Barkley 7/11/2003 - 2/24/2014

Near this spot

Are deposited the Remains

of one

Who possessed Beauty

Without Vanity,

Strength without Insolence,

Courage without Ferocity,

And all the Virtues of Man

Without his Vices.

When some proud son of man returns to earth,

Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,

The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe,

And storied urns record who rests below.

When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,

Not what he was, but what he should have been.

But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,

The first to welcome, foremost to defend,

Whose honest heart is still his master's own,

Who labors, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,

Unhonored falls, unnoticed all his worth,

Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth --

While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,

And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.

Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,

Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power --

Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,

Degraded mass of animated dust!

Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,

Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!

By nature vile, ennobled but by name,

Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.

Ye, who perchance behold this simple urn,

Pass on -- it honors none you wish to mourn.

To mark a friend's remains these stones arise;

I never knew but one -- and here he lies.

- Lord Byron

Thought for the Day

There are so many things on these shelves that most would not notice, small artifacts, strewn across the wood, pieces of time and place, breath suspended, and words not necessary for us to hear. There are pieces of the past, portents of the future, the tears and the shouts, the still and the peace, the power to be afraid, the freedom to live anyway. - L.B. Johnson

From Writer Shed Stories Volume II edited by Hemingway Foundation Writer in Residence David W. Berner 

On Invisibility

When we were kids, we used to talk about what super power we'd like to have if we were a Comic Book Hero.  Strength would be good, but I'd be constantly breaking things.  X Ray Vision? (the human TSA scanner - no thanks).  I never thought the one I'd get was invisibility.

One day you're walking down the street, and everyone wants to say hello, be your friend, hear you speak (or just chat you up), and the next the mailman doesn't even make eye contact.  You realize that you are what you always labeled anyone over 40 when you were that kid.  You're OLD, therefore invisible. You are that library no one visits, that painted landscape of experience and color that no one looks at because they're all too busy taking a selfie or staring at their phone.

But I'm OK that that.  When the world isn't clamoring for your attention, you are free to step back and truly see it.  See it in the quiet hours of domestic life that are marked, not by a time clock, but by the shifting of light and shadow on ancient oak. Hear it, in the grace of stillness that lingers between walls that have known multiple lives and loves. 

There's that sense of time lost, but only in those changes the loss makes in the course of our daily thoughts that can be felt in vague yet poignant moments of remembrance.  We remember those that have gone before, their breathing no longer in our power, but the memory as steady as always.  For with aging, not only comes responsibility, but loss. Suddenly, for myriads of reasons—fate, illness, accident; the people around you, as reliable as the sunrise, leave, insensible to your pleas to stay, 

But being invisible does have its perks.  I can watch the world as it does not watch me back; finding humor in the mundane, shaking my head at others so obvious to it all, their passive insensibility as the caffeine wears off interrupted by slight convulsive starts as a new text comes in, such as may be observed in a dog having a dream on a hardwood floor.  At first that sense of unwanted solitude is disconcerting, but then you realize how much you are truly not seeing, the stroke of a brush on a canvas, the launching of a thousand boats, the sound the tide makes as it retreats to the pull of an invisible moon.

After an errand that took me into the city, I walk down to the lake, before it gets too dark to be out alone.  The setting sun sets a metallic tinge to the waters as it begins to set, taking the moment to gather gold, the gold one meant to secure, but squandered, the gold that is promise, too soon forgotten, the gold worn on the left hand, enduring when all else was lost.  People think the clavicle is the most delicate bone in the body as it's so commonly broken, but to me anyway, it's the lacrimal bone, a small and incredibly fragile bone the size of the little fingernail, found at the front part of the medial wall of the orbit - its main function is to provide support to the structures of the lacrimal apparatus, which secretes tears.  

In my pocket is a small stone, gathered at a beach in Northern Indiana on one of the last outings to the water with Barkley.  I'd collected several, one of which looked to be an ancient seashell, found there on the shore of a lake 1000 miles from an ocean, that now lay upon a shelf by my bed.  I stand there at the water's edge, for just a moment as if separated from the world, the heavens, earth, and the very water next to me, swallowed up in a thick veil of gathering gloom.  As I clench that stone as hard as I can, I breathed out the name of that black dog, into limitless space, sure of being heard, instinctually sure that the plaintive hearts of small children, grey muzzled dogs, and a lone woman, are heard. 

As I feel the wetness on my cheeks, I guess I should just be happy my lacrimal bones are intact.  

