Christmas Story

I've added a new page to my blog. It's a short story I wrote some years ago. If you have time to read it, it's not long, and you can see my wry sense of humor.

Wonder: The Essence of Childhood

Wonder is a combination of thought and emotion. It's a form of illumination. It rises from the center of our being, our need to know. Children are filled with wonder. Everything is new. The world appears to the child to be well organized. Seeking the connections within this organization is a constant mental activity. The child has to put the world together, one experience, one discovery at a time. She has to discover reality. Reality is learned through experience. Wonder is born from the realization that there is more to reality than what we see. What is the reality behind reality? When we realize that what we see isn't reality, and that there's a reality behind the reality we know, wonder ensues.

What is the main source of wonder? It's mystery. It's the unknown and feeling connected with the unknown, feeling oneness with mystery.

Wonder, connecting with the mystery of the unknown,  is a central component of childhood, one that tends to disappear as the child grows older. Adults may still have flashes of it, through which it manifests as inspiration, particularly through works of art. Unfortunately, many adults experience less and less wonder and inspiration as they grow older. Becoming "set in their ways" they stop growing. Life becomes rather humdrum, perhaps boring, and filled with passive living. Watching T.V. becomes a way of life. A little travel can re-leave the boredom. But coming home is returning to boredom.

Continuing to experience wonder, to be thrilled by mystery, as we grow older is a form of staying young (or growing young). It can be a central component of the older adult's life if we do not become 'set in our ways'. Not becoming set in our ways should become an objective for us all. It requires openness, honesty, and even courage. But the reward for this is to continue to experience the joy of wonder.

God's greatest gift to mankind is joy, and the joy found in wonder is the greatest joy of all.

Happiness and Optimism

I won't hide it. I've been fairly happy this year. And I have also, at times, been optimistic. This has led me to wonder, which comes first, happiness or optimism. Is it being happy that leads you to being optimistic, or is it being optimistic that leads you to being happy? I've never been able to force myself to be happy, and I've never been able to force myself to be optimistic. Both seem to arise from a source separate from me (certainly separate from my ego).

Is being happy simply the absence of being unhappy, or is happiness some kind of force that pushes unhappiness out of the way, and vice versa? Is our mental state dependent on our thinking, or is our thinking dependent on our mental state? Can we think ourselves into a state of depression and think ourselves out of it? How powerful are our thoughts?

I'm of the opinion that we cannot think our way into and out of these states. If it were that simple, I think most of us would choose constant happiness. So, if thinking is not the source of either happiness or unhappiness, what is? Where do they come from? Are they part of some kind of teeter-totter within our psyches that tips to one side or the other? A pool of positive and negative emotions that bubble up and down, one or the other influencing us, depending on other factors within our lives at the time? Are they parts of our neurons firing and misfiring? Are they some kind of chemicals in our brains that organize and re-organize haphazardly or by some influence, such as thinking?

This is all so puzzling. I just know that when I feel unhappy, that's the way I feel, and it just goes away on its own, and when I'm happy, I'm happy until I feel unhappy. And I don't know why.

Lucid Dreaming: the heart and soul of writing.

Dreams (our indestructible desire to do, or be, something we find important), I think, emanate from our fantasies. The question then becomes, from whence come our fantasies? One of the definitions of fantasy is illusion, illusion being a mistaken idea, a misconception, a misleading visual image; hallucination. These definitions suggest a negative connotation. Yet, there seems to be nothing negative about my dreams. They seem positive and encourage me to act on them. So, perhaps, our dreams do not emanate from our fantasies.

If they do not originate in our fantasies, from where do they come? Maybe I should ask, which comes first, the vision or the dream? I have a vision of a scene and feel thrilled by it; it calls to me to save it. Don't let it die, because it has a life of its own. Does that vision morph into a dream and I act on it? I, therefore, start writing and fulfilling my dream. Is it the vision of the scene or the resulting dream that leads me to write?

