Buffalo
Friday journal, intent if not yet solid plan, walk & breakfast, drive to Apalachicola, retrieve friend Jean Purdy’s ashes from funeral home, couple stops, late lunch?, home to 7H.
Weekend bodes busiest, culminating in Sunday afternoon high priestly nap.
What? if ever there was in the first place, we have lost our buffalo, buffaloes, America, us, the South, TEC, me, world, earth, peoples of the Middle East. The changes are a base of the violent struggles going on here and there. In a captivating presentation Tuesday evening, a friend talked about a society’s cohesive center (not his precise wording), how when that center is lost, vanishes, is taken away, the directionless wandering, confusion, bewilderment, perplexity and anarchic chaos that ensues. His metaphor was Indians of North America whose cultural, food, clothing, shelter, religious center was the plains buffalo (his topic was Joseph Campbell), American bison that so sustained them for centuries that the animal evolved central to their self-identification, the core of their Being; and their devastating desolation when the buffalo vanished or the people were removed to Reservations far, far from home. I listened, heard, took-in, identified probably better, more closely than I remember ever having attended such a moment. It was as we preachers only hope a sermon might occasionally be for some in the pews: obliquely, he was talking to me.
Afterward, in the discussion time, I tried to organize my appreciation, experiences and feelings into an intelligible response to share with the group, but it did not work for me, an opportunity for self-disclosure in a trusted, confidential setting, that I regret, in a burst of instantly repented frustration, I missed my opportunity, and destroyed it.
The presentation greatly helped me with insight into my own life, going way back, three-quarters of a century and more. + My feeling of panic and change my first hour at Cove School, a Tuesday morning in September 1941, when I looked around the first grade classroom for my mother and she wasn’t there. + Lost in grief that lumped up painfully in my throat and chest for almost unbearable months after the death of my grandmother in January 1947. + September 1953, starting college and realizing that I so no longer had, and so felt the loss of, the core friendship of my StAndrews Church youth group, that I avoided going to the Episcopal student center to make new friends, or maybe I went once and was ignored, I forget. + Fall 1957 at Navy OCS in Newport, Rhode Island, somehow centrally lost because it was the season for starting school, college classes, where I never would be again. + Losses, changes in perseonal life and relationships. + February 1978, after retiring from the Navy, realizing that I no longer knew who I was, nor anymore had an identity. + In that same timeframe the Episcopal Church discarded The Book of Common Prayer that had lifelong been my spiritual core: the loss was excruciating as I floundered around grasping to somehow cling-to until I realized that I could not because it was not. + Retiring from parish ministry in 1998 into a void that I felt could never be filled, only to find that I was still needed, wanted, sought, valued, had value. + The moment I signed the contract to sell my house and lose MLP.
Personal and each case a loss of my buffaloes that, the very losses themselves, defined and define my Being, here as I look back unable to change a thing.
It probably doesn’t matter that I didn’t get to express myself Tuesday evening, because in retrospect it was nobody’s business anyway, a cubby in my mind that the presenter opened for the moment, and I am a most private person, keeping my own confidence. And though he wrapped me in, the presenter and his subject actually were reflecting on societies at large, not personal losses that force debilitating sea change that we did not expect and for which we are left unprepared.
At any event, I do have this blog where I can post all but the most perseonal stuff in my garage out back, where, though the window is thick with dust, I do manage to peer in from time to time, and the door is slightly ajar, and my Oldsmobile waits.
!!
Robert just called to say he can't walk. Friday moves to step two: we're on our way (we're on our way) to Apalachicola Ef El Ay ...
Friday the Seventeenth.
DThos+
Weekend bodes busiest, culminating in Sunday afternoon high priestly nap.
What? if ever there was in the first place, we have lost our buffalo, buffaloes, America, us, the South, TEC, me, world, earth, peoples of the Middle East. The changes are a base of the violent struggles going on here and there. In a captivating presentation Tuesday evening, a friend talked about a society’s cohesive center (not his precise wording), how when that center is lost, vanishes, is taken away, the directionless wandering, confusion, bewilderment, perplexity and anarchic chaos that ensues. His metaphor was Indians of North America whose cultural, food, clothing, shelter, religious center was the plains buffalo (his topic was Joseph Campbell), American bison that so sustained them for centuries that the animal evolved central to their self-identification, the core of their Being; and their devastating desolation when the buffalo vanished or the people were removed to Reservations far, far from home. I listened, heard, took-in, identified probably better, more closely than I remember ever having attended such a moment. It was as we preachers only hope a sermon might occasionally be for some in the pews: obliquely, he was talking to me.
Afterward, in the discussion time, I tried to organize my appreciation, experiences and feelings into an intelligible response to share with the group, but it did not work for me, an opportunity for self-disclosure in a trusted, confidential setting, that I regret, in a burst of instantly repented frustration, I missed my opportunity, and destroyed it.
The presentation greatly helped me with insight into my own life, going way back, three-quarters of a century and more. + My feeling of panic and change my first hour at Cove School, a Tuesday morning in September 1941, when I looked around the first grade classroom for my mother and she wasn’t there. + Lost in grief that lumped up painfully in my throat and chest for almost unbearable months after the death of my grandmother in January 1947. + September 1953, starting college and realizing that I so no longer had, and so felt the loss of, the core friendship of my StAndrews Church youth group, that I avoided going to the Episcopal student center to make new friends, or maybe I went once and was ignored, I forget. + Fall 1957 at Navy OCS in Newport, Rhode Island, somehow centrally lost because it was the season for starting school, college classes, where I never would be again. + Losses, changes in perseonal life and relationships. + February 1978, after retiring from the Navy, realizing that I no longer knew who I was, nor anymore had an identity. + In that same timeframe the Episcopal Church discarded The Book of Common Prayer that had lifelong been my spiritual core: the loss was excruciating as I floundered around grasping to somehow cling-to until I realized that I could not because it was not. + Retiring from parish ministry in 1998 into a void that I felt could never be filled, only to find that I was still needed, wanted, sought, valued, had value. + The moment I signed the contract to sell my house and lose MLP.
Personal and each case a loss of my buffaloes that, the very losses themselves, defined and define my Being, here as I look back unable to change a thing.
It probably doesn’t matter that I didn’t get to express myself Tuesday evening, because in retrospect it was nobody’s business anyway, a cubby in my mind that the presenter opened for the moment, and I am a most private person, keeping my own confidence. And though he wrapped me in, the presenter and his subject actually were reflecting on societies at large, not personal losses that force debilitating sea change that we did not expect and for which we are left unprepared.
At any event, I do have this blog where I can post all but the most perseonal stuff in my garage out back, where, though the window is thick with dust, I do manage to peer in from time to time, and the door is slightly ajar, and my Oldsmobile waits.
!!
Robert just called to say he can't walk. Friday moves to step two: we're on our way (we're on our way) to Apalachicola Ef El Ay ...
Friday the Seventeenth.
DThos+