family man

looked up "family" in the online etymological dictionary. this is what it said...


family
c.1400, "servants of a household," from L. familia "household," including relatives and servants, from famulus "servant," of unknown origin. The classical L. sense recorded in Eng. from 1545; the main modern sense of "those connected by blood" (whether living together or not) is first attested 1667. Replaced O.E. hiwscipe. Buzzword family values first recorded 1966. Phrase in a family way "pregnant" is from 1796. Family circle is 1809; family man, one devoted to wife and children, is 1856 (earlier it meant "thief," 1788, from family in slang sense of "the fraternity of thieves").

it's interesting how "family" originates more from notions of a "household" (that is, a location that centers a group) and "servanthood." there is no real notion of blood relation contained in the term until about 1667. furthermore, note how "family man" earlier meant a "thief."

i like, particularly, the latter connotation. family sometimes is an uneasy "fraternity of thieves," with shifting alliances, and eyes at the back of the head. certainly, it shouldn't be, but it oftentimes is, particularly when one least expects it to be so.

i prefer to be a naive "servant of the household," or rather, i cannot help but be so...

priorities

it's hard to win. on the last night of my week from hell (which was two weeks ago), i started to get the first inklings of a throat infection. while it hasn't been entirely unpleasant (no significant fever phase, for example), it has progressively eaten its way through my resistances, and now sits squarely in my chest. i've been too lazy to particularly analyze my situation with regards to chinese medicine, but i've felt symptoms of lung heat (including a kind of restless energy and irritability) combined with bouts of extreme fatigue, when i just "zonk out." at the same time, it has been terribly difficult to motivate myself to "follow through" on my demands, including completing the thesis and such. thus, i've been trying to take care of immediate responsibilities, which are significant in and of themselves, and despairing of completing the remaining stuff...

thus, priority one SHOULD be health, but often isn't... health is sacrificed so that i can feel some semblance of adequacy and responsibility to the impossible demands of life...

priority two should be my family, and all of its many aspects... in the immediate sense, it means taking care of my kids, doing homework with them, practicing music and soccer and whatever else with them, and struggling to maintain some semblance of continuity in their lives...

lynn should be included in this, but often isn't. sometimes i feel as though we are ships drifting alongside each other on a pitch black night, unseen, and carrying our own secret lives within our armored hulls... i do wish at times that we could find those same empty irresponsible moments we had when we were single and childless. nowadays, we live almost exclusively through our children...

priority three should be my work, which is, to me, my expression of compassion. i want to be a better teacher, i want to be a better healer, but in the run of things, oftentimes, it is a matter of settling for the expedient solutions... for just "managing" responsibilities...

priority four is my art, which actually encompasses several differing attempts to commune with the formless source of all creativity: in writing, in drawing, in music... sometimes i treat this as my release, as my addiction, which is a bad thing, because there shouldn't be any sense of compulsion in these matters. art ideally is a spontaneous and natural extension of oneself...

priority five (maybe it should be priority zero!) is my living practice, the practice of mindfulness. i'll admit that i've been laughably (sometimes not) mindless. paying no heed or attention. just hanging on to survive to the next day, or even the next hour. waiting for a break...

somewhere along this continuum are my friends. i don't think i commune enough with others, "let people in." it is enough to juggle my own spinning plates. i think, unfortunately, that people like myself isolate themselves in their own responsibilities, in their own "concentration camps." beyond the barbed wire and the "mine"-field, there are other souls, perhaps sharing the same miseries and joys. i think there are only rare moments of release and liberation that find me truly communing and communicating with others. most of the time, i find i am, at most, living "in parallel" with others...

i don't know if i'm the only one like this, or if i'm just more honest about it all...

not that i don't care, but i've invented cares of my own, and they are far more proximal and demanding.

someday, when i'm free, i'll be a better friend...

anyway, gotta get back to my priorities, my kids, which i must bocha...

