My photo project--one way I spend my time and energy

This blog has often had passages about engaging death. Frankly it gets a bit overwhelming at times. There is more to daily life than worries about an end I know is coming within a year. So I wrote the following. I hope you find it a respite from some of the more difficult topics in this blog.

Since October 24, 2015, I have been engaged in a photographic “366” project.  I post a photograph on Facebook every day and will do so for a year; it is 366 because I am doing this through a leap year. The series is called Early Morning. I try to take the photos before 9 a.m. I decided to do the project because it sounded like fun and a challenge. I set some rules. Photos can be taken of anything I can see from or in my yard or along one of three routes I take to and from purchasing the paper every morning. Or, if I am not home, then photos can be of anything I see near where I have spent the night. The photos must be taken on my iPhone 6.

Almost all the photos have been taken in Menomonie or surroundings (one of the routes is a circuitous one through the countryside). However, some illustrate spots near our apartment in Minneapolis or in places we have traveled to, like Waukesha, Wisconsin, or Cincinnati, or Austin, Texas.

On a few mornings I take only one photo, but most mornings I take 5-10. Then I give them all to Mary who chooses one which I place on my Facebook site. The response has been satisfying. Usually about 10-20 of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the image, sometimes less and sometimes more. Often friends will comment on the photos, perhaps 6 or so comments. These comments range from “wow” and “nice” to “my favorite so far” or “top 10” to comments about spiritual value and worth. Recently someone called them “optimistic.” I love those deeper interpretive comments, but the truth is that I don’t think ‘spiritual’ or ‘optimistic’ when I take the photo. I take what ‘grabs’ me.

Often when I run into someone at a store or other public venue I will receive a nice compliment about the series. It is clear that a lot of people watch for it. I have been asked several times whether I will publish a book of them—what a great compliment. And, speaking of compliments, an area artist, someone in Stout’s renowned art department has invited me to co-exhibit with her. She will paint versions of some of my photos and we will display them side-by-side. I am just amazed by the request and delighted to take part in the show.  When it is finally up, later this year, I will add a link to it from this blog.

The photos are mostly nature scenes. By far the most popular ones are sunrises. But I try to mix up the images. I have flowers, buildings, fields, country roads, rainy windows, ice on windows. We have a nice native plants garden so I use all of those flowers a lot in the summer.  If I am lucky, I am up for the summer dawns and will get the sunrise, though it is much easier to get a winter sunrise at 7:30 than a summer one at 5:15. Our bedroom faces east and has a large window. Often the sunrise wakes me and I run downstairs to take a photo, then return to bed for another hour or more.

The challenge of the project engages me. I like looking for the images and I like trying to mix the images up, so that I am not just doing flowers or sunrises all the time. Over the months my eye has sharpened considerably. I see the images as I drive—and I am willing to stop and take the shot. I can tell that my recent images are better composed than those I began with in the fall.

Dealing the Void and Finding Joy

I just found this piece that I wrote some time ago.  I find it accurate to what I experience, though I am now working my way into an understanding of spirituality, as I have explained in previous posts.

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The void and joy

June 14, 2015

I know the void. It is behind everything. I became aware of it when I learned I had a serious cancer that will probably kill me. Here is how the void works: It makes everything pointless. Suddenly questions like Why should I do that? or Why do I care? or Why should I make that plan? or buy that? or work on that project? all take on a different meaning. In my pre-cancer life those things were impinged upon by other cares and needs. The question was answered by considering the impact of a ‘void’ question--whatever it is--against that other thing that I had to get done or wanted to get done in my life. Suddenly with this new reality the projects can seem like whistling in the graveyard. What difference does anything make? If I have a project, say my genealogy, am I just killing time until I die? Is that life? Basically, Who cares?  The void exerts enormous pressure. It impinges on everything. It is present in all decisions, all moments. It is a huge blanket, fog, dullness. The response to it is to sleep. On bad days the void makes itself present, very present. Or perhaps it is that on those days, whatever protection I have against it is thinner. weaker, less able to stand up for itself

It seems to me that for many people the answer to the void is God.  God is as large as the void. God offers the hope of life after. God allows you to avoid the void because you have something as big on your side.

