THE HARD POSSIBILITY OF STOPPAGE: FOOLED ME!

Read this poem by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite poets, and then let's talk

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and
Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the
Next Days and Weeks

Mary Oliver

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled-
I'm wading along

in the sunlight-
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

from What Do We Know, Volume V, Number 3, Summer 2001
Perseus Books Group

Copyright 2001 by Mary Oliver.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced with permission
* * * * * * * *

Through most of my life, for whatever reasons, I have been regularly reminded of my own mortality, spent a lot of time in my head worrying about dying.

Occasionally I have obsessed about it. Those who know me well will tell you that I am a victim of both catastrophic thinking and  incipient hypochondria.  Any bump is, by definition, cancer or something else incurable. Skin rash equals melanoma, automatically. A headache is reflexively a brain tumor, incurable of course.

 I can remember spending several weeks in bed as a boy with an undiagnosed disease that the family doctor (PCP) thought initially might be polio, the scourge of the 40's. Somehow, as a young boy,  I never thought I would "get" polio or, if I did, that I would die from it,  at least immediately. Turns out I was right;  I had an indeterminate virus of some sort and recovered without incident. Ducked that bullet. But worried all the time I was getting well.

Over the years I had many other health scares, this time real, the initial and most serious involving unnatural noises picked up by my doc's stethoscope, sounds being made by my blood as it passed through my heart's damaged aortic valve. This discovery worried me plenty, but not enough for me to change some damaging eating, drinking, and life-style habits. And, it was not serious enough for surgical intervention at that time. But it was always in the back of my mind to dig out and ruminate about at odd moments.

Several years later in 1971, I was in a serious (should have been fatal) automobile accident; the whole front end of my vehicle was totally ripped away by a speeding Mercedes and deposited many hundreds of feet down the road; there was no dash or steering wheel or windshield left in front of me. Somehow I walked away with a slightly stiff neck and nothing else--except a moderately strong and lasting case of survivors' guilt. To reference Mary Oliver,  My "leaf" was still blissfully unfurled.

During all this time, from my Twenties  through into my Sixties, I knew intellectually that death was posited as the inevitable end of life for all living creatures, me included.  I had read novels and poems and the Bible, attended operas and plays, visited the bereaved in funeral homes, so I knew about death and mortality in my head just like I know that there is gravity or that the world is round.  But this was not the same as me feeling it or acknowledging it viscerally, in the gut of my self-understanding.

In those earlier years, it was almost impossible for me to conceive of me not being in this world, enjoying it or, in reverse, of the world not having me around to enjoy in return. I knew abstractly that someday I would cease to be, but I never allowed myself to dwell concretely on that reality, to feel the vacancy created by my absence, to fantasize about my visual lights going out for the last time never to go on again, to speculate on what it would be like to consciously draw what I knew to be a last breath or think a last thought knowing it was the last, or relish a memory that I knew to be the last time ever that I would have that pleasure. But change happened over time and outside of my awareness.

Now at 75, I look in the mirror and see wrinkles where there was once smooth skin, I see brown spots where there were once "cute" freckles, white hair has replaced the red, I feel flaccidity where there was once  rigidity and muscularity, accustom myself to shortness of breath and weakness of limbs and sore joints; and now having  had three cancer diagnoses, operations and treatments, and having had that faulty heart valve replaced by one from a pig that was sacrificed so that I could live, I find that thinking about my own death is no longer foreign and abstract.  I can much too easily imagine the last light of day, the final thought,  the dimenuendo of a fading, final memory, the Coda without a Da Capo, flesh returning to dust and being transported molecularly through all the remaining life in our cosmos. I really am getting old--surprise! So,  that which was only conceivable in a distant future is a reality of "now." I am sort of in shock, amazed, and often scared of the unknown.

I guess that pondering Oliver's thoughts on the  "Hard Possibility of Stoppage" is not inherently productive until you reach a "certain age," and then this musing does create, at least in me, a freshly honed mental acuity that allows me to see my life and the lives of those around me with sharpened, focused clarity and a somewhat more balanced perspective about what does and doesn't make a difference--as viewed from the Coda, a/k/a Oliver's Stoppage Time.

