Milt Greek's Blog: The River of Life - Posts Tagged "living-life-fully"

Franz Schubert, Frederic Chopin, Vincent Van Gogh – three sensitive people whose art is profound, beautiful, inspiring; three sensitive people whose lives were marked by suffering and early deaths.

Is the place of sensitive people in the human world to be martyrs, as the story of Jesus in the Western culture seems to say? Is the plight of sensitive people to suffer and die, as Don McLean’s tribute to Vincent Van Gogh suggests:

“And when no hope was left in sight
On that starry, starry night,
You took your life, as lovers often do.
But I could have told you, Vincent,
This world was never meant for one
As beautiful as you.”

There are many kinds of people. The violent men, the money-chasers and the puritans that hold sway over the larger human world can be overwhelming for sensitive people. Sensitive people seek to live in ways of beauty, of peace and of deeply held ideals that yearn for a better human world—a world, we are told, that is not for mortals to attain.

Yet, in my life, my sensitivity has been a blessing, because I have protected it from the harsh world of the violent men, money-chasers and puritans. The natural world and the loving practices of community activists seeking to improve the life of those around me show me what humanity can be.

Given my good fortune as a sensitive person flourishing in a world of suffering, I was able to study the human world around me and found ways to separate off from the suffering. With the guidance of older women and some older men in my life, I have led a happy, healthy and fulfilling life.

There are sensitive people in the world, far more capable than me; their lives are too precious to be lost as the lives of Schubert, Chopin and Van Gogh were lost. I wish to be able to provide some aid to these special people. While my life and my own character are far from perfect, more than two decades into my journey as a self-aware sensitive man I have some suggestions for sensitive people like me.

Source for Sensitive People, an essay written in the late 1990s scheduled for publication in the fall, has the beginning of what I can offer sensitive people. It will contain a glimpse of life that nurtures sensitive people’s needs for peace, beauty and harmony. Central to the content of this book is that as sensitive people we must lead our lives in ways that protect and nurture us, rather than make us victims of a human world controlled by violent men, money-chasers and puritans. In our own life-affirming personal world of beauty and love, we can flourish and celebrate life fully.

During this time, the warming Earth is re-awakening. Early spring flowers—yellow daffodils and forsythia, purple, red and white hyacinths and pale blue periwinkle—are arising from the cool Earth while eggs are being laid and hatched. On occasion, I lift up a stone or a large piece of thick bark and find tiny snakes, still wet with their embryonic fluid, sleeping in the dark, safe cover.

Local eggs, long scarce when the hens stop laying in the cold of winter, return to the market, bought by Easter egg shoppers with little knowledge of the cycles of life around us. Ramps, a green leaf with a tangy garlic flavor, spring up from the Earth as the first harvest from the ground. Adding milk from a local dairy and onions from our garden stored over the winter in our unheated basement, each spring we make an omelet to celebrate the new life emerging from the Earth.

My wife babysits a young child, the twenty-month old son of a friend of my wife’s daughter. My stepdaughter and the mom have known each other since before they can remember; from their view, they have always been part of each other’s life. My wife has likewise always been a presence in the young Mom’s life. When she was pregnant with her and her partner’s baby, the young Mom knew she wanted my wife to care for her young child.

Caring for the baby is a delight to my wife, who relishes time with young children and babies and has babysat for children of friends and neighbors for many years. I have also had the good fortune of sometimes caring for the young lives. The connections deepen our relationship with the families and the parents and my wife are mutually grateful for the opportunity.

Recently, the parents of the baby my wife currently cares for had us over for dinner and we found out that a neighbor of theirs, a blind older woman, sells eggs from hens she raises as a means to get a little more money. We asked our friends to get eggs for us from the woman, allowing us to both support local food and to aid a brave woman in need.

It is said that we reap what we sow; in modern terms, what we give energy to we bring into our lives. By caring for a close friend’s baby, my wife takes part in the sacred re-creation of life. By buying eggs locally, we get inexpensive, high quality eggs while providing a little aid to a woman with a disability. By living in a conscientious way, life can be full and meaningful even in our smallest of acts.

