A Young Man's Gift

What must it be like, to get a gift, for the first time in four years?

Four years in prison, after a childhood of hell, of being beaten and abused, and drunk and high, and then doing what someone did to you, to others, and then told by the cops that what you’d been taught was wrong, and you were going to prison.

And, then, for four years, no one in your family comes to see you, or write to you.  You are in classes to learn about what you did, and who you are, and how you might want to deal with all of that, and actually be healthy and strong, and become a real man.

Manhood, what a confusing thought.  

And, deep inside, you are a kind and sensitive soul, and spend your time being an artist, and creating some beauty in your world.  All that is new, to be good to yourself, and to be an artist, to create.  

How strange is that, after so many people have told you that you are a beast, and a pervert, and need to be locked up, and punished, for all the bad things you have done.

Yet, someone new in your life gives you a gift of a book, a book that honors art and creativity.  And the giver of the book writes you a letter inviting you to explore your creativity, your gifts of beauty, and reminds you that you are a good person, an artist, and a creator of wonderful and beautiful things in this world.  

No wonder you are confused.  No wonder you find it hard to make sense of this world, and who you are, and what is expected of you.  

Pep Talk

Pep Talk for My Buddy in Prison

Time for a pep talk.  

If you think I am “disappointed” in you, well, I’m not.  I admire your courage and determination to take on challenging tasks and to push yourself.  I admire how you grow and take care of yourself.  

You inspire me.  You inspire others.  You take on stuff I probably don’t think I have the guts to do myself.

I don’t think you need to hold yourself to the standard of S.  He is S, but you are you.  You are unique, and you are special.  There are a lot of things you do easily, and he finds those things hard.  We each have a special path to walk in life, and others may not know how hard it is for us to walk our own path.  

Looking back, the “failures” I’ve had in life have strengthened me, and challenged me.  Sometimes, I’ve had to change direction, but that’s been OK.  Good things have resulted.  I get stronger, healthier, and thus, happier.

Time is a valuable tool.  Time gives us perspective, energy, and a different viewpoint.  Time also gives us more wisdom.  Time is a big tool in your toolbox.  

My job is to support you, to be part of your team.  I’m at your back, and if you stumble, my job is to help pick you up and keep you on your trail.  

I don’t know of anyone who asks more of you than what you can do.  You have a huge amount of ability and talent and determination.  You aren’t perfect.  None of us are.  We humans learn best from our “mistakes” and our stumbles.  Not “succeeding” is an educational tool.

You want to go to college. You want to better yourself.  You want to be educated.  OK, so isn’t that a healthy and positive direction to be going?  And, aren’t you working on that?

I’ve given you books, music, letters, a guitar, and time.  All of that is designed to challenge you and inspire you, and to give you tools to achieve your goals.  There is a method in my madness of what I bring to you.  

You have a lot of anger.  It is righteous anger.  I challenge you to understand that anger, its sources, and its power.  I challenge you to redirect that anger into life energy which you can apply to work you need to do.  I challenge you to direct that anger into healing, and into the determination you have to make a good life for yourself.

You know what you need to do to deal with your mother and your brother.  You get to decide what that relationship looks like and how the relationship functions now.  And, in doing that, its OK to do what is good for you.  You are in charge of your life and you are in charge of your relationships.  

I also challenge you to forgive yourself.  Forgiveness isn’t forgetting; it is taking that energy and redirecting it into growth and self development. Forgiveness takes away the power that the garbage in your life has over you.  Forgiveness gives you freedom.  Forgiveness gets rid of shame and guilt.  Shame and guilt are poisons.   It is OK to put away the club you’ve been using to beat yourself up.  It is time to take out the trash.  

I don’t judge you on who you are or how you are living your life.  My job, instead, is to support you and to believe in you, and to give you positive energy.  My job is to reinforce the goodness that you have inside of you.  And, I do all of this out of respect for who you are and the manliness you have inside of you.  

Don’t underestimate yourself.  Don’t put yourself down.  If you see things in your life that you need to put in order, and to clean up, then do that.  You do that in the jobs you have.

I can help you study for college, and to get ready for tests, and to work on academic work that is challenging.  Put me to work.  It’s OK to ask other people for help, too.  Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.  Asking for help is not saying you are stupid – it is saying I want to learn, I want to grow.  It is being in charge of the direction your life is going.  It is leadership and self respect.  It is being a healthy man.  