I toss that small stone across the water, hoping to see it skip. only to watch it plunge into the darkness.  Next came a small stick, which freely made its way out into the depth of the lake growing small and indistinct in the near darkness.  Where would the currents carry it, north, south?  No matter how  long I stand, patiently, watching the gleam and spark of the waves as the sun sets, that small stick will not return. It is as lost to me as the stone, just taking longer in its leaving. 

Some would look at my countenance and just think "old woman" yet in my eyes is a gleam of surprising intelligence that looks at the world gravely, wide open and steady as if facing something invisible to all other eyes, while I stand straight, unconscious of myself, yet aware of the power I still had in my hands.  They are hands that have held the paw of my best friend as he left me, hands that have sawed through the human breastbone to take a measure of a heart.  Hands kind, capable, but not to be trifled with.

A storm is coming in, that time of year when you don't know if you'll get rain or snow, the temperatures in the high 60s yesterday and in the 20s today.  In the distance are long flashes of vivid lightning, interrupting the short bursts of annealing day, the thunder speaking in the tongues of the gods.  It's best to get home as the sound of traffic floats out of the great silence that is water as big as an ocean.

Arriving home, I'd watch the news, but I gave away my TV long ago, preferring the vast library of books behind leaded glass a hundred years old.  Besides, I'd need to don my rescue dog's "Thunder Shirt" to listen to the news any more.  

I let our rescue Lorelei out, her grabbing and shaking her favorite toy while I quietly watch smoke from the neighbor's chimneys spread the thinnest of veils of haze over the neighborhood. No one pays any attention to me, despite the green "scrub" pants, bright red coat, and orange hat (intuitive color coordination apparently another superpower I lack).  

An ancient tea kettle shrills its warning, and soon we are back inside, Lorelei riding her escalator up into the house, her tail waving like a Nascar flag as she rides past the finish line, where she can snoot the latch open and walk into the house.  Coat and gloves off, it's time to be savored over tonight's book. I gather the makings of the tea, my soul's task as focused on those simple tasks as anything I do, but that is just how I am.

I curl up with an old favorite—Joseph Conrad's story "Youth", an old man's story of his perilous experiences as a young seaman on a storm-wracked coal liner. Having always been a headstrong girl, taking on one dangerous job after another, I empathized with what he said. "I remember my youth and the feeling that I will never come back anymore, the feeling that I could last forever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men".

If I had the chance to be 20 again I wouldn't. Time and memory are what has made me who I am. Events in my life, even the ones I'd rather not repeat, all served to awaken within me a stranger who was strong enough to survive it, to grow, becoming someone forged new, honed sharper and stronger. I've moved past the deception of Conrad's youth, to a place where my soul is still, my heart is full and when I leap from a runway with the wind in my hair, I know I will not live forever on this earth and it doesn't bother me, it just makes me treasure what I have

I go to sleep with a clear mind, having given up alcohol or anything that dulled the senses several years ago, preferring life lived sharp, like obsidian, not fragile as shale. Earth, the waters of the lake, and the sky are all wrapped up in deep sleep as am I.  It's a sleep peacefully oblivious to wealth or misfortune, friends, or enemies, yet eternally aware of that empty spot by the window illuminated as the lightning flashes where an invisible a black dog stands watch into the invisible night.

 - Brigid

Thoughts For Valentine's Day

 

Flying with one of those fledgling airmen was like those evenings when as a kid you would lay with a friend out in the backyard, on your back looking upwards, trying to name the stars, watching for satellites that moved through the clouds in a slow, steady line. The deep relaxed breath of no worries and a quick glance of understanding between each other, that's what flight would be like with them. For they understood in their heart, and they felt it in that place that's always been inside of them. It's as if they just knew and were waiting for you to show them that to frolic in the presence of the clouds, far enough above the earth, was to get a sense of what it is to be blessed.

It is said that when Christ needed to center himself, he did forty days in the wilderness. I think I get a taste of that when I get days in the air. It's a divine communion with the heavens; it's not about travel, it's about absolution. Absolution for past fears and mistakes and all the trappings and stress of life and society that is laid out on our step each morning, like an unwanted soggy newspaper. It's laying open the book of your humanity, as tears of your defenses fall to its pages, gathering into quiet spots of yourself for a few short minutes. It's grabbing a little transcendence from the clouded, salty waters of that earthbound life. It's falling in love again when you thought that was all behind you.

