Friday morning and I am not the only one who will not be reporting to the office.  My usual Starbucks venue for coffee and writing was crowded.  I left for another Starbucks, my plan B.

So here I am, aware that my life is to change with retirement, the familiar routines of customer relations, the practical problem solving of a small company, will be replaced by a whole new set of challenges.  There is no respite from life, and from the friction that is entailed by the question that comes with every sunrise: “Who are you?”

I did not want to begin the post by anything Trump related.  The news reports are all depressing to me.  It is as if every act of opposition to his petulance is transposed into a consolidation of the tribe of supporters that surround and protect him.  It is not as if we agree upon the basics with our fellow American rightist-supporters.  We do not.  There are no rules which would allow us to reach an end of this disjunction of perspective.  Two worlds collide.

Christmas music is in the air.  Music is ethereal, hardly material,  — if you can grant that the pressure wave differential in the air is more “spirit” than matter.  My mind has been drawn to the lyric lines of Do You hear What I Hear by Carrie Underwood.  The lines are a imaginary recasting of the elements of the Christmas story in Luke’s Gospel text.

Said the night wind to the little lamb
Do you see what I see
Way up in the sky little lamb
Do you see what I see
A star, a star
Dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite..

Well Ok.  That is no more and no less a compelling image projected upon the screen of the imagination than is the story as told by Luke.  These stories are necessary, we’ve always had them, they rise up from the hidden, concealed unconscious, or from somewhere even deeper that defies interpretation.

Emanating from the speakers earlier in this Starbucks space, heard along with the hubbub of voices and the capuccino machine roar, a Christmas instrumental arrangement of the hymn, Abide With Me composed by Henry F. Lyte, 1793-1847.  I know that I have sung and felt comforted by this tune and lyric countless times in Sunday worship services.

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
the darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.

This is the first of four verses, a comforting blanket of assurance, that all will be well, that the Big Other has our backs.

Seems to me this begs the issue: What is real, where lies the bedrock of the Real?  I do not know.  I think that it is possible for us to construct a substantive reality, something with brute material-facticity from a very wide range of possibilities within our subterranean world, a world that comes to us veiled in dreams, and alluded to in song lyrics……

As to the rising intensity of conflict that we are seeing in the political dimension of our society I have this to offer.  Are we not seeing the materialization of the wild, chaotic, norm-shattering expression of our collective id?  There is a part of us, which we learn to disguise upon learning language, and the social forms of civil behavior — the undisguised frustration of a hungry infant that quickly becomes irrational, rage piling upon rage, — howling that one wants what one wants……