(no subject)
I went for a walk tonight at sunset and six thousand things occurred to me. Let's go through them, one by one, until all four of you have removed me from your Friends list. Except, probably, for shemshade who I hear finally succumbed to an overdose of "Soft Scrub."
I went up the hill to Main Street, south to Meadow Lane, west towards the Great Meadow. That's what it's called, the Great Meadow. It's great, but not all meadow. Some of it is cornfield.
A cornfield in April is a sight to behold: thousands upon thousands of rows of perfectly planted corn, once towering over the tallest head, now reduced to stubbly amputated stalks up to the ankle. Ears of renegade corn still preserved, bright yellow and ready, like flashlights dropped to earth in the "on" position and still dimly burning months later.
At the edge of the Great Meadow is the Connecticut River, tonight's destination. I walked through the cornfields to pay my respects to the river that rules this valley. Hello, river. You're looking fine tonight. Please, send my regards to Long Island Sound.
There's a North Pole across the state line in New Hampshire, a radio tower beaming red, and as fate would have it it's due north from Northfield. Polaris obsolete when that tax-free tower blinks.
Similarly, west is at the West Pole, which stands in West Northfield, in a section known as Satan's Kingdom, and more precisely in the middle of the Dump. The West Pole is a big long stick atop which are perched painfully powerful sirens, which will go off in raw cacophony if the nearby nuclear power plant should ever malfunction.
Yeah, have I mentioned there's a cemetery in my backyard, and I live within the evacuation zone of an aging nuclear reactor? Behold my quasi-rural domestic bliss and quaketh thou before it.
Tonight, just a bear's lap across the river from Satan's Kingdom, the sun set well to the north of the West Pole, it being April and me obediently due west.
I took a 360-review of the environs: color returning to the hills, unidentifiably decomposed agricultural equipment left to rot, the abandoned Schell Bridge over the river (an architectural marvel two centuries ago, now a $20 million charity case), and a vast swath of dead spiky cornstalks.
One image stood out against the blackening hills: a golden cross hoisted high atop the steeple of St. Patrick's Church, our friendly neighborhood Roman Catholic enclave. I could see virtually nothing man-made as I turned my back on the river and surveyed the eastern part of town, save this one glittering crucifix hogging all the sunlight.
I thought briefly of a newspaper report this morning about the Boston archdiocese's sale of the former Cardinal's $99.4 million dollar Boston mansion. Yeah, the servants of Jesus lived in a $99.4 million dollar mansion. (Okay, disclaimer, that sum includes many acres of land and other buildings, but still, man, you shoulda seen the place.) The church sold it to raise cash to pay settlements to victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy. Nauseating enough. I scanned the eastern hills for other signs of civilization.
I thought I could make out the "steeple" of the Unitarian Universalist "church" among the bare tree branches, but in keeping with UU "dogma" I couldn't really be sure if the building was there or not.
We went to the Unitarian church for the first time on Sunday, and the service was an absolute disaster. The regular minister, I learned, is only there every second Sunday, and as luck would have it, our first visit was on one of his off-days. We had a "guest speaker" who might as well have been lobbing spoonfuls of Marshmallow Fluff at the congregation for all the sense she made.
God is love, and love is God. Truth is God, and God is truth. God is happified, and our religion is happified. Some dour religions need to be happified! We are here to love, and to think, and to be. And to be understanding of love, and to love understanding. And across all of the earth there is an understanding of love, and of truth, and of a real knowing that God -- our happified God -- is love. Loving, to be sure, yes, loving, but also love. So be it!
It was enough to send me screaming down Main Street, stigmata dripping from my open palms, into the cold arms of Sister Mary Ignatius over in St. Patrick's, who would throttle me senseless and mop the basement floor with my brains so that my soul might be cleansed, anything to save me from the claptrap the UU's were serving up so cheerfully.
I can only pray that our semi-absentee Minister is a better communicator. I'll try again this coming Sunday and hope that he's there, ready with something to say.
