Be Here Now

Eckhart Tolle says,

A vital question to ask yourself frequently is:  What is my relationship with the present moment?  Then become alert to find out the answer.  Am I treating the Now as no more than a means to an end?  Do I see it as an obstacle?  Am I making it into an enemy?  Since the present moment is all you ever have, since Life is inseparable from the Now, what the question really means is:  What is my relationship with Life?

Try Awe!

I am intrigued by this report on the benefits of awe.

People increasingly report feeling time-starved, which exacts a toll on health and well-being," states the study. Using three experiments, researchers Melanie Rudd and Jennifer Aaker of the Stanford University, and Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota, examined whether awe can expand perceptions of time availability. They found that participants "who felt awe, relative to other emotions, felt they had more time available, were less impatient, were more willing to volunteer their time to help others, and more strongly preferred experiences over material goods.

Another idea originating at The Dish.

We are here...

From Annie Dillard:

We are here to abet creation and to witness it, to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but we notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house.

Developing Empathy

I spend about eight years of my life waiting tables, and there was much I liked about the job.  I grew up before sports was promoted for women, so waitressing seemed like my first athletic success.  Also, when the restaurant got really busy, being in the present moment was the only possibility.  Worries, if only for the shift, disappeared.  When I’m at a restaurant with someone who gives rude orders to the staff, I assume they have never waited tables.  I sometimes think everybody should have a turn as wait-staff.

Everybody Dies

Recently, Andrew Sullivan reported on his blog that he had the flu and was dividing his time between writing and shitting.  I like Sullivan, but I filed this under too-much-information.

I understand it better today.  Yesterday, I had a colonoscopy.  I had a lot of time to consider my colon, its function, and its products.  First there was the “prep.”  Then there was procedure itself and the many kind people at the clinic who were concerned with my comfort but also concerned that  my prep had produced a “clean” colon.

Complaining, Cont'd

Everything I've written about complaining and its lack of usefulness feels true.  Now I have this heightened sensitivity to my own complains (which are often silent).  So I am now—after all these years—surprised at how unbidden my complaints are—surprised sometimes at the self-righteous pleasure they can provide—amused at how often I complain about the complaints of others.

When I began practicing meditation, it seems I was always hearing, “You are not your thoughts.”  Thank goodness for that.

How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?

I have posted statistics before from the above named website.  The answer to that question today is 11,449.  But now the Slate sponsors of this site discuss why their numbers are not accurate.  Their statistics report on gun deaths reported in the media.  Suicides are not usually reported in the media and have therefore been missing from Slate’s numbers.  They estimate their chart is missing 20,000 gun deaths.

Truth and Reconciliation

In an interesting article at the Daily Beast, Peter Beinart criticizes the American media for focusing on Nelson Mandela’s capacity for forgiveness while ignoring his insistence that those guilty needed to acknowledge that guilt in the process called Truth and Reconciliation.  Deinart quotes Bishop Desmond Tutu who says,

True reconciliation exposes the awfulness, the abuse, the hurt, the truth…because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.

It seems there is something important in this for the United States. It also seems an appropriate addendum to the racial history explored in 12 Years a Slave. I recommend Beinart’s entire article.

12 Years a Slave

I saw 12 Years a Slave two nights ago.  I was reluctant to see what I had heard was a difficult film to view.  It was that.  But I walked out of the theater feeling as if I had seen an explanation for much of the craziness that exists even now in this country.  Slaves were brutalized by their “owners.”  And the owners may have gotten rich from slave labor, but they were not made happy.  The movie made it clear that trying to own another human being was a constant stress, and while the master might control the slave’s behavior, he could not own the person.  So all lived in painful insanity.  And we live with the legacy of that insanity still today.

There is a way that I knew most of the facts contained in the film.  However, the film conveyed the tension between slave and master in such a way, that I left thinking, yes, that’s how it would have to have been.  There was a visceral understanding of what was before mostly intellectual.  Before the movie, I picked up the idea that I needed to see this movie to understand something important about my country.  I believe this is true and highly recommend this movie.

The review from the Guardian is here.  If you live near Three Oaks, Michigan, you have until December 15 to see this film at The Vickers.

The Dark Side of My Computer

I stopped downtown yesterday at a computer repair shop to see if anything could be done to make my laptop operate more reliably. 

The short answer was no.

