Son 2 has a girlfriend

Yesterday Son 2 called me. He often calls on the weekend to say hello, though he's not strict about it. Anyway, this time he really said he had only one piece of news -- namely, that he has a girlfriend. I said this was much better news than his stepping in quicksand. He said, "Now you can decide that I'm normal," and I chuckled that I wouldn't go that far. He told me her name, and corrected my attempts to spell it. And that was about it. Then he said he was going to call Wife and tell her.

You will notice that this call told me almost nothing about her. Son 2 texted me a couple of photos, including one of the two of them together. She looks very pleasant; he's smiling. It's not quite what I've called a "goofy grin" but close. But he told me nothing else about her besides what I've told you here, and I didn't ask. My father was always really pushy and intrusive about wanting to know the details of my private life, and I want to spare Son 2 that same inquisition. I replied to his text saying that I'd be happy to hear any stories he wanted to tell me, but on his schedule. And that means that right now I know virtually nothing.

Son 2 did suggest that Wife won't be nearly so lenient. He left a message on her phone, and said that he expects "a barrage of questions." 

The call sounded rehearsed, and the abrupt way he ended it made him sound awkward. I assume that this relationship really isn't new, but that he got to the point of wanting to be able to refer to her by name when talking about her. Or maybe she pushed the issue, the way D once pushed it on me. Either way it didn't really feel like news. The last time or two that he stayed with me, whenever we talked he seemed to start a lot of sentences with "My housemate." ("My housemate did this," "My housemate did that.") Now he can give her a name, which is shorter. And one morning while he was sitting at my kitchen table, he got a phone call that prompted him to stand up and step outside right away; when that call wrapped up, I heard him sign off with "Love you." So as I say, it didn't really feel like news.

Doing the math, I realize that Son 2 is 23, and this is the first time he has said anything about dating anyone. That doesn't mean he hasn't dated, of course. He went to boarding school for high school and he went away to university, so anything is possible. But if he was dating before now, he never bothered to mention it. So it is possible that he started his romantic life kind of late, the same way I did.

Meanwhile his older brother, Son 1, has never said anything about dating at all. He has had the same opportunities as Son 2 for carrying on a romance out of sight of his parents, but I just notice that he has never said anything.

Twenty-three years old? When I was that age, I was already married. Not that my example is necessarily the best one to follow, obviously enough.

Anyway, that's the news.

         

Death of a Buddha

You may have seen in the news already that Thích Nhất Hạnh died today. This afternoon I got an email addressed to the UU Sangha that I used to attend back before COVID-19, spreading the word. Then in the early evening I logged in for my regular weekly Zoom call with Debbie. She was watching the tail end of a memorial service for him at a Zen retreat center in another state, and I said it would be fine for her to share her screen so we could watch it together.

We talked about him for a long time. Thầy — that's an affectionate nickname for Thich Nhat Hanh and means "Teacher" — is or was the founder and spiritual leader of the tradition Debbie follows. When I mentioned back in 2013 that she was ordained into a lay order, that meant that she had formally received the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings which ordained her into Thầy's Order of Interbeing. 

She talked about times she had been privileged to hear Thay speak in person. I added that I had seen and heard him in person exactly once, because he was there on the occasion of Debbie's ordination, formally officiating. Then afterwards he gave a dharma talk and took questions for a long time from the group as a whole. Some of the questions came from pretty far out in left field, but Thay answered them all: carefully, respectfully, simply, and compassionately. He was remarkably skillful. Debbie said at one point, "I truly believe he was the Buddha for our day."    

Later she said that all week she had been contemplating one of Thay's poems, "No coming, No going," and that it had helped her come to peace with his death. She added that even though he is physically dead as of today, she can feel his presence around her through his teachings. So in one way she was sad, of course, but in another way not. She was in any event profoundly moved.

After a long while we began to talk about the rest of her week. It has been a tough one. She works as an occupational health nurse, for a clinic system where close to 10% of the staff are sick at home with COVID-19, even as cases among the public in her area are spiking. She has to connect with every staff member who is out sick, and check on their progress, so the clinics can figure out how to reassign staff to maintain their coverage. And she told me, not only was the workload heavy but the emotional weight of it was just as heavy, because so many of her colleagues are sick and suffering, or have family members who are sick and suffering. One was a grandmother, who contracted the disease from her grandson; the grandmother was weathering it well enough, all things considered, but the grandson was in the hospital and intubated. Debbie asked if the grandmother would accept prayer for her grandson, and the grandmother grasped at the offer gratefully. By the time that phone call finished, Debbie added, both she and the grandmother were weeping openly.

