Tarmac Meditations

You are here: Home / Archives for Tarmac Meditations

Photographer’s Reflection

By Leave a Comment

Minnesota Morning

Photography, it is said, tells painting what it should not, what it cannot do.

This photo was taken  shortly after sunrise on a lake shore in northern Minnesota. On the shore that is implied to the left there was a fiery orange streak in the water rolling ashore, an accident of the sun’s angle and the absence of fog. Equally on side of the lake to the west (the right) the fog was thick and the lake glass like. The reflection of the boat, this perfect reflection, seemed more a painting than a true life image. And in fact this is not what my eye saw. What I saw as I turned and set up to take the picture was grey fog and green reeds and two boats at rest under the lightening  morning sky to the west. It all suggested a good day of fishing ahead. What the camera saw is what you see here, probably, certainly, an accident of white balance and angles. But here is the thing about what is and what can be. The camera saw what I, unconsciously, wanted to see, because it felt that way: a painting by Winslow Homer, a Matisse blue,  a quiet, surreal  mindscape where all was possible, where everything was in its proper place; hommage to childhood’s memory of a place occupied by happy elephants and talking monkeys, a place long gone but apparently still with me.

Frozen Morning Meditation

By 1 Comment

Tried to watch TV last night. Fell asleep on the couch, in front of the fire. Woke up in the middle of the eleven o’clock news. The fire was nearly embers. Shut off of the TV. Went to bed. This morning the TV was off and there were embers enough to begin again. Going running now. Coming back to a fire in the fireplace, coffee and the sacred quiet of a winter’s morning.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep./But I have promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep,/…” Robert Frost said that. The poet’s woods, a church of my own choosing, the crunch of frozen trail beneath my summer shoes, a cathedral sky; a world of men and obligation is over there, just out of sight.

When I get home the fire is low, in need of wood. The coffee is cold.

The words are waiting.

Tarmac Meditations…Lessons I Learned at Marathon Camp While Walking in Washington DC -A year later

By Leave a Comment

Catch the Wind 1Marathon Camp Lesson #12 … “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Mr. Lincoln said that.

Marathon Camp Lesson #12.5 … It was raining when he said it.  It had been raining for weeks. It was raining today when I went to “the Linc”. K. Newsome, the security guy told me he didn’t mind the rain. “It’s the Lincoln Memorial.” he said in explanation. Made sense to me.

Marathon Camp Lesson #12.75 … The rain drifts across the Wall. I walk the length of it. And back. A younger guy, Marine Corps fit, is checking names. He stops for a while in front of Panel E-24. August 1967.  I was 21. As I leave, he is looking up something in the book. Father? Brother? It was raining years ago in March of ’68 when I left home for good. Went north. Stayed north for a long time.

Marathon Camp lesson 13.1…Came home 10 years ago to a hot and dusty place. Stayed for several years. When it got hard to stay clean I hunkered down and weathered the storms. I had a lot of help from my friends. Why is this lesson  numbered 13.1 pointing, as it does, to the distance of the poorly named half marathon event? Because  my journey has only half  begun, despite whatever the chronological clock may say. I came home, put in my time, moved back  to this place of big weather and ancient trees, fixin’ to begin again. And like the marathon, if you don’t make the starting line, you don’t run the race. I’m in it now and speaking just for me, I am damned glad I made it.

November 19, 2010

It was  raining a year ago, it is raining today.   You can go home again despite what Thomas Wolfe, an excellent writer,  said all those years ago in an important novel about being an artist in the world. In fact, it turns out, you must go home again. I said that. ( It occurs to me that Bobbie Ann Mason, author of  In Country, may have also said that.)

My father’s birthday came and went yesterday. He would have been 92. I associate the Lincoln Memorial, politics, political compassion , America and moral conscience with him. He tried to teach me that believing in something is crucial to a life of value, that belief is enduring despite changes in focus, that one cannot help others until one can help him/her self, that individual responsibility is the predecessor to the body politic and conscientious social change. In other words, there is a higher morality, go find it, and then live it to the best of your ability. All the rest is conversation.  There are many days that I wish I had heard him earlier, that our last years had been less complicated by my addiction and his failing health; that we had spoken of what we knew to be true, that love abides and that I could and would be of value once my personal war was over and won. RIP  M. Mickey Lebowitz November 18 1917-October 14, 2000.

This morning, like that of a year ago, I was out in the weather mixing my sweat with the falling rain, a middle ground between the earth and sky, connected by my actions and my dreams to the world of others. I came in, I dried off,  I ate something and I sat down to look for the words. This is, after all, the life I have and it’s time to get it right(Mark Twain said something like that).

Tarmac Meditations…a note to a friend on his long sought and now imminent 24hr run

By Leave a Comment

What makes a man is to take a step…then another step…it’s always the same step…but you have to take it.   Antoine de St. Exupe´ry by way of my dad when I was an unhappy, drifitn 17 year old and I asked him what he read when he was my age. I could not figure out how to talk with him so I thought if i read what he read we might meet up. It was about as close to him as I  ever got, home to a sadness that lives on. The words though, the times they came from, the way in which they came to me, shared as they were  with equal parts love and concern,  illuminate  an abiding faith in the human spirit…these are from him to me to you, to any of you who set out not knowing the why of things but only that it is time for the doing of them. Knowing that when a friend is running out beyond his comfort zone, we are together where ever else we may be…it is always one step, then another…that the journey  from where we were to where ever we are going enriches all of us…WE, all of us,  are going with you…with you, along side you, up ahead in the uncertain dawn…the inspiration and the giants of which you speak are you and we are grateful.