LIFE'S UGLY SIDE: MY GARDEN SECRET

The good, the bad and the inconvenient

by Marge Piercy

Gardening is often a measured cruelty:
what is to live and what is to be torn
up by its roots and flung on the compost
to rot and give its essence to new soil.

It is not only the weeds I seize.
go down the row of new spinach—
their little bright Vs crowding—
and snatch every other, flinging

their little bodies just as healthy,
just as sound as their neighbors
but judged, by me, superfluous.
We all commit crimes too small

for us to measure, the ant soldiers
we stomp, whose only aim was to
protect, to feed their vast family.
It is I who decide which beetles

are "good" and which are "bad"
as if each is not whole in its kind.
We eat to live and so do they,
the locusts, the grasshoppers,

the flea beetles and aphids and slugs.
By bad I mean inconvenient. Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death.
   

"The good, the bad and the inconvenient" by Marge Piercy, from The Crooked Inheritance. © Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

I was taken aback when reading this poem because I have entertained many of the same ideas in the past; I figured that I was the only one who might have entertained such almost sentimental thoughts.   In the "old days," when my family was  involved in growing food from seeds, I used to agonize inwardly when I had to "thin" out a row of any vegetable seedlings.  I wondered about the implications for the plant of choosing which little seed's thrust toward life and reproduction I would terminate and which I would  allow to flourish.  I honestly felt badly every time I scraped a little green baby plant out of the soil to make room for its neighbors to thrive with more abundant space, soil, nourishment, and water.

In the same gardens, of course,  lived thousands of little insects and vermin  (pests) of various sorts because we didn't use chemical pesticides. Often the organic solutions we employed for pest "management" didn't work or were relatively ineffective, so the very existence of our vegetables was jeopardized by tiny creatures that were only seeking to sustain their own lives and then reproduce in kind. I regularly took their lives more mindlessly than I did the plants, wanting to thwart their destructive tendencies. Maybe I saw them somehow as "lesser" life forms as well as horticulturally undesirable. Through the course of the garden's annual life--its season from frost to frost--I was very aware of the curious life and death relationship and of my role in it.

In a sense, by planting a garden, we had, for what seemed good and noble reasons, altered the natural or normal relationship between flora and fauna. We had artificially added plants and vegetables to the food supply chain and, unwittingly, encouraged and supported an imbalance of supply and demand in the miniscule natural world of our little garden. From planting to thinning to fertilizing to harvesting, our human judgement and actions supplanted--and were inserted into--natural processes. In this microcosm, our human activity--even though it was comparatively benign and contained in scope--made an incredible life and death impact on the little world of our garden.

Thinking back on this agrarian enterprise causes me to be even more aware and horrified--yea depressed and angered as well-- by the often thoughtless impact of human activity on our earthly home. From my 11th floor apartment window, I can see acres of roof tops and miles of asbestos streets and highways, all built for our convenience and comfort, and with little thought to how we were changing where rain fell and water drained, where snow-melt flowed and stored, where leaves dropped and rotted to form new top soil, where the heat and cold stored by solid masses of roads and buildings changed the climates immediately around them, where root systems were covered, fauna habitats and chemical compositions of soil were destroyed or altered forever, and on and on. 

Just think about it. What I am seeing is just me and my limited view from one window here in South East Denver, a vista that encompasses an area perhaps as large as a square mile. Recalling  the impact that I had on my little garden (maybe 1/8th acre), I shudder when Google tells me that the land area of the earth is about 197 million square miles bigger than the square mile  I see, and that it is populated by over 7 billion people like me, acting as I have acted,  whose numbers are increasing by about 20 million a year; and I extrapolate from my limited garden experience to all this immensity and ponder what this most likely means for the planet...for my children and their children...for humankind...

"Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death."

DEEP THOUGHTS

How incredible an experience it must have been for James Cameron to descend [solo ]into the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a place where no human has ever been. [Correction: two men, Piccard and Walsh as part of the Challenger Deep Mission  made it in a bathysphere in 1960.] The Trench is the lowest spot on the surface of the earth, over seven miles below the surface of the Pacific, just East of Guam. At the bottom of the Trench, Cameron's underwater vehicle experienced over 8 tons psi of pressure on its surface. All went well and Cameron saw and experienced a place--and probably feelings--that none of us will ever have in our lifetimes.

