At times when others are afraid, or at least participating in the send-up of true horrors that Halloween is for most in my portion of the modern world, I find myself seeking quiet and reflection. I was so glad to find this piece by Debussy, for it fit the rest and reflection I sought, indoors and out ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoPQXWC9o-w
I heard it said this week about what makes truly great athletes: they make their fans feel something, specifically their shared love of the sport with their fans.
I smiled, knowing that my favorite musician walked into my world and then walked off with my heart because I felt his joy and love both for music and the people around him.
I was glad to be reminded that this is a universal phenomenon, as I find joy in my now-small circle deep with responsibility ... as I consider expanding in the future so far as my choice of things to do, this reminder is very welcome.
Everything else, perhaps, is just details, some of them reflecting an imperfect world.
On the surface of every beautiful lake, perhaps a little algae must grow.
The weather has at last taken on an autumnal cast, and there have been what I call electrum days... sun and clouds and growing autumn gold, so, silver and gold alloyed like the metal electrum. Such riches -- one can realize one is blessed beyond measure and choosing between good things...
... while acknowledging that for such electrum mornings to exist, into the nights of every life a little rain must fall...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OETMBfboKzg
Today is two years to the day of the launch of Seizing the Crypto Bull Run for Financial Freedom ... I look back and think of everything that fell apart in the autumn of 2023 to make that book possible, and how, two years later, nothing of the former life remains, or of fresh pain from losing it. Meanwhile, age has overtaken my parents and my grand old soldier, and I have had to work my way back from Covid and anemia while dealing with community responsibilities and personal matters.
There is indeed pain enough, and if I were not called to deal with what I have to deal with, I could not. But because I am, I find joy in doing all I can for those I deeply love, and in pouring into the small circle that I have to pour into and watching that circle be blessed.
Alvord Lake is a small circle ... I passed much time in the autumn of 2023, walking it, preparing to go forward into a new phase of my life alone ... listening to Kurt Möll and Gottlob Frick singing "Grenzen der Menschheit" and knowing they knew, in their respective generations in World War II, what happens when people try to reach toward deifying themselves instead of attention to the little ring assigned to mankind in its run of existence. When Herr Frick sings in 1949 (when Herr Möll was a mere boy of 11), one can hear his heartbreak for Germany when he sings, "Wir versinken" -- which you can pretty read into English as "We sink!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sl2E7Bwf-8A
But I love Alvord Lake, and I love my circle ... there is a sense in which attempting to have a much bigger one nearly sank me from sorrow twice in a decade ... a major community choir collapse and the mess of 2022, within five years of each other. I did my best in all of that ... but one, and everything connected to it, was doomed even before Covid-19, and those who would not move on from the mess in 2022 even into 2025 will likely find that 2026 is going to wreck them, despite all the opportunity offered them across all those years.
I tried so hard, from 2014 to 2024 ... it was in thinking of how I failed not because of lack of love and effort, but because those circles were not those in which I was called to succeed, and because I could overrule no one's choices and the consequences thereof, in the same way my choices would lead to the consequences of yet another beautiful day for me at the lake, alone relative to all that know me ... and accepting that this was always how it was meant to be. There remained a question with that, but for the moment, that was enough.
That all being established, the portal of imagination could open... it is the day before Halloween, and I knew the Ghost of Musical Greatness Past, being a proper literary ghost, had something up his sleeve. However, on a day in which one can actually see at some angles that Alvord Lake is maybe two feet deep (at best), I was absolutely not ready for his choice of costume.
"Wait a minute -- you did not get a rowboat in here!"
Yes, indeed he came as "Der Schiffer" -- the Shipper -- rowing toward a better world on a rowboat, singing ever more joyfully as I had to sit down on the bank for laughing at his antics -- complete with him doing the physical comedy of him being that large in the small size of boat that could get down the middle of that lake, hitting his oar on the bottom of that lake without missing a beat while he sang, and then finally stepping out of the boat at the peak of the song and just carrying the boat out on his back!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrBfynXUqQ8
I laughed until I cried, and he wasn't even done...
"Frau Mathews, I must apologize," he said, "because I told you I was coming as an admiral with a fleet, but I was laughed clear out of costuming and given something more appropriate to my role and actual experience on the water today!"
I literally was seeing stars -- he sent me to the Knockout Zone from sheer laughter -- and might have rolled into the water had he not put that boat down and embraced me!
"Happy day-before-Halloween," he purred when I had at last come back to earth, "and happy second anniversary of your fifth book!"
"I should have figured you were going to go to comedy!" I said. "Just wouldn't be satisfied with what the other literary ghosts are doing this week!" I said.
"Well, you know I never could pull that sort of thing off quite right," he purred, "and besides, I know my audience. I thought of a grand doppelgänger drama to reinforce the more difficult lessons of these two years, but I could not be a hypocrite, for I said to you that you need not deal with any more pain than is absolutely necessary. I could not put you through any scenario drawn from those dark times today, not when you have brought yourself here today in surrendered obedience to all that you have learned. But I could offer you a little bit of a reward for that obedience, and I say a little bit because I am just the echo of a much greater reality of joy laid up for you."