adrift words slide
no fading firmly soaked
no mangrove roots to hold
water clouds of darkness shifting

blood and stopper
note and bottle
tilting levels and horizons
nothing stops the wave, the ripple

that's the hope

shores keep us apart
shores hold us together
kiss and breath of waves

catchment

one by one
and hand over fist
i'll catch you don't worry
i never miss

a certain trajectory
in uncertain times
you shouldn't worry
that i find your rhyme

i sit in the darkness
awaiting your call
and space open a ripple
with each tear you fall

some tomorrow away
when you're drought and dry
i'll be hear waiting

i'll be hear waiting

long after i've forgotten why.

a description of my week from hell

so, having survived something pretty desperate and fatigue-inducing (just to think of it!), i'd like to recount last week's mishaps to you. actually, it wasn't so much mishaps as just a general huge blockage of feces that i had to pass... high concentration, very impacted, narrow sphincter of time. you know the feeling.

let's see... i had the usual stuff, which nowadays means student teaching (4th graders in a resource room, teaching language arts and math), acupoints class, friday clinic, miscellaneous appointments... superimposed upon this was my observed lesson, my lesson unit plan, and the dreaded thesis. i'd finished my single interview, and slowly transcribed it across the span of a couple of nights. i had to at the very least take a good shot at the results chapter, so that i could present it on saturday... oh yeah, let's not forget taxes (which encountered the obstacles of a missing turbotax cd, a downed desktop computer)... anyways, it's been a nonstop blur of taking care of responsibilities... it all having ended on a still-busy sunday, the return to the normalcy of things today (monday) seemed disappointing and anti- anti- climactic...

...

"are you fresh? are you sweet? are you strung out by the wrists?"

...

wife is currently watching twilight. kids are to bed. i am thankful for them, even as i have to ignore them to do my work. time moves quickly, kids grow so fast, I am growing fast... everything... holding on to stalks of grass in the middle of a hurricane.

love is the faith that holds today to tomorrow. the world will turn, dizzyingly, but love holds everything in its inertial place... everything in its right place.

...

i intend, after all of this is over, to write the stories that i intended to write so long ago. i intend to hunt that fantasy and kill it, stab it to the paper, and use its blood for ink... a dream that isn't hunted, isn't known.

been a year since my grandma passed on. last night, we went to the one year memorial service. honestly, haven't been to that church (aloha kyokai), not once, in the past year. you'd think someone nostalgic and missing a dear grandmother would attend church in her memory, but to be quite honest, it's like the only reason i ever went was to honor her... anyways, it was a nice service. i recall my off-tangent reflections during it, probably reflections i'd always had, and secretly laughed at, but failed to put words to until now... when we pray in tenrikyo, we face each respective altar, clap four times, bow in prayer and reflection for an unspecified period of time, and then clap four times again. and we usually take our cues from the head minister, who is directly in front of the altar, sort of serving as our representative before god... so, here's the somewhat awkward thing... the first four claps are alright, everyone kinda claps in unison... but then, as the head minister bows, and so does everyone, well, it becomes a matter of guesswork or intuition or something figuring out when the head minister will complete his prayer/reflection, stand up, and clap once again... and if your prayers are done way before the head minister, does that mean that you were somehow lacking in sincerity or something? didn't have enough to say? so what happens after that is this: sometimes people will rise up, their eyes peeking at the head minister, to see if he is up already or still in the midst of his prayers... sometimes, people ready to synchronize hold their hands in front on them in preparation to clap, like they are trying to catch a firefly or something... but what usually happens is this: the head minister silently rises up, while a lot of the congregation are still bowed down, and he jumps the gun, he starts clapping. and then, the rest of the congregation bolt up, and try to join in, their tardy claps sounding like hesitant fireworks or something... i always thought there was something funny about this, something relating to how silent prayer and communion with god is definitely not a publicly schedulable event...

last night, as we drove to chili's (my bro and min wanted to have a little celebration for me, for finishing my thesis presentation), we saw the moon, which was shaped like a crescent... i don't know when we starting thinking this way, but everytime we see a moon like that, we think that it is my grandma smiling down at us... so it was nice to see her happy like that.

***

i am very tired at the moment. have to get up and make some kind of effort to practice for taiko, which happens in a couple of hours... i love taiko. it's a welcome diversion and exercise for me...

well, i'd better leave off for now. thanks for watching.