Have Yourself a Stoic Little Christmas

Because Christmas lasts till January 6, you know...  But it's never too late to become a Stoic.

I'm feeling philosophical.  A good guiding philosophy can carry you through life with a sense of purpose and meaning.  It will help you to calmly face joys and calamities alike, and it will prepare you for the ultimate question: Death.  Surely, the hopelessness and anomy that we see in the world today--along with all the toxic worldviews, like racism, nationalism, and white supremacy--are due to the fact that people are living without an overarching vision of what life is, and how to live it.  When people live rudderless lives, they drift into erratic and desperate ways of thinking and acting.  And yet, there are lots of good life-philosophies to choose from.  The trick is to pick one that makes sense to you, and stick to it.  I'm most profoundly influenced by the Stoic philosophers of ancient times: Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius.  Even before I knew about their existence, I was living out a rudimentary form of juvenile Stoicism.  Now, as an adult, when I act in ways that are not in keeping with my Stoic philosophy, I run aground and end up wasting time and energy on fixing things, or covering up my messes.  But when I behave in keeping with the values and the vision that make sense to me, I'm consistently healthier in body and mind.

The word "stoic" is misused, and for that reason, it's become almost meaningless.  (I hate it when good and meaningful words fall into misuse...because a misused word is a lost word.  Take for example the verb "to connive," which is almost never used correctly.  Conniving means to allow something bad to occur, even though you have a moral duty to try to prevent it.  It means "to turn a blind eye."  And in this 21st century America, I think we need the verb "connive" because there's so much of it going on, with Congress and the Supreme Court conniving endlessly at the President's attempts to set himself up as dictator-for-life, modeled after North Korea or Russia or Congo.)  Words that describe complex or nuanced ideas are often lost--which means that "connive" and "literally" and "stoic" all face the same sad fate.  People use the word "stoic" as if it simply meant unemotional.  But being guided by something greater than our emotions is only part of being a Stoic.

A real Stoic is a person who tries to live their life in accordance with the ways of Nature while attending to four key principles: Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and Justice.  What does this mean?  Well, let's say for example that the doctor has given me 6 months to live.  My first reaction is to consider Nature: death is natural; all things die, and so dying isn't a terrible fate for me or anyone else.  It might be sad, but it's not wrong.  Next, I'll face my mortality with Prudence, which means that I'll think logically and carefully about it--I'll consider the ways that it will affect the people I care about; I'll write my will and plan my funeral.  I'll face it with Fortitude, which means that, to the best of my ability, I'll try to remain strong, and focused, and unafraid.  I'll prepare for death with Temperance, which is to say that I won't be excessive in any way--no maudlin displays, no giving-in to self-pity, no raging against the dying of the light, for the light will always wax and wane, and there's no sense in raging against it.  Finally, I'll confront my death with Justice, which is to say that I'll embrace the rightness of Nature's rule that all things must die in order to make room for other things.  Justice reminds me that I am only a small part of a very big Whole, and that I've had my day, and it was mostly good.  A Stoic focuses their energies on how they respond to the vagaries of life, while also accepting their lot with gratitude and trust.  You can't change realities, but you can decide how to respond to them.  

Okay, so there is maybe just a small element of fatalism to it.  Marcus Aurelius frequently speaks about resigning oneself to Κλωϑώ, the Sister of Fate who spins the destinies of all people and things.  In ancient Greek religion, even the gods were subject to the will of Κλωϑώ.  She spins the threads of one's life: its quality, its textures, its various entanglements and best uses.  She determines whether the thread of your life is coarse or fine, thick or thin, strong or soft.  Her sister, Lachesis, measures the length of the thread--determining your longevity.  The third sister, Atropos, cuts the thread--determining the moment and the means of your death.  While I don't believe in the existence of three literal Spinning Sisters who determine all of life, I do actually kind of believe that most things are pretty much predetermined, and the only thing we get to control is our reaction to them.  (And so, Stoicism makes me a good Presbyterian...as it was surely the ideological forerunner to Calvinism.)

