Memorial Sunday morning epiphany

                                                SUNDAY MORNING EPIPHANY
              Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, skypename halpep, pepinsky.blogspot.com
                                                                May 26, 2013


Perception is all
     we know how to change

               l&p hal

Rush Creek Village, the Pepinsky house, a personal history, Hal Pepinsky 052013

In case you come to visit and I haven't told you already, here's what I wrote for the guide for a state preservation annual meeting tour of local homes, which is a lot easier for you to read than to hear me say it:

From: Pepinsky, Harold E.
Sent: Monday, May 20, 2013 6:18 PM
To: nwright@columbuslandmarks.org
Subject: a little personal history

It will also save time if people know about my history of the house so I can just describe the house and layout of RCV when they get here.  Feel free simply to pass this along to the visitors in advance, perhaps even at registration if you still need to attract people:

I'm Hal Pepinsky.  I started first grade in the Worthington school system in 1951 when my parents and I moved from Pullman, Washington, when we moved into an apartment a mile down the road from the Rush Creek home my wife of 39 years, Jill Bystydzienski, and I moved into, after a good deal of restoration, two years ago this September; I transferred to University School at Ohio State in the fall of 1957, when my parents and I moved into the house you are about to visit.  The house, and the guest house I helped mix mortar for that was finished in 1959, were designed for me and my parents, Pauline and Harold B. (I'm Harold E.) Pepinsky over about a 2-year period of reviewing and adjusting preliminary plans, until we moved into the completed house in 1957.  It was our first, and my parents' only owned home.  My dad died in 1998.  Three years ago this summer, my mom moved to The Laurels of Worthington, just a mile up the road, where I join the director, Kristine, for weekly singalongs, and my mother slips peacefully and steadily into another world.  She will be 94 June 27.  I am 68.

My parents were research psychologists who got Fulbrights and a Guggenheim to spend 1961-62 in Trondheim, Norway, for which University School gave me credit enough for high school graduation.  Five days after we returned home, I went away (to Michigan) to college.  In intervening years, I, then Jill and then our daughter Katy too, visited the house many times.  I began teaching criminal justice full-time (trained in law and sociology) in 1970.  In 1976, I started my final job, in the department of criminal justice at Indiana University in Bloomington.  In 1998 after Katy had grown up and moved on, Jill moved from teaching sociology at Franklin College, to directing the women's studies program at Iowa State in Ames.  In 2006, she was hired in her current position as chair of women, gender and sexuality studies at Ohio State.  She chose a condo in Worthington, a mile the other side of where my mom now resides.  In 2009 I sold the house Jill and I had bought in Bloomington in 1977 as soon as I could after becoming eligible for early retirement, and after 12 years, finally got to live with Jill again. It was her idea that we move back to my childhood home.  I resisted on grounds that it would be like living in a museum.  By the time we moved, I had gotten used to looking forward to the prospect.  I never dreamed of feeling so truly at home.  When we moved in, I thought this first house of ours was pretty neat, but as my mother (who played muse to Ted van Fossen in designing our place) used to say to me, "You don't live visually."  Times have changed.  I am noticing patterns and details and siting and unfolding of wildlife just 3 blocks' routine walk from the center of old Worthington (chartered between North, South, Evening and Morning Streets in 1803; Rush Creek land and Colonial Hills annexed by Worthington only in 1952; Colonial Hills Elementary School opened in 1954; Wakefield and Freeman houses built in 1954; Rush Creek Village platted and incorporated in 1955, with the first lender in Worthington not to recognize red lining).  I'd like to begin your visit with our just sitting in the living area (there's no living ROOM), the geo-center of Ted's design, from which I can explain the orientations of the house, guest house, and surrounding houses (also with roofs sited topographically) in our community.

