The escort you can not afford to be without if you are a professional athlete

An athlete with his consort
CC Jean Stimmell

You don’t always get what you want

Apple tree at Wagon Wheel Farm: Durham, NH
CC Jean Stimmell: 8/18/16

This naturally occurring, obvious-beyond-doubt, heart symbol

is not Mother Nature’s date-stamp for love and good health.

Rather…

It is “heart-rot” caused a fungus who infected the apple tree

through a wound caused by a well-intentioned human pruner.

Creating the bowl that is your life

Raw Material of Life
CC Jean Stimmell

I had what still feels like a profound dream last Tuesday, 8/9/16 – like some kind of African proverb. I got up in the middle of the night and wrote it down. Here it is, for what it is worth, just as I wrote it down:

I am living in an indigenous village where school consists of only one task. The children are each given a cylindrical block of wood and their task is to cave a bowl out of this raw material. There are no time constraints: one can take as long as one wants.

 I use a curved knife and start cutting away the interior. It is slow going. One can chop with a knife in the early stages but that is dangerous: you might crack the wood or punch through the bottom. As I get further along, the work gets very delicate: using just my senses, feeling the outside and the inside simultaneously, I must make an intuitive judgment about whether the bowl is still too thick or approaching “rightness.”

While still in the dream I understand its significance: this is the bowl of life that I am fashioning to feed myself during my earthly existence. I can choose to take a shortcut and build a heavy, thick misshapen bowl. But that’s okay if that’s what I want to do. The bowl is still serviceable and will feed me well.  

On the other hand, I can strive to build a very light, piece of art (like the bowls that artisans sell at Sunapee Fair). It will impress some people and be easy to carry but comes with the risk of being easily broken.

The only way to fail at this indigenous school is to breach the bottom of your bowl. If it is too thin and leaks, then you will not flourish in life. Worse yet, if you cut a hole in the bottom, you will not be able to feed yourself and die.
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Cracked Bowl*
CC Jean Stimmell: August 14, 2016

* This photo is a black and white rendition of a carved, clay bowl created by Teresa Taylor, SaltyDogPottery.com. Teresa gave this piece to me because it developed a crack while being fired. I consider the crack gives the bowl additional worth, making it a magnificent sculpture.

The Unheard Buddha Hidden in the Shrubbery

Buddha by my office
CC Jean Stimmell: 8/3/16

Buddha, ever subtle, radiates his unheard wisdom

from the sanctuary of my rhododendron

Is that the same truth, I wonder, T.S. Eliot wrote about?

“the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery”

Untethered from time and space

Looking east from Saco, ME:  7/28/16
CC Jean Stimmell

This boat seemingly untethered from time and space

evokes in me the memory of another boat

I sailed upon long ago

bound for Vietnam

How transfixed I was on midnight watch

by our phosphorescent wake

splitting the mirrored sea:

Our boat only a speck

in the ocean of eternity

Modern nationalism increases mental illness, mass violence

The following essay was published in the Concord Monitor 7/27/16

Reflections in a Dover Store window: 7/17/16
CC Jean Stimmell

Reflections from back in time

Reflecting back on my youthful days as a card-carrying member of the 1960s counterculture, I remember being taken aback by a provocative statement by one of my professors: he declared that looking back through European history, people were happiest during the Middle Ages.

 He was referring to the ideas of Eric Fromm, psychoanalyst and social critic, who wrote that while people in that era lacked individual freedom, they had ultimate security as to who they were, what their place in society was, and what their purpose in life was, both while alive and in the hereafter. Out of that security came contentment.

Despite – or more likely because of  – the crazy era I came to age in, this idea stuck with me. While I certainly didn’t want to trade places with a peasant or stone mason from the Middle Ages, I was acutely aware of the immense weight of anxiety and stress bearing down on my frail shoulders, attempting to survive in ultra-individualistic America.

It fell upon me, and me alone, to design my own life, determine the purpose of my existence, and then endeavor to follow through on my goals in the effervescent flux of an ever-changing world.  There were no immutable standards to measure myself against: Any doubts I harbored over whether I was succeeding or happy could only be an indication of a personal failing. There was no fallback position: As a modern American, I could not blame fate or God or anybody else. I was the one solely responsible for my fate.

