Posts Tagged ‘Claverack’

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Letter From New York, August 21, 2011

August 21, 2011

Or, as it seems to me…
I am back from the Vineyard and ensconced this morning at the cottage, curled on the couch, as the early morning sun becomes hidden behind incoming rain clouds, rain that has been predicted all weekend but which has held off now until today, Sunday.

I realized that the cottage is my land of “off.” I arrive and feel a weight lift from me, for a moment I am away, mostly, from the deluge of email, some of which feel like they “e-maul” me.

And the lovely sight of Claverack Creek lazily flowing is more than soothing and over each day I am here, I want, as much as possible, to let the soul rest as well as the body, to enjoy quiet and to recoup from the wear and tear of life. Even though I know my life is magic compared with so many in the world – almost all our lives are – I also know we are not immune from the vagaries of life.

Earlier this week, I read that western nations are more deeply plagued by depression than underdeveloped nations. Is it, I wonder, the result of complex lives, the juggling of so much beyond the basics that our brains malfunction from the strain of processing? Is depression a by-product of technological development? At least on the scale from which we seem to suffer from it?

I don’t know the answer to that but the question has scratched around my brain since I read that factoid in an online article earlier this week while researching something completely different. So I went online and googled “depression and technology” and found out I am not the only man on a laptop who has questioned that this might be the case. “Depression and technology” brought up 131,000,000 items in 0.17 seconds [oh, how we love you Google]. There are also indications that technology can help with depression, particularly among seniors who are beginning to feel isolated and feel they have lost their autonomy.

It is complex and fascinating and a subject I am going to delve into more as time goes on. One writer ruminated on what he felt was the impossibility of the human mind at this time successfully processing all the information we are presented with [I’m saying ‘at this time’ because gosh knows we evolve; perhaps we are at a stage similar to the first creatures that crawled out of the sea to conquer land living?]. But certainly the human brain has had to cope with a dazzling degree of technological evolution in the last hundred or so years.

My Google search revealed people were beginning to wonder about it in the 1920’s and if they were wondering about it then…

Just think about how many of us get anxious if we haven’t checked our email on our smartphones in the last twenty minutes? How many people do I know, myself included, who roll over in the morning and check their smartphone to see what has occurred during the night? Many. Almost all of the people I know are information obsessive and feel anxious if they are cut off.

And this probably is not a good thing. Perhaps a very bad thing? Perhaps a road toward depression?

So I am going to do my best the next few days and pay attention to information overload, be sensitive to it and hold it a bit at bay while still accomplishing my duties and yet thinking about the role technology may play on us, individually and nationally, in encountering psychological distress as the price of technological innovation.

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April 11, 2011

Letter From New York
April 11, 2011
Or, as it seems to me…

There hasn’t been a missive in a couple of weeks; it’s not for lack of effort – there have been several drafts.

But I was never happy with what I have seen on the page. Coming back from SXSW, I felt the hope that was in the crowd at the Interactive portion – people could use technology to make the world better.

However, when I returned I was overwhelmed by events in the world. Libya. A third war for the U.S. Ongoing troubles across the Arab world, the price of oil soaring, budgetary crises in Washington, nuclear meltdown in Japan, a flurry of publicity and chitter chatter about the iPad 2.

I ask myself all the time: what is really important? The arrival of the iPad 2? Yes, it’s important. Apple and its devices are BIG news. But so is what is happening in Kabul and Baghdad. And all of that is pretty incredible and we have become, I’m afraid, immune to it – we have lived with this for too many years. We are at war in a lot of places: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, as someone noted to me today, how about Mexico, which is on the edge of exploding? That’s the way it is in the world today.

I can’t ignore it. And I can’t do much about it. I write regular letters to my Representatives and hope they hear what I am saying. There is a huge dialogue in the country about bringing down the deficit but it seems focused on Amtrak and NPR and PBS and all kinds of social service programs that really represent a fraction of the budget while no one talks about the cost of the wars we are engaged in or how do we make Social Security really viable for the next 100 years. We’re not having the conversations we really need to have.

I’m angry with everyone right now. I think the Republicans are demagogues and the Democrats aren’t offering real alternatives. And I don’t like waking up in the morning to NPR because the news seems all bad but I don’t change the channel because I feel I need to know what is really going on. And while I am depending on NPR to give the ugly news of what is going on I am also faced with a Congress that wants to defund NPR so that I won’t wake up in the morning knowing how bad things are. Because then we can live in the America that they think we’re living in which is not the America we’re living in.

