A good day for all the good folks in D.C. Met area. The District of Columbia and its suburbs in Virginia and Maryland are a living example of a global melting pot of ideologies, races, ethnicities and mental capabilities.

One of the best examples of this are the Washington Nationals baseball team, World Champions of a game basically only played in one hemisphere of the world. They come from a variety of backgrounds. To me the most interesting factoid (I think), that two of the players for the Nationals are named after two of the sons of Hamilcar Barca, the famous Carthagenian General of the 1st Punic War. His sons were named Hannibal and Hasdrubal (Mago, was the name of the 3rd) and they fought the Romans (Latins), for supremacy of the Mediterranean. They were descendants of the Phoenicians, who thousands of years before Rome ruled through trade and war, like US, a vast territory and introduced a method of assigning repeatable sounds to create meaning through various combinations to the objects and things of the world. In the ancient world a “Lingua Phonetica”, was used across many cultures for trade.

They originally had 28 sounds and later the Greeks took those up and dropped two of them, leaving most of Western culture with the Phonetic (Phoenecian) alphabet.

So, here are two modern Hispanic (Latin) baseball players with names from ancient Carthagenian Generals, whose language was Punic. Rome destroyed all of Carthage, plowed it under with salt so nothing could grow there and killed all who spoke the Punic language, so I find it interesting that those names have cropped up in the 21st century through mostly Latin/Native ancestral lines.

Asdrubal Cabrera and Anibal Sanchez, are world champion baseball players and their first names go back over 6,000 years to the once mighty traders of the Mediterranean, Eastern and Norther Atlantic and Indian Oceans who brought language to the Greeks and much of the Mediterranean while the dominant (ish), Europeans were still learning how to sew furs together for warmth, so they could spread out since the ice age was still slowly receding northward.

I love seeing these patterns of how humans spread and evolved and converted those sound making capabilities into forming the various minds that process the information of the senses in quite different ways.

Each one insisting that their way of processing is the best. I think somewhere along the line we sort of dropped the ball.

Speaking of which, there’s the Nationals who dropped fewer balls, but had more “…bals” than the Astros (another name to conjure with:)

Its not as if I didn’t know this was all coming but now that its here I’m not sure what to make of it. No point in not liking it, nor seeing it as a challenge or wishing it were otherwise. There’s just no way to prepare for realizing that one is old and the mind is going quicker than I had hoped. It’s not so much going, as distilling into a more reduced and thickened version of the old self that seemed somewhat under control.

Less helmut, but more Helmut. Ouch! (Wheezed the world.)

That’s my view from my kitchen window. Doesn’t look like much but when I step out and from under the portico, its a nice view. I lived in a couple of small cabins in the middle of mountain ranges, in a few places, and was always content to have just one window. If I wanted to see a view, I stepped out into it. It’s like people always talking about getting out into nature and spend a lot of time and effort to get there, whereas going and exploring self-nature is basically free and always nearby but the price seems hight. It costs us our distractions and they were hard to come by and even though tarnished or worn out we still can’t let them go.

Anyway that is the context for my views; a kitchen sink with cleaning materials, a glass cucumber, a cup made by a young niece some years ago with my name on it and a small plastic hand in it waving hello, a glass elephant blown by a friend a couple of years ago and the fruit waiting its turn. A simple life with new-forgotten old-regrets surfacing to bring tears or-remorse or-smile and joy.

Life is good and I wish I were better. A dear close spiritual friend sent me this quote today as part of a thank you note for a note I sent in the Spring, I really should make a copy of things I write people ’cause I have no way of knowing what I wrote, but she sent this in response and as a part of a thank you. Its beautiful, I wept as I seem to do more readily and always joy, shot through with regret; for all the things I didn’t do right.

Here’s quote from Wendell Berry, 1983©

It may be that when we no longer know what to do

we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go

we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is one that sings.

It’s been an interesting week. Aging, personal history, karmic history, present and future all swirling about in an almost visible way, and there was nothing I could do except try to get still, within it. Some success sufficient to not only ease negative feelings but also tamp down hopeful future-casts. Another week in the life of one who cares deeply and can be thoughtless and careless.

I know that the diminuendo in memory, which has never been top-notch, is getting some compensation in a small, but noticeable, decrease in worry.

I forgot, until yesterday, that nothing exists in a given state by itself for very long. It changes or there are side effects, or compensations within whatever the situation is. So, my mind is more at leisure.

However, I also realize I can’t just sit back. I need to make efforts, neither grand nor petty, yet sufficient to see if they will produce accommodation with the world as it presents itself, or are merely a fear based scramble for a status quo that ain’t quo no mo’.

I think I may be in a reasonable position to settle into a period of life where I actually can allow a vast decrease in expectation and reap a bumper crop of sufficiency.

I once wrote a Blues song titled

“Don’t Share Your Dreams With A Fool”,

After I had that deep title, I couldn’t

Go any deeper, so I cannot find words.

But, I know the music because it

Changes when I do get the Blues and

I can hum it and whistle and feel it.