Patterns
I see patterns in my faith. During my life, I ‘ve had faith in the existence of God. I’ve dismissed the existence of God. I’ve believed in the gods and I’ve forsaken the gods. I’ve believed in people and then discovered their frailties and inconsistencies. I’ve had faith in places. I’ve had faith in teaching. I have also learned that those faiths too are ephemeral. I notice my patterns of acceptance and rejection. It did not seem possible to have faith in myself without some kind of aid. Standing alone would require the inconceivable attainment of viewing myself as my own leader, my own true north. In the vast expanse of life that seems inconceivable.
Cynicism is a faith in irony. The belief that outcomes are always twisted. A temporary surety that leaves a void which rebels against the rule of giving up. That was my farewell to cynicism.
When the stars were so far away, we invented stories about their patterns in the night sky. When technology brought us closer, we perceived an endless array of repeating patterns, and gave names to the types of universes. We only see what we are able to understand. The patterns are reflections of us; what we are capable of perceiving. They are almost mirrors.
Awareness searches for connection. It needs a ratification of purpose. Does this come from its temporary nature? Is it because I cannot perceive the world without me?
Cave paintings weren’t made by me but I feel their search. I’ve seen the geometry of the pyramids, almost like beacons. I’ve stepped into a room and instantly become different. I’ve believed this from the distance of time. World views are looking glasses into us. All those expressions forming the patterns of who we are, of our migrations and hibernations.
I had this dream that I was in London but had become separated and could not remember where I needed to go. I tried to describe where I needed to be. I solicited directions. I walked in widening circles. Each time someone said, “Do you mean The Tower of London, or Buckingham Palace, or Trafalgar Square,” I realized that was not the place at all. It didn’t sound right and I had this feeling that I would recognize it as soon as I heard it. In some ways, that describes my patterns of faith. Would I recognize my destination?
Sometimes we find joy in the discovery or creation of patterns because it brings insight. Appreciating the beauty of a braid and knowing how to make one are very different experiences. It is not unlike appreciating music and making it. Writing a story and reading one. Viewing a painting and painting. They are different forms of the same magic.
Belief in magic opens a door to the possibility of eternity. It is not exactly a magic trick that is dependent on slight of hand. It is more than the making of sausage. It is closer to what brings grace into a dance. It can be the instant of harmony. In those moments, existence seems smiling and beneficent. Is that more than just a pattern that is the reflection of me?

There is a tree filled hilltop in back of an old farmhouse where an outcropping of rock opens to the sky and birds play in the air over the valley. There is a small point that juts out into a lake where the sun seems to rise and set and water glistens twice a day. There is a doorway with a ledge that looks out on the street. There was a house by the highway but it burned down and took a blossom tree with it. There is a desk by a window. Any place can be home.

Places speak to me. They ask me to stay or leave. They are far more consistent than people. Sometimes people want to see you and sometimes they turn you away. A wanderer learns the places that almost always ask you to stay. The ones that can heal you and share your joy. The ones where you blend in. They are part of our memory but they are steady as rock.

I wonder about when my memories seem to come from outside of me. They are seldom intruders and sometimes just need to visit. Plants and trees are like that. They cannot come to you but they need you to come to them. Maybe it is simply a need for connection. Maybe they recognize something in you that has touched them. Maybe they are messengers through time. Is that related to what we call de ja vu?

The other day I thought that perhaps they are forms of reincarnation. Maybe ancestral traits are manifestations of the reincarnations that we are. I don’t believe in popular reincarnation, where everybody gets to be Cleopatra or Alexander the Great. But maybe some lives have been so barren that we stuff their reincarnations deep so that they can never surface.

When the feel in the air or the light filtering to the street embrace you like a homecoming, and you have never been to that place before and have this one time to meld with it. When this one time, place, or creature melds with you and both ingest like sustenance, something special happens. Something deep in you responds. What is that instant of creation?

Sometimes I think it is in my DNA. I wish I knew more about the nature of DNA. I studied its effect on learning for years. But it was moving too fast and changing into its components, like the atom or fleeting love.

Chromatin has my interest today. It is a substance consisting of DNA and protein. It is part of our chromosomes. Is it the dwelling of our ancestors?  Scientific articles say that it is essential in maintaining the function of memory cells throughout the life of the organism. Is it possible that they go further? Do they speak to generations yet to come through their propagation?  Is it an expression of reincarnation?

