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One of the three lovely golf courses that bejewel our community is currently closed for renovations preceding some PGA event in the Fall. That is delightful because it means I need only step out the door to wander down paths that wind among ponds and streams, flowers and forests, and baronial homes – some of which actually remain within the limits of good taste. I am struck each morning by how breathtaking a golf course can be without the golfers. Herons, hawks, and rabbits all conspire to irritate the crows. Turtles flop about the ponds and yes, “Muskrat Suzie, Muskrat Sam, Do the jitterbug at a Muskrat Land” and then flee as my shadow crosses the bridge.
I suppose one might, therefore, find it a little strange that during this morning’s walk my thoughts turned to agoraphobia. While dictionaries will lead one into some splitting of hairs, all would agree that an agoraphobic would find my morning golf course ramble terrifying. Fear of open spaces, of social situations, fear of being out in the world, these all pop up in definitions of the condition. Perhaps my thoughts turned in that direction since agoraphobia is the existential opposite of universal resonance, and I was struck by how debilitating it would be to be trapped inside that perceptual reality.
The agoraphobic, I imagine, retreats into a home or a room because everything beyond the door is a manifestation of a “fearful otherness.” Universal resonance, quite to the contrary, informs us that we are in harmony with everything that surrounds us, that we need merely to open our eyes to recognize the symphony.
As the cart path winds behind one green, it passes a cutoff where some older equipment is stored – some good “rustique” methinks, for Dan Coyle, my oldest friend and fellow artist who fancies such things. Across the path, within hazard markers that foretell a future spraying with RoundUp, a resilient thicket of pokeweed reaches up knee high. Universal resonance finds a representational still life in this little slice of the world. Machinery, meticulously engineered and fabricated, spirals into decay in the still of the afternoon as the pokeweed thrives in that same neglect. Decay and renewal, for awhile, until the mechanics come along, refurbish the machines, which will then beat the weeds down to make way for the sculptured turf of the fairway. Decay and renewal. And I walk between, enjoying the smooth sway of my body, the machine that carries my chord, which will, itself, decay and renew until – finally exhausted - it will give up my chord to another renewal beside another fair way, as yet unknown. It is a peace utterly alien to the agoraphobic, and that realization casts a bit of a shadow on my ramble.
Still, I realize, bringing light to the shut-ins of the world is above my pay grade. It would be counter-productive for me to head back to school in the hope of, sometime in an uncertain future, hanging out my therapist’s shingle. Universal resonance asserts that we strive for a rational relationship between the mandate: foster harmony, enable beauty and oppose harm; and our own choices and abilities. I now accept that I write, I teach, I occasionally make art. I am interested in finding new pathways to share my efforts and the efforts of others. And that is how I best beat back the darkness; that is how I foster harmony, enable beauty and oppose harm. That, and of course rambling along . . . .
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