Tina Wakefield lives in the house where she cared for her mother Martha until Martha's last hospital stay.  She holds her parents' Rush Creek legacy sacred.  She would like you to know that she does not welcome you to come in only because her mother would be ashamed of how deteriorated the house has become.  Tina has neither the authority nor the money to do what needs to be done herself, and is something of a state of mourning over it.  I and many members of the Rush Creek community share that sadness.  Know that there is a gathering will to fulfill a dream of Rush Creek Company buying the house and turning it into a community center, as for instance for architectural workshops and conferences...and parenthetically, perhaps to save the first house that Ted van Fossen designed, built in 1940 for the Gunnings at 7595 East Broad Street, now also deteriorated and up for sale to be razed, for the 2 wooded lots to be used commercially.  My mother was aware of what was happening long enough to see the native planning, design and construction by the Columbus-born Martha, Dick and Ted, begin to get the appreciation and respect it so deserves.

Ted's slowness in perfecting Rush Creek designs for the original owners was a source of considerable frustration.  I am now beginning to appreciate just how painstaking and meticulous every detail of Ted's design is.  Ted spent a lot of time in our home; he loved to bring friends and hang out here when he was visiting town.  He used to talk about his struggle "to figure out what works."  I'm here to tell you it works, and I feel blessed to return here, where I hope to be when I die.  Talk about coming home...

I'm very much looking forward to showing off Ted, Martha and Dick's legacy to you.  Welcome!  love and peace--hal

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, skype name halpep, "Peacemaking" at pepinsky.blogspot.com
 519 Evergreen Circle, Worthington, OH 43085-3667, 1-614-885-6341

NOTE CLARIFICATION OF MAY 3 POST re "treating cancer"

I have posted this message at the top of that post:

FIRST A COUSIN, NOW A FRIEND, HAVE ASKED ME WHETHER I MEAN TO SAY HERE THAT I HAVE CANCER.  I DO mean to say that I refuse to have a colonoscopy because I don't want to know that I have cancer till it's too late for anyone to try to persuade me to fight it, rather than joining it as painlessly and freely as I can.  Sorry for any confusion--l&p hal  

A Dutch ritual abuse survivor's story

This is the stuff that pushed me to build defenses against ptsd, given that I couldn't bring myself to walk away.  Thanks to survivor Neil Brick, at www.ritualabuse.us, for this link to a Dutch survivor's story:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PyrPEu7nk1Q .  It is not pretty, it is graphic, more so than survivors I have brought to crim and humanist soc conferences have been.  As the saying goes, viewer discretion is advised, but if you can bear to hear a report like the dozens I have heard the last 20 years, survivors will thank you for facing their globally networked demons.  One of my own presentations at Neil Brick's annual survivors' conference may be heard at http://smart-talkspodcastblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/hal-pepinsky-2008-weighing-and.html .   l&p hal

Allen's reply to my answer on whether I believe in God

CHAIN OF RESPONSES TO “DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?” at pepinsky.blogspot.com, May 8, 2013—

 

From Allen, who asked if I believed in God:

This is amazing!  I really believe the same...  I have always extrapolated from the laws of thermodynamics, particularly that matter cannot be created nor destroyed...I have held firmly that this "energy" is what we give off as creation and the divineness that is already there...and the positive forms of energy like love, benevolence, grace and forgiveness are just as impactful and contributive as hate, anger, agression, and apathy....I look forward to this book and the others you are sending!

You are quite amazing Hal! 

I cannot wait to talk to you with a nice cup of coffee....you may find that I ask too many questions though ;-)

I love you Hal....

-----Pepinsky, Hal on 5/8/2013 3:51 PM wrote:

 

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, skype name halpep, "peacemaking" at Pepinsky.blogspot.com

May 8, 2013

                This blog post is the text of an emailed answer to the question of a long-term prisoner facing the prospect of release, with whom I have been sharing his primary task of taking stock of our lives and facing our futures:

Dear Allen,

                 Do I believe in God?  I think so.  I discovered my sacred text, Laozi s daodejing, in the fall of 1963, my first semester as a declared Chinese major, the same semester that the last US president I held as my hero was assassinated.  You might say it was the autumn that I discovered my ultimate refuge from my sense of my own mortality..  I have just ordered you a copy from Amazon.  Verse 14 is a direct answer to your question that suits me fine:

14. Mystery

Looked at but cannot be seen - it is beneath form;

Listened to but cannot be heard - it is beneath sound;

Held but cannot be touched - it is beneath feeling;

These depthless things evade definition,

And blend into a single mystery.

