random philosophizing

the mess of an answered prayer

amybiancolli random philosophizing, spirituality, Uncategorized 4 Comments

Do you ever pray for clarity? Or maybe just scrunch your eyes and hope for it hard, if you’re more secularly inclined? I do. Quite a bit. Mainly because I’m almost always clodding along in some murk or other, my poor, pointy head piled with dust bunnies that fog my sight and clog my thinking. Wait, correct that. Put quotes around “thinking.” Because what I’m actually doing is “feeling.”

So I’m always asking the Almighty for some handy-dandy clarification on some matter or other. I sent up one such request a few weeks ago, and while I won’t go into the specifics, the gist of it was: HELLOOOO, LORD! WILL YOU PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON, HERE?! I’M SORTA KINDA CONFUSED! THANKS AND LOVE, AMY!

The Lord replied in no uncertain terms, and in a manner I did not particularly enjoy, over the course of several days. The celestial public address system blared out loud and clear: HELLOOOOO, AMY! HERE IS THE ANSWER TO YOUR PRAYERS. IT MIGHT MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE A BIT OF AN ASSHOLIC AND CLUELESS BOOB FOR A BIT OF A WHILE, BUT DON’T WORRY, YOU’LL FEEL BETTER IN THE END! HAVE FUN! HOPE YOU ENJOY IT! LOVE, GOD!

And in the end, it helped. I did find my clarity. I came out the sunny other side of a long, winding, dark, malodorous, garbage-strewn tunnel, and if it seems to you I might be describing a voyage through an alimentary canal, you’re absolutely right. At its conclusion I felt as though I had taken a really big dump.

I felt lighter. I felt free. I wept with gratitude and thanked the Lord. I’m not kidding about that part. I did both those things.

The whole experience served to remind me that God — or the universe, if, again, that’s where your faith lies — isn’t exactly prissy when it comes to helping out. Prayer dissemination isn’t quick n’ smooth, like some lofty milkshake that’s made at our request. (HI, LORD, IT’S AMY AGAIN. COULD YOU PUT AN EXTRA SCOOP IN THAT? AND MAYBE A SQUIRT OF CHOCOLATE SYRUP? THANKS!) More often, it’s a right mess; and when the object is clarity, we’re really in for it. The answered prayer can be a hard-fought battle, littered with misunderstandings and emotional complications of the sort we like to avoid.

And in the middle of it, I generally send up another prayer, either a sarcastic THANKS FOR THAT or an inquisitive IS THIS SOME IDEA OF A JOKE? One of the things that most amazes is me is that God never reaches down and cuffs the back of my head with an irritated grunt. I suppose, being omnipotent and secure about it, the Almighty can take my snotty back-talk without resorting to whoop-ass.

Anyway, it all worked out. Clarity achieved! But as the old saw goes, be careful what you wish for. You might get it, it might take longer than expected, and you’ll probably need a flashlight before it’s over.

dark matter rocks

amybiancolli random philosophizing, spirituality, Uncategorized 2 Comments

I love dark energy. Love it. Dark matter, too. I have no idea what they are, but it’d be weird if I did, because no one does, not even all those crazy-smart astrophysicists who hypothesize their existence. All anyone knows is, dark energy in all likelihood accounts for about 68 percent of the universe (68 percent! that’s a passing grade in some places!), and dark matter takes up 27 percent, leaving plain ol’ ordinary matter, the mundane, run-of-the-mill, observable, occasionally stinky crap, to take up a mere 5 percent. I won’t even venture a guess on how much of that 5 percent is found in McDonald’s value meals. A lot.

I’ve been Catholic for 24 years. Been a Christian for 30 or so. Believed in God for almost 40. Before that, following the lead of my atheistic father and agnostic mother, I believed only in the goodness of humanity and the largeness of creation. But I tell you what: those beliefs remain the essence of my faith. As frustrated as I am by my failure to see the future, as sidelined as I am by my tendency to fret, I’m relieved to know that I don’t actually know a thing. It’s a gift to realize the full scope of what I can’t see with my squinty eyes and hear with my whistling ears and grasp with my pointy head: at least 95 percent of all existence. That’s a shitload of stuff I won’t ever understand. Thank God! There’s more to life than value meals!