That all sounds so farfetched. It is like a desire for eternity.

Places are relatives but different because the life of the organism is undetermined. It is more of an ecosystem than creatures appear to be, but that is only on the surface of things. In some realities, creatures are all echo systems. The purpose of the system is survival. Metamorphosis comes into the picture. A place can be reborn, and I guess so can a person. A place can not seem to remember who it was and neither can a person. But was can be perceived.

Our memories are also in our senses. All of them can transport us through time and distance. Sensory memory. Isn’t it clearly transported in other creatures who have the innate sense to migrate to a specific place they have never been? A part of them may have been there before. I like to think that it happens with plants and trees too. How does it look in people?

If everything is connected, mustn’t science connect with spirituality? Mustn’t conscience connect with the soul? Must’s they all connect with the senses? May they all not connect through generations?

Some things are so primitive that they are complex. Does the nature of the primitive seem to be among them?

Does science not reveal the microscopic structure and megascopic structure to be related? Or is it just our perceiving the surface of things more closely and from farther away than ever?

My chromosomes have taken a detour with me; they’re haven’t gone anywhere. Unless there is some other way to pass along my chromatin? To become part of what appears to be the fiber…

When I reach out for these answers, I am met with only the sense of be here now. The rest will work itself out.

The argument over what is called Critical Race Theory has brought an unspoken reality to light. In the harsh glare of that light, many have regressed to an attitude of not wanting to hear about it. White people have long known that they are favored by the legal system in the United States. Some have rationalized with anecdotal retorts to this idea. Everyone has a relative or friend who feels that he or she was the subject of reverse discrimination. These anecdotal renditions are often one-sided. They discount the innumerable injustices that have been foisted upon people of color with the cliché “two wrongs don’t make a right” or the oft used “I never owned slaves. Why should I be punished?”
Turning up the light to a glare, many on the other side have decided that unless the system that tilted the table against people of color be dismantled, it cannot be righted. This results in many rationalizations for behaviors that are unproductive and self-defeating. “The white man always protects his own and that will never change” is a refrain.
I look at my own life in this light and wonder if I have, by my very existence, supported this inequality. I am a white man who has aged to 72. I come from a long line of American families. I am a son of the American Revolution. I was born and raised in the multi-racial city of Newark, New Jersey. I grew up around racial slurs and attitudes. When I was very young, I no doubt adopted these views in order to be part of my tribe.
I was an inquisitive boy who was encouraged to learn. I took that to mean that I was encouraged to question. I began by questioning that which my family held dear: religion. I noticed that I was taught that belief was stronger than reason and faith more powerful than fact. I could not find a basis for this attitude and, slowly, it drove me away from Christianity. Then it drove me to look at all organized religions as methods of control. There was plenty of supportive evidence but was cultural control at the heart of religion or did it just develop into a means of control? Was it a function of the bureaucracy?
The romantic power of faith and belief does speak to us on a level deeper than reason. It does promote potential blind spots in who we are. For those who believe the moral scales can surely be tilted by the moral thumb of belief. However, belief may be at the center of the very construction of the scale. Its framework may be the creator of its own contradictions. When faced with this level of complexity, we search for solutions with simplicity.
I was in school at a time when the teaching of United States History was inculcated into my thinking from early primary education throughout my undergraduate studies. But there were noticeable gaps. While the Civil War was covered in some detail, what followed was reduced to a few scant chapters that were highlighted as “Radical Republicans and Waving the Bloody Shirt” to “Scalawags and Carpetbaggers” who took advantage of the dark period of American History that was glossed over in a race to get to expanding Industrialization and World War 1.
The South was depicted as romantic, beautifully gracious and reliant on an agrarian culture that depended on human labor that would have been wiped out by Industrialization anyway. They were shown as married to this original sin of slavery from their inception. But it was also pointed out that slavery was not unique to the United States. It was pointed out that slavery exists throughout history on most every part of the planet where humans have lived. It was pointed out that in the natural world species sometimes enslave smaller members of their own kind. This was taught as almost a natural division of labor. Was this a huge rationalization of American Slavery or was it an attempt to understand who we were and how we had met and not met the challenges of the past?
Examining the challenges of the past is not a smooth road for organized religion. The Judo-Christian-Islamic faiths are religions of the book, of the words. The words can be changed or interpreted. They have been but each claims divinity for its own interpretation, rendering the others unworthy.
The same is true for the proponents and opponents of Critical Race Theory. Just as Christianity once vilified Judaism and Islam dismisses both as lies at their very core, we face this challenge over race. I think of the many wars fought over religion. I think of the many wars fought over race. No matter what we do, we are the descendants of these conflicts. Of course they are woven into the fabric of our systems. If we cannot accept who we have been, how are we to know who we are and what will become of us? Even the highly praised advocate for social change Gandhi, a Hindu, believed in the retention of the caste system.
Some, like myself, decided on personal interpretation. But we would be just as much fools if we do not think and believe that we carry our past influences inside of us. For all of their flaws, our nation was founded on the idea that we could do better than we had done before. It is the aspirational notion of our union that carries this belief at its core.
Time and again we have failed in this struggle but we have continued it. We have, this point, endured. In this, one of our great writers, William Faulkner was and will continue to be, I fervently believe, correct.