 

In its rising there is no light,

In its falling there is no darkness,

A continuous thread beyond description,

Lining what cannot occur;

Its form formless,

Its image nothing,

Its name silence;

Follow it, it has no back,

Meet it, it has no face.

 

Attend the present to deal with the past;

Thus you grasp the continuity of the Way,

Which is its essence.

 

                When my mom started sending me at 6 up the street on Sunday mornings to Bible school at the Methodist church just 3 blocks from where I now live, I soon reasoned from my teacher that Jesus s love must be so great that he had no ego, let alone the big daddy who had magically inseminated his mama, to whom Jesus turned to for comfort and advice when the Romans convicted him of treason and used nails and a cross instead of an electric chair the way we were doing in Ohio to execute traitors.  Now that I think of it, that story--the way it came across to me from my Sunday school teacher (who was, after all, the expert my mother had sent me to learn from) that taught me everything I have ever needed to know and pay attention to confront what I now call violence (including my "crime problem") and peacemaking (my version of mediation in everyday relations).  It has taken me until now, 62 years later, to figure that out though.  I generally call "the dao" the force of love that flows through and binds us together these days, not because "force of love" is any more or less a "right word" for what English-speaking Christian faithful call God.  But I m satisfied that many who profess Christianity worship the same force the force of love, of empathy, of compassion regardless of name live by and preach the same "peacemaking" way or path (translations of "dao").

 

In physics-speak, peacemaking is called "synergy," violence "entropy."  The legend is that the daodejing is a set of quotations from someone deemed so wise during the chaotic "warring states" period right before the Qin dynasty first political unification of China.  Anxious kings are said to have specially sought out his visits to help them discover how to save their own skins, let along their kingdoms.  I ll insert one more verse where Laozi warns of the dangers of splitting people apart, of attempts to impose social order.  Since exertion of mechanical power is, as Newton told it, entropic, laying down laws (including what today are heralded as "best practices") inevitably tears social bonds asunder, as into "warring states."  Laozi says:

30. Violence

Powerful men are well advised not to use violence,

For violence has a habit of returning;

Thorns and weeds grow wherever an army goes,

And lean years follow a great war.

 

A general is well advised

To achieve nothing more than his orders:

Not to take advantage of his victory.

Nor to glory, boast or pride himself;

To do what is dictated by necessity,

But not by choice.

 

For even the strongest force will weaken with time,

And then its violence will return, and kill it.

 

                It is not only that this is sage political advice for any age.  It also explains me to myself.  Inside me is a material void that I equate with being alive: consciousness.  I can see material manifestations of consciousness in my own actions and brainwaves, and in effects of my actions on all my relations, from the rock I pick up and throw to nailing a capital offender to a cross to die.  But I can t capture it with an MRI, and I use the word "captured" advisedly.