It is OK to stop beating yourself up.  And, it is OK to reach out your hand and ask for a little help on the way, as we all hike along this trail of life.  

I’ll help you get ready for college.  This is training.  This is getting in shape and warmed up for the big basketball game.  If you don’t warm up, you will sprain an ankle, pull a tendon, tear a muscle.  If you don’t warm up and train right, you won’t play well.  

I’m part of your Team.  Put me to work.  Make me earn the privilege of sitting with you every week and being part of your amazing life.  

Sincerely,

Neal C. Lemery

Planting The Future

“One generation plants the trees, the next gets the shade.”

Chinese proverb 

Sequoia sempervirens, the coastal Redwood tree, can live up to 1800 years and grow as tall as 380 feet (200 feet in Oregon).  Their natural range goes north as far as the southern Oregon coast. They like the warm coastal fog of California and lots of rain.  And, one of the most spiritual experiences in the world is to hike through the groves of giant redwoods in the Redwoods National Park on a warm, foggy day, in the midst of ancient trees.  

I’ve got a few of them growing here, but I wanted some more.  Part of my soul lives in the giant coastal redwoods of California and I’ve nearly always had a redwood tree growing on my land.  I like the promise of starting a forest of giant trees that will live for hundreds, maybe several thousand years.

Today, I planted three more.  They won’t get to “giant size” by the time I leave this Earth, but I’ll know they are growing, taking root here, and heading skyward with their lacy leaves and thick red bark.    

I’ve always planted trees.  When I was a little kid, my folks had a cabin on 30 acres in what we then called the Tillamook Burn.  Several forest fires had raged through the area in the 1930s to the 1950s, turning the forest into a collection of burned snags and ferns.  So, in the late 1950s, my dad and I would go out with bundles of little Douglas fir seedlings, and our Pulaski (a combination axe and tree planting blade) and plant them on the hills and ridge above the cabin.  The deer ate a lot of them, but enough survived, so that when I drive by the place, I can see a nice forest there.  I like the idea that I had something to do with that.

When I was seven, my dad and I planted a few redwoods on the place we moved to.  Those trees are still there today, about sixty to eighty feet high, doing well, and getting pretty big.  And, the little guys I planted today, well, they are on their way, and will soon be spurting new growth towards the sky.  The fog will collect on their leaves, and big beads of wet will drop down to the earth at their roots.  And, someday, they might be the giant redwoods of the neighborhood.  They will be happy, making their home here, century after century, providing some shade, and peace and serenity to the generations that will come after me.

A few years ago, a friend gave me some little Monterey Cypress trees.  I wasn’t sure they would make it here, too cold and wet, I thought.  But, I babied them along, repotting them, keeping them watered in the summer, and they’ve done well.  They have nice healthy buds for this year’s growth, and big, thick root systems.  Today, I planted them, too.  They’ll be a good addition to the groves of trees I’ve been tending.

The other cypress trees I’ve planted here, Leyland, are doing well, too.  I read up on them today, learning that they are a cross between Nootka (or Alaskan) Cypress and Monterey Cypress.  In their native habitats, they didn’t get to crossbreed, but an English botanist experimented with them in the late 1800s, and they do well in moderate coastal climates.  We’re a bit of Alaska and a bit of California here, which explains why the cypress like it here.  

The rains are moving back in now. The little bit of sunshine I had between storms, which was just enough to grab my shovel and do my planting, is gone now. But, my trees are there, in the rich dark soil, the southwesterly breeze of the coming storm dancing in their needles.  They are ready to put down roots and make this place their home.

3/10/2012

Being Painterly In The Desert

Being Painterly in the Desert

Out here, the wind and the sun

has become the all around me

its rhythms, in sync with eons

before me, the maker of mountains,

sand, and dried river gulches,

granite smoothed by water and sun-- 

the palms and creosote brush

just an afterthought.

Others, with brush and paint, 

painted what they saw, felt

and the light, the glorious light

in all this emptiness--

much more, now, that I see

at last.

2/29/2011

Turning Fifty Nine

The wheel of the calendar

keeps turning

each experience, each day

new opportunities

growth, change, or

spinning idly, or hiding away--

choices, always choices

and, I realize now,

always mine to make.