From another perspective, if Cameron had ventured up rather than down, his voyage would have been totally unremarkable--since airliners routinely ascend to this altitude on a daily basis. The difference, of course, is the "alien" environment of water and its weight which increases with depth, while air decreases in weight as one ascends.

In any case, thinking about being where no one has ever been before returned me very quickly to many childhood fantasies that I entertained as a youngster. I spent lots of time hiking through Kentucky woods, playing explorer,  and amused myself by wondering if any human had ever seen what I was seeing exactly as I was seeing it at that moment, or if anyone had put a foot down exactly where my foot was planted. Surely, somewhere in my ramblings I must have been the first to touch a piece of ground or see a particular vista or tree or stream.

As a young man, being first was actually more important to me that the actual quality of the experience I was having. I wonder what was most important for Cameron. This world places such a high premium on being "first" that he may have been seduced by that motivation. Or it may have been fame, money, or as several observers noted,  the self-aggrandizement of a "rich leftie" who didn't mind spending $50 million to toot his own horn.

As for me, right now I am satisfied with exploring mostly safe environments (art museums, the Botanic Gardens, Rocky Mountain National Park, Mesa Verde, relationships, etc.) and letting others do the "deep diving" and "heavy lifting" off earth's surface.  The only unsafe environment I enjoy exploring these days is the abyss of my "Unconscious" which I do each week with my Jungian therapist guide. My interior life, I find, is bottomless, and exploring it provides me with quite enough in the way of excitement and thrills to keep me more than satisfied... and in my place. And yes, for sure, I am the first to set foot in this particular wilderness.

VERNAL EQUINOX

I love the spring equinox-- even though the autumnal equinox is celebrated on my birthday in September. For the next three months, the days are getting longer. My spirits are getting higher. Here's a lovely poem to celebrate today written by one of my favorites, Mary Oliver.

Spring

by Mary Oliver

Somewhere
    a black bear
      has just risen from sleep
         and is staring

down the mountain.
    All night
      in the brisk and shallow restlessness
         of early spring

I think of her,
    her four black fists
      flicking the gravel,
         her tongue

like a red fire
    touching the grass,
      the cold water.
         There is only one question:

how to love this world.
    I think of her
      rising
         like a black and leafy ledge

to sharpen her claws against
    the silence
      of the trees.
         Whatever else

my life is
    with its poems
      and its music
         and its glass cities,

it is also this dazzling darkness
    coming
      down the mountain,
         breathing and tasting;

all day I think of her—
    her white teeth,
      her wordlessness,
         her perfect love.

"Spring" by Mary Oliver, from New and Selected Poems. © Beacon Press, 1992. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

MANNING UP: AVE ET ATQUE

The bold headlines in the Denver Post, page one, today blazed out: "Changing Horses." And so, with hardly a second thought, it's in with Peyton Manning, and out with Tim Tebow.  And that also means that Tebow Time in Denver, on and off the field, apparently is over.

However,  in my own memory Tebow Time will not be over. Why's that, you ask? Because Tim has meant something important to me. Yes, I like Tim, really like and respect him. I applaud his work ethic, I like his positive "can and will do" attitude, his ability to avoid the Monday to Saturday drama that infects so many other players (nightclub fights, spousal abuse, drugs, DUI arrests, gambling losses, etc.), his absolute unwillingness to give up even when the circumstances seem most dire). I like and appreciate his prowess as an athlete who is a winner, on and off the field.

I  also appreciate Tebow because he represents to me an example of what hard work and commitment to a worthy goal can achieve. He was at practice before and after his team mates each day, and his disciplined and exhausting work ethic continued off-season as well. He did not live an ostentatious lifestyle, parade around with beautiful models or high profile celebrities, or appear in photos on the front page of the Post's Sunday society section attending  black tie charity balls or extravaganzas showcasing the rich and famous. Why? Because Tebow lives his beliefs to a degree that most of us cannot or will not.