The long answer was something like this:

• Computers are complicated machines, and they don’t last forever.  (Even can openers don’t last forever.)
• One day your computer will shut down and you won’t be able to get your documents back.  This can happen with a new computer too.
• If you don’t like this, you can use a typewriter.
• Save.

Complaining, cont'd

“Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself.”  A week ago, I posted this quotation from Eckhart Tolle.  This idea has been on my mind for a few weeks now, and I’ve been noticing my little complaints, noticing how they cut me off from others, even if only a little bit.  Paying attention to the mind is interesting.  So often, these complaints come to me unbidden, and often, they produce a certain kind of self-righteous enjoyment.

Tolle distinguishes between complaining and informing someone of a mistake that can be made right.

Tee Shirt Trivia

I heard this interesting fact this morning on Morning Edition:  It takes six miles of yarn (what we call thread) to make a simple tee shirt.  (More here)

Sad Numbers

Here’s a sad statistic from Paul Krugman:

Despite the lingering effects of the financial crisis, America is a much richer country than it was 40 years ago. But the inflation-adjusted wages of nonsupervisory workers in retail trade — who weren’t particularly well paid to begin with — have fallen almost 30 percent since 1973. 

Pumpkin Pie

The quotation below is from Ryan O’Hanlon in his article “In Praise of Pumpkin Pie:”

Without pumpkin pie, there would be no reason to continue with this elegiac revisionist-historical sham that is Thanksgiving. Without it, we’re left with bland, unfrozen white meat that always looks better than it tastes, an excuse to not actually bake bread, mashed potatoes (which are actually pretty good, I’ll admit), and continued suppression of what happened to the Native Americans after the first meal was over.

 Yesterday I posted a passage from Eckhart Tolle on the problem with complaining.  And for some reason, I love O’Hanlon’s complaint.  Maybe it’s the humor.

The One Day

This is a nice meditation on gratefulness and appreciating the present moment.

Who me...complain?

Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself.

I know I read this line by Eckhart Tolle (in A New Earth) years ago. I read it again a few weeks ago and this time it has been hanging on.  I’ve started noticing my complaints and how, when I pay attention, I can feel the wall they create that separates me from something, often a person who has inspired my complaining.  I am fascinated by the prevalence of complaining and some of the trivial things that inspire it.  This awareness has lessened slightly my complaining mind.  Sometimes I laugh at the things I complain about.  I am curious about the nature and value, if any, of this addicting habit.

 

Song of the Week

Remembering History

Last night, I entertained eleven friends with dinner at my house.  It only seemed natural to go around the table and see what everybody was doing 50 years ago on November 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot.  Ten of us were in school at various levels, one was beyond school and working, and one of the women, Elena, was not yet born in 1963.  The stories were pretty standard except that three of these people were immigrants.  Deeb was in Bethlehem at the time, and he remembers one of the teachers running into the room with the news.  Ian was born in Scotland.  His memories didn’t mesh with the times he was getting from those of us from the states, so he questioned the accuracy of his memories. 

Fifty years ago today and I am speechless, reduced to clichés.  We were clustered around our one television set pondering the power of one second to change what we knew.

This quotation comes from a review in The Economist of Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing by Lynne Segal. 

“The great secret that all old people share,” observed Doris Lessing, a Nobel prize-winning author, at 73, is that “your body changes, but you don’t change at all.” The effect is confusing, she explained—no less so, surely, now that she is 94 [until her death two days ago]. Old age often brings loneliness and sadness, but also a greater appreciation of the transience of all things—a thought that can be moving, not just depressing.  

Dreamy. Soothing. Knitting?

The Dish posted this quotation form Jenny Diski’s longarticle on knitting.  As someone who meditates and goes to the gym, I was interested in her comparisons.  Maybe when I have time, I’ll read her whole article.  Maybe I'll finish knitting the scarf I started two years ago.

As everyone says who knits, there is a dreamy, calming pleasure to knitting. You want to do more. The edges of anxiety are rounded off, you can feel the drip of endorphins soothing the rat in the solar plexus. Needles clicking, mind half on the pattern, half drifting. People liken it to meditation and gym work. I’ve done both, and it’s true. Trancelike sometimes. That simple repetitive work with the hands has a tranquillising effect is not a new insight, but it does work.