He paused, and then his embrace became even more tender.
"You do well, Frau Mathews, to have embraced this reality: surrendered obedience is hard, and costly, but less so than the alternative. I will faithfully echo what you now know by experience. 'All discipline is painful for the moment, but later, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those trained by it.'"
"That's somewhere off in the book of Hebrews," I said, "you good and faithful echo. I learned it in an English closer to the German of the Luther Bible, where it says that discipline yields 'the peaceable fruit of righteousness.'"
He smiled.
"That is a mouthful in German," he said, "even in the slightly less formal German of today."
"But I'm sure it is a good mouthful," I said, and his smile widened.
"Die friedfertige Frucht der Gerechtigkeit," he beautifully intoned, with all those butter-smooth consonants and that glorious voice taking all the sheer terror out of how different that is in effort from English!
"That's too big a bite for little me without practice," I said, "but I loved it!"
He laughed, and then looked at me, and laughed some more, but it was gentle laughter and expressed nothing but affection.
"Frau Mathews, my little contralto darling," he purred, "of course your mouth cannot hold that. It is mid-autumn. Life will continue to offer circumstances good and bad ... into every lake, some algae must come, but examine your life, years and years into making a decades-long climb. You are receiving your harvest, now, in the experience of your life."
He allowed me some time to think on that, and then added, "Your mouth cannot hold that German mouthful at present, but you could work it out with a little practice. Your life, too, will expand to hold the harvest you are beginning to receive, and already we see a deepening ... it is a good thing you are a contralto, meine liebe Dame!"
We walked on for a little while, charting another ring around this place of meaningful memory, before he continued.
"Which also brings us back to the question of a few weeks, now ... you are feeling tremors in your world. The expansion of opportunity and the training to meet it is finding you at an interesting moment in your life."
"It will forever be stuck in my mind that I began to start a new studio project and expand in Bitcoin just to have my parents suddenly have age overtake them that same sequence of days," I said.
He took a moment to consider his response.
"I invite you to consider a different interpretation of those events," he said, "since your parents were given the mercy of you loving them and being willing to set everything aside, and they are doing much better now. You were also graced, given that you had just been cleared from anemia the week before, with more time to stay close to home and not immediately resume great exertion."
"Yes, that is a truthful way of considering it," I said. "That was a painful form of discipline ... but we are all doing much better now."
"And for what would you exchange the dawning of the realization on your parents, and the daily experience, of how much you love them and appreciate how much they sacrificed for you when you were a child?" he said.
"Nothing," I said.
"And so the Blessed Hand granted you and yours that blessing, it being in His plan for all eternity," he said. "You and they are enjoying two generations of the peaceable fruit of righteousness, with some difficulties with it, but that is life and inevitable."
"The algae goes with the lake," I said.
"And even it serves a purpose," he said.
"This lake today reminds me today of Samuel Feinberg's fourth piano sonata," I said, "in the complexity of its beauty, and how it could be no other way and be beautiful as it is."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fSqdVVKzM3I
He smiled.
"I remember a young lady who would not so much as listen to Brahms," he said. "How you have grown, Frau Mathews, in what will be four years since you trusted your old Commendatore to keep you safe in Brahms in November 2021."
"We are literally here, in every way," I said, "because you bridged that gap for me. Sie haben meine ewige Dankbarkeit!"
You have my eternal gratitude!
He trembled slightly in hearing me adopt his phrase.
"Gern geschehen, Frau Mathews," he purred as he glowed up and blushed. "I dare say that no literally no literary ghost has been re-materialized to be blessed as I have, to be thanked and loved and walked with and taken to lovely places, and to share in such a harvest with so attentive a student to all the wisdom he has the honor to echo. It is, and for as long as it is called to be, it will be my honor, my duty, and indeed my pleasure!"
He was quiet for it was a quiet type of day, awed between summer and winter, gold and silver, shade and light ... but his voice had all of that gold and silver, softly ringing every bell of joy. He had been pacing himself, but seeing me in the middle of the pile of fruit such as we had discussed, and watching it dawn on me that this was the case, had him quite near to being overjoyed.
"Oh, I am already gone, Frau Mathews," he said, his voice still ringing those bells. "But it is a quiet day, and it is a solemn anniversary in some ways for you. I know that, two years ago, you did not intend to return here alone at least not figuratively... you had in your heart that everyone around you should be richer and freer, and you did everything you could. There is joy for you for the ones who did, and grief for you for the many who didn't."
"I have to stop myself from running the numbers mentally," I said. "The 'if only' gets worse and worse, every passing month! I have to literally stop the thoughts, because I would become overwhelmed in advance!"
