Sometimes, you don’t really know what you know until you have to explain it to someone, and then you struggle to articulate what you’ve known for yourself in a way that makes sense to someone else. In so doing, one is forced to fill in the gaps, and what had been somewhat fuzzy becomes more clear.

Another approach is to observe the work of others and interpret it in a way that explains a process that could be used to achieve a similar result. Music critics analyze musical compositions by explaining the structure of a piece, which leads to the idea that the composer actually composed the music through that very process. That the composer used such a process might be news to the composer, but that the interpretation is valid on that level remains true. A songwriter can read such a critique and realize that, intuitively, he does the same thing, and in so doing, is among the best company.

Otherwise, a non-musical person who wants to compose music but doesn’t know how can read that critique and, being the right person to read that critique, being the person with the exact questions that have the exact answers in that critique, he’ll have the intuition that here is the process he’s been looking for.

How does one write a song? A baffling question, but, in fact, there is an answer. I have a little 25-cent booklet of daily Lent meditations I’ve read every Lent for decades, so some its wisdom is ingrained in my mind. “Try to catch yourself unawares,” it says. “How do your thoughts naturally run?” Sometimes you say something and think, “I should write that down!” The late Captain Beefheart would order his wife to write down things he said, even things apparently only he found profound.

Our minds are overrun with verbiage, with vowels that have their different sounds and frequencies, consonants that have their own percussive signatures. Phrases run through the head, one overhears conversations, always with beats and rhythms, sometimes with melodies, and the inner musician spots a line and declares, “That’s a song!”

“Where are you going?” “Where are” both are the same note, “you” is emphasized and is up a tone, and “going” is the lowest note in the line, with an emphatic character that communicates that the phrase is complete. Spoken, it has elements of melody. When one focuses on that, he can repeat the line four or so times, conscientiously singing it. You can sing it into your phone, so you don’t have to immediately, permanently remember it.

One remembers reviews of classical pieces in concert programs. A certain piece begins with a single note, or a sequence of two, three, four or more notes, in a certain key, on a certain instrument. Those notes are then played in other keys on other instruments, sometimes not all of the notes, sometimes with those notes used as the basis for a more complex series of notes. Perhaps one or two of the notes are singled out as the building blocks of alternative blocks of music. The gist is that one starts with a little thing, and conscientiously explores and works with that until a whole composition has been built. This is a process a musician can use.

Another process is to start with that one line one has seized upon, and recite that over and over in one’s mind until the next development in the piece naturally occurs. Sometimes this doesn’t work.

If one has a lyric, one can simply follow the practice of composing four lines for a verse. My problem has been that when I absent-mindedly come up with a line and proclaim that it’s a song, I’ll write out the whole verse, and three more verses, and all 16 lines have the same melody, in the same key. It’s a song, but instead of verses and a chorus, it’s just four choruses, and I’d rather have the verses too.

This is where the classical music concert programs come in handy. I can take my initial line of fourteen syllables and break the melody down into three segments: beginning, middle, end. One verse’s first line will work with the three notes in the middle of the melody, the second line works with the two notes at the beginning of the melody, the third line works with the four notes in the end of the melody, and the final line is, finally, the whole melody. In the second verse, I can start with the end, move to the beginning, go to the middle, and finish with the whole. In the third verse, I can begin with the whole, go to the middle, then to the beginning, then to the end. The listener gets glimpses of the whole, and the whole itself at some point in each verse, wondering all the while how the culmination of the melody will finally appear. To provide that catharsis, which the composer himself is the most anxious of all to achieve, the chorus will be the whole melody repeated with each of the four lines, but sung an octave higher.

What to do with the bass, guitar, and keyboards? They can follow the example of the singer, and play around with the elements of the melody, playing the notes in different combinations, in different keys, playing off what the other instruments are doing, taking turns playing different parts. As one rehearses it all in one’s head, certain elements will become predominant, and one can emphasize those. The different characters of the different instruments will suggest departures particular to that particular instrument.

It can all begin with a simple beat, a simple rhythm, a simple melody. Tinkering provides additional material, and the whole mind brings it all together into a finished song, and with a little help from one’s friends– the critics– the world gains a neat little tune about the pleasures of watching a beetle crawl across a sidewalk.