Song of the Week

I remember a few years ago it seemed that everywhere I turned, I would hear Pachelbel Canon.  Now it's been years since I heard it.  Until yesterday.  I was writing in my notebook at the Main Street Coffee house.  This place was full of conversation and rattling dishes.  And then, under all the other noise, I heard it, as if it was playing secretly.  Sweet.

Writing My Heart Out

On October 31, I wrote that November is National Novel Writing Month.  The challenge is to write a 50,000-word novel during the month of November.  That’s short as novels go, but it’s a lot to do in a month.  So far I’m on schedule.  Last Sunday was very busy but I was a few hundred words ahead so I caught up in a couple of days. 

This has been a surprisingly energizing project.  That’s one reason I like it.  The other reason is surprises.  On Tuesday, my protagonist, during a phone call to his girlfriend, asked her to marry him.  I didn’t see it coming, but it felt right.

Most of us have experienced getting lost in a novel.  It’s even more intense when the novel you get lost in is one you are writing.

I’ve passed the halfway mark.  But I still don’t know if I’ll be writing on November 30.  Mostly, I just take it one day at a time.

And you say you never win anything...

I have often contemplated the amazing coincidences that led to my birth, so I was delighted to read this by Tim Maudlin. 

It can be unsettling to contemplate the unlikely nature of your own existence, to work backward causally and discover the chain of blind luck that landed you in front of your computer screen, or your mobile, or wherever it is that you are reading these words. For you to exist at all, your parents had to meet, and that alone involved quite a lot of chance and coincidence. If your mother hadn’t decided to take that calculus class, or if her parents had decided to live in another town, then perhaps your parents never would have encountered one another. But that is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg. Even if your parents made a deliberate decision to have a child, the odds of your particular sperm finding your particular egg are one in several billion. The same goes for both your parents, who had to exist in order for you to exist, and so already, after just two generations, we are up to one chance in 10²⁷. Carrying on in this way, your chance of existing, given the general state of the universe even a few centuries ago, was almost infinitesimally small. You and I and every other human being are the products of chance, and came into existence against very long odds.

I'm glad I made it through the odds.  I'm enjoying this life.  But if I hadn't been born, I wouldn't have minded would I?

Sunday Song (on Monday): Nourishing the Corny Side

Fall Back and Spring Forward

For years, my state of Indiana in the Eastern Time Zone stayed on the same time all year round.  Here in South Bend, during the summer, we were in the same zone as our Central Time Zone neighbors in Chicago, and in the winter, we were in the same zone as our Michigan Eastern time zone neighbors.  In 2006, we adopted daylight savings time, and it is still a subject of controversy.  So, Sunday, setting back my clock, I thought of it as a futile attempt to have more daylight when there is only so much daylight to have.  Whether you like to have the extra daylight in morning or evening seems more a matter of preference than anything else. Personally, I liked it when we didn’t change, but I was surprised that, when we switched to Daylight Savings Time, I also like summer nights where daylight lasted until 9:30 PM.

Allison Schrager has a different kind of proposal to what seems these days like sacred dogma:

This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. After that we won’t change our clocks again—no more daylight saving. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States. The east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. Anyone who lives on one coast and does business with the other can imagine the uncountable benefits of living in a two-time-zone nation (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).

I think I could like it.

(Another blog idea from the Dish.  The history of time in Indiana here.)

Resisting Obamacare

I can’t resist this powerful, partisan, political commentary from Michael Tomasky:

Someone I know asked the other day: Has there ever been a law in the history of the country as aggressively resisted by the political opposition as this? Republicans didn’t do this with Social Security. Most of them voted for Social Security. They didn’t do it with Medicare. They, and the Southern racists who were then Democrats, didn’t do it with civil rights. There was a fair amount of on-the-ground opposition to that, but it wasn’t orchestrated at the national level like this was. And when the Voting Rights Act was passed the year after civil rights, Southern states in fact fell in line quickly. Check the black voter-registration figures from Southern states in 1964 versus 1966. It’s pretty amazing. 

No, to find obstinacy like this, you have to go back, yes, to the pre-Civil War era. The tariff of 1828, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which led to the civil war in “Bloody Kansas” and ultimately to the Civil War itself. Not  comforting thought. But it’s where we are.

