Humpty Hypocrisy

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

Perched atop a wall, we look down on others. They’re broken. Not like us. They lie in fragments beneath the very wall whence cast we judgment.

Judge Humpty, in time, will fall and fragment.

Even all the wealth of a king cannot provide what it takes to restore another to wholeness. Especially if we are unwilling to look about us for the fragments of ourselves.

We loathe to look thus about us, for our own fragments lie scattered atop the dust of others further ground by our fall.

Yet, knowing whence we’ve presently come, the best of us look up and move beneath the next lofty judges, to lovingly break their falls…

How can that be a path to wholeness exceeding royal riches?
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Neil D. 2020-01-25

Ok Drowning Eye-To-Eye

I wrote to my sons, “Sometimes Dad likes a little encouragement too,” as a preface to a longer message I shared from a friend, of which this is an excerpt:

“I’m certain you’ve had conversations like this with them throughout their lives. I can picture you getting on the floor, eye level with them as toddlers, explaining things to them, asking them questions like, “What do you think about that, Gabe?” and listening to their thoughts and answers and theories and stories and imaginations and questions.”

Our youngest responded:

“I did bring you three cookies the other day🤷‍♂️. Sorry we don’t give you much encouragement Dad. I am very thankful for you.”

I replied:

I think it was 2007 or ’08 that the livingroom carpet which creeped into the diningroom was torn up and replaced with hardwood. Probably long before that, I remember passing out exhausted, lying on that carpet, and awakening to a quiet toddler, rearranging Legos near my face. Or two superhero figures soaring over the back of my head as I lay with a corner of my lips curled toward my twinkling eye.

Maybe I talked myself to sleep, or maybe I watched one of them act out their answers to my soaring questions, as I sprawled out with the carpet, at their eye level. And years before that, a son or I opened eyes, level with the other, as he lay on my chest rising and falling with each life-giving breath—in a bed, on a sofa, or on that same carpet.

How can this friend, whom I did not meet until a decade later, picture these things, merely by seeing me talk to today’s young men—toddlers then?

Two decades earlier, I sat on the top step in an apartment swimming pool while a foot away Joseph frolicked in the water like only toddlers can, breathlessly, with excited abandon, to peril oblivious. Feeling safe, unconsciously, under the gaze of his Dad, who remembers what happened next in slow motion.

Dad, standing in waist-high water a distance from the bottom step, mesmerized by his son’s joyous curiosity, watched every small motion as Joseph descended the steps with his eyes wide open throughout it all, soon standing on the bottom of the pool, the water’s surface ascended a foot above his head. He never closed his eyes, even after Dad scooped him out, sat on the top step, propped his toddler onto a knee, and they gazed squarely eye to eye, question in both.

Then Joseph grinned.

Dad giggled.

Everything ok.

Yesteryear and today. Whence my friend’s pictured scene. That’s how we make things, my sons and I. Even near drowning.

Everything, ok.

“Sorry we don’t give you much encouragement Dad.”

Yeah.

Everything.

Not much.

Everything. Ok.


Neil D. 2021-01-14

Samson 45

Each time I stepped outside the lobby to smoke, he sauntered across the street from the park’s stone washroom building. I gladly gave him what I had. His face is beautiful, shaped such that a smile is its most natural posture. Eyes partly closed, but twinkling. His weathered complexion made it hard to guess his age. So I asked. 45. He doesn’t hear well, so would gently raise his hand to his ear if I didn’t shout loudly enough.

The shelter a few blocks over won’t admit him. “I’m not funded…”

“What brought you to Saskatoon?” His ex started sleeping around on their reservation. He traveled away: “I’m healing…,” he struck his breast tenderly. He’ll have to go back as the season turns. Too cold here, and he’s not funded.

I wondered if the fixed smile–as I perceived it–wasn’t also a wince from hurt carried constantly conscious. Inescapable. I don’t remember what I said that made him laugh and cough, but then I knew. It’s a smile. Surely it’s both. Pain and joy. Fear and freedom. Desperate, but content to be sharing a cigarette with a stranger. The stranger content to be too.

He raised his cap and massaged his brow, and I tucked my near-empty pack into his leather-skin coat pocket as I readied to depart, shouting, “For later…”

Negligent of my own soul this morning, I didn’t ask to be blessed. But I was.

One cheek rose higher toward a sparkling eye. “Oh…you’re an angel…” He high-fived me.

You are too, Samson 45.

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Neil D. 2019-07-24

[Related: Green Shirt]

What kind of strength is weakness?

What kind of “strength” is the weakness that comes from suffering? The REAL kind of strength. It’s not a muscular or defensive (or even O-ffensive) kind of strength. It’s not from being a winner, of any game. It’s in a realm (“real”m) infinitely and eternally larger than infantile game-playing and falsely strong, winner, childish egos.

It’s the kind of fortitude and okayness that comes only from soaking up the outpouring from a ripped open heart.

From noticing with wisdom: You are still here. Your soul is a pool of strength that needs no sense of security or meaning from the small, imaginary world where the small, former you lived. But nothing about that smaller life was, or is, wasted. It is the birthing springboard of You being reborn into the fullness of who You was meant to be. Of You becoming more conscious of how enormous You is, and has been, all along. To have stood through all that, and still be standing.

You aren’t going anywhere, You. The weight of your suffering has planted You so firmly in existence and the real world that any forces which the old, small you feared will progressively evaporate as You grow in awareness that You ARE the unique You that creation has always needed for it to be whole and complete.

You do not belong to anyone. And you are realizing You do not even belong to your own self, even though you thought belonging to your self, and owning your shit, was a sign of strength. You belong to all of creation, just as it all belongs to You. You, still standing, belong here.

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Neil D. 2020-01-06

New Year’s Ode To Mothers

Throughout 2020 I photographed from my back porch roses which bloomed from the same vine.
New Year’s morning 2021, I scrolled through these photos and the song “Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming” came to mind.

I searched for lyrics and discovered the origins of the song from ca. 1600 on Wikipedia.

Isn’t it true that in virtually every icon we have of Mary she stands serene with her arms at her sides, but palms subtly raised toward us, in case we are moved to fall into her loving arms? Contrary to gathering our attention, she stands placidly, without chasing or beckoning us, just waiting to be noticed, like a rose with beauty in and of itself, which we can behold when we are moved to notice.

My own mother, born in 1931, has lived to see 2021, and is 375 miles apart from me. Even at my age of 52, I cannot wait to fall into the comfort of her bosom which makes everything OK. Sometimes, when I’ve longed for that warmth but we have been apart, a thought of falling into the open arms of The Rose comforts me. My mom would never be jealous of that because she has always been ready in solemn patience for any child to fall into her arms, no matter how old or large—for my mom too is stand-alone beauty itself.

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Neil D. 01-01-2021 (amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, grateful graduate of Notre Dame, “Our Mother,” regardless of today’s later gridiron outcome vs. #1 Alabama)