We can all agree on this point, right? Whether we believe in a deity or dark matter?

Me, I’m down with both. I don’t believe that science and faith are incompatible. Faith, to me, is not an obeisance to the known but an acknowledgment of the unknown, an abandonment to it, an against-all-odds conviction that a limitless Unseen lurks and envelops us. In describing the universe and its mysteries, scientists delve into that Unseen and assign it properties, laws, shape.

I assign it character, too. I assign it love. I can’t see it, but I’m sure it’s there.

accidental beauties

amybiancolli Albany, beauty, random philosophizing, Uncategorized 9 Comments

sunset

If you live in Albany, did you catch the sky at sunset tonight? It was all cotton candy magnificence. I saw it by accident through the upstairs bathroom window, and it caught me at just the right moment: I’d been fretting about something over which I have no control, which is, of course, the nature and boundless asininity of fretting. One never frets over the distressingly few things over which one has control, such as whether or not to floss before bedtime. (“Aggghhhh! I wish I knew! The suspense is killing me! Crap crap crap!”) Instead one frets over the infinite number of things outside our own personal agency. If we have no authority or power to act — and if we forget, for some long moment, that surrender is our only real and rational option — we brood.

I was brooding earlier tonight. But then I glimpsed the sunset, and the cloud of fuss suddenly lifted, whiffed away by those ribbons of pink and blue.

A similar lightening of spirit had occurred over the weekend, as I tooled through light whorls of snow along the Petersburg Pass to Williamstown. Once again, I was stewing. Once again, it concerned a matter over which I have no control. But then, mid-fret, I came around that glorious, mountainous, rising curve that swings into the Berkshires with an abruptness that always shocks me; I’ve driven that road a thousand times, and still, that morning, it caught me unawares. And I stopped fretting. Not only that: I felt like a boob for having fretted at all. Why should I chafe over little nothings, when the world can throw such beauties in my midst? They rise out of nowhere with the force and largeness of truth.

That’s what matters. Not that niggling, nagging stuff. And when the awful shit lands, the real shit, worrying won’t fix that, either.

Sometimes, flipping through the bible at night, my thumb lands on a passage from Matthew that addresses the boobishness of worry: “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Ummm, no. Definitely not. That there is one apt rhetorical question, Jesus. And yet I do it. I worry. I did it again in the bathroom tonight, right there at the sink, just by the floss — which actually might add an hour to my life. But then I looked over and saw the sky, and I opened the window, and I snapped a picture, and I smiled. No more fretting. For now.

this too shall pass

amybiancolli gross stuff, random philosophizing, Uncategorized 8 Comments

This weekend, I got a stomach bug. I will not go into any great detail, as I prefer not to offend the tender sensibilities of those I offended with last week’s horrifying mold photo, and if you suspect I’m going to find endless (and endlessly lame) excuses to link to it from future posts, you are correct.

But the stomach bug. Not the worst I ever got, but bad enough. What struck me, early on, was that old familiar sense of abandoning myself to the fates — that what-the-hell, here-we-go, whoop-dee-do resignation as I accepted the fact that I’d be flat-out miserable for the next 8 to 24 hours. And I was. Again: no great detail.

But here’s the kicker: I knew that I wouldn’t be miserable forever. I regarded this stroke of bad luck as finite, and in a flash, I recognized spasmodic abominable gastrointestinal distress as the perfect metaphor for life’s periodic grips of pain. They sneak up and slam us flat and maybe render us useless (or weak and dehydrated and headachy, with that awful, scraping burn at the back of the throat), but we know from that first stab in the gut that they won’t last forever. Maybe they’ll ease off, dupe us into thinking they’ve left, and then come back a few hours later with a fresh dump of agony. But then that’s over, too, and we awake in the morning with a clear head and an irrational swell of optimism. Life is good, right? Fantastic. Primo. Except when it ain’t.

