Category: Living

Have you ever fallen?  I mean falling hard on the ground – smack, thud, scrape.  It could have been some time you fell off a wall or down a hill, or you lost your balance on your bike and scraped the road, or maybe you were trying to carry something heavy and you lost your balance.  If you’re able to pay attention to your body as you’re wavering and tipping over, you’ll sense a quivery feeling in your limbs and your gut well before you actually lose your balance, before your momentum tips entirely.  It’s the last chance you get to right yourself – your body is giving you a warning shot.  You can avoid the plunge but only with a bit of an heroic effort, and only if you know you don’t want to drop.

Our bodies are real, beautiful, material things, and as such, they are subject to gravity on this earth.  And if you look at our bodies, they are well designed for most of what we do, but then we push them and do dangerous things beyond their design limits.  Falling is one of the inevitable results.  We learn as children to use our muscles to adjust our balance and prevent falls before they occur.  The mind and soul learn to fear uncontrolled surrenders to gravity, learning the lessons of the breaks, bruises and scrapes of our physical self.

Continue reading “Stop falling”

There’s an increasing trend in denser neighborhoods of people putting up “little lending libraries”.  In my neighborhood, there are two old newspaper dispensers – the kind where you’d put in some change and the handle would release, you’d open it up, and grab a paper from a stack inside – which have been unlocked and made available for book swapping.  In my son’s neighborhood, which is a little more upscale, a number of people have built miniature houses with glass front doors and a couple of shelves inside.  Some of them are marked “children’s books only”, and my son loves rifling through them and bringing a couple of books home when we take the dog for a walk.  Some are all-purpose, and on a recent walk with my dog, I found a copy of Thomas More’s Utopia in one of them.  I hadn’t read it since college, so I thought what the heck, I’m vaguely underemployed these days, let’s have a go.

Continue reading “Byron in Utopia”

I’ve been a bit on edge lately, which among my friends hasn’t been particularly surprising.  The relationship I was in recently ended, I’ve been chronically underemployed, and the long days of Seattle summer mean there’s simply more time to fill.  In other words, I’m bored.

I doubt anyone reading this is surprised by this revelation.  After all, I’m just starting a post of my writings online, which typically is driven by a combination of boredom and narcissism that enables someone to write enough to maintain a steady output of writing, and to feel confident enough in their own importance to post it on the Internet.  Surely, Peter, the reader is saying, it’s obvious that you’re bored.  Please, dear God, don’t bore us.

Continue reading “Limbo calling”