"But you can work with it, day by day -- that is wisdom, Frau Mathews," he said. "You are called to no more.
"But also, settle this into your heart: no one can avoid harvest time, and for those interested in righteousness and peace it is just another glorious time before the winter's rest. For those interested in foolishness and even deeper forms of evil, harvest time is still coming, and no one may rob another of the fruits that are theirs."
I thought about that for a long moment.
"You know it is popular to tell people that 'winter is coming,'" I said, "but depending on what your harvest is ... ."
"Autumn is worthy of all the fear that bubbles up in the middle of it -- there is a reason for Halloween and the things in other cultures near to it," he said. "If you think you have enough, you may well give thanks -- Thanksgiving exists close to All Saints' Day and the Day of the Dead in a couple of cultures -- to whoever you think graced you in spring and summer, and will get you through to the next spring.
"Yet those who will not plant their fields with good seed and tend their fields from April onward may well enjoy a wonder-shining month of May, delight in June busting out all over, eat cherry pie with you on the Fourth of July, and onward enjoying through September -- right through Oktoberfest, which goes into the first week of October. But not the last week, Frau Mathews. Well may they, then, have those premonitions in mid-autumn about ghosts and skeletons ... they have earned themselves, if you will, all that dopplegänger drama that may well overtake them long before December!"
I felt my eyes growing wide at that thought ... but it made sense ... all the things in the Northern Hemisphere that just got rolled up into Halloween ... people were doing all sorts of things for the gods of the dead, the ancestors, the saints, and the lost spirits in order not to join them in the winter to come. All the different ideas about offerings that have come down into dressing up as things of the dead and of the occult to receive treats or to play a trick ... to be appeased or to apply punishment ... but if you didn't have a harvest, all you had was regret and fear to guide you through an increasingly cold, dark, stormy world, in which nothing, beginning with your own hunger, could be appeased at all ...
"This also is why I would not put on a dopplegänger drama for you, today, my little contralto darling," he said, "for that is not your harvest. You were called to a harvest of peace, and you went in surrendered obedience. You are therefore blessed -- gesegnet, by decree of the Blesser -- not to partake in any of the alternate harvest, not even to have it played as a drama before you. You have no doppelgängers to meet in mid-autumn. Your harvest is of peace."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avBskikkbf0
I needed every beautiful note that Hans Grisch penned as we just walked around ... and around ... and around ... it took just that much for me to take in this massive insight.
"So, what you're telling me is," I said, "there are people that I met in the abundance of a spring and summer, and I did not know they had nothing in their fields that would get them here, and I did not know even how to check for that then."
"Yes," he said. "But, when your circles expand again in another of life's Aprils, you will know more deeply what to look for. Fields being worked with discipline and persistence show signs, Frau Mathews. You never need be surprised again: now you know.
"I also suggest to you something else, Frau Mathews, you who will never consent to sitting in a pile of fruit alone. Our cultures have in common a love of communal eating, so by April, there must already be people in both our cultures who are setting forth preparations for all the feasting to come. Living getting ready for a feast -- anticipating the joy being responsible for your portion of it will bring -- will give your mind something to work upon to keep grief at bay."
"And in the meantime, my students and my elders will feast well," I said.
"Das ist es -- that's it, Frau Mathews."
"Which then brings to mind a return to you feeling tremors in your world, of fresh opportunities that may be sprouting up in the ground around you. But do you think, given the weight of your existing responsibilities, that the One Who calls you, Who said to you 'Come unto Me, and I will give you rest,' will add to you anything that will keep you from the rest He is giving you with those responsibilities?"
"No," I said. "He does not contradict Himself."
"You may rest in that, and choose among your opportunities with that in mind."
"Is it really that simple?" I said.
"And that difficult," he said, "for you are one of those blessed to be tempted by good things that may not, at a given time, be good for you. Your heart is full of the desire to bless, to do good ... but consider that the feast you are laying for your elders and the students to two generations around you is already quite extensive and demanding. Consider the pace you have kept up, Frau Mathews, notwithstanding even the anemia, for everyone already around you, and then as your strength returned, you have poured even more into your parents and those around you. Consider that you still need deep rest, Frau Mathews, and that there is One Who desires you to keep time to come to Him for it."
"I do feel deep conflict within me," I said, "for on one hand, I do have more strength back than I expected, but at the same time I know that any move with people is new responsibility. I am not a casual person when it comes to the lives of others and their needs, so I cannot easily engage and disengage -- so if I engage in a new circle, I have to pour into it, and I know I can't unless it is a circle that also pours into me."
"Well, that clears it up, doesn't it!" he said, with a merry laugh.
"I suppose it does," I said. "That simple, and that difficult ... and still easier than the alternative."
"Das ist es, Frau Mathews. No need for doppelgänger Halloween dramas and doomed winter journeys for you. You get to enjoy the peaceable fruit of righteousness and rest from all but your certain labors ... as I have been saying from the first year, nur ruhe!"