The sacred re-creation of life is part the flow of life through generations. By taking part in it, we receive strength and joy. My wife’s life is much more fulfilling because of her caring for young lives. Our family and community is strengthened by her caring for a child of a lifelong friend of her daughter, making the connections between the families thick and deep with generations of shared love.

Sensitive people’s love of beauty and life pulls us into the human and natural world and into life-affirming works; the compassion we feel for others strengthens our relationships once we learn the wisdom to guide it. Learning from experience, my wife and I have received insight through lessons of failure and foolishness, making our sensitivity a doorway into a fulfilling life. Even as we age, we continue to deepen our relationships with the natural and human worlds around us, moving us closer to the center of the river of life that flows for unimaginable eons of time on this hard and wonderful Earth.

Around Memorial Day, we begin our local food club season with deliciously sweet, melt-in-your-mouth strawberries and tender, buttery asparagus, plus flavorful lettuces, green onions and eggs. Several years ago, I began organizing the food club to support local produce by buying in bulk at a nearby produce auction. The club has grown over time; over the last five years it has provided fresh, healthy food at wholesale prices to sixty families and households each season.

In working with the club, I have met local food activists—quiet, humble and serious-minded people who devote years and sometimes decades to help support the “triple bottom line” of economy, community and ecology. Mixing high ideals with practical knowledge and hard work, local food activists seek to market local foods in competition with unsustainable but enormous global conglomerates aiming to monopolize the food market. The activists I work with are rebuilding the marketplaces that connect local growers to nearby consumers that we lost in the United States following World War II.

The volunteering I do helps their work of bringing low cost, healthy, fresh food to people in town while supporting growers in poorer areas outside of our town. Though I began my work solely to support the produce auction, I have built friendships with growers, activists, volunteers, and members of the club. For me and for others as well, the food club creates a hub for people to meet and build community.

The produce auction itself is a hub for the outlying communities and connects it with the more urban town. It is a place where neighbors and friends meet to enjoy each other’s company and to watch as the auction unfolds. It is also a place where local people from different backgrounds and subcultures meet. As a friend once said, the auction is one of only a few places where you can see an Appalachian person, an Amish person and a hippie in dreadlocks talking together in a friendly, welcoming way.

As I’ve expanded my volunteer work, our kitchen has been filled with inexpensive, high quality, fresh, healthy and delicious food. An open secret for most local food activists and workers is that our kitchens and pantries often brim over with tasty food, flowing from the earth like a river throughout the growing season. Many of us learn to store food in our basements to provide meals during the winter and into early spring. Just last week we had a great entree mainly composed of six-month-old potatoes and tomatoes we canned a year and a half ago.

The work of the food club allows me to flourish as a sensitive person, pursuing good works and the ideals of supporting the triple bottom line of economy, ecology and community. In a practical way, it helps move my family and many neighbors and friends toward improving our sustainability as a human community re-integrating itself into the natural world around us. In pursuing this work, we gain rewards of fresh, delicious food at low costs, a healthy lifestyle and relationships with idealistic and well-meaning people.

By pursuing these ideals in a practical, concrete way our lives are improved. As a sensitive person acting on my ideals, we receive a life filled with beauty, nature, sensuality, friendships and good health. Rather than the stereotype that pursuing our ideals will bring suffering, our lives and our community are better as a result. By caring for others, the ecology and the local economy, our ideals benefit our own lives.

For the past few years, I’ve conducted a life review at the start of summer. It began during a difficult time in my life after I saw an episode of Northern Exposure where the Jewish doctor is reminded by a spirit of the importance of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur practices. In these traditions, people spend ten days considering their lives and actions in the last year, fast for a day as penance, and then begin the new year with resolutions to improve. The practice is timed with the Jewish Lunar calendar and since I decided to begin the practice in early June of that year, I timed it with the summer solstice.

I began the practice during a stressful time in my life and the results were immediate. Many people will say, “Why put yourself through an annual life review and moral accounting?” My response is that I can change very few things in this world, but one of the few things I can try to change is myself. Since what goes around comes around with some regularity, if I seek to improve who I am and how I treat others, my life will improve as well.