We are, as a country, way down on the lists of good things. We’re not at the top of lists of almost anything. And that really worries me. It doesn’t seem to worry many people how far down the list we are in terms of medical care. Doesn’t it worry anyone else that Costa Rica is better than we are in medical care overall? It does me. Now granted, that’s overall and not necessarily a specific situation. In a specific trauma situation we may well be the best but we’re not overall.

We’re 17th in math and science these days. And should I really worry about this? Yes, because this is my home. Once in the long ago and far away, I thought about emigrating to Canada or Australia but didn’t because America is my home, my homeland.

The United States is so many different things to so many different people, all inhabiting the boundaries, physically and psychologically of this unique, strange, wonderful, magnificent, convoluted thing called “America.” It is the dichotomies, rabid politics of some, the yearnings and tensions, the palpable ache for something better that makes this country what it is and today it is am much a riot as it ever has been if not more so.

My angst doesn’t change that the sun is shining in while I am working on this, with a nice Italian white wine while waiting for an old friend, which is also much of what life is about, so we can sit at lunch and talk about all of these strange things.

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Letter From New York, September 25, 2010

September 25, 2010

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Letter From New York

September 23, 2010

Or, as it seems to me…

Fall is in the air; the leaves have begun changing on the trees that overhang my creek and litter my land.  Soon they will begin to fall and will literally litter my drive, unattended they are daunting and so weekends will begin to be devoted to clearing them away.  I both love and hate the fall.  I embrace the brisk wind and the wild tension between the encroaching winter and the summer that wants to linger, a autumnal ballet of seasonal forces, a lovely, painful dance as the world sinks into winter.

As that dance progresses, the world has been watching the tiny island of Manhattan for two events that occurred there, one following the other.  The first was glamorous – the all important, celebrity studded Fashion Week; the rich, the beautiful, the fashionistas, the models, the mavens all squirreled in and through the tents at Lincoln Center, all sponsored by Mercedes Benz.  The city could barely sustain the excitement of all this elegance, luxury and excitement; every morning the city woke to yet another display of fashion fabulousity.

The second event was the General Session of the United Nations.  World leaders gathered; Obama addressed the General Assembly, hoping to elicit the support of others in the world to buoy up the Mid-East Peace Process.  Every leader comes with an agenda, a shift they would like to see the world take in the way it sees their efforts on the world stage.  Thursday, President Ahmadinejad of Iran, took the podium and used his time to decry the United Nations, the United States, capitalism, Zionists, laud the wonders of nuclear power and declare that the majority of Americans think that 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government.

Delegates from many nations walked out on him.  It was, as the United States spokesperson said:  predictable.  Ahmadinejad has used his annual trips to the UN General Assembly to further distance himself and his country from the rest of the world.  The scariest part of this scenario is that this man runs a country with an army, a pretty big army that has been testing missiles that seem to go farther each time they test them.  The saddest part of all of this is that the Presidency of Iran held by someone more rational could wield a huge influence for good in that desperate part of the world.  Iran is using its influence to stir up anti-Israel feelings all over the world and plays its hand on the world stage with a fistful of wild cards.  No wonder he makes the West crazy.  He hates the West.  Likes our toys, like nuclear power, but doesn’t like what we stand for…

Also in that part of the world is poor Pakistan, ravaged by floods, [have you donated anything to help Pakistan?] being torn apart by religious and political strife, the secular being clawed at by religious fundamentalists with a virtual civil war going on in the north west.  And, oh yes, they have a stockpile of nuclear weapons and they rattle that saber once in awhile.

When I think about these things, I feel great disquiet.  No wonder the fabulousity of Fashion Week is so attractive to so many – it diverts us from the fearsome realities that are just across town as the UN General Session met with frightening men like Ahmadinejad standing up there with all the other world leaders, completely free to rant against the organization hosting him and reminding us that he is running a country that is quite capable of the worst kind of mischief.

There is another Iran, the one that doesn’t want him and who marched in the streets in the spring but we saw what happened to them.  Who will ever forget the pictures of the young girl bleeding to death on the street, an event twittered around the globe.

