Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

The first monarch butterfly we’ve seen this year arrived yesterday morning, flitting about the weeping cup plants, reaching the end of their spectacular season. Unstated and unwatered, they have taken to flopping about a bit, another victim of my ennui with 2020 and shameful lack of tending to certain stalwart plants. I’ll be better to them next year, plan their stakes earlier, and cultivate their roots with more regular watering. For now, they have been good enough to perform without much care from my end. And yesterday they drew in our cherished monarch.

An undeniable signal of the end of summer, we used to see them on our fall visits to Ogunquit, happily pausing in their migration and swarming the cosmos and asters along the gardens by the Marginal Way. Beauty upon beauty upon beauty…

They know their light, waiting for the precise time of the year when the afternoon sun is at its most glorious, and the sky at its deepest blue. Then their stained-glass kaleidoscopic wing pattern lights up in breathtaking fashion, and their show steals the end of the summer season.

It is indeed a grand finale. 

May the show go on for a few more weeks at least…

The buzzing of a lawn mower. 

The buzzing of a leaf blower.

The buzzing of a motorcycle.

Such are the sounds of a summer day this year.

The buzzing of the cicadas was also there, joining in the summer song, and though they sounded from high in the trees, they were closer than all those other sounds. 

They haven’t been singing as much this year. Or maybe I simply didn’t notice them. During the long stretch of 90 degree days we had earlier in the summer, I mostly stayed indoors. Maybe the cicadas sang all their songs then. Now, with less than a week to go before September arrives, I listen to them singing on an afternoon overflowing with sun. 

It slants through the foliage of ferns and dogwood leaves, and it is already different than it was in July. Some of its potency has faded. When a cloud obscures it, the warmth instantly departs, unlike high summer, when it held on even through gray and overcast skies. Floating in the pool, I notice the air is cooler than the water. It’s the late August shift that sneaks in through the nights, finally starting to seep into the days. As seen in the browning tips of the ferns, there is no going back now, no way to return to the fresh green of an earlier time, the youth of a season. We have already lost that. 

Still, summer lingers. As the sun descends further, the angel’s trumpet begins its own song – a song of scent – and its sweet lemony perfume soon fills the poolside patio as its pendulous peach-colored blooms dangle high in the air. 

More buds are forming on its ever-expanding branches, further proof that summer has always insisted on staying through September. Since we got such a late start to having an open pool, we will take summer’s lead and keep it heated through October, savoring every last drop of sunshine shimmering on the water, drawing out the season for as long as possible. We will push fall deeper into winter, hoping to lessen the severity and duration of both. The angels are behind us. They will make it possible. 

The buzzing of the cicadas plays on. It is the soundtrack to summer, no matter how strange and upside-down the world feels.

Summer will have its say.

Summer will have its stay. 

The weekly recap is a day late due to yesterday’s birthday festivities, low-key though they may have been. So now, without any further ado, because we are all out of ado, here’s what went down in the previous week (and a day). 

It began with a batch of dill dip. 

Michelle Obama gave one of the most powerful speeches of my lifetime. 

A simple hard truth.

Don’t blame me for this fail; I tried to buy a pillow.

A gratuitous Hump Day post with some shirtless male celebrities. 

Fiery starbursts.

Do you like to swallow?

Moody summer days by the pool.

Some more sunbursts.

Tiny wisdom.

The blaring call of the angel’s trumpet.

Mock-up of a margarita.

A harlequin twenty years ago.

The drama of a summer caftan.

A trickster never returns, because a trickster never really leaves.

My 45th birthday. 

Birthday suit vintage.

Hunks of the Day included Bruno Alcantara, Glenn McCuen, Big Dipper, and Michael Yerger.

So what if nobody came? I’ll have all the ice cream and tea,

And I’ll laugh with myself, and I’ll dance with myself,

And I’ll sing, ‘Happy birthday to me!’ – Shel Silverstein

Behind the birthday-suited body in these sepia-shaded photographs from the distant past is the beginning of a Thuja ‘Steeplechase’ hedge which I planted in the early years of our home. Today, that group of shrubs towers above us, providing privacy and protection, and a home for birds. There are a lot of years in those Steeplechases. 