When I started the practice, family members close to my wife and I were having health crises and she and I were burdened and feeling stress from the work and worry. Our relationship was strained and I was irritable and hard-headed. As I began the life review, both my wife and I began to relax and by the end of the ten days we were getting along much better. There were some bumps along the way, but at the end of the process, our relationship had improved and we began the summer with a much better attitude toward each other and the challenges we faced. To our good fortune, the health of our loved ones also improved.

Each year, before the summer solstice, I spend ten days considering my failures and successes of the last twelve months and ways that I can improve in the future. The process is enlightening, because I see patterns and relationships that extend from my early childhood through my life now. Each year, it seems that many of my faults re-occur, changing slightly from the previous year.

I am learning to prioritize the biggest challenges and work on those. At the same time, I see my challenges as not just within me, but in the circumstances I enter into. I know that some things trigger my weaknesses and failings, especially when I am tired. If I can avoid those triggers and avoid dealing with challenging circumstances when I am tired or late at night, I can avoid many pitfalls.

I am part of a twelve step group and I believe the moral accountability of the twelve steps are central to a happy life. It is one of the most important ways that I can control my personal fate because I am seeking to control what I give out—what I give to others that I will receive in the future. If no one else ever does a moral accounting, it doesn’t matter to me—it’s important that I do it, because that gives me control of who I am and what I can be.

The more I improve how I treat others the more my life will improve. I know this from past decades, when I carried out the first real moral accounting of myself during my psychosis. It was a life changing process that I remain grateful for today.

After my ten days of life review, usually beginning on June 10th, I fast from sunset to sunset the day before summer solstice, making resolutions to try to improve. I break my fast around nine-thirty at night, just as the sun as sets, with a few simple snacks before I go to bed.

The next day, on the solstice, my wife and I have a meal celebrating the good things we have in our life together. This year we will open a Pilsner brewed a few months before, with seasonal food and gratitude for receiving these gifts of the bountiful Earth.

It is a time of thankfulness in the abundance of early summer, especially this year. After a couple of years of personal struggles and losses in our circle of family and friends, new beginnings with promises of happier times are happening. Like the sleeping Earth reawakening in the spring, our lives once again have the promise of new life, just as so many times in the past our struggles were followed by renewal and joy. All the while I struggle as a terribly imperfect person, seeking most of all to return the profound gifts of life and love I have received throughout my life.

During the summer season, the harvest from local growers is in full flush. Tomatoes, sweet corn, blueberries, peaches, cucumbers, peppers, potatoes, onions and many other staples of summer meals are available, with much more to come. From early July through fall, our food club normally provides enough food to supply a small family with almost all the vegetables and fruit they can eat. Our most recent bounty included blueberries, fresh red potatoes, onions, cucumbers, cabbage and broccoli, provided to members at half the price they would pay at markets.

As I prepare for publishing Source for Sensitive People this fall, I am reflecting on our food club and our involvement in it. Source for Sensitive People is the first book in a set of three short books I call "Circle One: Empowering Oneself." In this trilogy, I focus on living a full, empowered life as a sensitive person.

Empowering oneself is first and foremost about caring for one’s needs as a sensitive person who has strong emotions, passions for peace, beauty and love, and ideals for a better human world. When I wrote this short book in the late 1990s, I outlined what I was learning about caring for and protecting myself as a sensitive person. A good portion of Source for Sensitive People is devoted to that topic and I spent many years during that time strengthening myself by following the notes I had made about emotionally nourishing myself, my family and people in my face-to-face community.

As we grew stronger and happier, my wife and I found ourselves moving out into our community, seeking to improve the personal world around us. It was important to us that we tried to work for the best interests of everyone involved, conflicting with people only when there seemed no other alternative. Empowering oneself is about empowering ourselves, and as time passed, we did a lot of work helping people around us achieve practical things they needed. This ranged from my wife babysitting and caring for other children to me leading work to hold town hall meetings and support local produce through our food club.

The food club is an example of how caring for our community has returned to us in abundance. Beginning when we became involved in the local food movement, we realized that bulk food prices at the local produce auction were very inexpensive for very high quality food. At the time, we could buy eight quarts of strawberries for sixteen dollars and forty medium watermelons for twelve dollars. But how could a single household use so much food?

The answer was to combine the purchases for several households, buy the bargains in bulk and split out the shares. After a couple of years of trying different schemes, we found a way to do this effectively and membership boomed. We grew from a handful of households in 2011 to around sixty or so in a few years. The produce auction flourished and so did our community, with individuals, couples and young families becoming the center of our club.