(Thanks Sullydish) 

Sunday Song: Selfish Jean

I am rereading parts of The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.  I was Googling for a review and came upon this song, “Selfish Jean,” which, under the circumstances, I love.  And the video is pretty entertaining too.

Another Well-Known Poet Writes Poems about Dogs

This morning while driving my car, I heard Billy Collins read the second poem on this video.  Collins has a nice voice;  the poem was a surprise.

What's your sign?

I’m not a horoscope person, not unless the horoscope is from Bob Brezsny’s Freewill Astrology.  And of course, at best, my Freewill Astrology horoscope could fit anyone with sort of a goofy wisdom.  So here’s my Libra horoscope for this week:  

What do you think you'd be like if you were among the one-percent-wealthiest people on Earth? Would you demand that your government raise your taxes so you could contribute more to our collective well-being? Would you live simply and cheaply so you'd have more money to donate to charities and other worthy causes? This Halloween season, I suggest you play around with fantasies like that -- maybe even masquerade as an incredibly rich philanthropist who doles out cash and gifts everywhere you go. At the very least, imagine what it would be like if you had everything you needed and felt so grateful you shared your abundance freely. 

I like it. 

Becoming a Parent

Alexis Madrigal has this reflection as he looks at his newborn son: 

 I feel, like a newborn, unsure when to eat, in-and-out of the dream world, and as likely to provide a coherent answer about fatherhood as my little boy is when we ask, "Why are you the most beautiful thing on Earth?" 

Start writing a novel tomorrow.

In 2011, I wrote a novel during the month of November.  Was it a finished product on November 30?  No.  Heck no.  Was it good?  Probably not.  But for the most part, it was an enjoyable experience, and I learned as much about writing as I’ve ever learned in a writing course.  I wish I had done this twenty years ago.

The incentive to do this was the National Novel Writing Month project found at NaNoWriMo.org.  They describe their project like this: 

National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing. On November 1, participants begin working towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 p.m. on November 30. Valuing enthusiasm, determination, and a deadline, NaNoWriMo is for anyone who has ever thought fleetingly about writing a novel. 

Futile Votes?

I write my house representative and she writes back pretty much ignoring what I’ve asked her about. Her way is not my way. I think of that letter as one of the many futile votes I’ve cast in my life.  But sometimes I imagine a conversation with my senator or house representative.  “How do you balance it?” I would ask.  “Your constituents want opposing things.  You run on a certain platform and then you get a ton of mail requesting the opposite.  What is your obligation?”

Jamelle Bouie writes today at The Daily Beast about the job of a legislature: 

"Evil" by Langston Hughes

Looks like what drives me crazy
Don't have no effect on you--
But I'm gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.

Hooked on Classics, Sunday Music

For my birthday last month, I received a CD mix from my daughter.  One of the selections was parts 1 and 2 from Hooked on Classics.  We listened to this at some point when she was growing up, and listening again was wordless emotional travel though time.  It's also kind of cool as are these accompanying pictures.  

12 Years a Slave

I've been reading and listening to discussion about this film.  Terry Gross interviewed Steve McQueen who explained why he wanted to make the movie:

[My wife] found this book called 12 Years a Slave, and I read this book, and I was totally stunned. It was like a bolt coming out of the sky; at the same time I was pretty upset with myself that I didn't know this book. ... Slowly but surely I realized that most people, in fact all the people I knew did not know this book. I live in Amsterdam where Anne Frank is a national hero. She's not just a national hero, she's a world hero, and for me this book read like Anne Frank's diary but written 97 years before — a firsthand account of slavery. I basically made it my passion to make this book into a film.

Gross interviews the historian David Blight who says,

[I]t's important for Americans to remember this history…because, to be quite blunt about it, most Americans want their history to be essentially progressive and triumphal, they want it to be a pleasing story. And if you go back to this story, it's not always going to please you, but it's a story you have to work through to find your way to something more redemptive.

Leonard Pitts says, “The film is not just brilliant. It’s necessary."

I don’t, for the most part watch violent movies, and from what I hear, this film will be painful to watch. Has anybody seen it?  What did you think?

This too shall pass.

Progress Happens in Unpredictable Ways

Here's the New Republic on the death penalty: 

Thirty-two states retain the death penalty in the U.S., but a new obstacle is making it increasingly difficult for them to carry it out. Pharmaceutical companies are taking a moral stand. The manufacturers of the drugs required by state departments of corrections for executions are saying they will not allow their products to be employed in this way. Manufacturers in the UK, US, Denmark, Israel, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and India have taken steps to prevent their drugs being used in executions.