There are also a lot of years in this body, so I’ve been making some efforts to take better care of it, both the interior and the exterior. I’m even getting around to taking care of the ultra-interior. I’m not talking colonoscopy yet, but rather the inner-workings of the mind. Culling from the past – a past that finds its way to the surface on this day of all days – and the delicate observations that result, brings a certain peace after a certain tumult. It’s a similar feeling of relief and release that comes after a hard cry or tough argument. Maybe it’s the same sort of unburdening that comes after an entire year of living through one more spin around the sun. 

I’m expecting this 2020 birthday to be slightly shaded with melancholy. How could it not be given all that’s been happening in the world? To be honest, at some point in every birthday there is usually a moment tinged with contemplative somberness, a point at which I pause in mournful reverence. Birthdays have always been a strange combination of celebration and ending. Coinciding with the almost-end of summer, the end of summer vacation, and the end of another year on earth, they were a time of reflection, and because I was never one to enjoy big birthday parties and crowded birthday get-togethers, I often felt intentionally alone and quiet on this day. 

At 45 years of age, I am finally embracing that as my baseline and preference. It took all that time to be fully comfortable in my skin, to be ok with being quiet and reserved, to not being the star attraction or mirrorball around which the party revolves. That realization is a birthday gift of its own. 

It takes a long time to grow young. ~Pablo Picasso

Let’s not talk about birthdays in a time of a worldwide pandemic.

Let’s not talk about birthdays in the crazy-ass year of our Lord 2020.

Let’s not talk about birthdays in the way they suppress and bind us to a social-construct of age in carefully measured hours and days without care or concern for any measure of wisdom or grace or humility.

Instead, let’s talk about a birthday that arrives like the top of a mountain after a long journey. I thought I’d look around and be able to see the whole world from here, when in fact there’s so much fog I can barely see through to yesterday. More surprising is that above the fog line is not a clear vista, only more mountaintops, some even higher than the one I’ve spent months climbing. I can choose to do this all over again, to climb to higher points, or simply different points. I can also shatter the traditional paths and hop right onto a staircase of clouds, bouncing from bank to bank, only to find what looked so soft and solid and sure dissipate the closer I got to it.

Maybe I would step onto a gale and let it fling me into a cold rain.

Maybe I would grab a strike of lightning and all its jagged, angular energy.

Maybe I would hitch a ride on the rising sun, or latch onto the falling moon, or swing a lasso of stars to capture passage to another galaxy.

Or maybe I’ll simply stay where I am, at the end of a year’s journey around the sun, and the dawn of another trip around its orbit. It feels like I am standing in a very different place. A frightening place. An exhilarating place. A promising place. And a better place.

A place where I’m a little more sure of myself, and in ways that are genuinely healthier and more enjoyable than poses of the past. A place where I can admit the many ways I’ve been wrong, the ways I’ve been mistaken, the ways I’ve failed and faltered. A place where if I may not be able to fully embrace the imperfect, I can at least acknowledge and make motions to move toward embracing it. A place where I can work on forgiveness, and work on saying when I’m sorry.

This isn’t a place that’s fixed in any singular location or time, it occupies neither space nor history, and maybe that’s why I never got a glimpse of it until recently ~ and I’ve only had the briefest of glimpses. To be fair, I’m not even entirely sure of what exactly I’ve seen, but there is wisdom in that; knowledge of what you lack is always more important than knowledge of what you think you already have. 

In these last few months, when I’ve been more alone than ever ~ as we have all been ~ I realized the scary and liberating sense that we may have to be on our own, that being alone and finding solace in solitude is not only about survival, it’s about growth, about becoming something better, finding purpose, and finding meaning. Not everyone is going to understand or want to be a part of it. That’s ok. Love is sometimes about letting go, even of the people you thought would be with you for life. Because they will be ~ at least, they can be, if you allow it, if you learn how to hold them in your heart. If that means letting some of them go, that’s not necessarily an ending. And when you understand that, it’s less sad and sorrowful, and more of a reason to find the joy that remains. In some circumstances, a greater love will reveal itself, as the closer we get to truth and freedom, the closer we get to love.

