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“I know you are tired but come, this is the way.”

Rumi said that. 

It is soon to be Fathers Day (M. Mickey Lebowitz 1918-2000). Not enough sleep and some bad juju brought me to this tarmac meditation on my long road to here. It took me a very long time to realize that where my father was concerned, most of what was wrong between us was on me. He was a good man, reserved and thoughtful and wryly funny, disciplined and thorough, hardworking and committed to a world and its peoples much bigger than he. He loved his family fiercely and with a loyalty that knew no compromise. I saw all that when I was young, admired it, and rejected nearly all of it in the self-imposed miasma of drugs and bad choices. Lately I have struggled with what I was tryin’ to be, with who I used to be. I became an empty version of myself. I have come to know that simply to be who I am right now is what matters. Warts and all. A few weeks ago I came across the following piece by Senator John McCain:

“Not all the Americans who fought in the Lincoln Brigade were Communists. Many were, including Delmer Berg. Others, though, had just come to fight fascists and defend a democracy. Even many of the Communists, like Mr. Berg, believed they were freedom fighters first, sacrificing life and limb in a country they knew little about, for a people they had never met.

“You might consider them romantics, fighting in a doomed cause for something greater than their self-interest. And even though men like Mr. Berg would identify with a cause, Communism, that inflicted far more misery than it ever alleviated — and rendered human dignity subservient to the state — I have always harbored admiration for their courage and sacrifice in Spain.”

***

“’The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for’, Jordan thinks as he waits to die, ‘and I hate very much to leave it’. But he did leave it. Willingly.

“Mr. Berg went to Spain when he was a very young man. He fought in some of the biggest and most consequential battles of the war. He sustained wounds. He watched friends die. He knew he had ransomed his life to a lost cause, for a people who were strangers to him, but to whom he felt an obligation, and he did not quit on them. Then he came home, started a cement and stonemasonry business and fought for the things he believed in for the rest of his long life.

“I don’t believe in most of the things that Mr. Berg did, except this. I believe, as Donne wrote, ‘no man is an island, entire of itself.’ He is ‘part of the main’. And I believe ‘any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.’”

My father was one of those guys. And while he didn’t go to Spain to fight, he raised money for the Lincoln Brigade on the street corners of Union Square in New York City during the 1930’s; he printed leaflets, organized rallies and stood tall in support of the rights of of the oppressed Spanish loyalists. His dedication to freedom from Fascism knew no bounds and he enlisted in the US Army prior to Pearl Harbor to get into the “fight.” His politics cost him dearly in later life as the US government frowned on folks who were “prematurely into fascist “ in the euphemism of the times. His work life was restricted and he was on various lists at the FBI et. al. It took years for him to be able to travel freely and for my mom to not worry about whether or not he had been arrested on his way to work in the mornings as arresting people on their way to work in the mornings was the habit of the FBI in those days. She used to wake up and watch him walk down the block – we never knew that there was more to that watchfulness than a fond good morning-goodbye and a wish for him to have a good day at work. Ours was an insecure household for reasons that had only to do with heartfelt politics and fiercely defended philosophy.

I never knew the difficulty of it all and when I found out about it years later I blew it off as a romantic, heroic fairy tale which was way beyond my capacity to adopt and make real as a guide for my own personal commitments. After all, Spain was a righteous war, and Vietnam was an unholy mess. My responses to both were laced with what I came to know as my own selfish predilections for  drugs, alcohol and bad choices.

“I learned life were no dream /I learned truth deceived /Man is not God /Life is a century /Death an instant.” Gregory Corso said that.

I started today, after the long night’s journey to daybreak, with the realization that Dad (Mickey), you been on my mind– go figure.

“Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that…” Bob Dylan said that a long time ago about a love that was no longer in his life.

Love to you always, and if not always so easily expressed, it is deeply felt nevertheless, and laced with a large measure of gratitude. It is clear to me that whatever little of me has come to be worthy and upright in the physically and emotionally complex days of my life these past few years, I am your son in so very many stubborn, thoughtful and perseverant ways and it works for me, best it can. I still suck with money and frugality, Mickey, but I’m getting better.

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Poster image: No original copyright found (United States Library of Congress)

What follows is a Facebook update that I wrote this morning, wanting to be publicy pleased with walkng for some distance over terrain. I chose the image because it appealed to me. After I posted it I realized I had gone walking today because I had just heard that a very good friend of mine, with whom I had once danced under a full moon to a “tune that was a hit before her mother was born,” had suddenly passed away.