Everything’s finite. Everything cycles in and out. Good and bad, clean health and illness, joys and sorrows: they all come and go, obeying some unfathomable but relentless clock that won’t let us live with anything for long, whether it’s a welcome anything or an unwelcome anything. Stomach bugs seize us and leave (sometimes at our children’s athletic events, no great detail), but so do bouts of wonder. So often we’re clenched by blessings — embraced by a child, caressed by a lover — in moments that feel eternal but end all too soon.

This weekend’s virus didn’t quite feel eternal, although certain moments in certain places hold a certain accursed fixedness in my imagination, and here’s where I really want to explain to that woman in the UAlbany restroom Saturday morning that I really wasn’t drunk. No great detail. But even in the most abysmal throes, I kept reminding myself that I’d feel better eventually, whether “eventually” meant later that day or, as it turned out, Annie’s bottom-dollar-betting tomorrow.

I’m sure I’ll get hit with another stomach bug someday. And when I do, I’m sure it will involve 8 to 24 hours of flat-out misery. But right now, typing these words, all is well. My kids are happy and accounted for; my bills are paid; my house is warm; my stomach is at peace, even downright euphoric with relief, and so am I. It’s just a moment. It will pass. But for now it’s a gift, and I’ll take it.

“stuck on hope”

amybiancolli random philosophizing, spirituality, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Father Bob, a good friend and a great priest, said this in my kitchen. The two of us were eating cake and cranberry juice, talking about loss. We agreed that it sucks. Burying those we love, saying goodbye too soon, too soon, too soon, weathering all the hailstorms of grief that follow, trying to believe that life can still emerge into daylight, drumming up the faith and foolishness to uncurl from a ball and head out the damned creaking door for another day: it’s all too much. It’s madness, really.

And yet we do it, because there is no better option. Correction: There is no other option. Hope is all we have. Even when we’re exhausted and drooping from effort, even when we don’t know where we’re going or why we’re going there, we plod blindly on. And in this blind plodding we put our faith.

Father Bob and I were chewing on this and sucking down juice when I asked why any of us should believe that life might hand out anything but pain. We must be delusional, I said. Here we are, minding our business, tending our loved ones, laughing when we can — as R.E.M. put it, “lost in our little lives” — when fate or God or the cosmos or bum bloody mindless luck clobbers us broadside with tragedy. Why should anybody ever expect anything else?

“I guess,” he replied, “you just have to be stuck on hope. I guess that’s the answer.”

I was recalling this conversation today as I rode a surge of optimism on the first fresh morning of 2014. It was Cicero who observed, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” but the reverse is true, too. Where there’s hope, there’s life. It’s a syllogism. Life=hope. Hope=life. If we just keep hoping, if we just keep plodding, the schlep of life will take care of itself. It might even clobber us broadside with joy.

facing the slope

amybiancolli family, random philosophizing, Uncategorized, widowhood, winter 2 Comments

photo (14)
“Ames,” says my brother Danny, somewhere near the windy top of Killington. “I want you to ski this black diamond with moguls. I’ll show you how to do it. You’ll be fine.”

You want to me to ski a black diamond with moguls, I repeat back. You’ll show me how to do it. I’ll be fine.

“You’ll be fine.”

Ummm.

It’s around 3:30 Saturday afternoon, we’ve been skiing all day on sucky icy lumpy conditions, and I’m wrecked. Every joint and muscle and piece of bone in my body hurts, including the tips of my pinkies. A few hours earlier I wiped out trying to turn on a lump of wet, ungroomed crap passing for snow, so I’m not in the best shape for any kind of black diamond, be it accessorized with moguls or not.