But I am not really able to subscribe to that possibility. Where can I turn?  My answer for now is Joy. I enjoy a lot of things. Photography, rock climbing, eating, and on and on with a list of all the things I am involved with in a day.  The void would have me think ‘How foolish. Who cares? This is not significant.’  The presence of cancer has taught me that I can't accept that. I have to find a grasp on joy. I have to see joy as not some momentary incident (my team wins a baseball game, I see a grand child, I stop at a particularly fine building, I solve a genealogy research issue, I climb a difficult route). Joy or it, close relative engagement has to be permanent.

Where does Joy come from? Right now my only answers are my history and my present. For instance I have a history of rock climbing. When I get better at it the presence of my history of not being good at it feeds my joy. The same for the meal I eat that Mary cooked. But what about time wasters, like digital solitaire? If the void could dictate I would play meaningless solitaire until I die.  With joy solitaire is a connection between events.

There is also joy in the present. That joy has to come from acceptance. Since I have begun these thoughts, I have realized I have a different view of people I meet. I often found it easy to dismiss people--for all kinds of reasons. I won’t detail them. But even total strangers.  It is easy to poke fun.  Now I find that poking fun is ridiculous. Each of them dwells with the

Void. They have to find a way to deal with it.  Dealing with it requires attention to both the present and history. We have to find strength to maintain that attention, that engagement.

I wish I could tell you where that strength is.  I can only say that you have to find it. I found mine when the doctor told me I had cancer, bad cancer, and I realized that I was not afraid. That is my basis. From that I can look at meaninglessness and go forward. It is actually a bit odd, because I have been frightened by other things in my life, like the time I thought I would lose my sight or the various times when I worried that I could lose my job.

I am reminded as I write that when I taught literature, in particular lyric poetry, I told students that for any poem they could diss it or explore it. To diss is the voice of the Void.  It is easy to not realize that if you don't have the sense not just that you will die but that you will die in the foreseeable future.  Without that sense of death the Void is just another abstraction. It is only when it becomes the kind of reality that it has for me that I have found that I have to consider it and find a way to keep it from controlling me, or at least derailing me.  I suppose I am controlled by it.  The Hmong talk about the sickness having you rather than you having a sickness and that seems true to me now, though it did not when I first heard the concept.  In that way, yes, cancer has me. But I am not rendered helpless by that fact.  My friend Joe said when he turned one of the milestone birthdays, perhaps 75, ‘What am I supposed to do? Wait around to die?’ And the answer is no. However, the path forward from the point at which that question enters your life is not a flat paved trail or sidewalk.  It is a rocky mountain trail.  It is hard to negotiate, but if I look up it is also the place where I can see, now, beautiful sights, mountain ranges, glacial lakes.  It is the joy that happens when you explore a poem or a painting and suddenly it pays back with insight.

From a letter to a friend on spiritual reading

Thanks for the long email and the discussion of spirituality. More on that in a moment. I have been so long to write because the last chemo went after my stomach and lower GI. First diarrhea, then constipation, all accompanied by stomach discomfort (as in rice and apple sauce sound about the best for this meal) and weak legs. I was reminded of the ditty in Steve Martin’s Parenthood where the kid sings When you’re sliding into home and your pants begin to foam—diarrhea.

Tomorrow it is the oncologist and then chemo again on Wednesday. How often do you meet your doctor(s)? Today I had a blood test to determine my PSA level. Down from last time is good, up is really bad. I find it quite stressful to wait around to hear the number. It often reminds me of the time I opened the letter to tell me whether I had passed my qualifying PhD exam.

To offset the side effects I have begun acupuncture once a week.  I enjoy the sessions but I am still not sure that the procedure is working. One nice thing is that after the needles are inserted, I am left alone in a darkened room with woo-woo (as I call it) music, usually something that sounds like South American flutes. I find it easy to drift off into a quiet revery.

