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Lucubration

lucubration \loo-kyoo-BRAY-shun; loo-kuh-\, noun:

1. The act of studying by candlelight; nocturnal study; meditation.
2. That which is composed by night; that which is produced by meditation in retirement; hence (loosely) any literary composition.

About a third of my writing is done in the dark. Well at least at night if not actually in the dark. I discovered years ago that what I produce in the wee hours is of a different quality than my work product in the bright of day.

Sheer numbers tell me that I produce a lot more words on the page when writing during the day but they are of a very different flavor than my night writing. The emotive content, the big twists and turns come at night. Moving the story along filling in the linear details is a daytime activity.

Nocturnal work also contains a lot of marginalia both on previous sections and notes for future writing. There are times when the fingers just can't keep up with the ideas so I take lots of notes. This nearly always happens at night.

A new day of writing generally begins with reading yesterday's work. Words produced after dark often require a fair amount of daylight editing if only to fill in all the linkages for a potential audience. It's not stream of consciousness writing, well most of the time it isn't but methinks the collective unconsciousness rises closer to my waking world when the sun is on the far side of Gaia.

Silverhill Road

Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot
For one brief shining moment that was known
As Camelot.

My brief shining place was a stone cabin in Michigan located in the middle of a 20,000 acre state wilderness park off Silverhill Road. If you go there now a three mile section of that road has been returned to wilderness, grown over and grown in. The cabin is gone, torn down my the state just after I abandoned Michigan for California in 1975. But for two years, it was my Camelot.

Back in 1973 a good friend was living there, he was a park ranger. The plans to level the old cabin were in the works but until then someone got to live in the near idyllic setting. My friend was transferred and I got the cabin until the state brought in the bulldozer.

The old stone structure hugged a central stone fireplace that ran up through the second floor bedrooms. Across the narrow dirt road and far down the hill was the Crooked Lake campground. We were sheltered from even minimal intrusion of civilization by a huge hedge of violet lilacs, the smell in early summer was nearly overpowering as I lay in the front bedroom.

There was a small garden less successful than the wild asparagus patch nearby. We inherited a sheltie collie named Heather and my roommate brought his shepherd, Bo. I soon had Sam, Heather and Gisele who produced 9 kittens the second spring. Sam was the feline who trained me to pet him during the night.

When the trees were fully leafed out in the summer, the final two miles to the cabin were inside of a green tunnel with the trees on either side providing a complete canopy to Silverhill Road. In the fall the tunnel would darken and then burst into yellows, reds and silvers. There was a fairy circle of mushrooms in the meadow and a stand of lonely birch trees in the high pasture.

We had several big summer parties but the real highlights were the quiet nights in the spring, summer, fall and yes even Michigan winter. All the lights would be extinguished and the stars would burn brightly down on the small rise behind the cabin. I remember that rise for another reason but that is a story for another time.

Oreo Cameo

Take a good long look at this cameo. Then read the title of today's blog again. Yes, that is the carved cream of an oreo cookie.

Here's another one, although I object on moral grounds to a non-chocolate cookie. These come from an artist named Judith G. Klausner, you can find more of her work below and on her website

We know moths are attracted to light bulbs, then again.

She can be a most interesting artist.

Flora Dentata (Tooth & Nail)

-made from fingernails and baby teeth

She has some other works with praying mantis and a series on toast embroidery. I personally liked the oreo series, more my taste so to speak.

Another Numerical Phenomenon

Tomorrow is September tenth two thousand and eleven, at thirteen minutes and fourteen seconds past noon tomorrow it will be:

9/10/11 12:13:14

Which has absolutely no significance other than it is mathematically cool; and I get to use the Homer Simpson clock.

And yes thinking ahead, later this year we will see 11/11/11 11:11:11 and next year we get to celebrate 12/12/12 12:12:12, ain't the internet wonderfully absurd 3.1416% of the time.

Pace and the Wisdom to Ignore It

An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field. -- Niels Bohr

I am not claiming to be an expert but perhaps simply the holder of some wisdom accumulated over time. Recently I was doing was long-distance skype counseling session and heard words from my client that I had heard several times before. Now it's not unusual for individuals to have similar issues in their life, as much as we yearn to be uniquely ourselves we do share common thoughts, desires and frustrations. In this case my client was in an almost identical situation to two previous clients.

