It's So Damn Personal

It all is ... So damn personal, that is. If I listen carefully to myself, I hear it everywhere. I have told myself that I'm posting to a blog about Playing in the Last Quarter. It's a good story but, truth be told, one never writes about  anything but one's own and betimes others' footfalls and where one senses they have landed. Part of my Playing in the Last Quarter are these postings and I am, when all is said, a Senior Citizen writing about his own experience in getting old. All quintessentially personal. Lived life is bound inside of who we are ... and bound for both better and for worse.

I am talking this afternoon about relatioinship not because I am educated in such matters but as one for whom every cell in his body is forever connected somehow to relationship. Amongst my favorite authors? Kohelles, the writer of Ecclesiates who after studying all sorts of wisdom and amassing wealth, wine, women and song, discovers that in the end all is but foul wind except for his relationship to another and his relationship to his God.

I was walking by a garden patch that obviously just days before a recent frost had held the greens from last Spring's Lillies of the Valley among hearty/hardy Pachysandra that manage to remain no more than "looking chilled" through-out a Pennsylvania Winter. Oh! I didn't think they were speaking only to me. They were there to speak to anyone who would listen. How I identified with both the wilted Lilly-Greens and the strong Pachysanda.

And not long ago, I was comfortably meeting with another visitor to my life ... mine to theirs .... as my mind found its way along its winding and turning ways and times to a moment 30'ish years ago when, as an adult with adolescent children, my mystical grandfather asked if I wouldn't come and study those things that he had received in his studies -  90 years before - for one year. I remembered refusing .... objectively? I needed to support my kids. But personally? Receiving from another is never easy for me ... or for others, I suspect. Any case, I was aware that I was fighting receiving from that Other ... ach du lieber ... I was fighting, even if so cordially. I have known those for whom receiving is toxic ... feels like poisons ... "You can repeat what I say ... word for word ... and I'll deny it came from me and call it 'your poison.'" Oh! I'm so much more sophisticated than that ... oh! ... and substantively no different. Afraid like others in Clan Anthropos to take in from the World ... to feeling vulnerable ....

Oh, my. I remember coming off the streets of Brooklyn crying to my beautiful Mother about having just lost all the skins that m'Lord had placed protectively on my knee. I was open to Mom making it better. The antibacterials of the day burned ... mercirichrome ... methiolate ... but open to sharing those vulnerabilities with beautiful Mom. Maybe it's that loss of the ability to receive that keeps a "rich man from entering the Kingdom of Heaven?"

No. Receiving ... a notion buried amongst the details of traditions that have fallen from the generations before into my/our hands ... to do or not to do .... the word Kaballah (so popular in pop culture these days) is not defined by its content but means "receiving" ... the process of taking from another. I suppose Madonna knows that.

This afternoon for some three hours, I'll be talking about relationship ... the Elusive Good Relationship ... I suppose I could add ... As Reported by One Old Man who has Struggled to Find these experiences like someone who never gets off his dinghy ... rowing on Loch Ness ... waiting for Nessy to appear ... maybe just once more.

It's no wonder I spent years studying Mathematics ... It's so easy to pretend that Mathematics is impersonal.
Nothing is impersonal.