Well, on to spirituality. I have a way to go I can see. I read some of Honest to God by John A.T. Robinson, some of the Varieties of Religious Experience by William James, the Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton and the material you sent me including the last half of Life After Death and the excerpts from the Gita that you sent me. Merton’s story is an interesting one of the long experience of conversion and the difficulty of finding something to commit to, but, lord, it is old school Catholicism. All the world is evil and only the God experience is worthwhile.  I am not there. (Merton though seems very close to your view of the world as hell, the abode of senseless suffering.)

What I see in all the others is the sense of two worlds (or orders of being?) that are actually one, or can finally, with work in most cases, be perceived as one. Well I am not there yet either. I can understand the perception, the sense of meeting something other, of entering a timeless, noetic world, but I guess I have no faith. If faith is the evidence of things unseen, and if on the basis of that evidence, you commit, well, fine. But I have a ways to go, a long ways.

As I read I became more aware that spirituality can be active or passive. Passive is the openness to the experience of awe and wonder (as a good friend put it). So it is the sense that beauty, say the pattern of clouds yesterday, that engages not just an “oh pretty” or even a metaphor of some kind, but just that sense of wonder. Active is to seek the spiritual experience. That seeking appears to run the gamut from saying prayers or having some kind of regular thought/action about the spiritual world, to doing the kind of extreme actions designed by saints and recorded in various Ways of the Spirit rules.  So I got that far. But all the intellectualization of the issue seems to me to be the wrong path. I am still looking for the something inside me that will make itself known and that I can feel comfortable with, or at least willing to explore more. I have to reflect on the Upanishad excerpt you sent me.

Thanks for listening to that. I know you have worked on this part of your life for years. I am so impressed by that.

You mentioned in an earlier letter or email that you have started to write about your life, a memoir or an autobiography. I hope you are continuing with that project. You have so much to tell the world.

Progress report after 3 sessions of chemo

Hi, my PSA has gone down to 30 from 47. Nice. And thank you for all the good thoughts and prayers sent my way. As usual it is a relief to have the number go down, and a disappointment not to have it down to 2 or so. But so it goes.

The doctor is satisfied with my progress. I will have my 4th chemo tomorrow and then two more, one late in August and another near the end of September. It is possible that I will have more treatments but that decision will be made in September. The doctor is also interested (I think that is the best term) in my entering a clinical trial for “ippy” (Ipilimumab). His view is that I should wait until the chemo fails, as it inevitably will. In other words chemo will only reduce my PSA so far and after that it is classified as failed. This sequence happened with my last program of chemo where the PSA reduced to 14 then went no farther. It is a harsh term, but the term is failed. Anyway, after that chemo event, he feels that would be the time to enter the clinical trial. Currently that sequence is not clear and I urge you not to worry about it. I am simply trying to report to you what I heard today.

This last chemo session three weeks ago left me with more stomach lower GI issues for longer. Ugh. Or Puha. I will use some different strategies to combat those side effects after tomorrow. Among other things I will, at the Dr’s suggestion, stop taking aspirin and niacin every day. Hopefully this change will help with the stomach issues. We’ll see. The other side effect is tiredness. I am more tired this time and so, to my annoyance, I am not working out or climbing. The best I do is get in as many two-mile walks as I can.

So enough of the doctor report. We leave for West Glacier, Montana, next week to attend the wedding of my brother-in-law Steve’s son’s Jackson to Claire. I can’t wait. I get to visit with many of the relatives and also spend time in our beloved mountains. We met in Glacier Park in 1964 and have returned to hike many times over the years. The kids and grandkids want to see the room where I first laid eyes on Mary and in that instant became the proverbial ‘goner.’ Hopefully I will feel well enough in the fall to travel. I have no shortage of destinations—New York, DC, Seattle, Germany, and today I added Ecuador after talking with a good friend just returned from there.  We have a new apartment in Minneapolis. We moved from the 5th to the 1st floor and have a place with high ceilings, lots of interesting angles, our own front door and a patio. Lately, as seems befitting for someone in my position, I have started reading about spirituality. If you have a suggestion, I would be delighted to hear it. So far I have read James, Robinson, Merton and Chopra.

Once again, I thank you for your support. I could not do this without you. I love you so. While there are clearly clouds on my horizon I am not worried and not afraid. You be the same.

-August 9, 2016

Hug the ones you love,

Dan