Writing scenes is a pretty elemental part of writing fiction. In many ways, scenes are the heart and soul of fiction. They are the life of the story, the reason for everything. Everything the writer does is to make the scene come alive to the best of his ability. How does this relate to dreams? Visualizing scenes is a form of dreaming: lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is a positive form of fantasizing. For me, lucid dreaming is the thrill of writing. How does this form of dreaming relate to the big dream, the dream of being a writer? I think it's pretty obvious, the one flows from the other. The dream of being a writer is birthed in our lucid dreaming, in the satisfaction, should I say joy?, of lucid dreaming.

Is it a form of wish fulfillment? Another question for another time.

A few of my paintings from this summer.

The use of color  in my paintings this summer was self-taught experimentation. I came up with the idea of basing some of my paintings on books. I based the following four paintings on the Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyers.

Twilight (oil pastel on paper)

Eclipse (oil pastel on paper)

New Moon (oil pastel on paper)

Breaking Dawn (oil pastel on paper)

The following painting is based on a book by the religious mystic St. John of the Cross.

Dark Night of the Soul (soft pastel on paper)

This is an attempt to attain a three-dimensional effect in color.

Fish (soft pastel on paper)

Growing Old: Growing Young

The Baby Boom generation is now entering its retirement years.

Having been born in 1946, I'm among the first of the baby boomers to retire, which I've done. I actually retired at age 63; I'm now 66. One of my reasons for retiring was not one of the normal ones: to help raise my grandson, who is now four years old. Yes, I'm raising another generation. But, I well know that most baby boomers will not be retiring and raising a young child at the same time. Many will be retiring to a life of leisure, travel, and to looking for ways to remain relevant to the world.

This is one of the directions my blog will now take: how do we retirees remain relevant to the world?

This is certainly not a new problem, if indeed it is a problem, beginning with my generation. It's probably been an issue for many retirees in the industrialized civilization. Living on the farms, I imagine, kept one busy and relevant right to the day of death. I'm sure a farmer's work is never done. But when accountants, doctors, lawyers, bus drivers, police persons, teachers, garbage workers, real estate agents, sales people, truck drivers, etc., retire, they are often possibly confronted with another lifetime to live. It begs the question, what do I do now?

I certainly cannot tell someone else how to live his or her life in retirement or during any other time period. I can only relate my own experiences and what I learn from others and from research. And there's a lot of research from which to learn. Learning is nice and suffices for its own sake, but doing (being, in the philosophical sense) is the essence of life. What we believe and what we do from day-to-day is important. How we live is perhaps the most important component of living. That's what I hope to explore on my blog in the future. It's a vast territory with many theories and possible answers, and that's part of the beauty of retirement, I can begin a new journey, and perhaps fulfill some of my unfulfilled dreams. I suppose there are others like me.

So, I hope you join me on my new journey: to remain relevant to the world.

Blogging: Absent, but not gone.

I haven't posted much or written many posts lately. I have some in rough drafts that are not finished. But, the fact is, I'm still around.

What have I been doing? Drawing and painting mainly. My Two-D Design course takes up a great deal of my time. This is the only course I take, and I'm retired (sort of), so I can bring my course assignments as close to perfection as I like. But that takes up a lot of time. Art is about details, and they take time to perfect. (Really, how do full-time art students perfect their art projects when juggling four or five courses at the same time? I feel for them.) But I enjoy it so much that I can spend hours working on a piece of art and not even realize I've been working for hours. I've always been a perfectionist (which isn't necessarily a good thing), so I'm right at home with this artwork.

I haven't been writing. This is a dilemma for me. Where does my future as a writer lay? Do I even have one anymore? I have several books that are highly polished and I could self-publish them pretty much as they are, but I don't feel connected to them right now. My writing imagination is somewhat dormant these days, although I've been feeling some rumblings in the background. The desire to write isn't dead in me yet. But I'm not sure when I'll put pen to paper again.