deepforestsong

[deepforestsong]

To continue riffing on the theme of breathing and being alive, I am reminded of a scene from the television series Six Feet Under. In the show, the father of the main characters who run the Fisher funeral home dies in the first episode, but his character lives on in conversations and appearances throughout the show's five season run. He appears to his younger son David a number of times and in one exchange the deceased man tells David that because he is alive, the possibilities are endless, in sharp contrast to what the dead can do since their stories are finished upon their deaths. It's an emotionally touching scene between father and son and an excellent reminder to the audience to remember how life is full of possibility. That's its miracle.

As I frequently look back and kick myself for what my younger self did or did not do, I can become bogged down in despair, which at this point should have only one purpose: that despite not being able to change the past, the future is open to possibility as long as I live. It can be easy for me to become trapped in the weight of past mistakes and get bogged down in depression, which is its own form of inaction. Especially as this is Father's Day, remembering this scene is a good reminder to me and to others that our stories aren't done. We need to keep dreaming and working towards the futures we want to live in, at least until the invention of the time machine, which then, sure, maybe tinker with your past self a bit, at least telling him or her to be less of an asshole, kinder to all around you, and to love more with unselfish behavior.

[deepforestsong]

When we look back at our lives through the lens of the present, we cannot know what we might be seeing had we made different choices. A small measure of Taoist or Buddhist wisdom here would suggest the past is only in the past and the future does not exist yet because all we have is the present. So what do I gain from looking back and writing about events that took place over thirty years ago? Thirty years might seem like a long time in the relative life span of our species but just compared to say Earth time, thirty years is nothing. The briefest sensation of a slight breeze tickling the hair on one of our arms and then the mind asking if you really felt anything at all. It's gone, our lives are gone and over just like that. So what's the point, and more importantly what is the point I am struggling to arrive at? To paraphrase from Walt Whitman, that we exist and identity. That life exists and goes on and for a short time we may contribute our own verse to this powerful play. In looking back, I am struggling to understand the verses that I have contributed so far. In doing so, in my particular case, I wish to alter the nature of the verses I am still able to contribute before death closes my eyes forever. I wish I could erase and change many of the verses I contributed early in my life. I wish instead I was looking back on verses that exhibited a strong sense of self-worth and a healthy capacity to love others. Too often I was blind and selfish, blind from needing love so badly that I went about relationships all wrong. Blind in that I learned very late the practical results of how wanting things can lead to suffering. I sincerely hope that by doing looking back one last time, I can bring some love and acceptance to my mind today, in this moment, that I might breathe peace and equanimity more easily moving forward. That an unselfish giving of the love I have will become the norm moving forward as I leave the self-hatred and regret in the shadows of the past where they firmly belong. To ask forgiveness from the universe and those in it for the bad decisions I made in ignorance of the needs that drove me in the first place. To breathe peace in the present as a result. May all sentient beings be free of needless suffering.

To breathe is acceptance, to say yes to the present. We breathe every moment we are alive.

[deepforestsong]

I would imagine many young people whether or not they are aware of it, turn to God because of something missing from their lives. I would like to think in a healthy context, it might be out of pure love, but for many of us, that place likely comes from a sense of loss, or absence. I understand now that it did for me. In my own case I was searching for both unconditional love and someone physically present who would listen. It is in these teen years that we first start asking bigger questions about the universe and our place in it. It makes sense that we might seek the advice and ear of those older who have been asking similar questions but for a longer period of time. Certainly, some of the answers people find are worth investigating.

When I think about why I married so young, I can only come back to the need for love, the feeling of being loved physically and emotionally. I didn't get much of either from my parents at a young age. They lived as if they expected their only child to be fairly self sufficient, which at least on the outside I appeared to be. I understand now that neither my parents had the kind of examples as they grew up that would have turned them into the type of people who show love outwardly and understand the importance of communicating love and acceptance to a child for its own sake and how important that is to forming healthy adults. And yet, I think it is ok to have expected a little more in terms of self education and child development if you are going to have one. For my own self, before Staci and I became parents, I knew straight away that I didn't want to have only one, having been an only child, and I knew that I wanted to show my children a lot of physical love and verbal acceptance, while avoiding being overly critical. All of this came from my own childhood experiences in terms of things I wanted to be different for my own offspring.

