Dedicated to Jessie Lee Moss, May 3, 1939 – November 18, 2018
“Bull Durham” has remained an iconic film, not because men love baseball, but because women understand that the game imitates life. I grew up in a family, where at Thanksgiving, men watched football and the women talked about Spring Training. Men are men, their attention will move to the next shiny object of whatever sport is before them. Women in our family, however, knew deep in the essence of their being, that the seasons of baseball mirrored the cycles of life.
My family roots lie in Oklahoma, the Dust Bowl, the Great Depression, and baseball. Men played Saturday afternoon games on town teams. Family and friends gathered for the serious matter of bragging rights. Bitter rivalries often carried over into the week’s work place. The women knew the intricacies of the sport and the children mimicked their parents. Later in life, my mother would often recount having watched her father, her husband, her son, and her grandson all play baseball. Almost every woman in our family has a similar baseball pedigree.
Some of my fondest memories were of visiting my great-grandmother. As a young boy who carried two gloves and ball everywhere, she was always willing to play catch with me. As a teenager, she gave me a metal pin commemorating Jackie Robinson’s Rookie-of-the-Year season. Obviously, I still have it, along with my thousands of baseball cards.
My grandfather’s oft repeated tale of his relationship with Gene Autry, singer, movie legend, and eventual owner of the then California Angels, has mythic significance in our family. Before Autry left Oklahoma, their families lived in the Tulsa region. During the World Series, Autry would translate the play-by-play telegraph messages and post them on a giant manually operated scoreboard at the local train station. Men and women would hang around, talk politics and smoke, while getting the inning by inning updates. Family legend has it that Autry was sweet on my great-aunt. She would always deny the story with a twinkle in her eye. The plot of “Bull Durham” came naturally by its narrative that had been ground in a myth repeated for generations.
Our family’s loyalties divided between the St Louis Cardinals, the Dodgers, and the New York Yankees. Much of that was fueled by geography and regular World Series exposure. The Cardinals were close by and the Yankees and Dodgers were national rivals. When the early games appeared on TV, Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese simply fanned the flames. Those loyalties have softened over time with family migration, syndicated television, and additional MLB teams. The passion for the game, however, has not diminished nor the women’s knowledge of the game and its symbolic meaning.
Jessie Lee Moss, my mother’s cousin, passed away this week. We visited her last summer at her home in rural Oklahoma, not far from where she had spent her entire life. She was a lifetime Cardinals fan. A real fan. A true fan. She watched all 162 games and understood the nuance of every subtle move. When we showed up at her home, she paused the game to record it. I told her we would very be glad to watch the game with her, but she told us it was better if she watched it alone. It was her polite way of telling us she didn’t want to be distracted by our familial chit-chat while she was watching the Cardinals battle for a playoff spot. We understood and kept our visit to a reasonable time.
Today, I can hear my mother and Jessie laughing together. Most of the women of their generation had a similar laugh—hearty and rooted in simple pleasures born of painful sacrifice. Many of them suffered a natural melancholy; loss, grief, and death had left its wounds on their souls. They were woman who worked hard, played hard, and loved with passion. They spoke truth to power, suffered no man’s foolishness, and loved their family with every ounce of life’s blood. When these women watched baseball, their lives were reflected in the mundane pace of the game that requires attention to every detail. And even with the most careful planning, to win half the games is earned success. The only failure is not to give your all. Strikes outs happen every day; everyone makes errors; some days you just can’t throw a strike to save your life. But then, there are those moments, though rare, when you hit a game winning home run, or you strike out the side in the bottom of the ninth, those times when your team embraces you in love, respect, and appreciation. You live for those days. It is the good times that we remember, but it is those bad times that make us what we are. That is the truth of baseball.
In a “League of Their Own,” a movie about women’s professional baseball during World War II, the manager tells the one his players, “There’s no crying in baseball.” That line gets repeated too often, for its not true. There is a lot of crying in baseball. But it’s usually hidden in the souls of the brokenhearted. Jessie Lee, we are grieving our loss today. And we will cry, not only in brokenhearted souls, but outwardly, where everyone can see. And it’s okay, because we love you and we will miss you.
Today, Jessie Lee, as your number is being eternally retired, you are embraced by all your family, past and present. You played the game well. You showed up for every inning with all you had. You finished every season with gusto, no matter how well the team played. You rested in the off season. And you anticipated Spring Training with great joy. Now it’s your turn to take a final lap around the field and receive well deserved accolades as you are being inducted in Life’s Hall of Fame.