And so, on that day so many years ago, as the rain dripped from the eaves, I waited. Because soon the cold front would pass, the sun would break free and through that door would come someone with whom I could share. And when I heard the oft-told tale that “I've always wanted to do this, but I was afraid it would take time and things away from my loved ones,” I tell them what I've learned. It's the same as this, what I tell people now, thirty-some years later.

For, I still teach, but it's interns in my field, waiting breathlessly to pursue something that drives them, hanging onto my words for some piece of sage advice in a world gone mad. And I tell them now, what I told those flight students then. I tell them that the journey will not be quick, as no journey that leads to our soul's longing ever is.  I tell them love does not exist just in one place, one instance, and one body out of all of the time you have; all the bright light and streaming sky of your life, it is there, waiting for you, with no price tag but your happiness.  I tell him or her that this often mundane and irrational existence of ours at one point contains within it a command to be seized. They will know it when it calls to them.

When they do, look up; reach out and grab hold of it and never let go.

 - From True Course - Lessons From a Life Aloft by Brigid Johnson

The Shadow of Nightfall

I like to go for a walk, just as darkness takes over the sky.

My friends say, "Aren't you afraid. being out there by yourself? You're in a MetroPark, 12 miles from the center of Chicago with just your big dog (and .45 hollow points)?" There are a lot more things in this world to be afraid of, and in the last few years that's on my mind more than a walk in the woods.

Maybe I worry too much about the terror threat around the world when I'm not at work. I dated a guy before 9-11 that thought Afghanistan was in South America and said "if it doesn't affect me directly I don't care". Some of my peers say the terrorist danger is simply a political mechanism to distract us from what is really wrong with the country. But the threat is real, and while we sit cozy in our little homes, the world is spinning outside of our control, on its axis of turmoil. Finding my biological family recently opened up my eyes to a world unlike the one I was raised in.  I'm mostly Scot on my mothers side but on my father's side I'm  Hungarian Ashkenazi Jew, a population almost completely decimated in the death camps during World War II.

My overall odds of just being here are beyond small. And I've survived this far because I remain aware of these things. I've survived landing a crippled jet, I've survived a abdominal septic shock 2 and a half years ago, from a 1 inch wound that couldn't see anything but a virtual doctor during Covid, an infection that has a mortality rate of 72% (I am so glad they told me that AFTER I was out of ICU and unplugged from all the machines).  I'll probably survive airline food, taxes and heartbreak. I can survive because of emotion (which is from Latin emovere "to move away").

Erich Remarque described it flawlessly in All Quiet on the Western Front. "At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it. A man is walking along without thought or heed - suddenly he throws himself down on the ground and the storm of fragments flies harmlessly over him - yet he cannot remember either to have heard the shell coming or to have thought of flinging himself down. But had he not abandoned himself to the impulse, he would now be dead. It is this other second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us".

As the bumper sticker says - s^&# does happen. There are things that are going to happen to us that we can't control. All we can control is how we react to them, whether we flee or fight. Carrier pilots are briefed on it. The briefings aren't as much about technical knowledge, if these men and women didn't have that they wouldn't be responsible for a armament laden, multi-million airplane with their name stenciled on the back of their chair. (Pez, Chaos, Spurt).

Though part of a pilots briefing is to remind them of important stuff they already know, the aviation equivalent of going to church, it's mainly to remind them that they are staring death in the face, that out there in the ever changing stream of a world in conflict, death swims in the water-like flow of the winds. Like a river, the sky can be be tranquil but it can just as easily be wild, with predators cruising it's currents and the distance back to the banks of your ship much further than it appears. They are told to respect that, for fate waits in those dark eddies under moss grey clouds.

I think about that each time my hands bring up the throttles. Even if no one is shooting at me, there's always a risk. As much as I love to fly, I have spent enough hours aloft to know that the heavens are a two edged blade, one of joy and one of violence, that can cut you clean from the sky without a moment's hesitation. I think about that now, alone and cold on the edge of a vast field of corn as a hawk dives down for a field mouse, his talons glinting in the last scrap of daylight. While I walk, others stay home and warm, basking in the illusion that they are safe on home soil. Maybe illusion is really all they have. But I know too well, and in especially these last  years, the self induced damage that living with an illusion can do.

I look out at the approaching dark span of space running off in all directions under a low, uncaring sky and realize how vulnerable I really am. The sun takes it's final bow to the west, the hawk steals away with his prey, a hoot owl calls, and I run back to the safety of my house. Quick enough to keep up with the shadow of nightfall, just fast enough to keep up with the spinning of the earth