebook and hotmail exchanges with friends and family who celebrated my birthday with me and to reflect on yesterday's events. I am so grateful for life and hope to keep that positive attitude even as going gets rougher with age.
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