Places where I had intimate interaction and that shared themselves with me for a time. Not the bolted-down desks where I was made to sit and write at school that felt like writing from a cage. A living room couch in the basement apartment where I was young, at home, with my legs bent over a stack of pillows and a pad propped on my thighs. That was also where I liked to read but there were just two rooms and that was where the TV was.
On the floor that was covered by a rug, I watched TV. I tried to write while TV was on, but the TV found its way into the words. I could block everything out when I read and I had to learn to do that when I wrote, and then undo it. Then to be able to slide between doing it and not doing it, consciously and naturally.
The next place was on my bed. I had a desk but it was in a dark corner and the only light was a too-bright overhead. I used it for storage and to lose things in. I wrote on my bed. Sometimes I wrote at the kitchen table, looking up at the street level traffic.
At school, the desks became movable but the rooms were distracting. It was like writing while blocking out and I wandered off course, went on tangents. I didn’t like the place and I wanted to get it over quickly.
I wrote on my bed pretty much all the way through school. I lowered my bed to the floor and pushed it under a window. Now I had the bed and the floor and a window. I was happy! I typed at a kitchen table.
My first writing table was old office furniture, heavy squared maple legs and a scarred top. It had one drawer underneath. I covered it in cloth that women gave me. I arranged objects at the far corners. I was attracted to bronze and used bronzed baby-shoe book ends to hold up the line that I was using. A feather-tipped quill pen sat in an empty, red ink jar. I padded my rolling chair. It was my table. It welcomed me into its embrace. Then I added a plant to grow by the window next to my table. I would ride on the vibrations of my things, along with stereo music.
The TV and radio could be somewhere else. Maybe the radio should be by the bed. I had the necessary elements of a room! Just a window, lamps, a rug, my records, books and stereo. A place to go to the bathroom and to eat. Later, I hung things that interested me on the walls.
The room grew to hold bookcases and paintings. My desk became a blank door set up across sawhorses. There was a lamp at either end. A typewriter and my padded rolling chair. A chair for someone else that I made look like I used for reading, but I still read in my bed on the floor, by my radio and TV. I sat by my multiplying plants.
So what makes a study?
My first thoughts are about things, books and a table but maybe it is a place that provides a sense of comfortable privacy. Maybe it’s wherever you wind up most alone. Maybe it is the place where you perform your last dance. Or the one after that.
Planks of wood on cinder-blocks, a bronzed cup from the 1905 World Fair: they were parts of older studies that didn’t make the trip. Either they were misplaced, discarded, or crumbled.
Always a table somewhere. Once across an opening that looked across to the kitchen. Once in a room that leaked from ice damming.
Then there was my window on the lake from a small room that overlooked it. There was a floor to ceiling built-in bookcase and closets on one entire wall. I added another bookcase and the computer furniture that was now so important to my writing. But it was from my chair at the computer table that I looked out daily on the wonders of the ever changing lake.
Now my study is a room with scarred furniture. Refinished pieces that are thought to be too heavy today. I still do not write at my desk. Now I have an L shaped work station with two computers and a printer and a modem and a router. My router looks like an old style desk set, pens sticking out of their slots that are now antennae for reception. My walls are filled with collages and photographs but none are of family and all have found a family here. My Chippendale fan back chair sits in this room with the secretary it sat next to 70 years ago and in a different world. I came to visit then and now I have brought them back together after so many years and experiences. I feel what they carry for each other across overlapping rugs.
There is one window but I mostly keep it covered to shut out the light. My plants have moved next door and have their own room.