We had been overlooking English bay, after midnight in the spring. It suddenly seemed such a long long time ago. I needed to get outside and breathe. When I came back I wrote the post, and as you can see it had less to do with walking and my physical improvements and more to do with the grinding reality of Tarmac Meditations in my life:

“I wanted a cappuccino after I did my little lifting routine (2x). I had learned before all this lifting happened that a longtime, good friend of mine, a fierce, wicked smart, loyal Prairie tough kind of gal had suddenly passed away, much too young. ‘Oh no, goddammit’, my first thought. Walking to the store became my necessary and sufficient choice for remembering. I walked to the local market to get the coffee. Then I walked back, downhill one way, uphill the other. The image came to mind and finding it cheered me, but it needled me as well. Maybe the ‘road goes on forever’, but with apologies to Robert Earl Keen, the party (?) comes to an end. ‘Life is a century’, Gregory Corso once wrote, ‘Death an instant’.
RIP Sharon Riis (1947 -2016).”

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I couldn’t write a word in the last two weeks. I don’t know why or what was in the way; it just seemed so “useless and all” (Bob Dylan). I have struggled with disconnection my entire life: daydreaming, wandering in classrooms where I was meant to be paying attention, drugs and alcohol and an often conscious desire for a hard straight shot of oblivion, no ice no water.

On May 1 of this year I was fifteen years clean and sober.

During those years I have written as I always meant to, with some success. I found entirely by accident that I had an inclination for photo journalism. It became my life passion in the form of building a career as an ultra-endurance event photographer.

Several years ago I ran into an undiagnosed A-fib situation which resolved itself in a stroke, followed by two more events and a bout of congestive heart failure (scary shit that). Aside from the obvious challenges involved in aging, combined with a little bit of bad luck or timing, as the case may be, my ability to keep shooting the events that allowed me to make a living, and to be me, disappeared. My used-to-be caught up with me as a silent daily lament. I was a “good old wagon but Daddy, I done broke down,” an old song says.

So now what? I HAVE TO WRITE!! is an enormous amount of pressure on a compromised system. So I began to go to the gym and rebuild. Every now and then I take my camera and shoot what’s around me; the images that follow are what I have seen with a camera in my hands. The other day I shot a local race event. These daily non-race images are markers of recovery, small celebrations of being present, doing what it is that I can do with what I got – I think.

What do you think?

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Love Song #87

I love you, I said, but it is not enough.
Around the next corner the darkness will embrace me. The night will
sing like Eurydice,
to Ulysees’ sailors.
I will drown looking for paradise
on the way home.

When my dick gets hard.
All the pain in the history of the world
Won’t make it right.
Not on this slag heap,
not this night.

I don’t want to need you ever again,
I found love once, at a turning
where slept the slouching beast.

There is something out there.
It is more than nothing.
It has come to matter to me. 

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

It has been more than two years since I have been able to wake up out of a restful sleep, grab my camera pack and head out the door with purpose. Such is the aftermath of several strokes and a round of cardiomyopathy, the latter of which damn near did me in. Seriously. The result has been, not in any specific order, a general gratitude for each new day; a rage-inducing inability to type quickly (or slowly) with any accuracy; a variety of med-induced incapacities (read adventures), digestive and otherwise; severe back pain from one of the early strokes (a fall recovery that accompanied said event caused some longterm disk damage); and a whole inventory of newly minted whining and complaints. IN other words, one morning, I woke up OLD and broken. But after all is said and done, I’m doin’ fine, and like the poet said, “Don’t ya think twice, it’s alright.”

Nowadays I am often restricted to shooting what I see out of my back window or my front door. This particular day has some great light changes in it. And since I can no longer chase the shots (read runners) that appeal to me and for which I used to get paid, I have gone back to basics: natural light, in the world as I am in it. I have made my studio the world outside my door as I can see it, and I wait for the shots to come to me. Very freakin’ ZEN, no? But what else is a guy to do, especially if he hates flash and arranged shots (I started out in this passion late in my life; I found my inner photojournalist too late to be a combat/social photographer but just in time to become a decent sports shooter, all natural light and unscripted action). I love telling stories with the images I make, the ones that find me. Here are several, both colour and black and white, of a morning in my life not too long ago.

After all the whining and losing are done, and the relentless, useless calculations of loss finished with, all that is left is the doing. I said that. 

Poto Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.