The food club has many benefits—it provides income to local growers and the local economy; healthy, fresh food to people in my town and cost savings to young families on a budget. It also supports our local produce auction in its mission of supporting local communities and providing healthy, inexpensive food to a region where there are only a few grocery stores providing produce. By providing local produce, it cuts the secondary carbon footprint of everyone in the club who would otherwise buy produce shipped hundreds or thousands of miles to stores in our community.

We’ve made friendships with local growers, been inspired by the hard work and ingenuity of idealistic food activists, and found ourselves the center of the club’s activities. Most tangibly, we’ve received an abundance of fresh, healthy, tasty and inexpensive food in our home for nearly a decade. Without the club, this would be much more difficult and expensive for my wife and I. Through our volunteer work, we flourish.

As our community benefits, our family, friends and neighbors benefit as well. While some would see volunteer work like this as self-sacrificing, I have learned it is like regular physical exercise—essential for my own well-being. By being a sensitive person, my desire to make the world a better place has moved my life and my family’s life into a better place, making our sensitivity and ideals a strength that gives back to us.

By Labor Day weekend, the declining light has begun to bring some cool, dewy mornings mixed with the lingering heat of summer. The woods hum with the sound of insects calling and seeking mates and large butterflies, ranging in color from yellow, orange and brown to black and metallic blue, are common on flowers. Later crops are appearing at the market, including the first sweet apples and grapes. After the hubbub and bustle of the hot summer days, the coming fall brings a quiet, peaceful feeling to the woods and fields. The plant and animal lives born and raised in the spring and summer are maturing while the leaves on Black Walnut and Box Elder trees are turning yellow and falling, returning fertility to the soil below them as part of the composting of the approaching dark, cold seasons of fall and winter.

In the abundance of the luscious late summer crops, we repeat our annual trek to an orchard an hour north of us to harvest Concord grapes to make a mildly sweet, robustly fruity wine. The tradition began almost a decade ago when my wife wanted to make a sweet wine like her Grandmother had made for her and her family years before. For years, we would travel with my dear Mother-in-law to the beautiful orchard where pink, plate-sized Hibiscus flowers greet us at the gate and rows of trees heavy with bright red apples stand alongside rows of vines filled with blackish-blue bunches of sweet grapes under a deep blue sky. Gathering the grapes ourselves amongst the rows on a day filled with natural beauty and anticipation of turning the grapes into wine, the event always marked the fullness of our lives in all ways.

Though my mother-in-law passed a couple of years ago, much to our great loss, we continue the tradition and bask in both the day and the memory of years of celebration. After gathering about eighty pounds of ripe, richly colored grapes, we return home and enjoy our good fortune and our labor in this celebration of life. Through many years of trials and challenges, my wife and I have been fortunate to have our relationship strengthen our lives and make many things possible that were impossible for me before I met my wife. Because our relationship works, my life works; in my personal journey, my wife’s presence has made many things possible that were impossible before.

“I give others the gift of my own life working” – Sanaya Roman

Source for Sensitive People begins with this affirmation as the starting point of empowerment. In thinking about the meaning of this, I reflect on times both my life and the lives of others not working.

For years, I volunteered in the struggle for peace and justice in the larger world. In addition to meeting idealistic, self-sacrificing activists, during my journey I saw that some use the problems of the outside world as a way to distract us from our own failings.

For several years, I was in men’s self-help groups where we discussed our problems as men and how we could improve ourselves. At the start of one meeting, a man talked about how awful a powerful politician was and how the politician’s policies should be strongly oppose. His focus delayed discussing our personal lives.

It soon emerged that the man, who had cheated on his wife in the past, was cheating again. The circle of friends around him and his wife were enraged at him while he seemed unable to face how much his infidelity had hurt the woman he loved.

As our men’s group continued, a second man and I grew concerned that not enough was being done to push the cheating husband towards taking responsibility for his actions and showing true remorse, even as the web of life around him become more embroiled in the scandal. I left the men’s group, feeling that by failing to confront the man we were perpetuating sexism in the same way that an all-white group that fails to confront a racist perpetuates racism. Ultimately, resolving the problem was up to the man and his partner, but I felt a strong need to create a boundary so that I would not be complicit in the situation.