She added one other thing, which did not surprise me a bit. One by one, her coworkers have been talking to the president of the clinic system, telling him how grateful they are for Debbie's unstinting help and deep compassion. She told me this only by the way, only to say how grateful she was that she had been able to help them so much. She explicitly rejected the idea that it reflected anything special on her. But — as I say — I wasn't a bit surprised. Debbie's compassion really is almost boundless. It's one of the things I love about her. She would rebuke me sharply for putting it this way, but she is a bit of a saint.

So she talked. I listened, reflected back to her what I heard her saying, and tried to console where I could. I remarked that hard weeks like this are even harder when you can't meet anyone in person, to offer a hug or even hold a hand. (The thought came to me because there were so many times during our call that I just wanted to hold her.) She agreed, and pretty clearly understood what I was saying. When we wrapped up the call, she looked straight into the camera and said:

"You know I love you."

I nodded and replied:

"I love you too. I will always love you."

And I will. Of course I knew it and she knew it anyway. But sometimes it's nice to say the words out loud.

            

Quicksand?!

I got a call from Son 2 this morning. He was out on a job site and accidentally stepped into a patch of quicksand. Me, all I know about quicksand is that it's used as a plot device in movies, like "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Blazing Saddles." But apparently it's an actual hazard out where he's working.

The good part is that he had a stout wooden staff with him. As he left for the site this morning, he figured that surveying it would require a lot of hiking and the staff would come in handy. Well ... it came in handy helping him out of the quicksand! Then he called me for about a minute, to let me know it had happened, and went back to work.

This has nothing to do with any of the other threads in this blog, but I just couldn't fail to mention it.

    

A different future for marriage

Some years ago — gosh, seven, now that I take a look — I wrote a post on the future of marriage, with some of my thoughts at the time. Just today I saw an article on-line that harmonizes remarkably well with what I wrote, though it reflects an option I don't believe I considered at the time. The option is "platonic life partnership," and it means ... well, it's interesting.

When I read the headline, my first thought was, "Marriage without sex," and it didn't sound like much fun. In a sense it's that, but in a sense not at all. The idea is that modern marriage combines multiple relationships into one: a spouse should be a lover, a best friend, a co-parent, and a part of the household. Marriage is supposed to involve compaibility of values, of temperament, and of sexuality. And the concept here is, Why not unbundle those? So the article talks about people who are best friends, who already know that their temperaments and values are compatible, who therefore decide to set up a household together even though they have no intention of ever fucking each other. That's not to say they plan to live lives of celibacy: they are perfectly free to fuck other people. But it means that they don't rely on a bond as passionate, unreliable, and evanescent as lust to ground a relationship that requires permanence — the way that establishing a household, building a financial future, and raising children do.

So these people establish permanent partnerships with their best friends, and then date on the side. If one of their dates wants to stick around for longer than a one-night stand, right away there is a conversation about, "My life is tied to my friend here. If you want to be part of my life, you have to accept that."

The original article is here in USA Today, but seems to be behind a paywall.

I read it here in MSN Start, but I don't know if that link will work for everyone.

Interestingly, this kind of relationship fits all of the descriptive statements that I mentioned in my post from so long ago, except in two places where the statement may not be applicable:

• Marriage is a school for character. 
• Marriage provides a home for raising children.
• Marriage must be practical, not idealistic.
• Adultery happens. Get over it. This one's not really applicable, because there is never any sexual expectation built into the relationship in the first place.
• Marriage does not have to be between one man and one woman.
• Once the kids are out of the house, it might be time to call it quits. The applicability of this one is open to question. What I really meant at the time was, Don't quit while your kids are still in the house because they need you. And I still believe that. But why should we expect the bonds to loosen over time? Because "People change"? Yes, people change; but I think one of the common kinds of "change" is that the fog of romantic lust slowly dissipates over time, revealing a relationship between people who are in other (non-sexual) respects seriously incompatible. In a "platonic life partnership" there isn't that fog of lust in the first place, so maybe the odds of long-term compatibility are better. I think we need more empirical research to be sure.

Anyway, I thought it was an interesting respin on the concept of marriage. I'm glad to see there are people thinking through the options. And I'll be interested to see where it goes.