It is fall, the season that precedes the long winter, a time when the mind roams to all the things that could go bump in the night.  And right now I hear a bump.

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A Tale of Two Towns August 25, 2009

August 25, 2009

Hell hath no fury like Mother Nature…

The cicadas are chirping in a dark, damp night – it has been damp all summer.  I am beginning to believe it will be damp the rest of my natural life.  This summer is headed towards the history books as the coolest and possibly wettest summer in recorded history.  I feel I am living in Oregon again. Weather is the subject of conversation everyone can safely go to rather than face the high emotions of health care reform – and it is as important a subject.   Whether you call it global warming or just natural climate change, something is happening that is different and in its difference is deeply unsettling.

Friday afternoon a riptide of a storm raced through Claverack while I was beginning my way home and by the time I got home roads were ravaged by downed trees and power lines.  Cut off from home, I was offered a port in the storm by my friend Alana.

Saturday morning unveiled the extent of damage – hundreds of trees broken and fallen, homes shattered, my tree sheltered cottage lucky with only one tree down; it had fallen against another tree saving the house.  The weather service called it sheer wind; locals claimed seeing mini-tornadoes tear through their yards and fields, ripping up the landscape and their trees in a sight none remembered before – this was weather as it had not been experienced in living memory.

And that is what is troubling us all – experiencing weather phenomena that no one recalls and no one recalls being told about before.  No one I know has a grandmother who told them a story of the time mini-tornadoes ripped through the town.  Though many who lived through this last Friday will tell their grandchildren…

What is happening with the weather seems new to us.  It may just be the natural cycle of the planet – or not.  It may be global warming – or not.  The debate will go on; what is irrefutable is that what is happening with the weather has little to do with the oral history passed down to us.  What’s going on today wasn’t talked about when I was a child sitting on the steps of my parent’s house and weather was discussed.  There was a sense then that weather had a pattern, a rhythm that had gone on, if not forever, for as long as anyone remembered.

Not so today.  What is happening with the weather has a decreasing amount to do with what we have known and more to do with assimilating what we are experiencing.  Today on NPR I was listening to a report about a glacier in Antarctica, four times the size of Scotland, which seems to be in the process of disappearing – something that seems to have really started about ten years ago.  We are assaulted by stories like this – glaciers disappearing here and there, ocean temperatures far above what they were.  No adult in my childhood told me these kinds of stories.  I don’t remember sitting on the front stoop of my parent’s home being told we were moving into a new weather world that broke all the rules of all the remembered generations.  And that’s because when I was a child the weather rules still reigned – what had happened seemed likely to happen again — yet now we are living in a world where what is happening is not what has happened before.

We are living in a frightening world.  There was an ad campaign not so many years ago – not your father’s Oldsmobile.  Well it’s not your father’s weather anymore either.   Oldsmobile is gone and so is the weather we used to know.  Might be Global Warming, might just be a natural cycle.  Doesn’t matter – the world of weather is changing and it is, like so much around us, a bit frightening.

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Tale of Two Towns August 5, 2009

August 5, 2009

Doesn’t matter what town…

Not so long ago I wrote about the woman who was on the cleaning staff of my office building who was murdered. One of the elevator operators has been arrested for the crime. It was shocking and since then I have not been comfortable in the building. It is hard not to think about that act of violence; it hangs on the building, a heavy shroud of violent sadness I sense whenever I am there – which won’t be for much longer as I am moving offices shortly.

That particular blog elicited a large number of responses – many emails simply repeating the same two words: very disturbing. My beloved sister-in-law wrote me a long note. She “wonder(ed) how we can ever get back to a civilized society? One without such a dark side.” That line has tumbled around my brain ever since. I think it is common to believe things were better in the past, that we were better beings previously and that we have descended into a dark morass, darker than ever before but from which we can escape.

I don’t think man has ever inhabited that kind of Camelot.

The dichotomy in mankind that inspires and repulses at the same time is that we are so capable of goodness and we are so capable of darkness.

The 19th Century lithographers, Currier & Ives, are associated in today’s mind with a time that is frequently recalled as that kind of a Camelot – they captured all kinds of aspects of American life, including those we now associate with all the good things about Christmas. Yet as Currier & Ives were capturing those bucolic images of American life, we were sending cholera infected blankets to Native Americans as a way of thinning their numbers.