For a Stoic, there is a form of life after death--or more accurately, life-outside-death--in that all things--including one's personal identity--return to their source, which is the universal consciousness at the heart of all existence, and which governs all things.  At death, a soul is broken down, simplified, and subsumed back into the Whole of which it was always a part.  And so, we continue to exist after death, but all the things that mattered to us before--like accomplishments, and relationships, and possessions--become moot.  If you invested your life into the ways of Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance, and Justice, then your eternal lot is peaceful.  But if you led a turbulent, egotistical, self-centered life, then these anxieties remain with you in death.  In other words, we are in eternity what we were in time.

I was a Stoic long before I knew what the word actually meant.  But there are other guiding philosophies that might work better for other kinds of people.  (Alfred North Whitehead appeals to me, and his tenets would be a good guide for a person's life, but I'm just too fatalistic.)  The best way to weigh your life's guiding philosophies is to take them to the bike trail at Oil Creek State Park in the dead of winter.  You won't get far without a sturdy pair of ice cleats, so be sure to get some Yak Trax.  Go walk on the ice.  You'll have the whole park to yourself.  Let the dormant trees and the chilly creek tell you what most surely matters, then go home and write it all down.  If you had to reduce your guiding principles to just a few words--maybe even three or four watchwords to live by--what would they be?

Oil Creek State Park under Snow

I slipped away on a Sunday night, just after the concert described in the post below, to go up to the North Country to write a Christmas Eve homily.  The sermon on Christmas Eve needs to be short, poignant, and pleasing to the ear.  It's more a poem than a speech, so I needed the inspiration of snow and silence and trees.... Also, my birds were getting hungry. 

While there, I went to an area of Oil Creek State Park that I'd never hiked before.

I didn't realize that Oil Creek State Park was originally created by the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, which owns and operates the Frank Lloyd Wright house, Fallingwater.  That knowledge inspired me to become a supporting member of the Conservancy...which I've considered doing for years.

Oil Creek really is a beautiful place.  It's not jaw-dropping beauty, but it's consistently scenic.  And there are great birds.  In fact, this park put on a brief course in birding, and that's how I got initiated into my newest hobby.  On this short jaunt, I saw nuthatches, a downy woodpecker, and the ubiquitous chickadees.

The snow seems to last all winter up there...

Old Petroleum Center Road was a sheet of ice.

The park is mostly just the steep-walled valley of Oil Creek, which I seemed to have entirely to myself on a Monday afternoon, a few days before Christmas.  

My goal was to follow the Gerard Trail from Old Petroleum Center Road up to the overlook, or "vista," that's shown on the park maps.

The ghost town of Petroleum Center was located where the park office currently stands.  It was as wild a place as any other oil boomtown in these parts: saloons, brothels, overnight millionaires, whiskey, opium, intrigue, abductions, de facto slavery...  Girls were lured to these boomtowns with the promise of respectable work as nannies for wealthy families.  But once they got here, they were imprisoned in the bedrooms of the bordellos and made to commit sex acts against their will.  All that remains of the notorious Petroleum Center is a train station and a single historic house that appears to be maintained but disused.

Interesting how the towns that existed prior to the oil boom are still in existence: Pleasantville and Plumer go back to the 1820s.  But Pithole and Petroleum Center disappeared when the oil began to trickle out.  So many ghosts of the oil days are hidden in these hills.  Old wooden barrels, grassy old roads returning to forest, rusted pipelines, and even the occasional shed or other building.

The birds were great, but I also met a porcupine!  Porcupines are pretty consistently less excited to meet me than I am to meet them.  This guy refused to pose for the camera.  In fact, he wouldn't even let me look him in the face; he kept turning his back and fanning his quills at me.  

Here he is again.  I remember being told, many years ago, that porcupines can shoot their quills at you.  I'm not sure I believe it, but I didn't want to take any chances, so after a brief conversation, I allowed him to carry on along his slow and tottering way.  Our conversation was largely one-sided anyway, more a monologue than a dialogue.

This portion of the Gerard Hiking Trail was picturesque.  

And here's the humble vista out over Wildcat Hollow, with a bench to sit and watch the raptors soaring over the treetops below.

The Gerard Trail circles the entire park.  I really, really want to complete this whole 30-some mile loop someday.  It'll take me three days to do it, due to the fact that it's very strenuous in places.  In winter, you really need a pair of cleats on these steep and slippery trails. 