The visit was not without divine intervention, however. There was another young couple in attendance with a young baby. In a town where half the population is over 60, young couples and young babies stick out like nuclear emergency alert towers. It turns out it was their first visit to the UU church (just like us), they had a seven-month-old girl (Fiona is eight months), they were inspired by her birth to find a good church and a semblence of connection to the community (uh, yeah) and they were eager to meet new people in the area and find babysitters (whoa!).
We told this couple we were taking Fiona to see Greg Brown in concert later in the evening; they'd seen Greg Brown in concert nine times. We said we'd lived in the Bronx before moving to the area; they'd lived in Brooklyn. And on and on.
Supposedly we're seeing them again next Sunday, so our daughters can steal one another's pacifiers and we can laugh awkwardly at one another's jokes. Lobbed fluff aside, it turned out to be a worthwhile Sunday morning, and a curious coincidence. (And Greg Brown put on one hell of a show.)
But back to Jesus and Tori Amos. Did I mention I was listening to Under the Pink on headphones during tonight's walk in the cornfields?
I'm not a big fan of Tori Amos, but dammit, it's time for me to come out of the closet and say, fuck it, I believe in Jesus, and I love the words attributed to him, and I find comfort in his guidance, and there's an allure to that golden cross floating against the darkening hills at twilight. I was born into a love and fear of Jesus. It's who I am. I can't run from it. We all need a place to go when life chafes.
At JFK's capacious international terminal last month, waiting for my departing flight to London, I found refuge and solace in the Roman Catholic chapel they'd set up between the Jewish room and the Protestant room which was across the way from the Buddhist room which was next to the pseudoMosque, all of which were vacant at 5 P.M. on a Wednesday, St. Patrick's Day as it happened. I went in, by myself, to the Catholic room, and I spoke to Mary, and I spoke to Jesus, and I spoke to the Holy Ghost, and I asked them to get me back to New York alive after flying Beyond Canada and Over Greenland to the other side of the ocean, and it all made sense, speaking to them, these figures I believed in until about the age of 12, I mean as a kid I had Jesus in my fingernails and Mary under my tongue and the Holy Ghost always just at the edge of my vision, menacing and real.
I don't want Fiona to grow up thinking she's evil, the way I did. And I wouldn't ask K. to sit beside me groaning the Apostle's Creed if it goes against what she believes. But I have to admit that the corrupt, hypocritical Roman Catholic Church is my original spiritual home, and everything I understand about God begins there, and I'd like to think that Jesus and I have ... an understanding.
It being April, I was reminded, in the Great Meadow, of my Great Breakdown, in April 1994, when all of my adolescent delusions were knocked down (mostly by a contingent of wise women in my life) and I really saw myself for who I was, for the first time.
Previously, as an arrogant teenager, I had convinced myself I was a kind of Renaissance man and Ubermensch, completely above the trappings of time or place and certainly above the nightmares of history. But that spring, I realized for the first time that I was a straight white Irish Roman Catholic heterosexual male from suburban Boston, with specific memories and defining characteristics and pasty skin, and that I had a context to work from, to build from, as I moved into adulthood. I was not my own creation. I was not all brain. I was body, too, and boy. My parents made me. I wasn't all present and future. I also had a past.
Tori Amos helped out with certain lines from Under the Pink. That's where she comes in. She was the most poetic of that contingent of wise women ten years ago who held a mirror up and helped me see who I was. She mostly drives me insane with her breathy voice and opaque lyrics, and I hold some of her work in stinky disregard. But that record on headphones, blared into my ears like sirens, means the world to me. I still hear her. Clearly.
And I wondered if something was coming full circle ("circles and circles and circles again") as I really settle into this acreage-and-offspring phase of life, if the foundation I've spent my twenties looking for exists in the lessons of my childhood.
In someone else's LJ today I read a quotation from Isaiah that nearly made me cry, and I wonder if that counts.
Dark twilight fell fast as I stomped home using the bad-boy shortcut (the still-active railroad tracks, deep gulches on either side, the clunky threat of oncoming Amtrak everpresent). I paused for a moment and imagined how cool it would be to perform a superpower full-tilt Jimi Hendrix blowout version of "Cornflake Girl," stripping it of all its preciousness and emphasizing the fuck-you punch of the lines
This is not really happening
You bet your life it is
If only I played guitar.