But Danny’s insistent. And he’s smiling. And he’s my brother. And I haven’t died so far today, so I’m on a streak of good fortune. Continue reading →

the expanding universe

amybiancolli family, random philosophizing, Uncategorized, widowhood 8 Comments

This Christmas, as usual, my kids and I joined Chris’s family for a day of eating and laughing followed by yet more eating and yet more laughing, with breaks in between for energetic gift-giving and weak passes at digestion. While he was alive, I considered them the best in-laws anyone could ask for: caring, attentive, generous, never intrusive, always warm. After he died, they conveyed to me, in gestures and words, that my husband’s death was not an end to my bond with his family. In the midst of all that hurt, I was profoundly grateful to realize that I hadn’t lost them, too.

My universe can’t shrink any more than it has to. I want it to expand. And strangely, despite all the losses, it continues to. This is how it functions. This is its inclination, flinging outward from a central moment — the Big Bang, or the moment of creation, or whatever you want to call the giant cosmic spewing that kicked it (and us) into gear.

I happen to believe that a Someone set it off, but even if I didn’t, I’d still take comfort in the knowledge that, no matter what interplanetary flotsam we encounter, we’re forever moving forward. Even when our lives contract so grievously after a loss, they’re still expanding. Even when we seem to have derailed entirely, skidding off toward some forbidding landscape, we’re still going somewhere. Old relationships deepen and change. New friendships form. New family arrives in unexpected and miraculous ways.

It was Chris who remarked, “Amy, for someone whose family is dead, you have a lot of relatives.” He made this remark about 15 years ago, but I’ve recalled it often these past two, whenever I found myself in the welcoming embrace of his siblings, their spouses, their sons. Soon we’ll be seeing my extended and splendiferous non-blood family, the loved ones I acquired as a kid. How my universe expanded when I met them. How it expanded again when I married Chris.

And now, two of his nephews — my nephews — are getting married. I would say their fiancees are about to become members of the family, but they already are. They’re already eating and laughing and gift-giving. It was some of their food I went on to digest last night; if baked s’more cookies and lemon bars can’t seal the deal, nothing will. As the universe expands, so does my stomach.

term of the day: “shit magnet”

amybiancolli family, language, random philosophizing 10 Comments

SHIT MAGNET (noun) ˈshit ˈmag-nət. One who attracts shit, any kind of shit, be it death, woe, romantic break-ups, legal tangles, financial or medical catastrophe, accidentally lighting your hair on fire or other grave misfortune, especially any that results in the production and propulsion of large amounts of snot. Synonyms: punching bag; hopeless wreck; gnasher of teeth. Origin: Randy.

Yes, this is Randy’s term. He gets the credit. He reminded me of it in his response to my post about getting swiped and subsequently swooped-upon by the TSA, and I’ve been meaning to give it a full airing. In case you’re wondering who Randy is, and you should be, he’s a kind, funny man, and he’s my brother, and he’s been that way for a couple of decades now. My brother, that is. Not kind and funny; he’s been that way since birth, at least I assume so, because I didn’t actually cross paths with him until I was, like, 14, and he was, like, 13. His dad was headmaster of Wykeham Rise, that itsy-bitsy arts school where my mom taught music.

Randy and I met one afternoon when he was out in the  Wykeham parking lot, kicking the soccer ball around, and he said Hey, and I said Hey, and he said Do you play soccer, and I said Guess so, and he kicked the ball to me and I kicked it back and the freaking thing slammed straight into the Latin teacher’s car so hard that it made a dent in the door. Thank heavens it popped straight back, although the Latin teacher, a diminutive Hungarian eccentric we called Doc, was the worst and most oblivious driver of all time and probably wouldn’t have noticed a dent in his car the size of, you know, the car.

So began my friendship with Randy, who went on to utter phrases of startling pithiness and discernment well beyond Do you play soccer. I will probably quote him again sometime. Several years back he coined the phrase above, hypothesizing that some people exert a fecal attraction more powerfully than others.