A beautiful winter day to be out in the world.

Carnegie Music Hall, Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh, too, has a Carnegie Hall.  Except that we pronounce the name "Carnegie" as the man himself pronounced it: carNEGie.  (In New York, they insist on pronouncing it CARniggy.) Until last Sunday, I had never been inside the Carnegie Music Hall, which is attached to the stately library and museum complex in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh.  This is the foyer.  There's a statue of Andrew Carnegie at one end of the room, not pictured here, and a large fireplace at the other end.

And this is the balcony above the foyer.  I'd have gotten better photos of the beautiful marble work, but I got chased out of the balcony by an employee who told me the area was closed.

When you enter the music hall at the main level, it appears small, even a little cramped.  If you sneak up to the third level (which was also closed, but who's gonna tell?), the place opens up and appears enormous.  We were there for a Chatham Baroque concert titled "A Corelli Christmas."  There weren't many recognizable Christmas tunes, but it was an outstanding performance, as always.

 

I gotta say, the place has just a whiff of neglect about it, benign, grandiose, ornate neglect.  The window frames seem to be rotting out of their casements.  There are cobwebs.  And strangely, there are two women's restrooms on the main levels, but there's only one men's room, and it's all the way down in the basement.  This could be one of the reasons the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra relocated from this venue to Heinz Hall, downtown.  Ah, but this is Pittsburgh; glorious neglect is sort of our thing.

Actually, the Pittsburgh area has three of these grand music halls attached to the big marble libraries that Andrew Carnegie gifted to the various communities.  There's a Carnegie Music Hall attached to the public library in Homestead and another one, confusingly, attached to the way-cool hilltop library in the town of Carnegie--which is one of my favorite cities in the Pittsburgh region.  That's to say, there's a Carnegie Music Hall of Pittsburgh, a Carnegie Music Hall of Homestead, and a Carnegie Music Hall of Carnegie.  I've never been to the one in Homestead, but the one in Carnegie is smaller than this one and less ornate.  Still, it's a pretty cool venue.  When Andrew Carnegie gave all these libraries and concert venues to the towns here in Steel Country, the factory workers famously said, "Libraries are nice, but how about safer working conditions and more time off?"  I heard an estimate that about 30 people died every week in Carnegie's steel factories, but that number may be apocryphal.

Real Winter in the North Country

How many times have I left a brown and gray city, in the chilly ghost of a climate change winter, and driven north only to find that, by the time I reach Grove City, it’s full blown Hibernus?  Then, as I go further and further north, leaving the interstate and taking to the backroads, the lanes grow narrower, and the trees draw nearer, and the temperatures drop, and the snow deepens. I had to dig this driveway out by hand on Friday morning of last week, the same morning I dug my neighbor’s car out of the snow where she got stuck while driving her child to school (which they never cancel up in those parts).

I love that about my almost-weekly journey up to my other life: I seem to journey into a whole other climate, another realm altogether. It’s consistently 5 to 10 degrees cooler up there, and there’s snow all winter. Last year, we had a brown Christmas in Pittsburgh, but then we went to our place up north for the night, and had a white Christmas as daylight faded. When I left Pittsburgh last Thursday after work, the city was in its usual chilly gray wintertime garb—without snow, as usual. By the time I got up north, it was a friggin’ blizzard. I love it. I love being snowbound up there and watching it falling among the trees.   

One of my favorite sights is a snowy deciduous forest—where dark tree trunks stand out against a perfectly white forest floor. I went up this past Thursday to bring my older daughter home from college for Christmas break. Because she’s minoring in Arabic, she’ll be spending next semester in Jordan. I know better than to worry too much about that. I was even younger than her when I spent a summer homeless on a beach in France after having been robbed my first night in Paris. There are few joys greater than travel. Do we even know ourselves before we have another culture to compare our assumptions to? Can we even say that we speak our native tongues without some working knowledge of the world’s other languages? Travel and living abroad make a person wiser, and more accepting, and far more interesting.