Cruelty to other members of the human race has been one of the things we humans have excelled at since the dawn of time. Get conquered in war and chances were during most periods of human history it was a death sentence – or at best you got sold off into slavery. Slavery – now that’s a fine institution that’s done a good deal for us; we’re still dealing with the aftereffects of American slavery and will continue to deal with it for a long time to come even though long strides have been made.

Everyday, everywhere human beings do terrible things to other human beings. Yet, despite that, there are things we are doing as individuals and as groups that show the other side of the two-sided human coin. Somewhere in the world today someone will risk their life to save another life as well as someone who take one. We live with this two faced aspect of man everyday when we walk the streets of any town, anywhere. Could be Hudson. Could be Claverack. Could be New York City. Walking the streets anyplace means we will be exposed to the possibility of evil and the possibility of goodness.

We’ve come a long way since the days of the human sacrifice of children to the god Moloch. I’ve been thinking about that the last couple of weeks as I am working on an initiative to help bring attention to the International Day of Peace celebrated on the 21st of September. Odyssey is working to get a million people to take a minute and think about, pray for or envision world peace – a world without nuclear arms. At least hundreds of thousands of people have participated in the past twenty-two years, probably millions. I don’t recall a time in history when such large groups of people have joined together to promote a concept that has been mostly alien to us – peace. It gives me hope. And it is hope that drives us towards goodness.

Put it in your calendar. On the 21st of September take a moment to think about, pray for, envision a world with peace breaking out everywhere. Help make it a million minutes for peace.

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Letter From New York: A Tale of Two Towns

June 12, 2009

Letter From New York
June 10, 2009
A Tale of Two Towns

With credit to Kate Thorsey

Anyone who has followed my musings for the last oh so many years is aware much of my heart lives in the Hudson Valley, in Claverack, on its named creek, on my God’s little two acres. A good portion of my life resides around that spot and when I am gone too long my heart yearns for it in a way it has for no other place I have inhabited in my life. That cottage is my home, the refuge I have preserved against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – the place I have clung to through the ups and downs of life and the place I have retreated to in order to heal.

Yet there is the reality I must, in my business, travel extensively, spend huge amounts of time in New York City and I have learned, particularly in the last weeks, a part of my heart resides there also. Long, long ago when I was living in Los Angeles I recall a time returning from New York when I breathed a sigh of relief as the flight crossed the Rockies and headed into the west that was then my home, a relief that grew deeper as we flew closer to LA over the sandy desert colored its many shades of burnished ochre. I feel that same feeling now when I bounce through the rutted streets of New York City on my return from some journey. I feel it even more when I fly into Albany International Airport, working my way south to the cottage passing familiar places that make my face smile – such as the turnoff to my friends Chris and David’s home where I have had so many memorable times, including one awesome lobster adventure that caused all attending to imagine they were at a Roman bacchanal.

Like many people I know in Columbia County I call it home and must, for various reasons, including psychological and financial ones, remain attached to the buzz and jive of New York City, appreciating that and the bucolic ideal of the Hudson Valley. Would I appreciate Claverack as much if I did not have the contrast of New York City? Perhaps. I do have the contrast so I am deeply appreciative. I also know the limitations of the countryside; while wonderful there is the siren call of the bright lights of the big city. We humans seem to want both and – lucky me – I have both. I can revel in the city yet know I can jump a train north [thanks to my ten pass ticket] and in two hours be home. Because when all is said and done it is Claverack that wins the battle for my heart and will be the place, God willing, where I’ll be at the end of my time.

Though I have been there eight plus years this is still a new feeling for me – it’s one I have never had before. In the rare times people have spoken to me about jobs outside of New York I have always known I did not want to give up that place, that one small place where I have had a sense of home — in most of my life I have let career choose where I live. Now my choices include that place which gives me a sense of home.

It’s not perfect; no place or situation is. It is better than any other place I have been. I feel torn between two worlds – as do many of the folks I know in the Valley. While they would like to be there full time there is not a sufficient platform to support us so we must remain divided between two towns. I must labor in the city to enjoy the pleasure of “home.” The labor in the city is less burdensome because it supports “home.”

I expect I will live for a number of years more in this “tale of two towns” and at the end I expect I will follow my heart home. May everyone be so lucky.

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