The glory of the first few weeks of fall in Montana, indeed most of the mountain west, is under appreciated.
We advertise the powdery snow & bright sunshine of our winters and the long temperate days of our summer for tourism, but I love the precious few middle days of transition as we approach Michaelmas season.
The harvest wraps, the fall begins in earnest with frost ever ready, and we prepare ourselves for darker days ahead.
I personally try to be outside as much as possible in this transitional period. Throwing on sneakers and a vest is much easier than snow boots and a parka.
Rambling across county pastures, over makeshift bridges across streams and across neighboring fields in the morning sets the tone for a positive day.
Someone acquired a new piebald
Once I’d returned home, the abyss of the open internet was there to stare back at me as I looked too hard upon it.
The prayers I had uttered in thanks for the glory of our mountains, the brightness of the sun, and the mercy granted to the living was pushed back by the darkness of greyzone algorithmic memetic warfare.
I am still recovering from travel so weak enough that I have little desire to self censor. The ebbs and flows of conflicting constructed realities are fighting for purchase on the American mind and it’s not pretty. God given inalienable rights are not on anyone’s mind when there are others to blame.
I hardly knew if I should pick up Heidegger, Nietzsche or (shuddering at the thought) Schmitt to make sense of apoplectic displays of poorly harnessed power being thrown about by competing and angry egregores.
What could I possibly do or say or read to make sense of anything? I suppose that’s how the abyss gets you. The Nothing only needs you to stand idly by as you are absorbed into the abyss. Michael Ende and Madeleine L’Engle may be better places to go to understand the abyss than Nietzsche. Lest we lose our sense of wonder in the horror.
As I often do on transcontinental travel days, I wrote my post for the day first thing in the morning. I wasn’t sure how the journey would go so I thought “let’s post this early” in case things get hairy. And boy did it.
It’s a weird thing to complain about air travel on 9/11, but I don’t think much of the security theater we’ve accepted over the years did much to keep my transit safe yesterday. Twenty four years later we go through the motions of keeping air travel safe from terror because what else are we going to do?
In fact, it didn’t seem as if security was particularly tight yesterday so much as particularly incompetent. It was chaotic confusion everywhere from passport checks to boarding flights.
I had a Frankfurt to Chicago polar day flight, along with a positioning flight on each side. I went through a lot of security screenings and passport checks yesterday and stood in more lines than I can count.
In Frankfurt the lines were so long that even with planned two hour airport transit time, I was among the last to board my flight.
The “special purposes” line I begged my way into as my inbound was delayed by fog was glacial in its pace. It seems the new transit grift is wheelchairs. So perfectly abled people are now pretending at disability to board early and use special security screening lines.
It left wishing I’d registered my real disability as I attempted to run the two miles of the international terminal with suitcase and backpack torquing my spine so I wouldn’t miss my flight to Chicago.
Deplaning at Chicago I couldn’t even count the full set of wheelchairs waiting.
Add in enormous confused families using the special purpose line, who spoke neither German nor English, with 3-4 bags a piece and every sort of banned item from pocket knives to 1.5l bottles of liquids and I am shocked anyone made it through security to their flights on time.
I watched a foursome of black Arabic speaking grandmothers in hijabs and wheelchairs shouting at German security guards and their extended families as I waited for my turn. Their fierce attitudes did not speed anything up that I could tell.
I saw them 9 hours later gathering somehow even more checked luggage upon arrival in O’Hare. I’m glad my Global Entry let me pass them by at passport control as I did not want to be behind them again.
Not that I got through Chicago’s security lines unscathed. The TSA pre-check lines were four times as long as the regular line. Figuring I was well packed I could handle the normal line. Naturally I got randomly selected and unpacked basically everything
As I stood in my socks waiting for the agents to stop gossiping and listen to the only working agent explain to them that “yes that the ice pack was for medications so they can move this along” I got an alert on my phone that the conservative political organizer Charlie Kirk had been shot.
I wandered in a daze to the United club where I was denied entry. This despite booking a business class ticket for the entire transit through their own hub via their Star Alliance partnership with Lufthansa, I couldn’t use the club as “the last leg of my flight didn’t qualify.”
I knew this was possible as this last leg issue happened to me on my last transit through O’Hare so I’d bought a day pass ahead of time. But they weren’t honoring those as it was too busy. I schlepped to another club in the terminal where they were still letting in day passes. There I listened to scared speculation from two blonde women about Mr Kirk’s status.
Another hour later I made my way onto my flight to Montana. I decided to just jump to the front of the line as I was in first with seat 2B. If everyone is ignoring lines then it was irrational to keep trying to politely queue.
As the plane boarded it was all talk of Mr Kirk. A news alert crossed my phone saying he had been killed.
A gentleman was playing a video of stitched together angles of footage on his phone with full audio on. You could hear the bullet hit again and again.
The cabin attendant told him to turn it off, saying sir please have some respect for the dead. A few hours later, still living, I made it home to Montana.
This is one of the strangest weeks of the year for Americans. Labor Day marks the end of summer but it takes a bit to shake off the remains of the dog days.
Every day can jarring these days as whole world can narrow to a pinpoint with personal pain. Death will be stalking millenials as their parents age and die even as the money seems tilted in their favor with healthcare spending.
But as debts go up, investors price in risk and the state grapples with the turn and spend. It’s jarring to live as usual as change plays out in the personal and geopolitical.
I say Rome didn’t collapse in a day because anyone rushing for the exits doesn’t realize that change has surprising ways of reorganizing attention and power.