My search for a father figure was also in part a search for self acceptance, which goes a ways towards why I cared so much about what others thought of me. When a person doesn't feel as if they have that basic acceptance from their primary caregivers early on in life, you go looking in other places because of how important it is that we receive positive reinforcement about ourselves. It's essential to becoming an adult with a healthy psyche. Unfortunately, I think for most of us, the only real father figure that matters in terms of how we develop a healthy sense of self worth, is with our actual fathers. Pseudo father figures can be good friends, offer guidance and other important parts of friendship, but they cannot take the place of what a child needs from an actual parent as it grows up. This is why no matter how many alternate father figures I tried, they all failed. Through no fault of their own.

Our species needs love. We need to be loved to be healthy and more importantly, to be able to love others outside of ourselves. We don't find this self love in trying to please others, or playing for the acceptance of others as a way of feeling validated in our own selves, and we can't ultimately find self love anywhere but within ourselves in order for it to be genuine and hence transforming.

[deepforestsong]

Warm, still air radiating heat A cumulonimbus range rules overhead All around, the green world gathers To celebrate All Things growing.

#poetry #summer

[deepforestsong]

Father Figure (Not the George Michael song)

It was not until quite recently that I really began to understand the source of so many of the decisions I made early in life grew out of this gaping hole in my teenage development, made possible by an absent father, and to a lesser extent, an absent mother. It sounds strange to read this given that I was raised by two parents in the home, two parents who had been married and divorced before and were determined to make their relationship work for the sake of their only child. That sounds great, right? and to an extent of course it is. My situation sure beat a bitter custody battle, irresponsible parents who are constantly putting one another down in front of their child, etc... but having two parents in the house who are living together does not equate to presence in the life of a child or children. Not automatically anyway.

Looking back on my middle school and high school years, I kept myself quite busy between school, athletics (I lettered in tennis) and after-school jobs, beginning as soon as I could get a work permit at age 15 and a half. I rode my bike down to the Steak Corral in Temple City to bus tables and wash dishes. I don't think at the time I was consciously aware of my need for a father figure especially. These years were relatively happy for me. I had two close friendships, some dates, my first real heartbreak over a girl. Normal teenage experiences. As my dad even commented some years later, he was relatively proud of me during these teenage years. It's what came after that made him not so proud. Granted, neither my mother or my father voiced out loud to me that they were proud of me during my high school years. I probably just assumed they were and didn't give too much thought to needing to hear that approval verbally at the time. What kid does? And after all, what parent would not be proud of a hard-working, A student, who managed his own car payments, didn't drink, or do drugs (like at all, save for coffee lol) and got into good colleges. On top of that I went to church every Sunday for a long while there, together with my two close friends. Long after my parents stopped making me go to church since my dad no longer had time for it after starting his business, I started going on my own at age 15. I didn't realize it then, but this was the beginning of my search for an alternative father figure. Someone who was present more than my own dad, who worked six days a week during my teen years.

[deepforestsong]

The Importance of Nurturing

Lately I have been thinking about the importance of nurturing in child development. Now, I'm not a specialist so my thinking here is strictly my own. My thinking began when I started to realize that my parents were not particularly nurturing when I was a child and this lack of something might explain some of the decisions I made early in life and also some of the relationships I formed at that time in my life as well.