From this experience, I saw three things. One was that the man was misusing the power he had as an ordinary man; if he held the power-over-others controlled by the politician he detested, I wondered how much worse the philanderer would have been. The second was that his focus on the failings of a famous, powerful man was a way for the cheating husband to avoid facing his own failings. The third was that by betraying his wife and causing their circle of friends and acquaintances to become embroiled in the scandal, he was making himself less powerful and losing time and energy he could have used in working for policies he supported. His betrayal lessened his own ability to change the world as he wished for it to become.

In my early life, I was self-centered, arrogant and thoughtless about my effect on people around me. I ignored the trauma that contributed to my personal problems and displaced anger onto others rather than face what the psychologist Carl Jung called “The Shadow”—the painful feelings and hideous aspects of my inner self. My early adulthood was filled with crises and turmoil while I trumpeted with pride my belief that I had a vision to make the world better and to overcome evils of those I opposed. Like the man in my men’s group, my own world came crashing down around me as a result of my own actions and the turning of the karmic wheel; what I sent out came back to me, I reaped what I had sown.

The crises and turmoil of my early adulthood were crucial in my overcoming, at least for then, my egoistical failings and my own desire for power over others. Seeing clearly how I was responsible for my life falling apart, I realized that my first responsibility was for my own life to work and for me to try to be honorable and harmonious with those around me.

Rebuilding my life and my ability to provide for myself economically and emotionally took years, requiring the kindness and help of family, friends and professionals. Once I was able to reach the point of self-sufficiency and some luxury, I began to help others in need, including the community around me. While I remain oftentimes far too insensitive to the needs and feelings of those around me, I’ve reached a point in my life where I can say that, for the most part, I can give the gift of my life working to others. In doing so, those around me and those who care about me benefit, just as I do.

There is probably no greater gift that people can give those who love us than caring for ourselves and having lives that work well. This simple, crucial gift is the threshold to a life of happiness, health and movement toward sustainability. Without it, we and those who love us are helpless to change our web of life for the better, much less the larger human and natural worlds.

Slowly responding to the growing night, the temperatures of late summer are cooling. The days are noticeably shorter and the summer crops are passing into fall. While tomatoes and corn are still present, long-lasting storage crops—potatoes, sweet potatoes, winter squashes, pumpkins, onions and others—are filling the rows at the produce auction and our Farmers Market. In a blessing of nature, the early spring crops of berries and asparagus are fragile and quickly make way for later harvests, but the harvests of late summer and fall keep well in unheated cellars and can provide food for us during the cold, dark months of winter.

Preparing for the changing season is a way of life for people who live close to the Earth. I recall a fall equinox gathering decades ago where we sat in a circle on a grassy field in the declining light and a woman encouraged us to think of the animals of the woods while they faced bitter cold, darkness and hunger in the upcoming months. The ebbing light was a reminder of the dark times to come and the importance of preparing for them.

For our autumn equinox meal, we will have a dinner of local late summer crops—including late season heirloom corn, tomatoes, and apple tart for dessert— and open a robust porter that goes with the cooler weather. We hope to share the meal with friends—a couple who run a microbrewery and have two young children. As part of their business and family life, they seek local sourcing and sustainability and have been part of the food club for years. They have had success and outgrown their house on our street and are moving to a larger home for themselves and their children. On the next day, we plan to can tomatoes bought at the auction for use during the approaching fall and winter. It is a time of reflection on good fortune and preparation for the time to come.

In the larger human world, the strife and strains of conflict and hostility continue as always, with the structures built by money-chasers, violent men and puritans doling out winners and losers for all sides. Emotions run high and blame and accusations of the worst in ones enemies are commonplace. In the millennia of patriarchy, spiritual corruption has been commonplace and hierarchies have protected men from the consequences of their acts. Reading the laws of the past is shocking and sometimes horrifying; acts that we now consider crimes have often been a privilege of those with power-over-others. Sadly, the tragedies of our modern history are not new.