My own sense is that everyone’s a shit magnet of one sort or another; it’s just that not everyone talks about it. Seriously: do you know anyone who hasn’t been dealt some monumentally awful hand at some point? Maybe several points? Even that jerk who cut me off in traffic the other day, prompting spasms in my middle finger, is likely carrying around his own sack of pain. And if he isn’t, he will someday. The shit flies in all directions, just not at the same time. 

We take our turns as shit magnets, I believe. I’ve had mine. Randy’s had his. Someone else is next. Tell me, then, that this isn’t the most fitting synonym of all: human being.

snow angels and the theory of northern cities

amybiancolli Albany, random philosophizing, winter 4 Comments
Moses, an Albany resident, striking snow from a rock.

Moses, Albany snow angel.

This morning, I poked my head outside to look for the papers — the print version, or what I like to call the paper papers — and found a snow angel clearing my sidewalk. Snow angels are neighbors with snow blowers, or maybe just a strong back and a shovel. However they’re equipped, they’re a force of good on the planet, especially this part of the planet, especially when Madre Nature, feeling generous, dumps a blanket of fluffy hexagonal crystals more or less overnight.

I smiled and thanked the snow angel and ducked back inside, paper paper-less. About 15 minutes later I ducked back out again in search of these same old-school information circulators only to discover that a second snow angel had shoveled off my front steps. In another half an hour or so I went outside myself and started digging out my cars and driveway, joining my fellow smiling digger-outers engaged in the cold, bright industry of clearing off vehicles and steps and sidewalks and sundry after a storm. It wasn’t long before a third snow angel showed up and helped. I smiled and thanked him. He smiled back. Everybody happy.

Northeasterners in particular love to complain about winter. We love to complain about summer, too. The truth of the matter is, we love to complain about everything, including the fact that we complain so much. But winter kvetching is special, because the frigid agonies of the post-storm shovelrama bring with them a certain amount of joy — a joy that goes beyond our stupidly mocking moral superiority (I’ll admit it) over Continue reading →

sit still and follow the stick

amybiancolli Albany, music, random philosophizing 2 Comments

Without fail, every single time I attend a city school concert — and I’ve attended lots and lots of concerts over the years, as it’s been lots and lots of years — two things smack me between the eyes or, depending on the sense being aroused and the direction I’m facing, the ears.

One is the sound of winds and strings and beatific voices playing and singing in tune, or damn near close to it. And that’s not nothing. No matter how often grown-ups crack jokes about the squeaks and squawks emitting from student instruments in the midst of practice — as though these sounds are any more aggravating or less mellifluous than any other noises emitting from a child at any point in his or her early life, like, say, whining, farting, shouting for cookies and marathon virtuosic tantrum-throwing  — the fact is, learning an instrument isn’t easy. If a kid is bold enough to wrap hands around a viola or a French horn or an oboe or some other ancient and altogether convoluted melody-making machine and actually create something akin to music, well, huzzah. Let us applaud loudly. Let us applaud the teachers, too.

This leads me to the other fact that smacks me in the face whenever I’m squished in the crowd at a school auditorium — as I was earlier tonight for my son’s middle-school winter concert. It’s the fact that APPROXIMATELY ONE MILLION KIDS are crowding the stage, sitting still, performing an insanely complex, cooperative task, doing so with total coordination, concentration and good nature, and — this is the best part — TAKING DIRECTION FROM A SINGLE ADULT HOLDING A STICK. And not even a big stick. TAKING DIRECTION FROM A SINGLE ADULT HOLDING A PATHETICALLY FLIMSY STICK. 

I watch this spectacle of civilization at its best, and I wonder: Why don’t schools encourage more of this shockingly effective crowd control disguised as art? Why don’t workplaces do it? Whole troubled neighborhoods? Congress? If a mob of squirmy children can get along for several long minutes to perform an arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture,” then shouldn’t leaders of belligerent nations give it a whirl? Leaving out the cannons, maybe? If they have trouble with it, no probs. The kids can show them how.