During interviews, he repeatedly ducked  efforts of the press to lionize him at the expense of the rest of the team. He understood his role in each contest and always went out of his way to make sure that other players and coaches got the praise they deserved. Unlike so many of Tim's colleagues, he kept the game of football in perspective, never for a moment hinting that playing or even winning was his  life's summum bonum. Yes, he was a winner, but not at "any cost," and for him, football was only a part of his life, never the whole enchilada

He always had the needs of others in the front of his mind. I like the way that Tim, at the end of each game, whether he was judged to be as a hero or a chump, would choose to leave the spotlight and go immediately to share his personal aura and notoriety with a kid, or someone sick or injured, or, in short, with one of the "poor and downtrodden" of this world.  The looks on their faces which told the whole story of the importance of Tebow's visit to them often moved me and choked me up.

I like the fact that Tebow used a chunk of his mega-bucks salary to set up a charitable foundation which has the following Biblical quote from St. Paul as its core belief: "whatever things are true, whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy – meditate on these things... and the God of peace will be with you."

I think that Tebow is an unusually good human being, exemplary as a model for boys and men, girls and women, young and old, who follow his life and career. In his time in Denver, Tebow converted many people into "believers," and not primarily religious ones--both on and off the field. By being who he is, and doing what he did, Tebow brought hope to a city in football despair, and this hope rippled out across the city and into the lives of lots of our people. Incredibly, the Tebow phenomenon was not limited to Denver.  All over the country, indeed all over the world, people of all ages and conditions were wearing NUMBER 15 on their jerseys and, apparently, many "Tebow Values" in their lives as well.

In your quiet moments, consider the impact that this one good man, a genuinely good man, had in a world so accustomed to, and sickened by, the tawdry, dirty, underhanded, selfish, greedy, dishonest, self-serving types who normally grace the  headlines and blabber meaninglessly on talk shows. As St. Paul said, meditate on these things...

As you meditate, you'll see why Tebow Time will remain embedded  in my personal memory even if   Peyton Manning were to lead Denver and our Broncos to an undefeated season and a Super Bowl victory next year.

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

The other day on Colorado Public Radio, I had one of those "driveway moments" they talk about, except mine was an "underground parking garage moment." The occasion was the celebration of Langston Hughes' birthday on Talk of the Nation hosted by Neal Conan. Towards the end of the program, Neal asked one of his guests, Nikki Finney, a National Book Award winning poet from the University of Kentucky, to read one of Hughes' poems.  She chose Let America Be America  Again. I was unfamiliar with this particular poem although I knew Hughes' work  pretty well from my days teaching American Civilization.  However, these verses spoke to me in a deep and powerful way, so much so that I remained in my car for a while after Finney had finished, the radio had grown silent,  and the moist, musty scent of damp  concrete had seeped into my car. There in the mostly dark basement of my apartment building, I tried to imagine what Black people have felt ever since they were forcefully brought to America early in our nation's life. I couldn't help the tears welling up when I realized the painful truth of Hughes repeated refrain for himself as as an American Black person: "America never was America to me." How incredibly awful, not to be in any sense "at home" in America or to participate in or share the original dream except as a dream...only a dream, never a reality. More tragic, of course, as Hughes points out, is that it is not only the Black people for whom America has never been America. Later in the poem he broadens his observations to include the poor farmer, the worker, the people in debt without relief, those who never got ahead because, for whatever reasons, the decks were stacked against them. Lord what a tragedy, and how guilty I feel, that I have been fortunate enough to have dreamed the dream and enjoyed its benefits, but not responsible enough to help improve the condition of those who honestly and sadly have said--and say right now--America must become America to all of us, not just to me. I join with the Occupiers, temporary and permanent,  who cry out that we must take back our land from those who "live like leeches" on our lives, from those who espouse power, profit, gain and greed--all at the expense of the rest of us--the poor white, the Negro, the Indian', the immigrant, those who are down trodden for any reason. For me, Hughes' poem trumpets a call to awareness and demands that I take whatever action I can to advance the cause of human freedom and justice, as much as I can--given my own station in life. At the very least I can be kind to others, give support and lend a shoulder to the weary or tearful, stand up and complain when people make racist  remarks, or tell immigrant jokes, or put down the opposite sex, or ignore people who are hurting in their lives.  We can all do something--at the very least, in an election year, we can avoid  supporting and electing ideologically motivated, greedy and self-serving people to the legislature and White House.  Let's swear the oath: America will be...and we can make America America again. Here's the poem. Try reading it aloud--making use of his punctuation. Listen to the sound and feel the feelings. It's a beauty. I dare you not to get teary. Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.") Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-- And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed! I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-- Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years. Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become. O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home-- For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa's strand I came To build a "homeland of the free." The free? Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay-- Except the dream that's almost dead today. O, let America be America again-- The land that never has been yet-- And yet must be--the land where every man is free. The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-- Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again. Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-- The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America! O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be! Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!