I was very fortunate to have a very stable home growing up. My dad is a very responsible person and while we were not wealthy growing up, I had my own room and my parents owned our home. I didn't realize as a young child how many children growing up don't have this security. To say my parents were not particularly nurturing is not necessarily a harsh criticism on my part. It is generational to a degree, as is the way they raised me. I was an only child but was fortunate enough to grow up in a neighborhood where many families with kids lived, so all I had to do was go outside my front door and there was usually someone to play with. Our neighborhood was very safe too, another way in which I was fortunate. This was the 1970's so me and my friends were largely free ranging all around a two or three mile radius on our bikes and such. It was a wonderful way to grow up. I remember feeling very free outside of the home, even at a young age. I didn't know any parents who helicoptered back then.

I was also the only, 'only' child on my street. When I was home, I often had to amuse myself because my parents both worked and had their own interests, so it wasn't always playtime with them inside the house, although we had those moments too, some of which I remember very fondly. Chutes and Ladders with my dad. Model building with my mother to name two. Being an only child is what led me to reading and I am sure it is why I am a reader to this day. Reading gives you magical worlds to explore and is a great way to spend time. Because I was a kid before the Ataris or Nintendos of the world came into being, I did not develop a gaming habit as a youngling, though I am sure I would have had these things existed when I was 10-16. There were arcades though, and I did visit these from time to time when I felt like riding my bike a little farther out.

So I was an only child, raised by fairly conservative parents, who had a lot of time to fill with books and adventures with friends. I was also fortunate enough to have my mom's parents living a mile away. I spent more times with my grandparents growing up than my own given my grandparents were mostly retired by then. My grandfather, whom I adored was also very reserved in temperament, much like my parents but my grandmother was the opposite. She gave me what I was lacking from my own mother and father: tangible affection and almost zero criticism. I loved being at my grandparents house becuase I was truly free to be a kid there and this meant a lot to me. Kids are messy! Some adults are ill equipped to handle this. My mom was a neat freak and if growing up I so much as spilled a glass of milk, she would birth several cows or have a shit fit like no other. On the hole, my mom and dad were much quicker to criticize than they were to give praise. More so, my mom was just a very critical person. I don't think she had the right temperament to parent a young child. As a grandmother it was a different story, as it so often is. So as I got older, I became very self-critical. My dad wasn't as bad but he was by no means easy to please and could be very moody. Neither were huggers or offered much in the way of encouragement when I struggled as a young person. Worse, my folks were not that interested in my athletic pursuits so I'd often go to my little league games alone or my dad would ask another parent to take me. Not every time, but enough of the time. My first season in little league at age 10 I didn't get a single hit. I struggled and still remember how determined I was on that last day of the season to hit the ball! No dice. When this scenario would present itself in the form of my own son some time later, my dad would be quick to get him hitting lessons, batting cage sessions, etc... so at least things improved, and honestly for me I loved taking my kids to the batting cages and did so often. My childhood was different though. Even when I played tennis in high school and went all the way to the finals in league. I played to an audience of one haha. So it goes.

Why am I writing all of this? I am trying to paint a picture of being a kid who was largely left wanting for attention from my parents, both through generational norms for parents at the time but also through who they were as individuals. Neither of their childhoods were easy, especially my dad's. Rural, rural Missouri. Farm father who couldn't farm well, drank too much and to hear my dad tell it, just wasn't a very good person. My dad definitely did not get any nourishment of his own from this person and it wasn't his fault. His mother was a rock in terms of support, but also quiet and reserved, so not a lot of physical love from her either. My mom's relationship with her mother was pretty toxic from what I observed, and my mom bore a lot of resentment, some of it very understandable. Her rock was her father, but like my dad's mother, he was on the quiet side with little physical love to give let alone verbal emotional support, so both of my parents had some emotional deficits. I understand now that kids who grow up needing more attention and nourishing from the parents, will as soon as they can, go searching for it outside of the home. In my own case, this led to some bad decisions with lasting consequences, like marrying the wrong person at too young of an age because I was desperate to be loved even though I did not understand that at the time. This early failed marriage after nine years led to other lasting consequences as well, but before I get to that, a little about kids who go looking for father figures when their own are absent.

