celtic_writer

Soul

It is Veterans Day, 2012.

Back in March of 2006, I wrote a story about accompanying Doug to The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. It was a trip that took him 36 years to make. You can read the original here.

The story's synopsis: Doug was an Army Warrant Officer and helicopter pilot in Vietnam from 1969 to 1971. Shortly before Doug finished his tour of duty, a fellow Warrant Officer named Mark J. Robertson and crew switched missions with Doug and his crew. Mark and his men were shot down and the whole crew lost.

Doug found Mark J. Robertson again at The Wall that cold day in DC.

And Doug finally, finally wept.

It is a story that has happened often to so many in warfare...maybe not when flying through the air, but when boots have been firmly on the ground. But stories also have a way of turning themselves inside out for a different view. That's the thing about tragedy: it can start off at one extreme and then pivot and run in the opposite direction. Some people call it catharsis. I think it is also known as soul.

Five years after that day at The Wall and the publication of the original story, a comment was posted on this blog by a man named David P. Fella. He wrote:

"Mark J. Robertson is my wife's first cousin. The traveling Vietnam Wall was recently in our home town in Michigan. When we first heard it was coming we both knew that we wanted to go and see it and find Mark's name. When we got there we went into the information tent and were asked what name we were looking for. After mentioning his name, a volunteer named Lisa pulled out a information sheet with Mark's picture and what information she had and asked my wife, " Is this your cousin? " To my wife's surprise it was him. The volunteer was so excited and had informed us that they had a march for Mark over the Memorial Day weekend two weeks prior. This has brought much excitement to Mark's family and has sparked a renewed interest in finding out more about what happened to him and we came across this blog. What a mind blower. Doug, you and Mark will forever be linked together by fate and God's will. God chose to spare your life and bring Mark home that day. Mark is survived by his father, two brothers, and three sisters. We would like to thank all who have become a part of keeping Mark's memory alive as well as the many other soldiers and their families who have paid the ultimate price for our freedom. Thank you and May God Bless America."

A day later I received an email from Lisa, the volunteer David wrote about:

"Hello. David Fella was kind enough to pass on your email and share Doug Hoyt's story. Doug's visit to DC is such a beautiful story, and I hoped you would be kind enough to share this photo with Doug. This is the sign that was carried in honor of Mark during the Dearborn, Michigan Memorial Day parade in 2011. Additionally, the link below is to the parade itself. You can see the Boy Scout group marching in Mark's honor at approximately the 1:38:52 mark. His name was read aloud during our Memorial ceremony as well. The reading of the names begins at about 2:58 on the video.

Thank you."

So on this Veterans Day, I am thinking about how it would have felt for my own father to have lost a son at war and know nothing about what really happened for so many years. Then, one day, a relative comes to my father with a simple story printed out on a piece of laser paper that proves that his son was a very brave man, that his son is not forgotten, and is honored in thought every day by someone who was there, one of the last people to see him alive.

The soul never dies.

A few years ago Doug and I took a trip to New Zealand. We met an Australian on our travels named Max. Max owns a large station in Australia, and had recently purchased a helicopter to travel about his ranch. When Max found out that Doug was an Army Warrant Officer and flew helicopters in Vietnam, Max stopped, looked up at Doug and simply said, "You guys were legend."

Where the Words Are Said

The Celts believed that our heads, our minds, are part of our souls.

And that stories connect.

The journey stories, my favorites, told to me in childhood, felt nourishing, odd and brave.

Brendan the Navigator went on pilgrimages to unknown lands in a tiny leather boat. He said Mass on a whale's back on Easter Sunday. When the Devil showed him the pain of hell, Brendan was serene. He encountered a heathen giant whom he baptized, though did not civilize.

When he reached the island of his vision, Brendan found a hermit clothed in feathers.

Brendan was Leonard Cohen, centuries before.

They proclaimed him a saint. But I don't know any of those. I think he was just a guy on a trip who kept his eyes wide, wide open.

My friend Vicky Johnsen sent me a quote the other day. And it sums up the importance of stories told, the ones we remember, the ones we always knew. It is from a man named Michael Meade:

"There is this old Celtic thing, that there is very little difference between a song and a poem, between a poem and a story, between a story and a prayer, so that anytime someone is singing a song, or telling a story or reading poetry to a child, they are also inviting the child into a prayer. There's never a need to talk down to a child at all…because something in the child already knows all this and is waiting to hear it again.

So that parents and teachers who give great stories or poems to children are feeding this old soul that is in the child and are reassuring the child that they have come to the right world, that, yes, the world may be confusing and increasingly chaotic, but this is the world where the words are said."

-- Michael Meade

The Words of Men

When you visit Key West, there is a story you will hear.

It is a place in Florida...at the southern-most point...before you reach Castro.

If you are listening, you will be told that the writer, Ernest Hemingway, built a wall.

One around his house, down on Whitehead Street.

It is the most crooked wall you will ever see.