                My own lot in life from moment to moment is what most deepens my faith in going with the force of peacemaking as Laozi advises.  I thank God in my own way recurrently by acknowledging that the most reassuring, most dependable, safest and most secure human relations are those that happen to me, rather than those I have made happen.  I can make a book by myself, but I cannot buy beauty, loving companionship and peace of mind in retirement.  Nonethless, my desire to retire when I first became eligible to rejoin Jill, and the coincidence of collapse from alcohol poisoning with Jill but in a safe hospital bed with quiet time to detoxify and reflect, plus who knows what else, have left me here with Jill in my true home at 519 Evergreen Circle.  God s force in my life keeps showing me results.  I m looking out the window at the cardinal pair building a nest for their forthcoming family, while in the evergreen we planted at the edge of our "front" yard behind me, the south pair of cardinals is building another.  On Sunday as I sat on the patio watching a succession of groups of tiny to large sized bees take turns gathering pollen from a dandelion below and the huge blooming honeysuckle above, and birds visiting too, what I found out was a migrating Swainson s hawk 2 states east of its normal path from Argentina to Canada flew in from the northwest, circled over my head, landed in the crook of a high branch on a dead ash tree straight in front of me; we exchanged glances for perhaps 15 seconds and when I dipped my head to blink my eyes and looked up again, she was flying back northwest toward Canada and she was followed by 2 curious buzzards who came to check out an ohio state graduation party in someone s back yard at the top of the hill the hawk had just crossed.  I recognize I come across to many as a little nutso when I remark on the "coincidences" like this I notice almost daily.  Which amounts to saying I continually feel the presence of God, not as some kind of being I can picture, any more than I can picture Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed incarnate.  My God doesn t punish people; people are their own undoing when they try to put each other in their proper places or categories, or to treat them as ingredients to be added in proper measure to a recipe for a social pie..  The best English-language term I have found for the political attitude my faith implies is "anarchism" power sharing rather than imposing power on others.

                How am I doing at answering your question?  Thanks for asking.  Love and peace, hal

Do you believe in God?

DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD?

Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, skype name halpep, “peacemaking” at Pepinsky.blogspot.com

May 8, 2013

                This blog post is the text of an emailed answer to the question of a long-term prisoner facing the prospect of release, with whom I have been sharing his primary task of taking stock of our lives and facing our futures:

Dear Allen,

                 Do I believe in God?  I think so.  I discovered my sacred text, Laozi’s daodejing, in the fall of 1963, my first semester as a declared Chinese major, the same semester that the last US president I held as my hero was assassinated.  You might say it was the autumn that I discovered my ultimate refuge from my sense of my own mortality.  I have just ordered you a copy from Amazon.  Verse 14 is a direct answer to your question that suits me fine:

14. Mystery

Looked at but cannot be seen - it is beneath form;
Listened to but cannot be heard - it is beneath sound;
Held but cannot be touched - it is beneath feeling;
These depthless things evade definition,
And blend into a single mystery.

In its rising there is no light,
In its falling there is no darkness,
A continuous thread beyond description,
Lining what cannot occur;
Its form formless,
Its image nothing,
Its name silence;
Follow it, it has no back,
Meet it, it has no face.

Attend the present to deal with the past;
Thus you grasp the continuity of the Way,
Which is its essence.

                When my mom started sending me at 6 up the street on Sunday mornings to Bible school at the Methodist church just 3 blocks from where I now live, I soon reasoned from my teacher that Jesus’s love must be so great that he had no ego, let alone the big daddy who had magically inseminated his mama, to whom Jesus turned to for comfort and advice when the Romans convicted him of treason and used nails and a cross instead of an electric chair the way we were doing in Ohio to execute traitors.  Now that I think of it, that story--the way it came across to me from my Sunday school teacher (who was, after all, the expert my mother had sent me to learn from)—that taught me everything I have ever needed to know and pay attention to confront what I now call violence (including my “crime problem”) and peacemaking (my version of mediation in everyday relations).  It has taken me until now, 62 years later, to figure that out though.  I generally call “the dao” the force of love that flows through and binds us together these days, not because “force of love” is any more or less a “right word” for what English-speaking Christian faithful call God.  But I’m satisfied that many who profess Christianity worship the same force—the force of love, of empathy, of compassion regardless of name—live by and preach the same “peacemaking” way or path (translations of “dao”).

