A Harbinger of What's to Come

An Alien Scene: Icicles Melting off our Roof
CC Jean Stimmell:1/130/16

Looking out my window today, I see pussy willows already blossoming, mud in the driveway,  what-little-snow-we’ve-had-all-winter melting off my  roof.

Climate change, excruciatingly racheting up the tension – as was so masterfully done on medieval torture racks –  torments Mother Nature and our minds. Environmentalists call this the “long emergency" from which there is no escape. 

Glenn Albrecht, an Australian professor of environmental studies, has come up with a new diagnosis: “eco-anxiety.” Though we don’t yet find this term in the DSM-5, it perfectly describes what we are all feeling: ‘‘the generalized sense that the ecological foundations of existence are in the process of collapse.’’*

*Albrecht, G. (2012). Psychoterratic conditions in a scientific and technological world.

In P. H. Kahn, Jr., & P. H. Hasbach (Eds.), Ecopsychology: Science, totems, and

the technological species (pp. 241–264). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Blessings happen when our unconscious takes the lead

A Book I chanced upon at the Book & Bar book store 

If we step away from our mundane routines, the unremitting logic, stress, and anxiety of our every day lives, we provide an opening for our unconscious to manifest itself and take the lead. If it does, one might call it a waking dream. 

Such a blessing happened to me on New Year's Day while browsing in a bookstore: I have tried to capture the emotional feeling in the following poem:

Four Synchronicities and an Epiphany – 
at the Book and Bar

Synchronicity #1: Jane Kenyon

Browsing at The Book and Bar

I chanced upon a book,

The Best Day the Worst Day, 

written by Donald Hall

about his wife, the poet, 

Jane Kenyon.

She was/is special to me,

not just from serving together

as Editorial Board Contributors

for the Concord Monitor.

It was more than that, 

although we never met:

I felt a strong attraction:

my fantasy heartthrob.

Synchronicity #2: Cancer Treatment

I open the book at random

  to page 96 and read how

Jane was “walking and strong” until

enduring her last cancer treatment:

“When I brought her home a week later

she used a walker; she was broken

and never mended.”

Synchronicity #3: Vietnam

U.S. Napalming Vietnam village: 1972

Continuing with Hall’s quote:

“Weakness, bone pain, neuropathies, delirium, 

and daily vomiting were not results of her disease 

but of its treatment. I thought of the American major 

who [said]… after an assault on Ben Tre in Vietnam, 

‘We had to destroy the village 

in order to save it.’”  

“The analogy is false, because Jane's despoilers 

were not ironic majors but doctors trying to keep her alive. 

All the same, the village of Jane was razed again and again — 

bamboo huts burned down, markets napalmed, oxen 

machine-gunned, wells polluted with blood and offal.” 

Synchronicity #4: “The Sixties”

Here I am on the Mekong River
Vietnam: February 1967

Reading about Jane being razed,

while suffering my own cancer:

being irradiated on a cold slab,

like a specimen on a slide,

Agent Orange’s bad karma

from my tour in the Nam.

Meanwhile, as I take my first sip of  IPA,

Jerry Garcia’s iconic song begins to play:

“Driving that train, high on cocaine,

Casey Jones you better watch your speed

trouble ahead, trouble behind”

Bombarded beyond belief, 

my defenses are breeched...

The Grateful Dead are gunpowder

Jane’s medical nightmare the trigger 

exploding flashbacks in my mind 

of the agony and ecstasy of the 60’s

and the sweet nostalgia 

for what could have been.

The Epiphany

My mind is blown away

doors of perception cleansed

 just tasting my salty tears 

Powers of such magnitude –

Suffering, Death, Resurrection–

bombarding me simultaneously

canceling each other out

creating absolute calm: 

I float on white light

 a smile on my face:

A RUMI MOMENT

SERPENT UNCOILING UP MY SPINE

OH HOW I LOVE LIFE

The End]

Tranquilized by trivia, yearning for those good ole pagan days

Looking out on Great Bay: 12/27/15
CC Jean Stimmell

What a wonderful solstice present!

Hiking along a pristine path

bordering Great Bay estuary

we came across evergreens

adorned with dried fruit

simple and natural

as if hung by pixies and elves

harkening back to pagan times

before the invisible hand

of rationality and “affluensia”
consumed our souls.

Ah yes, rationality and affluensia, the modern epidemic of denial:

...you can see that basically our lives are, to a large extent, spent in avoiding confrontation with ourselves. And then you can begin to make sense of the enormous amount of our culture's daily activities, which attempt to distract us from ourselves, from deep reflection, from deep thinking, from existential confrontation. There's a wonderful phrase by the philosopher Kierkegaard, "tranquilization by the trivial." And I think our culture has mastered this better than any culture in history, simply because we have the wealth and means to do so. – Quote by Roy Walsh, psychiatry professor, in The Search For Meaning by Phillip L. Berman