Saturday, November 24, 2018
Saturday, November 10, 2018
An Altered State of Mind: Parables of an Alchemist
“An Altered State of Mind: Parables of an Alchemist”
Part 1—The Dragon and the Muse
At three in the morning, the darkness feels permanent. My partner breathes deep in her dreams, while the dragon is tightly curled in the warmth of his corner pile of blankets. The night had frozen in place. Against reason, my body left its warmth in my lover’s bed. My feet braced against the floor’s cold surprise of my presence. Even with thirty years of familiarity, my feet shuffled in protection and my hands groped for assurance. The labyrinthine walk through the hundred years of hallways and down the twisted stairs, left me staring out a frosty kitchen window into night’s grip of blackness. I am fearful of my comfort with the darkness; but I don’t want to disturb the feeling of being disturbed.
On All Hallows Eve, my internal clock rolled over to remind my soul that I’ve traveled around the sun 65 times. On that first pilgrimage day, long ago at the exact same in the morning, my dad left my frightened and bleeding mom on the doctor’s back room table. He had been instructed to fetch the nurse from another Oklahoma farmhouse down the road. My trickster-treat nearly killed my mother.
Pondering the darkness of this cold morning, I wondered if it wouldn’t be better if the sun never came up again. At least we might not be subjected to the continual onslaught of emotional terror; mass shootings at synagogues, churches, schools, civil service offices, concerts, and local bars, all too familiar hate crimes, racism exercised from authority figures with weapons, homophobia and the of the denied rights of transgender people, the fear evoked from the non-threat of the oppressed in a walking caravan 900 miles away, a war-torn man-made famine that is starving millions, abandoned refugees, global unrest, and mentally unstable leadership. Nothing feels “great” and I tremble at the past horrors that might happen “again.” I can feel the apocalyptic horse coming to collect her due for those who falsely assume they are the bride.
My depression headed South. My head throbbed. I needed coffee and medication. But I couldn’t stand to be blinded by artificial light. Instead, I sat in the dark and waited to see if the sun actually made another appearance before caffeinating and medicating. If, perchance, the king chose to hide on the other side of the horizon—I had been practicing my blind man’s shuffle.
The dragon stirred. I could hear him begin his serpentine journey through the darkened house. His name is Jesus Jameson, and he’s been living with us for thirteen years. He lost his eyes three years ago. I just heard him bump into the credenza down the hall. For some reason he always bangs his head on the same furniture. The familiarity of pain, I guess. Jesus is headed for the back door, evidently, he needed the old man’s nightly relief. He wound his way under my chair, reminding me, that if I ever wrote anything again, I should say that though he looks like a Jack Russell—he acts like a fire breathing dragon. He might be the prophetic image of my future. Maybe the thought of such things has caused the words of my soul to wander aimlessly for a time.
I intentionally stopped working on a book two years ago when I began the stint as an interim pastor. My spiritual guide suggested that working with people in such pain could bleed into my writing. At first, I shrugged him off. But after deleting a few dozen pages of garbage, the book went on sabbatical. I kept writing sermons and the occasional book review. That seemed like an amenable way to assuage the muse. I assumed she was hanging around, though I hadn’t seen her since I had stopped working on my book. Two months ago, I decided to stop writing sermons because I rarely ever looked at my notes when delivering the message. The paper I held was more like a pneumonic device or a talisman, prompting my memory. But an unexpected consequence of not writing the sermons revealed that the muse had either gone away or was taking a very long nap. I had been keeping my journal, my notebooks, and recording my dreams, but the muse must have been bored—she was silent.
On All Hallows Eve, I woke up with the words “The Dragon and the Muse” circling through my mind. I laid in bed a while thinking I might go back to sleep. But then I heard a familiar voice threaten me with, “write it or lose it.” I wasn’t going to take a chance. I had no idea what those words meant, but I scratched them in my notebook and stared into the darkness, waiting.
The dragon wandered back into the house. He banged his head on the credenza. He probably went back to bed. I thought about following him, now that I had the odd words tucked away in my notebook and nothing else seemed to be flowing.
And then I heard something stirring at the back of the house. It sounded like someone with an aged body painfully struggling their way down the hallway. Maybe the dragon was teaching someone to walk in the dark? I wondered what Jesus felt like when he couldn’t heal the blind man on the first pass.
And then I felt a presence engulf the room. A wave of brilliance radiated into my darkness; so intense I could see nothing but her glory. The Muse has awakened and she had been transmuted into the Queen of the Crone Forest, Mother of the Black Sun. She gained power as she drank my lusty need to know her again.
Euphoria arose from an empty cold cave deep within my body. The room spun but the Muse caught me before I tumbled into nothingness.
“My love,” she whispered. “Can you see me?”
“Strangely so,” I said.
“The eye of your imagination has been liberated. Come, follow me into the realm beyond this reality.”
She flowed into the Light of the Darkness, me clutching her warm dark gentle hand. “Look,” she said. And I witnessed her swallowing the rising sun.
We stepped into altered consciousness—the realm of the seen and unseen, the real and the imagined, the dead and the living—where what could be is becoming.