My dad and uncle started their own business when I was 12 and from that time until I left home, I barely saw my dad. He worked six days a week and our old Saturday routines of grocery shopping, burger lunches, trips to the Legion for shuffleboard and hot dogs, trips to the gun range, motorcycle rides, etc... all of this went out the door and a lot more. Family vacations and also time for my mother who also suffered through those early years when she was forced to stop working due to illness and was suddenly pretty lonely for her husband. These were difficult times for all but the business was successful. But those years where I didn't see my dad at all even though he slept in the same house, were very important years for me developmentally even though he would not have understood that or paid much attention if a psychologist had pointed it out. Even I didn't seem to understand at the time. I was a good kid. Made good grades, worked after school and had several close friendships. Everything seemed copacetic. Only on the surface. Underneath I would come to understand later, I was desperate for a father figure to demonstrate love and affirmation. As a result of not having these things, I was very un-self confident and looked for approval literally everywhere else. I was desperate to please, to have some kind of positive affirmation. I didn't realize until I was much older that this affirmation, this reinforcement of self, especially as a young person, has to come first from the parents. Sadly, I missed out on this despite all of the material stability I had. Emotional stability is far more important in terms of wealth a parent can give. It wasn't until decades later as a middle-aged person filled with self-loathing, nay, hatred, self-criticism and its ugly cousins doubt and fear that I began to look back to try and understand where it all began. It begins at home. More to follow.

#writing

[deepforestsong]

One of life's greatest, but simplest, pleasures is sitting in the back yard on the patio, good book in hand, reading and listening to the spring birdsong all around, saying hello to the birds who come to my feeder. The warm air wrapping itself around the world like nature's security blanket.

[deepforestsong]

Crown Lands - Feeling Good (Audio)

a deep forest song if you like! Perfect for Imbolc. 

#youtube

[deepforestsong]

Calm - Daily Jay. January 10 II.

I usually meditate first thing in the morning. It helps set my mindfulness for the day and adjusts my mood a bit since I usually wake up a little sore which can be depressing. The Daily Jay is one of three 'daily calm' options, each about ten minutes, but Jay likes to keep his to about 7 minutes or so. He is the latest addition to the Calm team and when he showed up I didn't know anything about him, but I liked his format right away: some deep breathing to start, followed by his topic, usually personal growth and life coach focused mostly rooted in his time as a hindu monk living in an ashram in India. Originally from the UK, his voice is pleasant and he seems like a genuinely nice person. I've listened to quite a few of his sessions in the past year but the one on tap for this morning was like listening to him describe the root of my struggles in my early and young adult life. Struggles whose ghosts still haunt me although I'm trying to rid myself of them before I die.

Jay talks about playing sports as a kid and wanting his dad to be at every event because he longed for his dad's approval. I can relate to this. Jay goes on to talk about our need for the approval of others, especially our parents, which is perfectly normal, and what happens when we don't have that and go in search of it in different place with different people. This is a dangerous and often unsatisfying way to live because then our wellbeing is dependent on other people and their emotions. Don't I know it. Of course I didn't realize what I was doing in my twenties but when I look back I was totally seeking out pseudo fathers. Fathers who would give me their time and approval. From an early age my dad would sometimes have me catch a ride to my little league games with a neighbor father and son. I think at the time I thought to myself it was because I wasn't very good at baseball. That first little league year I didn't get a single hit. I'd often just play a couple of innings and so when my dad did come he didn't exactly see me play much, so who could blame him for not wanting to see his son suck at the plate! Even at a young age I could understand or at least rationalize the absence this way. I do remember liking when he did come because I did make a few good catches in the field and thought this would make my dad proud. I could catch the ball in left field, as I did play a fair amount of catch with my dad growing up in the school yard behind our house, but I needed a lot of help at the plate. I still remember our last game that dismal season (we were 4-17) and how hard I tried to get a hit. I swung the shit out of that bat to no avail! If there were batting cages to help struggling hitters like me in 1975, I was a stranger to them and did not know of their existence. Given how shitty our team was, you'd think if there were batting cages we would have held team practices there!