This is one of my stories, it's not about any of the three clients and I am not going to disclose the exact life situation they shared. Just for clarity let's say they all had a similar scary nightmare when they were young.

There is a full decade between my current client and the previous one and another decade or more to the first time I was told about the 'nightmare' by a client, probably sometime in the late 80s. After the recent skype session I pondered just how differently I had reacted to those three so very similar situations.

My first experience happened during one of those 'kitchen sink' second sessions with a client. Sometimes after an introductory therapy session the client will spend the week thinking that they did not get all of their 'issues' out on the table, so in the second meeting they talk and talk about everything, just so the therapist has the whole picture of their life situation. When this happens the therapists has to spend a lot of time sorting and absorbing the client's words. Unfortunately, I did not give full weight to the 'nightmare' disclosure and that lack of therapeutic insight delayed the client's progress.

Ten or twelve years later, I picked up on the significance of the client's words as he said them but I also recognized he was not ready to pursue that particular aspect of his recovery. You see there is a therapeutic concept known as pace. If you push a client too soon or too hard they will shut down or run away; well that's the short version of pace. I was really into therapeutic pace back then. What? You didn't think therapists had strategies and styles?

Finally the most recent client. Again I knew exactly what was being said but I also knew this client was interested in progress - immediate progress. So I pushed back, when she resisted I pushed harder. Was I violating the client's pace? Possibly, but I am older and potentially wiser. On her third attempt at deflecting the conversation I said:

"Look we can talk about your boyfriend being distant or your boss being a dumb ass manager; but I thought you wanted to get to why you are unhappy and since you just told me exactly why, shall we talk about that?"

There are lots of responses you can get from a client, some good, some bad, some confusing and some confirming. She said:

"Remind me next time to see a therapist who can't see so easily into my soul."

Therapeutically speaking I've made most of the mistakes before and from those hopefully I've gain a modicum of wisdom, if not expertise.

[Situational aspects of these client interactions have been changed to protect the indentity of the clients. No animlals were harmed in the writing of this post.]

photo from National Geographic

That Time I Got Bit By a Fairy

Last week when Irene was blowing around the East Coast, I heard a news report about evacuations on the Carolina Outer Banks and I was reminded of my own evacuation from those same islands some forty years ago.

In the summer of 1971 I was traveling on the Eastern seaboard with the then love of my life. We were taking a car ferry to one of the islands off South Carolina. This was one of the remote islands, back then you had to boil your water when camping out there. We parked the car about midships and I headed for the restroom under the bridge. On my way back to the car the ship lurched and started to pull away from the dock, I was between the bumpers of two vans and decided that might be a dangerous place to be standing, so I stepped out into the space between the vans and our car.

What I discovered later was that the ferry was running behind schedule and the deckhand was drunk. So the captain gave a hurried sign to cast off from the auto dock and the deck hand missed it. The ferry started to pull away from the dock before the final chain (not rope but one inch diameter chain) was unhitched.

The end link of chain snapped under the thrust of the ferry, it opened up like a three pound horseshoe and was flung forward. It would have shot the entire length of the boat and splashed down harmlessly in the ocean had it not been for the right side of my head being in the way.

I went down against the side of the car, didn't quite lose consciousness but by the time the incident was brought to the captain's attention we were more than halfway to the island so we completed the trip, waited for cars to disembark and then made the run back to the mainland. About two hours later I was getting my neck stitched up with several South Carolina Ferry officials trying very hard not to say the word - liability.

I remind you this was 1971, which might lend some perspective to the doctor not giving my any pain meds nor mentioning the potential for swelling in my neck and throat. So at 2 a.m. I was in an emergency room fifty miles down the road getting an injection into my throat and medication for pain and soft tissue trauma.

Forty years ago, my crackerjack lawyer got my medical expenses reimbursed and the cost of three nights in a motel so I could recover in an air conditioned room. No damages, no pain & suffering, no negligence.

That time I got bit by a ferry.