Part 1—The Dragon and the Muse
At three in the morning, the darkness feels permanent. My partner breathes deep in her dreams, while the dragon is tightly curled in the warmth of his corner pile of blankets. The night had frozen in place. Against reason, my body left its warmth in my lover’s bed. My feet braced against the floor’s cold surprise of my presence. Even with thirty years of familiarity, my feet shuffled in protection and my hands groped for assurance. The labyrinthine walk through the hundred years of hallways and down the twisted stairs, left me staring out a frosty kitchen window into night’s grip of blackness. I am fearful of my comfort with the darkness; but I don’t want to disturb the feeling of being disturbed.
On All Hallows Eve, my internal clock rolled over to remind my soul that I’ve traveled around the sun 65 times. On that first pilgrimage day, long ago at the exact same in the morning, my dad left my frightened and bleeding mom on the doctor’s back room table. He had been instructed to fetch the nurse from another Oklahoma farmhouse down the road. My trickster-treat nearly killed my mother.
Pondering the darkness of this cold morning, I wondered if it wouldn’t be better if the sun never came up again. At least we might not be subjected to the continual onslaught of emotional terror; mass shootings at synagogues, churches, schools, civil service offices, concerts, and local bars, all too familiar hate crimes, racism exercised from authority figures with weapons, homophobia and the of the denied rights of transgender people, the fear evoked from the non-threat of the oppressed in a walking caravan 900 miles away, a war-torn man-made famine that is starving millions, abandoned refugees, global unrest, and mentally unstable leadership. Nothing feels “great” and I tremble at the past horrors that might happen “again.” I can feel the apocalyptic horse coming to collect her due for those who falsely assume they are the bride.
My depression headed South. My head throbbed. I needed coffee and medication. But I couldn’t stand to be blinded by artificial light. Instead, I sat in the dark and waited to see if the sun actually made another appearance before caffeinating and medicating. If, perchance, the king chose to hide on the other side of the horizon—I had been practicing my blind man’s shuffle.
The dragon stirred. I could hear him begin his serpentine journey through the darkened house. His name is Jesus Jameson, and he’s been living with us for thirteen years. He lost his eyes three years ago. I just heard him bump into the credenza down the hall. For some reason he always bangs his head on the same furniture. The familiarity of pain, I guess. Jesus is headed for the back door, evidently, he needed the old man’s nightly relief. He wound his way under my chair, reminding me, that if I ever wrote anything again, I should say that though he looks like a Jack Russell—he acts like a fire breathing dragon. He might be the prophetic image of my future. Maybe the thought of such things has caused the words of my soul to wander aimlessly for a time.
I intentionally stopped working on a book two years ago when I began the stint as an interim pastor. My spiritual guide suggested that working with people in such pain could bleed into my writing. At first, I shrugged him off. But after deleting a few dozen pages of garbage, the book went on sabbatical. I kept writing sermons and the occasional book review. That seemed like an amenable way to assuage the muse. I assumed she was hanging around, though I hadn’t seen her since I had stopped working on my book. Two months ago, I decided to stop writing sermons because I rarely ever looked at my notes when delivering the message. The paper I held was more like a pneumonic device or a talisman, prompting my memory. But an unexpected consequence of not writing the sermons revealed that the muse had either gone away or was taking a very long nap. I had been keeping my journal, my notebooks, and recording my dreams, but the muse must have been bored—she was silent.
On All Hallows Eve, I woke up with the words “The Dragon and the Muse” circling through my mind. I laid in bed a while thinking I might go back to sleep. But then I heard a familiar voice threaten me with, “write it or lose it.” I wasn’t going to take a chance. I had no idea what those words meant, but I scratched them in my notebook and stared into the darkness, waiting.
The dragon wandered back into the house. He banged his head on the credenza. He probably went back to bed. I thought about following him, now that I had the odd words tucked away in my notebook and nothing else seemed to be flowing.
And then I heard something stirring at the back of the house. It sounded like someone with an aged body painfully struggling their way down the hallway. Maybe the dragon was teaching someone to walk in the dark? I wondered what Jesus felt like when he couldn’t heal the blind man on the first pass.
And then I felt a presence engulf the room. A wave of brilliance radiated into my darkness; so intense I could see nothing but her glory. The Muse has awakened and she had been transmuted into the Queen of the Crone Forest, Mother of the Black Sun. She gained power as she drank my lusty need to know her again.
Euphoria arose from an empty cold cave deep within my body. The room spun but the Muse caught me before I tumbled into nothingness.
“My love,” she whispered. “Can you see me?”
“Strangely so,” I said.
“The eye of your imagination has been liberated. Come, follow me into the realm beyond this reality.”
She flowed into the Light of the Darkness, me clutching her warm dark gentle hand. “Look,” she said. And I witnessed her swallowing the rising sun.
We stepped into altered consciousness—the realm of the seen and unseen, the real and the imagined, the dead and the living—where what could be is becoming.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