This has had an astonishing effect. Shortages of lethal injection drugs and attendant litigation have resulted in moratoria—an official halting of executions—in Arkansas, California, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, and Tennessee. 

I notice Texas and my state, Indiana, are not on this list of states halting executions.  The New Republic article describes some of the crazy strategies Texas uses to obtain drugs for execution. Still, from my view, this is progress from an unexpected source.

Etc., Etc., Etc

On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza killed 20 students and 6 staff members at Sandy Hook elementary school.  Like many who learned of this tragedy, I was stunned and began reading a lot of articles about gun policy in the U. S.  I was reading so much, I decided to reactivate my blog and start posting some of the things I was learning.  I wrote eleven posts in December, seven about gun policy.  Looking back at January and February, I can see I had already mostly stopped writing about guns.  I guess there’s only so much one can say, but there is also a feeling that I’ve just given up.  I joined two groups, Moms Demand Action and Americans for Responsible Solutions and sent them donations.  I’ve sent letters to my representatives and read their lame replies about how they support the second amendment.

Everyday, guns kill people, often in suicides that don’t make the news or statistics.  Today, there was another shooting in a middle school, another reminder to grieve and send letters to my legislatures.

Late last December, I posted the question, how many people have been killed by guns since Newtown?  The answer was 160.  Today, the answer to that question is 9,675.  What's next?

We all need a pep talk...

This Sunday song/video is schmaltzy, cute, SWEET, and contains a hopeful message.  Please click.

From Maya Angelou

Seek Patience

Seek patience
and passion
in equal amounts.

Patience alone
will not build the temple.

Passion alone
will destroy its walls.

(Thanks to Chip)

Humbling Thoughts

I keeping thinking that I’ll write a post on why Ta-Nehisi Coates is my favorite writer, but so far, I can’t do him justice.  This recent passage below, however, is one of my reasons.  

It is not enough to know that you are the descendant of slaves--you should also understand how easily you could have been the slave-master. You don't read George Fitzhugh to assure yourself that there is evil in the world. Auschwitz is all around us. Auschwitz is alive and well and living in your noble heart. The existence of evil is the premise. The discussion must proceed from there.  

Years ago, when I was reading Slaves in the Family by Edward Ball, I realized that if I had been a southerner in 1830, I too might have thought slavery was natural and right.  It was, in a way, a life-changing thought.  Coates says history “is sometimes rage-inducing. But in the end it should be humbling.”  Yes.

What You Probably Already Know

Standard & Poor’s estimated that the shutdown of the government cost the economy around twenty-four billion dollars.

A Community Creation

Yesterday I finally joined the painters at the Michigan Street Bridge project (South Bend, IN).  It is touching how much community involvement has helped to make this project happen.  Close to a thousand people have helped paint. The design incorporates a number of South Bend landmarks into a semi-abstract design.  Designer Chris Stacowicz says, it's s"like visual hip-hop of the different spaces...”  

  

Stacowicz is pleased that this project is funded without any tax dollars.  The project is supported by the Community Foundation, Memorial Hospital, Outpost Sports, Home Depot, Behr Paint, YMCA, The Center for the Homeless, and others.  Companies like Slatile Roofing and Casteel Construction have provided scaffolding and other needed apparatus. In the picture above, we’re eating a lunch donated by Subway.  Other local restaurants donate food on other days.   

The project will be finished soon.  Read more about it here and here.  Picture by Kathy P.

Committee Members and Tomatoes

Recently I did some committee work with a woman who seemed to have a negative comment and prediction about everything.  It didn’t take long before her comments began to irritate me.  In a small way, they became painful.  Then I felt bad about my thoughts, and that “You’re too judgmental recording,” started playing.  I managed to stop myself from doing a little internal rant about her personality deficiencies. 

Later I thought about tomatoes.  I really don’t like the taste of raw tomatoes.  It’s not a judgment; to me, they’re just icky!  The tomatoes themselves are innocent, and I love the role they play in pasta, pizza, and chili, but the taste and texture of raw tomatoes make me gag.