Where I go, what I do,

who I want to be

mine to make, 

to grow, or to die, 

all mine to make.

Looking back, lessons learned

many, to repeat 

to learn again

until I get it, finally,

and move on.

Today, the wheel turns again,

again at the top, ready for yet another

year, another

gift

of what I can do, 

who I can be,

and where I want to go.

Each day, a gift

to be opened, to be used,

the how is always mine to choose.

The where and when and why 

is left to the Universe

in all its wisdom.

This day is yet another number, 

another turn of my own calendar

another cog in the wheel of this life

moving ahead, as sure as the sun 

rising on this day

this day that is mine to live.

--Neal Lemery, 2/28/2012

Check out the north Oregon Coast's new literary journal, The North Coast Squid, published by the Hoffman Center in Manzanita.  A fine collection of juried stories, poems, and photographs from Oregon Coast writers and photographers, including my wife, Karen Keltz, and me.


http://hoffmanblog.org/

The Late Winter Gardening Day Check List

• Towels dried in the sun.  At the end of the day, I will wash off the actual sweat of outside physical labor, and smell the sunshine on the sun and wind roughened terrycloth.  I will rejoice in that simple pleasure, which will be followed by a glass of wine.  
• Located garden coveralls, which were stashed last October in the back of my closet, and forgotten on the rainy and cold days of winter.  
• Located my favorite garden pruners, oiled them, and put them in the pocket of my garden overalls, and ventured out into blinding sunlight.  My sweatshirt was too hot for me, and I left the front door open, frightening the cat that likes to stay inside.  “Dad, what is that bright light?” she meowed.  I am not sure.  It is a strange and unfamiliar phenomenon.
• a month’s worth of trash burned, including an amazing collection of cardboard boxes.  Do these just reproduce in the dark garage like rabbits?
• Kitchen compost to the compost bin, which I turn over.  Anticipation of putting compost out in a month on the grapes and apples.  The funky compost odor smelled good, almost springlike.  
• Lawn mowed, ending the “winter rough” look.  Getting intoxicated on the smell of fresh mowed grass.  The lawn mowing activity brought back the simple pleasure of cutting grass and not having to really think about much, except just following the pattern of mowing.  A word of gratitude to the gods that the lawn mower actually started.  
• Flag put out, with no foreseeable hurricane force winds to propel it a quarter mile down wind, or twist the flag and the metal pole into a broken pretzel.   Watched the flag flap in the breeze, against bright blue sky.  
• Apple tree planted, replacing tree twisted in half by November gale.
• Plum tree planted, adding on to our little orchard.  Now there are two plum trees.  Noted that I am not a precise planter of orchards, and future pickers of fruit here will note my less than exact grid of trees.  May the apple gods remind them that this Johnny Appleseed was a lawyer, not a surveyor.  Or, maybe they will just blame the less than perfect grid of trees on the storms, or think that I got into the Scotch before I started to plant the orchard.  I’m OK with that idea.
• Tied up two apple trees listing leeward from the prevailing winter gales.  New stakes and lots of baling twine.  Now, the orchard actually looks like an orchard, rather than an example of wind damage, and Exhibit A of an application for a FEMA claim.
• Pruned apple orchard of “new” trees.  It is, amazingly, the eighth year for this orchard and it is starting to really look like an orchard.  I am especially nice to the tree that produced its first crop of amazing pie apples last fall.  I asked the gods of the orchard for an encore of that gift.
• Planted magnolia in front yard, anticipating its eventual growth to twenty five feet, and filling the yard with the scent of magnolia blossoms every spring.  Had to expand the hole, as I discovered what is likely a very significant buried rock.  I consciously tried not to think about the three other magnolias that have died in the front yard by my hand and the whimsy of the gods.  
• Eucalyptus trees re-staked and pushed upright, with more bailing twine.  They apparently do not like 60 mph gale force winds.  Wimps!
• Bark dust reapplied around some of the shrubs in the front yard, making the yard actually somewhat presentable.
• Bird nesting boxes cleaned out, letting them dry out in the sun and readying them for the spring nesting season.  Last week, a house finch mama was seen checking them out.  I must be a good host for the parents arriving soon.
• Mentally noted an expanding list of future garden chores awaiting me the next time I venture out.  
• Realized that Tylenol is an essential element of one’s love of gardening and the enjoyment of a sunny day in February.

                         2/4/2012