© 2012, Academy of American Poets. All Rights Reserved.

I Discover What The Shadow Knows

As you may remember, I was born in Kentucky where I was  raised by a quintessential WASP family.  We were members of a "frontier" religious denomination called The Disciples of Christ (The Christian Church).  This splinter denomination was conceived and born in what was then the trans-Appalachian West in the mid-19th century.

The denomination's doctrines and beliefs were few and simple: centrality of the Scripture which every person interprets his/her own way, baptism by immersion (no infants), priesthood of all believers, each congregation govern itself, no political hierarchy, and weekly communion (Eucharist) partaken of by all believers who had accepted Christ as their personal savior. I accepted Christ--that is, I made my "confession of faith," when I was 12 after many hours of Sunday School and Vacation Bible School instruction.

That morning in 1948 as I sat on the mauve cushions in the front row of the starkly white sanctuary, waiting for the minister to call my name and ask me the requisite questions about my belief and intentions, I really didn't have the foggiest notion of what I was doing  or what my membership in the church entailed. The plain truth is that I was doing what my parents and relatives had done before me and, therefore, expected me to do as well. And so I did it. Always the dutiful child.

I performed admirably, answering correctly while looking  Rev. Tom Giltner directly in the eye, shaking his hand firmly, and then the following week joining him in the baptistry where I was dutifully immersed.  I noticed no descending doves or claps of thunder. But it was apparent that my parents and close relatives were very pleased with me and I could feel their warm glow and hear their repeated words of pride as they talked to their friends while we stood together in the reception line in the Church's social hall.

Inside my 12 year old self, at that point, I understood a couple of things. First, now that I was baptized, I could  take weekly communion. This was a major part of the weekly service of worship that I was required to attend.  Previously I could only watch others have communion. I felt left out. Deacons served the bread and wine to the congregation, pew by pew, in polished silver salvers designed for that one purpose.  The bread was actually Matzos, crackers made of unleavened flour and broken in small pieces.  The "wine" was actually Welsh's Concord grape juice served  in tiny half ounce glasses, the claret liquid always warm, and cloyingly sweet. These two elements comprised the communion that was partaken of every Sunday by all declared believers in the congregation. "This is my body" and "drink this in remembrance of me" were the words intoned solemnly by the elders at the communion table in front of the church, and so, once baptized, I ate and drank along with the rest, not really knowing what I was doing.

Second, I realized that being allowed able to take communion was a powerful symbol and public acknowledgement that I was now  "grown up." In my 12 year old head, the recognition of being "grown up" was both good and bad. The thought suddenly engendered  numbers of thoughts and numerous questions that rattled around in my brain.  For example, what would happen to me now that I was "grown up?" Would I have to be "good" all the time?  Would people forgive me my mistakes less than before?  For years I had been told  "wait until you are grown up," or "you'll understand that when you are grown up," or "once you are grown up you will have to become responsible, or act like a man, or know the difference between right and wrong... etc." This new status was scary stuff even though I desperately wanted in one way to be a grown man. Somehow I intuited that I had just entered the Big Leagues where things started to count, where good and bad deeds and thoughts would be registered in the heavenly log book on a clean new page that had been put there just for me.