Children Should Play

When I was a child in the 1950s, my friends and I had two educations. We had school (which was not the big deal it is today), and we also had what I call a hunter-gather education. We played in mixed-age neighbourhood groups almost every day after school, often until dark. We played all weekend and all summer long. We had time to explore in all sorts of ways, and also time to become bored and figure out how to overcome boredom, time to get into trouble and find our way out of it, time to daydream, time to immerse ourselves in hobbies, and time to read comics and whatever else we wanted to read rather than the books assigned to us. What I learnt in my hunter-gatherer education has been far more valuable to my adult life than what I learnt in school, and I think others in my age group would say the same if they took time to think about it. 

My Values Are Better than Your Values!, cont.

A man I was once close to said to me, “I know I’m right; I’ve thought about his.”  I didn’t have it in me to laugh, but this statement had a humorous side.  He implied that only he thought about things when of course, I had thought about it too and arrived at a different conclusion.

My Values Are Better than Your Values!

Yesterday I wrote about my frustration with the Republican Party and the government shutdown.  Today I return to a question I have asked before:  Can we be peaceful and loving people and still care about the politics of our country?  Ann Lamott writes this today: 

[My family] felt, and taught, that our family was better than other families, because we had gorgeous classical and jazz on the hi-fi, and worshipped at church of Julia Child, and the New Yorker Holiness Temple. I knew how to unpack a New Yorker cartoon by the age of six. We knew enough to hike, and support the Sierra Club. My Uncle Rex famously rolled down his car window and shouter "Litterer!" at people in the early sixties who tossed stuff out the windows as they drove. Being a Litterer was right up there with being KKK, or the pre-curser of the modern Tea Party, the John Birch Society…

We were better than all of them, because of our values, which were obviously the correct values to hold. Otherwise, we would have had other values. 

I can relate to this, and I know it is flawed.  I’m not sure how to handle politics, but the above is a good reminder that most everyone thinks they have the correct values.  Otherwise, we would have other values.

Music and Dance

Here’s another borrowed idea from Andrew Sullivan’s site.  The acrobatics in this video are amazing.  The rap, ok.

All Parties Are Not to Blame

Can I burn down your house?

No

Just the 2nd floor?

 No Garage?

No

Let's talk about what I can burn down.

No

YOU AREN'T COMPROMISING!

I think the source of this little dialogue is Judd Legume of Mother Jones Magazine.

Here Jim Fallows gives two reasons why this problem is so limited in it’s causes: 

The Price of a Shutdown

From Brad Plummer:

In a research note Tuesday, J.P. Morgan analysts estimated that federal furloughs will reduce national income by a total of $1.3 billion per week. As a result, the shutdown could shave 0.12 percent off fourth quarter GDP growth for each week it goes on. That forecast doesn’t account for any knock-on effects on the private sector or dent in economic confidence which are harder to quantify.

I wish I had something original to say about this shutdown, but I don’t.  I sent the passage above to my House representative this morning.

Stop Complaining

Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself.  Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in….Resentment is the emotion that goes with complaining and the mental labeling of people adds even more energy to the ego…. Complaining is not to be confused with informing someone of a mistake or deficiency so that it can be put right.  (Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth) 

This passage seems appropriate for a day when the government has been shut down, but separating the two—feeding the ego and putting things right—is no easy job.

Rocky Goes Out for a Morning Run

I don’t want to think about how long ago it was that I watched this scene from Rocky 2--almost another life.  Last week, Andrew Sullivan posted this clip on his blog.  My first response was amusement.  Would such a corny scene work in 2013?  My second response was a sort of automatic emotional feeling.  I found myself being moved by the combination of music and effort.  My emotions seem to have an inconsistent mind of their own.  

Can we have peace in our hearts and still care about politics and what it stands for?

Kindness Matters

Two weeks ago I was returning home after twelve days in Scotland.  My first stop in the U.S. was Philadelphia.  So tiring and tedious, one curling line after another.  The good part was, all of the people who directed me through these lines, examined my passport, and patted me down, all were friendly and polite.  My favorite was the guy who looked at my passport, looked up at me, smiled,  and said, “Somebody’s having a birthday soon; Happy Birthday!”  I’ve thought of these people more than once, especially the Happy-Birthday-guy.  Human kindness does make a difference.  Today’s my birthday.  Wish I could thank that nice guy in Philadelphia.