The theme of absence would continue through my junior and senior high school years. When I was 12 my dad started his own business with my uncle and basically disappeared from my life for the next x number of years, as did our family vacations, dinners, etc... I don't remember caring that much at the time, however. I was self sufficient in those years. Paper route at age 13, first part time job at 15 and a busy life with my two best friends between school and work. Maybe I felt like I didn't care because I was an only child and usually had to rely on myself for amusement anyway? Not sure. I played three and half years of tennis in high school and it was the only sport I lettered in. I won a silver medal for second place at JV finals the year I was sixteen. My parents absence continued however, as neither watched me play a single match in those years. I didn't blame my mom much at the time because she had been through some serious health issues and I rationalized my dad being away in that he was working all the time and this was for the good for our family. If you had asked my late teen self if I needed my dad, I would have answered nope, all was well as is.

And yet, an objective outsider would probably call bullshit since I had developed a father to son type of relationship with my good friend's Jon's dad, and would continue to do so throughout my twenties. The need for acceptance and validation only grew more intense in my twenties given I married young and pretty badly failed at being married, which brought out a lot of criticism from my dad. Criticism in many respects is the opposite of approval. Some of it is valid, but when you don't have some form of approval to balance out the criticism, regardless of how valid it might be, then you are set up for a pretty painful collision with unhealthy neediness co-dependence. We all need love, and we all go in search for it when it doesn't begin at home when we are young. Approval is a part of the love and self esteem package. It's essential and it wasn't until some of these pseudo father relationship began failing that I started to realize that I was in search of something as an adult that I needed to find in myself first given my childhood was now in the past. As an adult, approval has to start with ourselves. I think it's easier if you have it growing up from the people that matter most to a young developing mind, parents, grandparents, but at some point you have to realize it begins with you in adulthood. This was the central point of the Daily Jay today and it really resonated with me. I'm a middle aged man with terrible self-esteem and I carry around way more self hatred than I would like. Meditations like the one today remind me where I need to start to begin to change all of that hate into self love. I can't change my childhood, or my parents, or my own mistakes as a younger person, but I can change how I think of myself as I do my best to move forward.

[deepforestsong]

January 6

Today I listened to a new release on Deutsche Grammophon of Schubert's Lieder only this time arranged for voice and orchestra. The orchestral accompaniment is different from the usual piano and voice recitals of these songs. I'd say the results are mixed. I mean, Schubert's Lieder are beautiful, but depending on the subject, some of the material is more suited to all the colors that an orchestra bring. The piano might be an small orchestra all by itself, but in the more intimate songs, it still rules in terms of bringing out the key emotions. I'm still grateful for the results here. Any new explorations of these wonderful songs are most welcome.

[deepforestsong]

January 3

This morning's listen was courtesy of the wonderful Aglaia aka Gino Fioravanti, an Italian ambient musician. 2022's Perennial Source is a quiet ambient album that unfolds over 74 or so minutes. Most of Gino's music that I have listened to is fairly contemplative, with drifts of ambient keyboards occasionally spiced up with stringed and percussive instruments. Perennial Source makes for a chill winter morning listen, pardon the pun since I live in a state where long cold snowy winters are the norm. Artists like Aglaia bring some needed warmth to the season with their beautiful ambient music.

[deepforestsong]

Winter Tide by Erik Wøllo

The composer states that he wrote this long piece in March from his remote place in Norway, at a time when the temperature was very cold and there was a lot of snow on the ground. When I listened to Winter Tide on bandcamp this afternoon I found the music almost perfectly matched my mood as I wrote on my computer and watched the monochrome winter sky outside of my window. I like to think that the guitar parts are representative of the snow falling and the wind swelling in spurts, while the keyboard sounds represent the frozen world of winter. The music is recorded live: https://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/winter-tide-live-at-soundquest-fest-2021

#music

[deepforestsong]

To a door marked summer

#summer

[deepforestsong]