If we woke up someday and our pet chinchilla Qyx was gone, we’d know it was The Rapture. That was a joke in our family. But it wasn’t The Rapture that took Qyx– it was a buildup of gas, and she died during an extended stay at a veterinary clinic.
Somewhere between a goldfish and a dog is a chinchilla. A goldfish can be buried in the yard without a permanent memorial, and a dog or cat is too big for that. We wanted to bury Qyx in our yard with dignity and grace, as a beloved member of our family.
The question often arises about the spiritual status of animals. A common answer is that reincarnation explains the role of all life forms, human and non-human. If that’s the case, I’m fine with that, because if it is, God has decreed that it be so. I’m not threatened by the possibility that Christianity does not have all of the most correct answers. A “Tales Of The Hasidim” story relates that a wedding party was short one person, so they enlisted a poor passer-by. “So be it,” he said. After replying to every request with that answer, someone asked him why. He quoted the Scripture, “Blessed are the people with whom it is so.”
Do animals have souls? A Zen story has someone asking, “Does a dog have a Buddha nature?” In reply, the Zen Master said, “Mu!”
Asking a Catholic to explain a Zen concept is the same as asking a Zen adherent to explain a Catholic concept. I’ll simply say, hoping I’m not too far off the mark, that the Master was telling the student that there was an nswer to the question the student should have asked, but didn’t, and if he didn’t know the right question, he couldn’t tell him the question, or the answer, but, regardless, truth prevails.
Maybe the answer is that we share our souls with animals. Not literally, not metaphysically– simply to say, when a beloved pet dies, a part of us dies, too.
I dug a deep hole in our backyard in front of our big statue of Our Lady Of Guadalupe. (I found it by a Dumpster at our old condominium.) I sprinkled holy water in the hole, lit a candle in the lantern above Our Lady, and lit three long sticks of Vietnamese incense.
Aimee came outside after she put George to bed. We took Qyx out of the box she was in, out of the plastic bag she was in. It was our Qyx all right, eyes closed forever, our sweet, pure, innocent Qyx. I sprinkled holy water on her. We stroked and kissed her, shedding many tears. I played the song “Afterglow,” by Genesis, from “WInd & Wuthering.” After the song, I read the 4th day of creation from the book of Genesis, a passage from Ecclesiastes (“A time to mourn,” etc.) and the account of The Rapture from First Thessalonians. We said our final farewells, wrapped her up in a little red blanket, and lowered her into the ground. We sprinkled more holy water into the hole, and as we gently filled the hole, played two more songs from WInd & Wuthering: “Unquiet Slumbers For The Sleepers” and “In That Quiet Earth.”
Elaborate, yes, but befitting the love we have for our beloved companion of the last almost five years, and for those we love, nothing is too extravagant.
All life has dignity and honor as part of God’s creation, and all beings have dignity and honor. As Christians, we do well to remember that all life is dear to God, and we do well to prayerfully place our pets in His Hands, Who is aware when even a sparrow falls to the Earth. Who knows what might come of our prayers after God takes them into consideration? All things are possible.

Greetings, poetry lovers!

Here’s a poem I wrote during my family’s Easter weekend visit to the lodge at Longmire, Washington, up on a flank of Tahoma (Mount Rainier). Clumsy and ungainly, not really edited, but I’m not sure I want to change it all.

LONGMIRE

I belong with the trees

that I don’t come up to their knees

and I don’t give a toss

with my toes walking in the thick moss.

I find a branch for a walking stick–

that’s the kind of thing that makes me tick.

How I love to take walks

among glacial deposits of rocks.

When I hear a raven croak

I laugh at the private joke.

I hear the frogs call at dusk

by the pond that smells of sour musk.

What a noise the river makes!

My teeth chatter, my whole body aches.

Eye to eye with a cloud

and my heart beats loud.

“Adam named her Eve, because she was the mother of all the living.”

Maybe they didn’t entirely live happily ever after– Adam and Eve, Abel and Cain, all the way down to us– but that Genesis 3:20 line always gives me a warm feeling toward Eve. Adam and Eve made some mistakes, but who hasn’t? Why wouldn’t they have?

Easy for us to say they shouldn’t have made mistakes, but that’s always the case. We are hard on others who make mistakes, and hard on ourselves even when we think we might have made a mistake, fallen short somehow, disappointed our mothers.

I was thinking about my own mother a week ago, and realized that I can’t remember a single time, a single moment, when she really seemed happy.

When she was near death, one day in the hospital, broken down by emphysema, she took great pains to dress herself because she had gotten the idea that she was going home. She wasn’t. Maybe for a few moments, amidst the pain of trying to dress herself, she was happy, and that merely served to deepen her pain when she realized she’d been mistaken.