The week of 9/11 reminds Americans in particular. But the US Open closes and fashion week opens in New York and life finds a way.
It’s already playing out and we are all rearranging our lives and interests and families as we see whose time is sunsetting and who might be clever enough to ascend. I myself hope to thrive in the churn
I’ve got my over the ear noise canceling headphones on playing a Solfeggio frequencies of 396 Hz which is labled as “liberating guilt and fear” on my Endel mobile application (which I recommend though I’m not involved with it).
My father died this weekend. While I had been preparing for the possibility for sometime the reality of the moment is never what you expect.
Grief is a strange emotion. You forgive your parents but they don’t always forgive themselves. And then it’s over and everyone is free. The pain is over and the past arrived and your present is without them.
The past becomes a foreign country and you don’t speak the language and as you become middle aged you see your life reworked through success and failure and the hard costs which your ego previously obscured like too much greasepaint.
It is maudlin to stay in grief but if we do not let go of the past we will project past pains and old understandings of reality onto others that do nothing but harm.
It’s a beautiful thing to watch these huge emotions play out in your life. Death offers grand dramas when all you can offer is having built a future on the foundation they gave you.
And of course, the most famous remains the 5 stages of grief from Kübler-Ross’s “On Death and Dying,” the 1969 book in which she proposed the patient centered stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
I was prepared to go through all of it. And I did. The shock was immediate as soon as I learned she had passed. I was angry she was gone. I asked why someone else couldn’t have been taken instead of her. I was sad to carry on with out her. Acceptance seemed distant.
But as I started to communicate my own feelings I recognized an emotion I wasn’t prepared to encounter so soon. I felt immense joy. Losing her overwhelming made me feel grateful for the joy she’d given me in my own life.
What incredible luck I had to be a part of her life and receive so many emotional gifts as a result. The freedom she encouraged in me gave me the capacity for boundaries and needs and wants I’d never accepted fully.
And then, even though I was prepared for the possibility, she was gone and I realized she had been right. I could accept things that I’d distrusted for so many painful decades.
Our bodies replace many of their nearly 30 trillion human cellsregularly. About 330 billion of those cells are replaced every day — that’s about 1 percent of all our body’s cells. Other cells, like the tiny ones in our gut, renew within a week.
I’m not much for dreams of eternal life. Chronic disease tends to give you a bit of appreciation for Sisyphus and the torture of daily physical embodied indignities. But give me the hope for constant change and you’ve got my attention. And yes I moved a lot as a kid who do you ask?
Doesn’t 1% renewal day seem both manageable and swift at the same time? It’s one of the recommendations I give to folks who are interested in biohacking. Change one variable by a small percentage every single day. Big changes come from compounding over time.
I’m not the same person I was yesterday. I’m not the same person I was a month ago. If I look at how much change I’ve undergone in just the last year it feels dizzying. If I consider how different June of 2023 Julie is from June 2022, I’m barely the same person.
I take solace in the 1% renewal. That even if this version of myself is suffering, I am building a future version of myself that compounds into better versions. Seems like we should be grieving a little every day doesn’t it?
One of my Twitter mutuals suggested I explore the work of psychiatrist Francis Weller and his work on grief. I spent two hours with his lecture and another hour on the writing and exercises explored in this talk available on YouTube. I found his five gates of grief particularly helpful.
1.Everything that you love, you will lose. 2. Places inside of you that have not known love. 3. Sorrows of the works. 4. What we expected and did not receive. 5 Ancestral grief
I have been exploring my childhood emotions and the unconscious way those experiences still affect me. Using Weller’s gates of grief I see I need to grieve but also understand these patterns and what I gave up as a child so I can see what to let go now as an adult but also understand what gifts it has left me with.
In the framing of the second gate, I felt abandoned and unloved as a child. There were parts of me that were never loved. It was a challenge to get attention. This has left my inner childhood fearful that love is unreliable, attention is fleeting and abandonment is always to be feared.
Francis Weller asked what are these lessons or emotional complexes protecting? Why do I feel this way and what did I gain? At the heart of every experience is a jewel of great price. I was protecting and nurturing the capacity to get my father’s attention.
As a small child I didn’t understand why he didn’t pay attention to me for the things I wanted and I liked. So I found ways to get his attention through the things he liked. I developed the expectation I would be ignored. I wouldn’t be paid attention to unless I made myself appealing. So I learned to cut deals to be paid attention. I learned useful skills this way. A pearl of great price indeed. But I was also giving up the idea I’ll be loved just for being his child.
That all the things I did to change myself to be paid attention to and to be loved never ultimately got me what I needed when I was a small child is a loss I must grieve. I’ll never be able to go back and feel like I was wanted. No change I made fixed it either. I must mourn the second gate.
To leave behind these coping mechanisms or emotional complexes, to grieve them, is to admit that they did not work. I cannot change that I felt I was not wanted or loved. They have nothing to offer me now. I have to grieve the lack of a loved childhood to love myself in adulthood.
But it is not a bad thing. Francis Well shares that the other hand of grief is gratitude. In one hand we hold grief and on the other gratitude is in our other palm. So I recognize I have gratitude that my childhood gave me the skills to see what others want. I see what they are looking to find. I know what others are manifesting. I see what others are building and making and wanting. I learned to see the power and magic of others so I can hold space for them. And I learned how to golf. Useful skills indeed.
I grieve that this was my tool for attention and love as a child. I deserved love and attention just for existing as a child. But I am grateful for what it has given me as well.