 

  

Silly coincidences

A couple weeks ago I mentioned a blog post by John Michael Greer on numerology, which has to be the least plausible form of divination I've ever heard of. But Greer is an interesting fellow, so I continue to follow what he writes. And today he posted another one, here.

This one is specifically about how to calculate your "birth number" and what it is supposed to mean. How to calculate is easy: write out your birthdate in numbers and add them up. Suppose you were born on July 4, 1976: then your birth number = 7 + 4 + 1 + 9 + 7 + 6 = 34, and 3 + 4 = 7. So you would be a 7. And his post gives a long paragraph about what it means for your personality and destiny to have "7" as a bith number. (Normally when you get a two-digit answer you add the digits to get a one-digit result. But there is an exception for 11 and 22, each of which gets its own description.)

I'm not going to quote any of his descriptions: you can go read his post for that if you want to. But I was struck by a number of coincidences, by which I mean pairs of people I know who both have the same birth number.

Hosea: 22, which has its own description but shares a lot in common with 4.
Brother: 4

Wife: 8
Marie: 8

[The description of an 8 is very close to what Wife used to be like before she got so sick and basically became a whole different person.]

D: 9
Debbie: 9

Schmidt is also a 9, come to that, but I don't think of him in quite the same way that I think of D or Debbie. 

Son 1: 6
Son 2: 6

[I suppose this could explain why Son 1 has made a point of taking in Wife to make sure she has a roof over her head.]

The descriptions don't always work. My mother comes out as a 5, which doesn't describe her at all. But maybe that's what she used to be like before I was born …? No idea. (My dad was a 7, in case you wondered.)

[Update a year and a half later: I revisit my mother's birth number in this post from May 2023, in which I conclude that it makes a lot more sense than I thought at first.]

But my brother and I are both 4 (more or less); my sons are both 6; my first two girlfriends (Marie and Wife) were both 8; my two romances immediately after Wife (D and Debbie) were both 9. I mean, sure, the odds for finding a pair here or there probably aren't that bad. But it sure looked a little funny.

Maybe I should stop talking about this now.

      

Gender dysphoria and transition

I told you that Cassius suffers from gender dysphoria, and wants to transition to life as a woman. When Cassius told me this in our long phone call, he said, "I don't know what you think about these things," and I said I hadn't thought about them much.

But in fact I had already thought about them some, and these days I am thinking about them more. Since these are general philosophical topics rather than strictly personal ones, I'm posting them over on the Patio. I start with this post here, and then proceed with the next few posts after that.

     

Madness road

Last month I explained an idea that had occurred to me many years ago, that there was a connection between Wife's openness to the invisible world and her mental illness. On the one hand, she did seem (at least in the early years) to have some demonstrable level of psychism, sometimes knowing what was going to happen before it did. The psychism, for that matter, seemed to run in the family: her mother had the same Gift, and talked about it in the same matter-of-fact way that she would talk about her sewing or her needlepoint or the latest gossip from the local Historical Society. Wife's oldest sister had the Gift as well; she lived in another state so I didn't know her nearly as well, but again she took it as a matter of course. Wife's middle sister never talked about the Gift, not even with Wife or their mother, and apparently didn't have it (or else turned her back on it). All three brothers — so I was told — lacked it as well. (I met the middle sister many times, but never met any of the brothers: one had killed himself, one had died of cancer, and one had abandoned the family — all many years before I ever met her.)

As I say, sometimes Wife knew what was going to happen before it did. Not always, of course, but once in a while. She also had remarkably good success reading Tarot for herself or others. I watched her do reading after reading while she was learning the cards, with the result that I kind of picked up the textbook meanings associated with each card. And I learned the layout she usually used. But then I would watch her read for a total stranger — some friend of a friend that she met at a party, who asked her to do it. She would shuffle, lay out the cards, ... and then confidently tell them things about their lives that had nothing to do with the textbook meanings of any of those cards. Afterwards it would turn out that she was right.

And she was very good at "aspecting" the Wiccan gods or goddesses, most often Cerridwen (her patron) but any of the others as well. I mean by this that she was good at making herself a vessel or channel through which one of Them could speak — good at letting her own personality step aside so that the Deity could possess her body and speak with her voice. (I mention this briefly in a couple of paragraphs here, and I allude to it in this poem. Not sure if I explain it anywhere else in the blog.)