These are the things I say to myself, and they mostly allay my fears about letting my child go off to see the world alone. But…well. It’s also true that when I was her age, I knew how to stay out of trouble and how to throw a punch if staying out of trouble wasn’t an option. (I had three brothers…) Jordan is a very quiet country with a whole lot less violent crime than the United States. She should be the one worried to leave an old man like myself back here.

She’ll be fine. I guess my real issue with her studying overseas is the fact that I will be out of reach. I was always there when she was sick or scared or lonely. I was mother and father to both my daughters (in their mother’s constant absence).  It’s no use being too sentimental about such things, but it does make it hard to see them go to live in the Middle East. 

My bird friends were so, so hungry when I got up north. The deep snow makes it hard for them to find seeds to eat, and the bugs are all gone for the season. Never before had I seen such a convocation at my bird feeders: dark-eyed juncos by the dozens, many black-capped chickadees, no small number of tufted titmice, a hairy woodpecker—which is a beautiful creature with a ridiculous name—a few graceful nuthatches, sleek and elegant, and even a blue jay and a cardinal, which had never deigned to visit my feeders before.

The thing about beautiful times and places is that they give you a strength that you can take with you anywhere. They multiply their beauty to you, and it comes back to shelter you in a cold season. I hope I’ve given my children that, now that I see them fledging. As for me, there’s very little I want except to commune with trees and observe birds. Jordan, of the world’s many peaceful places. She’s only going to Jordan. Hell, I went to Cameroon when I was four years older than her and spent 5 years. Oh, how I missed the snow during that half-decade-long summer.

Pittsburgh at Night

My precocious 12-year old nephew (who is hyper-intelligent, and home-schooled, and being raised by well-intended-but-misguided fundamentalist parents) came to spend a night with us in Pittsburgh.  We were celebrating a late Thanksgiving for my side of the family…but gratitude is always in season.  I love it that I’m the favorite uncle on that side of the family.  God knows they’ve got enough uncles to choose from.  My nephew and his family live on a farm in Ohio, and they don’t much see the outside world.  When he entered the neighborhood church that I pastor, he said with complete awe, “This is the highest ceiling I have ever seen.”  He was clearly smitten by the sense of grandeur and otherness that the building is meant to inspire, but which it fails to inspire in many nowadays.  It made sense to show him the city at night and to drive down through its Christmas lights and crowds.  He was…flabbergasted by the urbanity.  There are so many ways to live a life….

 

The Joy of Burn Barrels

My rural grandparents used a burn barrel, and I recently took comfort in following their lead.  I don’t recall their ever putting a trash can at the curb.  There was no trash can and no curb—just a grassy embankment where the gravel road met their property.  Household trash had two destinations in that time and place: the rubbish heap and the burn barrel.  “Rubbish” consisted of anything that would rot: coffee grounds, food scraps, eggshells, plant waste, anything once-living and now-dead…you get the point.  Things that could go up in smoke were not put on the rubbish heap; they went into the burn barrel: paper, cardboard, wood, styrofoam, plastic…. The occasional soda can found its way to the burn barrel, too—even though it didn’t burn—for lack of recycling.  But there was precious little soda (or “pop”) in that house, and never any beer cans for such devout Methodists as they were.

Of course, this was a horrible way to dispose of household refuse.  While the composting was actually a good thing, the burning was a very bad thing—especially in the case of plastics and styrofoam.  Burn barrels are illegal in many municipalities nowadays, including all of Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is located.  But my place up north has an old burn barrel that’s rusting out near the bottom and “leaning toward Fisher,” as my grandfather used to say of anything crooked.  (Fisher is a village in Clarion County.)  I don’t even know if burn barrels are still legal up there, but I had some cardboard items to get rid of, and the burn barrel was beckoning.  The fire made a pleasant glow against the 5:00pm gloaming—warm and bright, everything this season is not.  See how it lights up the snowfield and holds its flame bravely, briefly against the gathering dark?  I know the world is too old for such nonsense, but there was such comfort in standing down there by the edge of the woods, in the chilly gloaming, to warm my body and soul by the orange flames of the burn barrel.  

 

Two Mile Run County Park—Way Cooler than It Sounds!

I’m a native of Venango County and a homeowner there.  I’ve been exploring this place pretty regularly for much of my life, but especially since my return three years ago.  Even so, I’d never bothered to go to the popular Three Mile Run County Park.  But look at this place.  It’s well worth a visit, even in an early North Country winter.  