Do you ever feel like you want to disappear? By disappear I mean as in change the physical nature of your body so that every last cell in your body is transformed into something else. In Iain M. Banks's Culture series of novels, the highest level a species can achieve is level 9, sublimation. At this stage the species transcends their physical presence to become something else, something different. Stardust maybe, or atoms more elemental to the universe in which they live. For the past several months, I have had this lingering feeling that if I could, I would transcend somehow and leave my physical body behind for good. Pure energy, for example, no longer bound to a physical body and all the ailments that come along with it, but it's not just physical sensation I wish to leave behind, but memory. I would like to forget my past journeys and experiences, erase my presence and memory from everyone I know and just be. Like light traveling through space from a dying star, or a grain of sand. "We are stardust, we are golden We are billion-year-old carbon And we've got to get ourselves Back to the garden"

This lyric is from Joni Mitchell's song, Woodstock, written by her because she could not perform at the festival in upstate NY in 1969 and yet she wished to capture what the promise of such an event held for her in her mind. The band Crosby, Stills and Nash were there and they recorded Joni's song and made it a very big hit. The message is admirable, opening with the idea that we are all children of God with an innate higher purpose. The lyrics end on a note of hope and an image I still find appealing: "And I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes Riding shotgun in the sky Turning into butterflies Above our nation."

Wouldn't that be nice? If a bomber jet bound for the (then) Vietnam War can turn into a butterfly then it should be possible for any of us to transcend just by the power of thought and will alone. For me, I believe for this to be possible we also need to reconnect with the idea of impermanence and non-attachment, two important teachings we learn from buddhism and taoism in the East. When I write about wishing to be free of memory, part of this is a desire to be free of my attachment to those memories and the prison they have the power to create. Living in the moment sounds simple but it is the most difficult thing I think a human being can attempt to do. It involves nothing less than transformation, non-attachment and the will to embrace impermanence. Every day I do my best to keep trying, starting with a deep breath and a centering meditation that allows me to be grateful for this moment and for my force of will which can be a source of love in the world. "Well, I came upon a child of God He was walking along the road And I asked him, "Tell me, where are you going?" And this he told me

Said, "I'm going down to Yasgur's Farm Gonna join in a rock 'n' roll band Got to get back to the land Set my soul free"

We are stardust, we are golden We are billion-year-old carbon And we've got to get ourselves Back to the garden."

[deepforestsong]

Summer

[deepforestsong]

July

[deepforestsong]

I remember the day the neighbors moved in across the street. Two cars, two parents and two kids, but only one parent was moving that day. Moving Day is an old song by the late folk artist Bill Morrissey and watching the newly split up family navigate the fresh and unfriendly waters reminded me of the poignancy of that song. Something about a house no longer feeling like home. I immediately felt an immense sadness for the family as my own memories of Moving Day came rushing back like 1994 was yesterday. I don't know the details but from the looks of things and the body language, the mother had decided to leave the father, just as in my situation all those years earlier. I have no way of knowing if the decision was a mutual one between the parents but again from the looks of things, it wasn't. It's tough being the one who is being left behind. At least in this case the mother didn't appear to have left the husband for another man, as in my case. This makes the healing process a little easier for the one being left, but the pain involved in watching your young children go from house to house, the fact of having to say goodbye to your kids over and over again. That pain stays with you, as do the memories. I used to imagine time stopping when I was with my son and daughter and we had a string of days ahead of us. If time stopped, then I wouldn't have to say good bye again and watch them leave with their mother when it was her turn. I have no doubt she felt the same but I also know that it's different when you are the one making the choice to leave, as she did. I didn't date for almost two years after she left me, mostly in the hopes that the relationship with the new guy would run its course and we might put our family back together, but that was never meant to be and so you have to go on as best you can at some point. Even almost thirty years later as I watch another young family go through something I went through all those years ago, the pain becomes fresh again and I wish no one had to experience such pain ever again and that all families could be whole.