Story goes that Hemingway bought the bricks for a penny apiece, then engaged a couple of cases of beer, and one of his good friends, to help him construct the barrier to keep out the world while he wrote.

The buddy's name: Tennessee Williams.

Ernest Hemingway has always been a hero of words to me. And to visit his home in the January humidity, has been like a trip to Mecca.

As an Irish-American child, I learned how to tell a story from listening to the words of men. My father, Frank J., and Uncle John. They knew how to weave them. As a child I was allowed to sit in the kitchen of grown-ups, so way past my bedtime, resting my head on the table, listening.

In high school, I discovered For Whom the Bell Tolls.

And The Sun Also Rises.

A beginning. The middle. Then the end.

Everything is as it should be...as the story goes.

In middle age, I read A Moveable Feast. I continue to live it. So long after the author silenced himself, way up in Idaho, via a gunshot to the head.

When Hemingway was a child of nine, he wrote: "My favorite authors are Kipling, O. Henry and Steauart Edward White. My favorite flowers are Lady Slipper and Tiger Lily. My favorite sports are trout fishing, hiking, shooting, football and boxing. My favorite studies are English, Zoology, and Chemistry. I intend to travel and write."

Hemingway was a man of so many appetites. You see, and feel them, when you tour his southern home. The woman he loved, then left, there. The photos of safaris and fishing in far-off places. The ancestors of cats called Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe, who still sleep on his bed.

And what amazes me most is how such a man of intense pleasure wrote so true, and so carefully.

How he got so much emotion, intention, and life, into such sparse sentences.

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places," he wrote.

It is true.

And forever possible.

54 Quotes

At 3 p.m. today, I became 54.

Years, that is. Swimming pools. Movie stars.

For those of you who know me, you understand that I write in notebooks. Black Moleskin notesbooks. Every day. All year round.

I find quotes, and write them down. I make up quotes, and scribble them in.

Here are 54 of them that I have gathered over the last year, a list in no particular order, a collection of words written for the most part by people so much wiser than I can ever hope to be.

1. "As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary." - Hemingway


2. "He is able who thinks he is able." - Buddha


3. "Whenever we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." - John Muir


4. "Adversity makes men, and prosperity makes monsters." - Victor Hugo


5. "You cannot travel the path before you have become The Path itself." - Buddah


6. "When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it's his duty." - G.B. Shaw


7. "No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path." - Buddha


8. "A writer is dear and necessary to us only in the measure of which he reveals to us the inner workings of his very soul." - Tolstoy


9. "Turn your face to the sun, and the shadows fall behind you." - Maori Proverb


10. "In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you." - Tolstoy


11. "Take eloquence, and wring its neck." - Paul Verlaine, French poet


12. "He who finds a thought that enables him to obtain a slightly deeper glimpse into the eternal secrets of nature has been given great grace." - Einstein


13. "In a real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day." - F. Scott Fitzgerald


14. "My life has taught me to be more curious than afraid." - Ishi


15. "But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads." - Albert Camus


16. "At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past." - Maurice Maeterlinck


17. "Young people do not perceive at once that the giver of wounds is the enemy." - F. Scott Fitzgerald


18. "Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear." - Ezra Pound


19. "Never go on trips with anyone you do not love." - Ernest Hemingway


20. "Work out your own salvation. Don't depend on others." - Buddha


21. "All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time." - Hemingway


22. "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places." - Hemingway


23. "To be successful in writing, use short sentences." - Hemingway


24. "Never mistake motion for action." - Hemingway


25. "The biggest temptation is to settle for too little." - Thomas Merton


26. "I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion." - Jack Kerouac


27. "People living deeply have no fear of death." - Anais Nin


28. "A mind that is stretched by new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." - Oliver Wendall Holmes


29. "Religion is for people who are afraid to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who have already been there." - Bonnie Raitt


30. "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the Creator, there is no poverty." - Rilke


31. "Own only what you can always carry with you; know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn


32. "But if you do not find an intelligent companion, a wise and well-behaved person going the same way as yourself, then go on your way alone, like a king abandoning a conquered kingdom, or like a great elephant in the deep forest." - Buddha


33. "Could it think, the heart would stop beating." - Fernando Pessoa


34. "A nation that keeps its eye on the past is wise. A nation that keeps two eyes on the past is blind." - Quote written on the wall of a pub in Belfast, Northern Ireland, posted on Twitter by NGS Travel Editor
    
    
35. "One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time." - Andre Gide, French writer


36. "If we have not found heaven within, it is a certainty we will not find it without." - Henry Miller


37. "If we are in harmony with life, life will keep us alive." - George Dibbern


38. "Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace." - Victor Hugo


39. "There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth...not going all the way, and not starting." - Buddha


40. "As long as you have not grasped that you have to die to grow, you are a troubled guest upon this earth." - Mircea Eliade