Like much of the state, and almost all of Venango County, Three Mile Run Park is scenic, if not quite beautiful.  The sepia tones of early winter seem to suit the place under moody gray skies...  

Do you remember these things?  We called them merry-go-rounds, even though they weren’t like the ones at the fair.  I thought they’d been deemed too dangerous, and that they got pulled out of all the playgrounds decades ago.  As a child, I took many a bruising from getting swept off these things by centrifugal force.  But you always get back on.  It’s fun to be dizzy when you’re a kid.  We grownups can’t take it.

The reason I’d never been tempted to visit Two Mile Run County Park was written right into its name: “County” park.  There’s a lot of public land around here, miles and miles of woodlands to discover.  We’ve got the Allegheny National Forest, and the beautiful, lesser-visited Oil Creek State Park, and Cornplanter State Forest, and many game lands owned and operated by the state.  I assumed that a “county park” would be nothing more than a few baseball diamonds, some swing sets, a tennis court and a dog run.  I was so wrong!  Two Mile Run is as cool as almost any state park I know, and it offers just as much.  It’s got trails for hiking, biking, horseback riding, and ATVs.  It’s got a lake for fishing, with a swimming beach, kayaks and paddle boats for rent, and a big concession stand—closed for the winter.  It’s got a large campground with restrooms, and showers, and primitive sites, and sites with full hookups, as well as rustic cabins, like the one pictured here.  The campground is closed for the season, but the park even has an office that’s open year round.  And of course, it’s got the ubiquitous playgrounds and sports fields…for those of you who are into that kind of thing….

At 2,700 acres, it’s bigger than the ever-popular McConnell’s Mill State Park…and more than twice the size of Ryerson Station State Park.  The trail system is impressive, and the scenery is pleasant.

Oh, and picnic pavilions.  There are so many picnic pavilions.  This is the Big Rock Pavilion, presumably because it’s located next to a big rock.

Venango County was very wealthy at one time.  The decaying old mansions in Oil City and Franklin are evidence of that, not to mention the grand old farms and rural estates—some of which are still privately owned, but most of which have fallen into the hands of religious or social nonprofits.  Venango County had oil money, and lots of it.  But how do they continue to maintain such a magnificent park today, when all the money the polluters and frackers make goes down to Texas?

A part of me wants to learn how to do oil paintings.  I’d do scenes pretty much like this one.  I’d be the Corot of the inland Northeast.

In addition to all the many recreational opportunities at Two Mile Run, there are also two houses that you can rent.  This one they call “The Cottage.”  

And this one they call “The Farmhouse.”  I mean, what other county has a park this awesome?  

See the face in this tree?  That’s another thing I like about Two Mile Run; unlike the sometimes sterile, institutional feel of state-owned lands, someone really loves this place.  Think about it.  In order to maintain a park like this, the county has to pay office employees, lifeguards, rangers, groundskeepers, and maids to clean the rental properties.  They’ve got to pay for all the mowing, and snow removal, and maintenance of everything.  Does Venango County do all of this with taxpayer dollars?  If so, it’s a fantastic use of our taxes.  But how do they do it in such a deeply Republican county, where everything is about private ownership and Trumpism, and the tax base just keeps shrinking?  Anyhow, I definitely need to come back here.  There’s much more to discover.

Serious question: If you had to spend the rest of your life within the bounds of a single American county, which one would it be?  You’re wearing a bracelet on your ankle that will zap you painfully hard if ever you cross the county line.  Choose wisely.  There aren’t many counties that provide a full array of urban, suburban, and rural opportunities.  Los Angeles County, California, offers the best of both worlds: first rate urban opportunities as well as mountains, wilderness, and outdoor wonders.  But do you really want to live in Southern California?  Allegheny County, where my primary residence is located, is far too heavy on the urban dimension and too light on the rural.  I don’t think I’d pick Venango County.  The urban opportunities are just too few.  But between Oil Creek State Park, and Clear Creek State Forest, and the various state game lands, and Four Mile Run County Park, we’ve got enough wild places here to keep me happy.