Everybody wants a happy ending ~ and we seem to believe it’™s the ending part that is most important. We seek out some sort of definitive resolution, some finale that ties up all the loose ends and wraps everything up in a pretty bow. I think we have it backward ~ it’s the happy that should matter most, not the ending. At the ripe age of 45, I’m only beginning to find that happiness in those loose ends, in the unresolved tensions of a day, in the messy unfinished chaos that means we have another day to make everything better. It means that we are alive, that we are still here, still making mistakes in the muck. And it is a most beautiful muck…

Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears. ~ John Lennon

“My intention has been to write not simply about mythological tricksters, but also about the disruptive imagination and the art it gives us. The term “art” covers a lot of ground; what portion of that ground intersects with what tricksters do?” – Lewis Hyde, ‘Trickster Makes This World’

“From the point of view of his more settled neighbors, his aimlessness makes him an embodiment of uncertainty – no one knows when he’ll show up, or how he’ll break in, or what he’ll do once he has arrived. Not surprisingly, the stories exhibit some tension around this issue, for these more settled neighbors often tire of trickster’s disruptions and set out to bind or suppress him. That turns out not to be so easy, and to have unexpected consequences.” – Lewis Hyde, ‘Trickster Makes This World’

“Along with the revelation of plenitude, then, comes revelation of a complex, joint-working consciousness, one that can always find those corridors of humor, one that will play with any concept, no matter how serious it seems (play with shamanism, with the truth, with the apples of immortality), and one that can create new artifice if need be, that can turn to shaping when it tires of shifting.” – Lewis Hyde, ‘Trickster Makes This World’

“Complexity has been with us since the beginning of time, and a mind as supple as the skin of an octopus arose to work with it. In the last part of his prophecy, trickster reveals himself, for he is that mind. When a human mind recognizes what has been revealed, it is recognizing itself. The hunter finds two things at once when he finally sees the octopus hidden on the rock.” – Lewis Hyde, ‘Trickster Makes This World’ 

Twenty years ago, I was summering in Amsterdam, NY, preparing to return to Boston for the fall, and in the midst of creating ‘A Man of Mode’ – the cover of which is seen here. It’s a harlequin by Pablo Picasso, and it inspired the new project, which largely marked the end of the third-person documentary-like form of most of my projects since 1993. Magnificently sick of myself, I would begin diving into character-driven studies, where I could inhabit the soul and posture of other mostly-made-up people, trying on various guises, a man of shifting modes and endless masquerades. 

An artistic and creative outlet, my projects had always provided a means of analysis and self-introspection, but by 2000 I was looking for something more. I had just met Andy, and I could feel the realignment of priorities, the way love makes the world open up, lending a new kindness as well as a new danger. Turning 25, and having experienced a full quarter century of life, thinking I knew mostly everything, or at least more than most, I also had a deep understanding of the limits of my knowledge. Whenever I met someone slightly, or abundantly, older than me, I would invariably ask them the same thing: what do you know now that you wish you knew in your early twenties?

On the eve of turning 45, I think back to that almost-precocious query. How foolish I was to attribute wisdom to age, yet how rare for someone so young to seek out knowledge from the elders. The older I get the less I feel I know, and the more sure of that I get, the closer to wisdom I get as well. It’s one of the few tricks of the universe that is as pleasurable to discover as it is to practice, and the more you practice it, the more enjoyable life becomes. 

In the year 2000, when this photo was taken, I wasn’t ready for the lesson, even if someone I had asked explained it as plainly as possible. I’m afraid I’m not even explaining it well, and that too leads into something greater. For so many years I would invest such import and drama into being right, and knowing everything, that I’d almost miss the jewels of life that were hidden right in front of me. Luckily, enough of them forced themselves into my bumbling way that it was somewhat clear which way to head. That path was the goal, and despite whatever else I didn’t know, from the time of my childhood I understood that simple, if cliched, adage. 

These summer days of August, when the earth’s spot in its rotation around the sun enters the place where it was around my birth, I spin into a more contemplative space, this year perhaps a bit more-so than others, when we’ve all had a chance to be a little more quiet. 

From the fiery mouths of dragons…