I went up the hill to Main Street, south to Meadow Lane, west towards the Great Meadow. That's what it's called, the Great Meadow. It's great, but not all meadow. Some of it is cornfield.
A cornfield in April is a sight to behold: thousands upon thousands of rows of perfectly planted corn, once towering over the tallest head, now reduced to stubbly amputated stalks up to the ankle. Ears of renegade corn still preserved, bright yellow and ready, like flashlights dropped to earth in the "on" position and still dimly burning months later.
At the edge of the Great Meadow is the Connecticut River, tonight's destination. I walked through the cornfields to pay my respects to the river that rules this valley. Hello, river. You're looking fine tonight. Please, send my regards to Long Island Sound.
There's a North Pole across the state line in New Hampshire, a radio tower beaming red, and as fate would have it it's due north from Northfield. Polaris obsolete when that tax-free tower blinks.
Similarly, west is at the West Pole, which stands in West Northfield, in a section known as Satan's Kingdom, and more precisely in the middle of the Dump. The West Pole is a big long stick atop which are perched painfully powerful sirens, which will go off in raw cacophony if the nearby nuclear power plant should ever malfunction.
Yeah, have I mentioned there's a cemetery in my backyard, and I live within the evacuation zone of an aging nuclear reactor? Behold my quasi-rural domestic bliss and quaketh thou before it.
Tonight, just a bear's lap across the river from Satan's Kingdom, the sun set well to the north of the West Pole, it being April and me obediently due west.
I took a 360-review of the environs: color returning to the hills, unidentifiably decomposed agricultural equipment left to rot, the abandoned Schell Bridge over the river (an architectural marvel two centuries ago, now a $20 million charity case), and a vast swath of dead spiky cornstalks.
One image stood out against the blackening hills: a golden cross hoisted high atop the steeple of St. Patrick's Church, our friendly neighborhood Roman Catholic enclave. I could see virtually nothing man-made as I turned my back on the river and surveyed the eastern part of town, save this one glittering crucifix hogging all the sunlight.
I thought briefly of a newspaper report this morning about the Boston archdiocese's sale of the former Cardinal's $99.4 million dollar Boston mansion. Yeah, the servants of Jesus lived in a $99.4 million dollar mansion. (Okay, disclaimer, that sum includes many acres of land and other buildings, but still, man, you shoulda seen the place.) The church sold it to raise cash to pay settlements to victims of sexual abuse at the hands of Catholic clergy. Nauseating enough. I scanned the eastern hills for other signs of civilization.
I thought I could make out the "steeple" of the Unitarian Universalist "church" among the bare tree branches, but in keeping with UU "dogma" I couldn't really be sure if the building was there or not.
We went to the Unitarian church for the first time on Sunday, and the service was an absolute disaster. The regular minister, I learned, is only there every second Sunday, and as luck would have it, our first visit was on one of his off-days. We had a "guest speaker" who might as well have been lobbing spoonfuls of Marshmallow Fluff at the congregation for all the sense she made.
God is love, and love is God. Truth is God, and God is truth. God is happified, and our religion is happified. Some dour religions need to be happified! We are here to love, and to think, and to be. And to be understanding of love, and to love understanding. And across all of the earth there is an understanding of love, and of truth, and of a real knowing that God -- our happified God -- is love. Loving, to be sure, yes, loving, but also love. So be it!
It was enough to send me screaming down Main Street, stigmata dripping from my open palms, into the cold arms of Sister Mary Ignatius over in St. Patrick's, who would throttle me senseless and mop the basement floor with my brains so that my soul might be cleansed, anything to save me from the claptrap the UU's were serving up so cheerfully.
I can only pray that our semi-absentee Minister is a better communicator. I'll try again this coming Sunday and hope that he's there, ready with something to say.
The visit was not without divine intervention, however. There was another young couple in attendance with a young baby. In a town where half the population is over 60, young couples and young babies stick out like nuclear emergency alert towers. It turns out it was their first visit to the UU church (just like us), they had a seven-month-old girl (Fiona is eight months), they were inspired by her birth to find a good church and a semblence of connection to the community (uh, yeah) and they were eager to meet new people in the area and find babysitters (whoa!).