41. "The whole soulmates idea...is really most useful when you are stealing someone's husband. It is not so good when someone might be stealing yours." - Maile Meloy, Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It


42. "We've all got our good sides and our bad sides. If you want to have joy and love in this lifetime, you've got to live by mercy." - Rhett Ellis


43. "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." - Thoreau


44. "Until we accept the fact that life itself is founded in mystery, we shall learn nothing." - Henry Miller


45. "One's greatest security is to be loved. Banks fail, love never." - George Dibbern


46. "If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance." - George Bernard Shaw


47. "If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to." - Dorothy Parker


48. "A chief event of life is the day in which we have encountered a mind that startled us." - Ralph Waldo Emerson


49. "This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force." - Dorothy Parker


50. "Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken." - Jack Kerouac


51. "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." - Leonard Cohen


52. "...But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face..." - W.B. Yeats


53. "Always do what you are afraid to do." - Ralph Waldo Emerson


54. "It is only when you realize that you don't belong to anyone or anything and that you truly own nothing, it is then that your life begins to make any sense. You only belong to something bigger...God, nature, whatever you want to call it. It is then that you have learned to write your name in the dark." - MPG

As It Should Be

Friday night. What a week it has been.

This morning, before class, the Web server at the school was acting muddy, so I traversed from the fifth floor to the second to inquire about the box's health to the server administrator.

Anton looked tired. "I woke up this morning and had the horrible thought that it was still Thursday," he told me. "No, my friend," I assured him. "It is Friday." "Good thing," he replied. He restarted the server. Flow was established again.

So tonight, while rummaging through a box of old journals in search of some research I had done long ago, I opened a book and this picture floated to the floor.

What I know is the picture is 35 mm, and that Ken probably photographed it. What I don't know is the location. Where is this place? I have no idea.

But that smiley sun is urging us to have a good weekend, to have a nice life, to be kind to our neighbor, to be thankful for the silence, the relationships we have.

How often we forget.

I've kept a journal since I was 18. I have boxes and boxes of these writings. For what? I do find snippets in them, say way back in 1986 I saw something and wrote it down, so I have a record. I search for the thought, and it helps me state some recognition. 32 years. That's a long time to write memories to oneself.

My brother Kevin gives me gift certificates to Staples for Christmas. He knows what I like.

I buy accounting Record books. Created for numbers, I use them for this journaling. Hard-bound, with the word RECORD stamped in gold on the front. It is what these books hold for me...a record of life. They last through the years, and I write in them every day. So I am rich in lined paper, these unfilled books, just waiting for me to fatten them with words. And they do put on weight. Something about putting pen to their pages chubbs 'em. Lay a new record book and a fully journaled record book side by side. Compare the bottom of the books, the page depth. The journaled book is always plumper. It's full of life.

Looking back through these, I discover the fact that when I was younger, I wrote in pen. Now I write only in pencil, a Twist-Erase 0.9 Pentel to be exact. Life is not black and white, but differing shades of grey.

As it should be.

Dear Allison,

So the clan has another publicly-proclaimed graduate. Allison Helen Gillen, graduate, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia.

We all attended the The One Hundred and Seventy-Seventh FINAL EXERCISES on The Lawn in Charlottesville on a sunny Sunday, May 21, 2006. Thomas Jefferson determined the basic educational policy for UVA. It has changed very little in the school's 187-year history.

You look happy. You are beautiful. You are in love with a man, one who has a big heart, who studies hard to become a pediatric ER physician. And you are a teacher, birthed from two teachers, so it is right you will soon be guiding young lives in Chesapeake, VA.

Your mother shown so bright that Sunday, enthusiastic for your accomplishment. Your Auntie Peg, despite a stress fracture of the foot, hobbled her way to sit on the stairs of the concrete amphitheatre to cheer your hard work. Your brother and cousins, Uncles Chas and Kev, Aunt Kathy, future in-laws and friends, and mentors were there. You deserve it all.

Besides you, it was your father I watched most. My brother. Sunburned, in khakis, UVA cap on his head. Striped tie, and button.

I have not seen him this happy since you and your brother Matt were born. You came to this world during a massive winter blizzard, when your old man called the AT&T Security folks, the guys with 4-wheel drive, to come help transmit your Mom to the hospital. How, after your birth, he had to hitchhike home in the snow. He didn't mind. And how that cold February evening he called to say, "I have a daughter. Her name is Allison."

And I bet, standing there after the ceremony, arms around you, he put his face close to yours, you in your cap and gown, and said, "I am so proud of you." 'Cause, ya know, that's what his old man said to him on his graduation day. The apple never falls far from the tree.

So, as your crazy old Aunt Mary is apt to do, I wandered about in the short time between graduation and dinner, looking for stuff most people miss.

I found it. It is an engraved stone, sunk into the ground under some trees, so near the intersection where people cross the street to go to Starbucks or buy t-shirts. Most people walk right by. They don't even know it's there.

It reads:

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

- George Bernard Shaw