Anyway, some years ago I began to wonder whether there might not be some kind of link between these abilities and her mental illness. I don't mean it in an insulting way ("People who think they are psychic must be crazy!"), but in a clinical or diagnostic way. In other words, I wondered whether the reason that some people have a greater ability to do these things than the rest of us is that they are somehow born with naturally thinner shielding around their minds. The rest of us have naturally thick shields, and screen out all the psychic or supernatural data that is normally in the environment; therefore we don't see it, and assume it doesn't exist. But maybe a few people are born with thinner mental shields: then on the one hand, they are able to perceive data that the rest of us miss (so that they exhibit psychic abilities); but on the other hand, their minds are correspondingly more fragile and break down a lot more easily.

On this view, Wife's mental illness — along with all the misery that it caused her and me and everyone around her — was somehow in the nature of a tragedy. On this view, her neuroses and all her craziness were just side-effects made possible by the same natural endowment that provided her Gift. And on this view, her total collapse once she got sick was just a predictable consequence of the same thing. She came into the world as a delicate instrument who could pick up signals the rest of us could never hear. But delicate instruments don't fare well when they are dropped. And when, because of the normal vicissitudes of life, she slipped off the shelf ... she hit the floor and smashed into a hundred pieces.

For several years I tried to comfort myself with that story. In some ways, it is a very generous story because it makes so much of what happened to be Not Her Fault. But I never knew if it was just a private conceit, or if it was the kind of thing somebody else might come up with too.

Until today.

Today, while I was wasting time on the Internet, and found a link which took me to Galina Krasskova's blog Gangleri's Grove. Once there, I saw a post from New Year's Eve called "Treading the Path of Memory," in which Ms. Krasskova spells out the striking similarities between ballet and shamanism. (If those don't sound related to you, read the article. Once she gets into the details, it becomes a lot clearer.) In particular, though, she has some very specific things to say about the relationship between shamanism and madness. She writes as follows:

Long ago, I learned that there were two paths to becoming what many might term a ‘shaman': madness road or death road. The idea is that you are cast down from your world, shattered and in the process of rebuilding and restoration, one comes back stronger and more resilient than before. There is a third way though, and that is the road of art. What is that? It is living a life where you are fully given over to the daimon of an art – in my case dance. Every inch of your identity, everything inside and out by which you exist and define yourself as a human being, centers around, relies upon, and is defined by one’s art. Then…usually at a terrible and critical juncture, that is stripped away and the result is a psychic shattering of the self. You rebuild (or not, but “not” involves consequences that are a luxury for a spirit worker. “Not” involves destruction, devolution, sometimes madness, drug addiction, and death). You claw your way back into some semblance of existence. You learn to live again and eventually, if you’re lucky, to find some measure of joy. If this is part of a spirit-worker’s journey, then this is when the Gods begin the process of direct formation. (In the end, I think every spirit worker or shaman ends up traipsing painfully down every one of the roads at some point in their life as we are remade again and again in service to our Gods. It is the way of things – formation never ends). The easiest and most productive thing to do is to embrace the process.

This could have been Wife's story, with only cosmetic edits. 

• She started out wanting to play music, and became accomplished on the pipe organ. Then her teacher told her she could never play professionally because her hands were too small — playing for church services was the best she could hope for. 
• So she gave up music and threw herself into scholarship and teaching. That lasted until she failed her qualifying exams in her second graduate program and had to leave school. 
• Then she gave up scholarship and teaching for the world of business. And that was taken away from her when her health finally collapsed and she could not go on another step. 

One by one, her goals were taken away from her until she had none left. If you ever wondered about the source for the despair she shrieked out in this post ... well, this is where it came from.

An interesting consequence of Ms. Krasskova's perspective is that Wife's losses stop looking like disasters, and start looking like tests, ... steps along the way towards learning to become a Priestess. I don't remember if I ever proposed that she look at things this way. Some days she would have taken my head off for saying anything like that. But that's the kind of thought I had in mind when I wrote:

The road marked for my wife is hard,
With pain and sickness closely barred.
But those who will to serve the gods
Must meet their tests, despite the odds.

Anyway, it was nice to find that someone else sees it all the same way.

__________

P.S. [added the next day]: The thoughts in this post are also connected to the line of thought I pursue in this post from three years ago. The difference is that the kind of "dying" I talked about back then is nothing like as dramatic as the things Ms. Krasskova discusses above, and nothing like as dramatic as the physical or mental illnesses that wracked Wife and destroyed her life. Also I have never claimed to be a shaman or spirit-worker. But there is an echo here, however distant.