In physics-speak, peacemaking is called “synergy,” violence “entropy.”  The legend is that the daodejing is a set of quotations from someone deemed so wise during the chaotic “warring states” period right before the Qin dynasty first political unification of China.  Anxious kings are said to have specially sought out his visits to help them discover how to save their own skins, let along their kingdoms.  I’ll insert one more verse where Laozi warns of the dangers of splitting people apart, of attempts to impose social order.  Since exertion of mechanical power is, as Newton told it, entropic, laying down laws (including what today are heralded as “best practices”) inevitably tears social bonds asunder, as into “warring states.”  Laozi says:

30. Violence

Powerful men are well advised not to use violence,
For violence has a habit of returning;
Thorns and weeds grow wherever an army goes,
And lean years follow a great war.

A general is well advised
To achieve nothing more than his orders:
Not to take advantage of his victory.
Nor to glory, boast or pride himself;
To do what is dictated by necessity,
But not by choice.

For even the strongest force will weaken with time,
And then its violence will return, and kill it.

                It is not only that this is sage political advice for any age.  It also explains me to myself.  Inside me is a material void that I equate with being alive: consciousness.  I can see material manifestations of consciousness in my own actions and brainwaves, and in effects of my actions on all my relations, from the rock I pick up and throw to nailing a capital offender to a cross to die.  But I can’t capture it with an MRI, and I use the word “captured” advisedly.

                My own lot in life from moment to moment is what most deepens my faith in going with the force of peacemaking as Laozi advises.  I thank God in my own way recurrently by acknowledging that the most reassuring, most dependable, safest and most secure human relations are those that happen to me, rather than those I have made happen.  I can make a book by myself, but I cannot buy beauty, loving companionship and peace of mind in retirement.  Nonethless, my desire to retire when I first became eligible to rejoin Jill, and the coincidence of collapse from alcohol poisoning with Jill but in a safe hospital bed with quiet time to detoxify and reflect, plus who knows what else, have left me here with Jill in my true home at 519 Evergreen Circle.  God’s force in my life keeps showing me results.  I’m looking out the window at the cardinal pair building a nest for their forthcoming family, while in the evergreen we planted at the edge of our “front” yard behind me, the south pair of cardinals is building another.  On Sunday as I sat on the patio watching a succession of groups of tiny to large sized bees take turns gathering pollen from a dandelion below and the huge blooming honeysuckle above, and birds visiting too, what I found out was a migrating Swainson’s hawk 2 states east of its normal path from Argentina to Canada flew in from the northwest, circled over my head, landed in the crook of a high branch on a dead ash tree straight in front of me; we exchanged glances for perhaps 15 seconds and when I dipped my head to blink my eyes and looked up again, she was flying back northwest toward Canada…and she was followed by 2 curious buzzards who came to check out an ohio state graduation party in someone’s back yard at the top of the hill the hawk had just crossed.  I recognize I come across to many as a little nutso when I remark on the “coincidences” like this I notice almost daily.  Which amounts to saying I continually feel the presence of God, not as some kind of being I can picture, any more than I can picture Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed incarnate.  My God doesn’t punish people; people are their own undoing when they try to put each other in their proper places or categories, or to treat them as ingredients to be added in proper measure to a recipe for a social pie.  The best English-language term I have found for the political attitude my faith implies is “anarchism”—power sharing rather than imposing power on others.

                How am I doing at answering your question?  Thanks for asking.  Love and peace, hal

treating cancer--CLARIFICATION: If I have cancer, I don't know it

ps--FIRST A COUSIN, NOW A FRIEND, HAVE ASKED ME WHETHER I MEAN TO SAY HERE THAT I HAVE CANCER.  I DO mean to say that I refuse to have a colonoscopy because I don't want to know that I have cancer till it's too late for anyone to try to persuade me to fight it, rather than joining it as painlessly and freely as I can.  Sorry for any confusion--l&p hal  

             I will post this essay on the blog only, and expect to distribute it only to close family, as a form of living will.  I have just finished listening to a “Fresh Air” rebroadcast of Terry Gross’s interview with Bradley Cooper, just after Mr. Cooper’s father had died.