Common people like myself are often encouraged to support “our” side and think the worst of our neighbors who have other views and traditions, even though we all share both virtues and failings, as all people I know do. The question in the darkening days is not only about the larger world but also about preserving ourselves in our personal world. No matter the short-term outcome, the problems and crises of our unbalanced and chaotic human world will continue. Self-preservation is a central part of life; ignoring our need for it brings suffering not only to us, but also to all who love us.

For our lives to work, we need to care for our own emotional and physical needs. This is especially true during stressful times and extremely important for sensitive people. Near the beginning of Source for Sensitive People, it says to “Begin all growth by nourishing yourself.”

Some of the suggestions for caring for ourselves include:

“Start the day with 20-30 minutes doing something you enjoy

“Build exercise into your daily life (example: walk to work)

“Laugh every day (example: watch comedies on TV and the internet)

“Have quiet time to seek inner peace

“Do something special at least once a month

“Celebrate life whenever possible (examples: birthdays, holidays, anniversaries)

“Take time off from focusing on stressful events in your life and the outside world.”

It can be very hard to care for ourselves when we are preoccupied with stressful events and responsibilities around us and in the outside world. Though it is not our tendency, the more stressful the outside world and our lives are, the more important it is that we take time off from those stresses and strains and celebrate the good things in our personal life.

Taking time off from the media, including news fasts, and doing something enjoyable—listening to pleasant music, walking in a natural area, visiting with a good friend, or enjoying a healthy meal—is the best way to make it possible for you to help others by caring for yourself. A key focus for our lives must be the needs of the people we love and ourselves. If we care for those we love and ourselves in our daily life, we can create a stable center from which we can influence the world around us for the better. That center needs nourishing most of all as the days darken.

In these hard times, it is essential that sensitive people empower ourselves. Written in the mid to late 1990s after meeting my wife, Source for Sensitive People details a personal spiritual revolution for me. I envisioned living in a more life-affirming way during my psychosis and my wife was a catalyst for a powerful leap forward, giving me more than I could imagine. The book itself is more or less notes on what I learned from that journey and my wife’s wisdom applied to my life.

I want to help people like my wife and I, who have an emotional depth and ideals of peace, love, harmony, beauty and intimacy that make it difficult for us to navigate the harsh and unfeeling constraints of warfare society. I wrote it knowing that whoever reads it will have their own personal world, their own interpretation and their own dreams that I cannot know.

To empower ourselves, we must change our personal world, build on the positive and reduce the negative. Through changing our personal web-of-life, we can overcome traumas, abuse, bad relationships, addictions, loneliness and other challenges that we commonly face. Source for Sensitive People was written concisely as possible, encouraging the reader to focus on her or his face-to-face web of life, learn from those around him or her and gain emotional strength through a happy, healthy face to face community.

After writing it, I set it aside, not particularly interested in bringing attention to myself through publishing. Instead, I continued to apply the ideas to my own life. Part of these ideas were to practice good works and acts of charity in my personal and the larger world. Eventually some of the mental health work I did on that path brought me to the attention of some people outside my community. While on a sabbatical beginning in 2014 from mental health work, I decided to publish writings to help sensitive people like my wife and our family. Using material that mainly developed decades ago, I am now beginning to publish the Small Gifts for Sensitive People series that this book is a part of.

In the two decades since Source for Sensitive People was written our lives have flourished, despite many crises in the world around us. Every few years I reviewed it to see what I would change, which has been very little. Two decades after I wrote it, I would say that my mistakes were mainly times when I failed to apply it. In the meanwhile, I’ve had many happy times and personal successes in my face-to-face community, ranging from gaining many friends to having a positive effect on my community to attaining a deep spiritual understanding of my personal path. When I’ve carried out the practices, I’ve also experienced many times of deep contentment, happiness and bliss.

I’ve gained a deep gratitude for all the gifts I’ve received, which includes everything that Westerners might call “my” accomplishments. I reflect on tremendous good fortune that I can only ascribe to luck, my dear wife and the crucial kindness of strangers.

I do not know if the path I have taken will help you in your personal web of life and with your journey. Ultimately, if someone chooses to read it, it is up to each person to measure it by his or her own life and apply or reject it however seems appropriate. All I can say is that the principles in it have helped me tremendously. I hope it and the other essays and short books in the Small Gifts for Sensitive People series will do the same for you.