Third,  in my 12 year old head was the conviction that with my baptism, something spiritually significant had happened to me,  or should have happened, something very like a lightening bolt striking a tree, and that adulthood as a  newly-minted believer would render my life different and make my choices much easier and allow me to move ahead with my religious life with clarity and confidence. Although I searched and searched for the "difference" that baptism made in my little mind and soul, I could honestly find nothing new or radically changed. I was still the same red headed, freckle faced, four-eyed, funny, testosterone-charged little guy that I had been before walking down the slippery steps into the baptistry pool. Maybe I had messed something up. Maybe it hadn't worked. Guilt.

My search for the "difference" went on for many, many years, as did my deepening self-applied guilt for not finding or feeling that "something new," astonishing, sparkling, clarifying had occurred. Moreover, as I looked around me I saw that it wasn't just me. I saw that other people, particularly grown ups who were also members of the church, who had allegedly been hit with the same spiritual lightening bolt that I had been hit by, had apparently not changed their behaviors after the lightening strike--a deacon was caught with another man's wife, an elder who was President of a Bank aided another church member in committing fraud, one of dad's friends went bankrupt and killed himself, several couples got divorces for reasons that were only alluded to in low tones behind closed doors or in whispers covered by hands with out-turned palms.

All the while, plagued by spiritual and moral unease, I kept remembering two commandments (learned at Sunday School and at the dinner table) that I knew should be directing my internal and external lives.  The first was from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount when he said, "You, therefore, must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt, 5:48). The second was uttered by my own father, the most nearly perfect living man I ever met, who told me, "If you do not turn out to be a better man that I am, then I have failed you as a father." Consider for a moment the impact of these two instructions on the life of a 12 year old boy who wanted desperately to "do"  adulthood--to accomplish being "grown up"-- right.  And understand that I knew with absolute certainty at the same time that  perfection of the type being required of me was not even remotely possible in my life. I had already failed at age 12 when I shoplifted a paperback from the Walgreens and also when I indulged in thinking lascivious thoughts about one of my mother's friends. And there was lots more stuff than that, primed and loaded, and stored in the locker of my imagination ready for action. The conflict between knowing who I really was and who I was supposed to be was intense and painful.

Much of my adolescent and adult life, therefore, was spent focusing on my shortcomings, call them what you will, assigning appropriate guilt, and on carefully covering up imperfections and "sins," so that they would be invisible to the outside world. Variations on the question "what would the neighbors think if they knew?" became the moral leitmotiv for decisions I made that occasionally reined  in my natural impulses--when they did. I think back with regret on the amount of mental and emotional energy that I wasted on these tasks, on worrying about the neighbors, in beating myself up for not being perfect--or sometimes not even wanting to be-- over the years.

But relief was finally in sight. In the last third of my life, I have become acquainted with the thinking and writings of Carl Jung, and many of my earlier conflicts and self-imposed guilt are in the process of being resolved.  Healing is possible even for an old guy. It was in Jung's concept of the Shadow that I gained a better understanding of what it might mean--for me at least--to be "grown up." I learned that all people, not just me, "carry a shadow...a reservoir for human darkness." I also learned that "the shadow in being instinctive and irrational, is prone to projection: turning a personal inferiority into a perceived moral deficiency in someone else." I discovered that perfection is a mental construct only, and not a realistic goal to be desired, sought, or even achieved.

The "take-away" idea from my reading of Jung, and by my personal therapy is an "a' ha" of sorts: perfection in the sense it was described to me by Jesus or Henry Johnson, Jr., on any level, is simply not possible, not even desirable. I accept that for me to be human is to have a Shadow that, outside of the control of my will,  fills my thoughts, influences my motivations, encourages me to judge others and to find fault with myself, prevents me from copying those perfectionist behavioral models expounded by parents and preachers.

Now comes the very different and difficult task of forgiving myself. Easier said than done, I am finding. But in the effort, I am increasingly realizing the incredibly broad dimensions of what it means to be human, specifically what it means for me (for all of us) to be fully human. This also means that  I have to accept the Shadow as an integral and loveable part of me along with everything else that contains  traces of good and noble. I find this acceptance is a very hard task, but it isa necessary one if I am to move  ahead with my process of individuation and maturation.

Who cares what the neighbors think?? The Shadow really knows!