                Cooper’s father had had stage 1 lung cancer, been treated into remission, when Cooper describes getting a devastating call from the doctor that his father’s cancer had recurred, and that he had 9 months to a year left to live.  Fortunately, Cooper’s occupation allowed him to take time off to nurse his father at home in Philadelphia.  Cooper told how great a gift it had been to hold his father’s hand the moment of his father’s death.

                What got my attention was what Cooper then described: his father’s fear of death and unwillingness ever to mention death or talk about anything but getting on with life.  And, said Cooper, that was the way his dad had always been.  His dad also appears to have been a remarkably gentle and openly antiracist person.

                Recently, my mom, who will be 93 June 27, had the latest in a long series of strokes which has visibly paralyzed her right side.  Initially, it looked to me as though she might stop being able to swallow, and I made it known that she was not to be artificially sustained if she stopped eating or drinking.  The way I see it, the light of life in her body is dimming.  As so often before, she has rallied a bit.  Occasionally, she utters a “perfectly normal” short response to something I say, before her mind goes elsewhere.  This morning when I greeted her by asking how she was doing, she smiled gently and said, “I’m surviving.”

                Last week on impulse I stopped by to see her nursing home director, Kristine Provan, the one I join for weekly sing-alongs, to explain why I wanted no further therapy (including “occupational”) for my mom, and to thank her and the staff for giving her and me the gift of such a warm and loving place for her to die.  And I cried when I told Kristine that my mother had always been “scared to death of dying,” and now, in semi-lucid moments, had showed me she was scarcely afraid any more.  It happens that Kristine and I share kinds of a belief that the life in each of us is a concentration of energy that dissipates, goes somewhere else, as the bodily light dies out.  In the Kristine I harmonize with Thursday mornings on the sun porch, I was able to share my relief and release that my mother would die suffused with love rather than fear, confident that our lives have no beginning and do not end when our hearts stops beating forever.

                When I heard Bradley Cooper describe his father’s final fight with cancer, I saw where my theory of bodily life as organismic homeostasis leads me with respect to how I regard the prospect of cancer in myself.  Although I do not count the quantity of the life I enjoy in chronological units, I actually think my probability of surviving longer before cancer takes the life out of my body will increase if I leave internal tumors especially alone, and let the strength of my immune system take on that isolated target or targets.  I figure that trying to kill a tumor, whether by cutting it out, poisoning or incinerating it is another one of those wars that works like pouring water on a grease fire to put it out: It spreads.  Meanwhile, the “treatment” has so weakened the rest of the body that it can’t marshal nearly as much strength to surround or eat away at any of the new tumors that has been seeded, let alone get them all.  And so, when any of the cancer-causing agent has gotten out already in a tumor that is “treated,” the cancer is likely to have metastasized before long.  Meanwhile, instead of enjoying those extra years, if treated, I would largely be more miserable than if the care were simply palliative, and more active, and with less loss of immune response.

                What does “the evidence” say?  Nothing, because there is no control group I know of containing people like me whose cancer has been detected and has decided against interfering with the body’s own immune response.  I do know that a close friend of mine, the late Mike Andrews, a non-smoker, was diagnosed in his early 20s, at the Cleveland Clinic, with lung cancer, and decided to go elsewhere for a second opinion.  That took long enough that by the time he showed up for his new clinical workup, the cancer had disappeared.  Mike died some 30 years later of pancreatic cancer.  So frankly, if I skip checkups that might detect cancer in me “early” until I’m showing enough symptoms to seek treatment, no one can show me that my chances of extending my life by early detection and treatment are greater than if I one day go to get relief from a problem, and to my relief, discover that I have stage 4 cancer so that my family members won’t quarrel when I refuse “therapeutic” treatment.  Relieve my pain, let me just go out like my mom if I don’t just drop dead instead: lovingly cared for and cared about.  Thank you Bradley Cooper for enabling me to explain my death-defying attitude.  And thank you, Laurels of Worthington, for loving and caring so warmly and wonderfully for my mom.  Love and peace--hal