Amazon Kindle version: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07J5MKNXQ/...

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After a long and hot beginning of fall, the temperatures recently dropped. Frost thickly covers the grass each morning and leaves are beginning to change to yellow and red, several weeks behind the natural rhythms of our climate. My wife has observed that in the last few years, the seasons have been getting later, with fall, winter, spring and summer all beginning and ending later than normally. A few days ago, we saw yards with crocuses, the early spring flower, blooming, creating a strange beauty out of sync with the natural cycles of the year.

Still, fall crops are being harvested and we will go to the last produce auction of the season soon, seeking potatoes, winter squashes, beets, turnips, cabbages and daikon radishes if available. We have already canned over two dozen quarts of Roma Tomatoes and in our unheated basement an authentic German crock given to us by a friend has a hot and sour Korean Kim Chi aging in it for the winter. A Rye Stout is fermenting in pales for opening in mid-winter and the grapes we harvested and froze in September are thawing, to be made into wine for next fall.

As the Earth cools and the plants fall into a deep sleep for winter, humanity recognizes the season with traditional holidays. All Hallows Eve, the Day of the Dead, Samhain, and Halloween, among others, mark the beginning of the season of cold darkness and scarcity, a season where animals like us often face death more directly than the robust seasons of spring and summer. In my own family, mid-winter marks the anniversaries of five deaths in my immediate family in the past two dozen years, a reminder that for mortal bodies, the cold darkness takes a toll that is very real and, in many ways, an inevitable part of the joys of a full family life. Each in their own way, the seasonal holidays of mid-fall commemorate the season of death and recognizes our gateway into the unknown darkness. As the Earth sleeps and enrichens itself with the compost of fallen plants and leaves, we animals contend with hardships we do not wish to face.

In the past few years, a wave of deaths, injuries and sickness swept over our web of life with a power and affect like never before. In our personal knowledge of family and friends, extended families lost over two dozen loved ones, including my own dear mother-in-law and her brother within days of each other, with another immediate family member suffering a severe injury and a lasting health crisis. Parents, grandparents, older siblings, friends and tragically a young child all were taken from our web of life and many other illnesses and health crises occurred. I had seen waves of death and misfortune before, but the enormity of the losses were shocking, shaking our personal web of life and changing families and friends deeply.

Then, gradually, the wave subsided in our personal web of life. People who had fallen ill or suffered injury began recoveries. Mourning did not cease, but was lessened by happier times. The wave of deaths and injuries was replaced by a slowly growing wave of healing, pregnancies and births. Babies and young children began to take the place of those we had lost and we found ourselves once again renewing our lives and love of others while still feeling the loss of those who has passed.

As the Earth falls asleep and the scarcity of the coming season renews the season of death for animals, the Earth composts the season’s growth, fertilizing the ground in preparation for the renewal of next spring. In the larger human world, many are distracted by the political challenges, with sensitive people and other traditionally powerless people feeling threatened. What the media dominated by white males calls identity politics is really the politics of traditional power-over, with inequalities of traditional society challenged by the growing strength of women, people of color and other traditionally oppressed people.

The history of the United States is largely the telling of the struggle between the forces of traditional power-over against the growing democratization of society, with our own Apartheid system ending with a finally democratic government in the mid-1960s through the passage of the Voters Rights Act. Recognizing that their numbers are dwindling, the people who adhere to traditional power-over relationships are more desperate to retain their privilege, making their flaws more apparent for a younger generation of more liberated people. Just as the winter composts to make the ground more fertile, I sincerely believe that the challenges of these times will be followed by a greater awakening.

Meanwhile the seasonal cycle continues, the Earth slumbers and nourishes itself, walking into the dark underworld and reincarnating in the new life of next spring. We continue to prepare for winter with harvests of long-lasting storage crops and canning, freezing and fermenting food for the coming season of scarcity. We await, with great anticipation, the births of more new lives into the circle of our friends and family and prepare for the joyful, exhausting work of the season of renewal and new life. For those who prepare for the cold darkness, it can be a time of nestling in, introspection and the warmth of a happy home. In these hard times, I wish the same for all the Earth.