For some, happiness in life is always paid for in suffering. Things turn out bad, and one wishes he had never been happy at all because the cost was way too high. One looks askance at the happy, at happiness.

I saw a floral arrangement paid for by an endowment from the estate of a great society lady. The plaque reads that this lady was always surrounded by beauty. I can’t help but be reminded, by that, of all the others whose lives are surrrounded by anything and everything but that sort of “beauty.”

My mother wouldn’t have thought of herself as one of those people. She loved the ballet, The Man of La Mancha, Frank Sinatra, sports, gardening, cooking, traveling, beer, wine, and her children. She was loved by her friends and family, and cared deeply that her sons be raised as people of good character. We four went to Catholic grade schools and high schools.

Like herself, my mother’s own mother had not been lucky in family life.

Because of men, women suffer: that was a clear lesson in my life. And because of girls, boys suffer: a clear lesson of my younger days. But who runs away from wives and kids? Men. Who gets a trophy wife? A man. How often does one read about the homeless father and his kids? The rich woman who abandons her husband of decades for the college quarterback?

Mother’s Day was perfunctory in my life with my mother. It takes a long time before a person grows up and out of the self-absorption of youth sufficiently to have any insight into the experience of his parents. One might wish to go back and treat one’s parents differently after he’s lived long enough to have a deep appreciation of them as persons, on a personal level, but that’s the beauty of living as we do, as children of Eve, children of God.

A father looks at any child with the intuition that that little kid is the most precious kid in the world to a father who is much like himself. Older people of a certain age– the mothers, the fathers. If they are not, maybe they are those one would never describe as always being surrounded by beauty.

Brothers, sisters, cousins, mothers, fathers, children: all of us are sons and daughters. In this life, of our own mothers; in history, Eve’s children; in eternity, God’s own.

“In Heaven, volunteers will be seated on couches, and others will cater to their wants and desires while the volunteers relax and enjoy themselves.”

Years ago, in the kitchen of a local church, I saw a poster that said something like that. Whoever wrote that didn’t understand volunteers! Volunteer work isn’t always a means to an end– more often, it’s an end in itself.

People want to be useful. People want to use their talents, skills, and resources effectively. We want our enthusiasm and good intentions channeled constructively.

“Enter through the narrow door,” Jesus said. I think He was referring to the small, simple door used by servants who are in a place to work there. Family and guests have the nice door. The servant just needs to get inside and get busy.

Not everybody wants to use that door. Not everybody wants to be defined by their actions, but if someone honestly endeavors to do his best, he has the consolation of knowing he’s done what has been so often encouraged by Therese of Lisieux, John a Kempis, and countless others of all walks of life.

The Feast of St. Joseph The Worker is still new to the Catholic Church. A Catholic is long used to hearing how Christmas and Easter are versions of pagan holidays, so to see the church conspicuously take that exact approach to May Day is heartwarming.

St. Joseph was a carpenter, and a family man. When angels appeared in his dreams and told him what was really happening with Mary, he accepted it and worked with it. He took a clear look at the circumstances of his life and accepted them as the tools he would work with: a wife, pregnant with a baby he did not father. That they were his responsibility was the demanding work of his life. He had to get his family to Bethlehem for the census. When the life of the child Jesus was threatened, he kept them safe. That was the work of his life, along with carpentry.

Most every type of social cause is welcome at a May Day parade. People understand that labor is work, and every type of constructive social and political activity is work. Social justice is ongoing hard work.

“Labor” is toil. The unfortunate get sentenced to years of hard labor. “Work” is the constructive use of one’s time.

Much of life can be labor. One can work at a job he has no love for, that he must have to obtain the necessary means of shelter and sustenance. In that everyday struggle, one has the opportunity to work at one’s character.

Pope Francis recently described the “concrete, humble, lowly service” of St. Joseph. I read that as a splash of cold water in the face, because so much of my workplace work is of a concrete, humble, lowly nature. In the context of the economy and the workplace, it’s often nothing more than toil.

But life is complicated, and the story of how I wound up doing what I’ve so long done is a long story.

Life includes the option that one can make of one’s life what he will. My job in this work, with my jobs, with all my activities, is to somehow interpret all the circumstances and responsibilities in the most enlightened manner possible, so that I see the drudgery of life not as mere drudgery, but as opportunities to put my highest values– compassion, honesty, empathy, justice, fair play– uniquely and creatively into practice, and so transform the drudgery into positive, rewarding work.

We all come into this world through that narrow door, and in all the labor and work we do, we continually work on being better people and building a better world, even if it has to be one menial, otherwise pointless, task at a time.