We told this couple we were taking Fiona to see Greg Brown in concert later in the evening; they'd seen Greg Brown in concert nine times. We said we'd lived in the Bronx before moving to the area; they'd lived in Brooklyn. And on and on.
Supposedly we're seeing them again next Sunday, so our daughters can steal one another's pacifiers and we can laugh awkwardly at one another's jokes. Lobbed fluff aside, it turned out to be a worthwhile Sunday morning, and a curious coincidence. (And Greg Brown put on one hell of a show.)
But back to Jesus and Tori Amos. Did I mention I was listening to Under the Pink on headphones during tonight's walk in the cornfields?
I'm not a big fan of Tori Amos, but dammit, it's time for me to come out of the closet and say, fuck it, I believe in Jesus, and I love the words attributed to him, and I find comfort in his guidance, and there's an allure to that golden cross floating against the darkening hills at twilight. I was born into a love and fear of Jesus. It's who I am. I can't run from it. We all need a place to go when life chafes.
At JFK's capacious international terminal last month, waiting for my departing flight to London, I found refuge and solace in the Roman Catholic chapel they'd set up between the Jewish room and the Protestant room which was across the way from the Buddhist room which was next to the pseudoMosque, all of which were vacant at 5 P.M. on a Wednesday, St. Patrick's Day as it happened. I went in, by myself, to the Catholic room, and I spoke to Mary, and I spoke to Jesus, and I spoke to the Holy Ghost, and I asked them to get me back to New York alive after flying Beyond Canada and Over Greenland to the other side of the ocean, and it all made sense, speaking to them, these figures I believed in until about the age of 12, I mean as a kid I had Jesus in my fingernails and Mary under my tongue and the Holy Ghost always just at the edge of my vision, menacing and real.
I don't want Fiona to grow up thinking she's evil, the way I did. And I wouldn't ask K. to sit beside me groaning the Apostle's Creed if it goes against what she believes. But I have to admit that the corrupt, hypocritical Roman Catholic Church is my original spiritual home, and everything I understand about God begins there, and I'd like to think that Jesus and I have ... an understanding.
It being April, I was reminded, in the Great Meadow, of my Great Breakdown, in April 1994, when all of my adolescent delusions were knocked down (mostly by a contingent of wise women in my life) and I really saw myself for who I was, for the first time.
Previously, as an arrogant teenager, I had convinced myself I was a kind of Renaissance man and Ubermensch, completely above the trappings of time or place and certainly above the nightmares of history. But that spring, I realized for the first time that I was a straight white Irish Roman Catholic heterosexual male from suburban Boston, with specific memories and defining characteristics and pasty skin, and that I had a context to work from, to build from, as I moved into adulthood. I was not my own creation. I was not all brain. I was body, too, and boy. My parents made me. I wasn't all present and future. I also had a past.
Tori Amos helped out with certain lines from Under the Pink. That's where she comes in. She was the most poetic of that contingent of wise women ten years ago who held a mirror up and helped me see who I was. She mostly drives me insane with her breathy voice and opaque lyrics, and I hold some of her work in stinky disregard. But that record on headphones, blared into my ears like sirens, means the world to me. I still hear her. Clearly.
And I wondered if something was coming full circle ("circles and circles and circles again") as I really settle into this acreage-and-offspring phase of life, if the foundation I've spent my twenties looking for exists in the lessons of my childhood.
In someone else's LJ today I read a quotation from Isaiah that nearly made me cry, and I wonder if that counts.
Dark twilight fell fast as I stomped home using the bad-boy shortcut (the still-active railroad tracks, deep gulches on either side, the clunky threat of oncoming Amtrak everpresent). I paused for a moment and imagined how cool it would be to perform a superpower full-tilt Jimi Hendrix blowout version of "Cornflake Girl," stripping it of all its preciousness and emphasizing the fuck-you punch of the lines
This is not really happening
You bet your life it is
If only I played guitar.