Fromm thought that such ultra-individualistic freedom lead not only to stress and anxiety but to alienation and serious mental illness. He did not think this was a private problem where individuals had become “unadjusted;” he thought it was a public issue, a “pathology of contemporary Western society.”^⁠1

I was reminded of these ideas recently while perusing a new book by Liah Greenfield, Mind, Modernity, Madness.  Like Fromm, Greenfeld claims that increasing mental illness is the price paid by the developed world for replacing communities knitted together by traditions with nation-states organized by the liberal values of equality, liberty, and declining religious authority.

If this is so, I wondered, what relevance does this have to the recent upsurge of unstable individuals committing mass violence. The pertinent question becomes: If democratic nationalism breeds mental illness, is there a causal connection between this rising psychopathology and the recent increase in mass violence?

The NYT recently made such a connection,^⁠ in a piece entitled “In the Age of ISIS, Who’s a Terrorist, and Who’s Simply Deranged?” Terrorism experts agree that the Islamic State has “a broad appeal to the mentally unbalanced, the displaced and others on the fringes of society.”

One can certainly make the case that the causal factor in much of our recent violence is mental illness, not terrorism.  In many recent cases of mass killing, the deranged perpetrator converted to a terrorist ideology only in the last weeks of his life, or last days, or in one instance, the last minutes before he was killed.

From a mental health professional viewpoint, the sequence of events leading to violence likely is as follows: an unstable individual sits and stews, isolating  himself from others, ruminating about his perceived failings, churning with inchoate rage she don’t understand and can’t verbalize. Over time–if left untreated– his rumination can turn to delusions. Losing touch with reality, he projects his repressed rage and unacceptable feelings of aggression onto some outside entity–a person, group, or country, who he comes to identify as the devil incarnate.  Finally, after dehumanizing this “enemy,” he takes action, believing no type of brutality against such evil could be too extreme.

To Liah Greenfield, this does not bode well for our future. She believes that madness bred of nationalism will become a mobilizing force, “creating a politics of sheer ideology and shaping a destructive form of political action”,^⁠3 more tribal than productive.

So far, her dismal prediction appears to be coming true with the rise of increasingly aggressive and xenophobic strains of nationalism around the world – including, unfortunately, right here in the United States, as personalized by the rise of Donald Trump.

What can be done?

One thing is clear: It is counterproductive to arm every citizen to the teeth or mount military campaigns against other countries or whole religions as a response to such deranged, lone-wolf attacks. While less dramatic, and thus unappealing to politicians, it would be far more cost efficient and effective to provide quality and affordable mental health services to all our citizens, as well as to people around the world.

While that would be a significant improvement, it would still only be a band-aid treating the symptoms.

When it comes to treating the cause, it is Fromm, not Greenfield, who prescribes real medicine to treat this spreading “pathology” of contemporary life. His diagnosis extends beyond a critique of nationalism to blame unbridled capitalism for uprooting community, putting profits over people, and corrupting politicians, resulting in increasing disparity between rich and poor –all of which accelerate economic insecurity and psychological suffering.

Fromm knew we could never turn back the hands of time: Modern democratic nationalism is here to stay, but he believed the correct treatment could do much to ameliorate the human suffering it causes.

Eric Fromm’s medicine of choice was democratic socialism. Maybe it’s time to give it a try. Bernie Sanders certainly thinks so.

xxx

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¹ The Sane Society by Eric Fromm, page 6

² New York Times, 7/18/16

³ American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 119, No. 5 (March 2014), pp. 1527-1528

Passage to Middle Earth, Primal Labyrinth, Mythic Rhino

Today at Adams  Point, Durham, NH

Primal Labyrinth      CC  Jean Stimmell: 7/24/16

It is so important to keep the eye glued 
o the reality of the actual holiness! 

– from Alfred Kazin's Journals

Mythic Rhino     CC  Jean Stimmell: 7/24/16

Without worship, without respect, without wonder, 
without the great work  with which our wonder 
and awe plunge us, what is there — what?

But the “modern” epoch is precisely that in which 
each of us must discover our gods for ourselves
– from Alfred Kazin's Journals

Passage to Middle Earth    CC  Jean Stimmell: 7/24/16