I studied different sorts of people for over a decade, coming to believe that describing the myriad of human beings was difficult. We automatically tend to think that basically most people are like us. I realized, however, that the differences between sensitive people, thinkers, partiers, puritans, mechanic-craftsmen, violent men, money-chasers and activists is at a deeply elemental level—it is as if we are virtually different species with different subcultures, goals in life, experiences, romantic partners and different worlds that we wish to live in. Political views are largely the product of a person’s aspects, ethnicity and gender. We think differently, we feel differently, and if disharmonious aspects like puritan-partier or violent man-sensitive person exist within the same person, our lives are often stories of conflicting inner selves fighting for control.

Violent men, money-chasers and puritans often have characteristics that conflict with sensitive people, thinkers and activists, among others. The trio of traditional aspects have virtues and the less traditional others have flaws and vis versa. All have their own ways of living, their own life paths and their own stories of suffering and transcendence. Why should I take sides by speaking from the point of view of a sensitive person when I share some qualities with the traditional aspects?

Ultimately, I decided to write to support sensitive people because I realized that sensitive people are an important and often-maligned group who do not fit well into the human world created by violence, money-chasing and sensual control. After years of attempting to write about the human panorama of experience, I felt seeking to support sensitive people was a vital way to make the human world better.

This commitment was supported recently during a trip to visit friends in the Bay Area of California. Our friends include an artistic dancer who a couple of decades ago had invented with a computer programmer a synthesizer that could be played by a person dancing. They attached devices to wrists and other parts of the body and the dancer’s movements would send messages to the synthesizer to make music.

With another friend and her two year old daughter watching, we enjoyed a brief show where the dancer produced music through his dance. The two year old was delighted and began to dance with him, much to everyone’s enjoyment. It was a nice moment, made more meaningful because as sensitive people we all share a love of art, music and children.

When I asked the dancer about his invention, he explained that he has envisioned the machine to be a toy for children and young people, encouraging them to dance and make music. It obviously was fun for the two year old and something that sensitive people could enjoy throughout life.

The rights to the device were sold an electronics company to refine and market it. However, the money-chasers at the company made plans to radically change the invention. They changed the device to aim it at violent-minded young boys—instead of music, the boys’ movements would make the sounds of violence and war, akin to comic book heroes and villains. Deciding that this would not make enough profit, the company then shelved the invention.

A little later in the day, I came into the TV room where the two year old girl had been left watching the beginning of a movie adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit story. The Mom assumed the movie would follow the delight and innocence of the original Peter Rabbit tales. Again, however, the creation of a sensitive person for children was perverted. Within the first few minutes of the movie, the plot twisted into the killing of Peter’s father by a farmer, followed by the death of the farmer.

To help the innocent child, who seemed frightened and transfixed by the story, I explained that this was a made up story that was scary to get people’s attention. As I said this a couple of times, the child relaxed and then seemed bored by the movie and began to pay attention to other things. I explained the situation to the Mom and the older women with us and they changed the TV, perplexed by how a movie about a rabbit had turned so violent, especially when aimed for young people who, like the girl, had not been introduced to the terrifying concepts of death and murder.

Both the dancer and Beatrix Potter created their art to support and enrich the lives of sensitive people and to encourage children to develop their own sensitivity, their love of beauty, art and innocence. Taken by mainly male money-chasers, their creativity was turned into products that sought to make money through imaginary violence and death, serving children who are prone to violence and supporting the violent man culture that has held sway in the so-called civilized world since the beginning of large-scale warfare a few millennia ago. In doing so, the money-chasers twisted sensitive people’s art and accomplishments into something that perpetuates the violent man money-chaser culture, including its suppression of sensitivity and sensitive people.

After wrestling for years with the complexity of trying to write something from all the perspectives of people, I choose to write for sensitive people because we often fall into the trap of believing we shouldn’t be sensitive. Rather, we throw ourselves onto the rocks of the violent man-money-chaser-puritan ways of life, much to our own detriment. By recognizing our virtues and protecting our sensitivity, we empower ourselves. We can enrich the troubled and crisis-filled violent man-money-chaser-puritan world by encouraging others to be sensitive, have compassion and live in ways of peace and beauty. In this way, living a full, rewarding like is a way sensitive people can help the human world be a happier, better place.