Belief Is the Enemy of Faith

From the magazine UUWorld: 

The good news is that people, at least in the developed world, are rejecting cultural and religious exceptionalism. By religious exceptionalism I mean the conviction that my religion possesses the truth and, by extension, yours is false. When I grew up I was taught that religion was about what we believed. What made my denomination different (and correct, of course) was our sound doctrine. We were right. This made religion too much about being right, about us and them. Too much attention then goes into defending our beliefs.

I am now convinced that “belief,” in the way we usually use the word, is actually the enemy of faith, religion, and spirituality…. When we dwell on beliefs we ask all the wrong questions. My faith is much more about what I love than about what I think.

Vote for "Obamacare"

“… the right has dominated the Obamacare public debate through blunt rhetorical force,” says Jonathan Chait.  While mainstream health analysis publications are cautiously optimistic about the benefits of the bill, realizing they cannot predict the future, a large group of conservatives express no doubt as to their predictions.  Chait worries that these doomsday predictions of the right may contribute to its failure. He says, "The predictions of a train wreck are intended to precipitate one."

 To me, this extreme effort to repeal the Affordable Healthcare Act seems like a repudiation of democracy.  I have written my house representative and requested she drop this obsession and move on to more creative governing endeavors.  I don’t have high expectations for this, but I believe in voting, even when I think my candidate or issue will lose. 

 It’s easy to contact your representative. Google their names and go to their gov website. Usually they have a “contact me” option. Write a few sentences and click send.  That’s it—interesting how long I can procrastinate dong such an easy little thing.

Not Prepared

Ian Leslie writes about our understanding of privacy for the online magazine aeon.  He describes one study conducted by George Loewenstein where college students were asked to make choices about their privacy online.  Leslie says, 

The students were using their instincts about privacy, and their instincts proved to be deeply wayward. ‘Thinking about online privacy doesn’t come naturally to us,’ Loewenstein told me when I spoke to him on the phone. "Nothing in our evolution or culture has equipped us to deal with it."

Adam Gopnik continues to speak eloquently about the problems of guns in the U.S. He points out that in this latest mass shooting the people in the building were not schoolteachers but trained members of the military, many of them armed. The main point of his piece however, is despair.  He believes we will eventually come around to policies that will reduce this violence.  Read his entire piece.  

Hello

It was my first morning in Edinburgh.  I was standing on the balcony outside our rooms when I saw an official looking building flying three flags: the UK flag, the Scotland flag, and…and…a white flag with black letters spelling “Hello.”

It got my attention, but I had no idea how such a strange grouping of flags came about.  During our stay in Edinburgh, I continued to see the Hello-flag flying atop buildings.  It was an enjoyable curiosity.

Today, back in the U.S., I Googled it and discovered it was to welcome visitors to the annual arts festival.  The flag was the idea of Peter Liversidge who specializes in performance art. There was something cute as well as goofy about that flag. It was an incongruous and sweet welcome to my first full day in Scotland and a light-hearted memory to store with the incredible dramatic scenery of the Scottish countryside.

Not Again!

It has happened again—another mass shooting in the United States. There are many other shootings as well, single deaths that don’t make national headlines.  Just a few days ago, the South Bend Tribune, reported the death of three-year-old as the result of a game being played between the mother’s boyfriend and the child.  The boyfriend forgot the gun was loaded.

From time to time, I look at the Slate site’s, “How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?”  The answer as of September 16 was 8,259. I don’t know whether or not that includes the latest spree.

Yesterday David Frum posted the following: 

Resonance

Some friends of mine from here in South Bend attended the 2014 Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky, and found themselves listening to Eboo Patel, a Muslim from India, tell this story about an experience he had at a Catholic University in South Bend, Indiana. 

That's an important phrase in my life. Look for the resonances. It was actually formative in my own development as an interfaith leader. It's something that my father told me when I was really just a boy. My family is in this country because a Catholic University in Indiana, Notre Dame, allowed a somewhat wayward Indian Muslim student into their MBA program in the mid-1970s. That man would be my father.

Coming Home

I arrived home last night after two weeks in Scotland.  Nine of those days were spent hiking.  Getting to Scotland, coming home—tiresome and tedious.  Being there—beautiful and wonderful.

A few posts down I quoted Pico Iyer saying, 

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate….And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. 

He also says, 

[F]or me the first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle. 

If I could write like Pico Iyer, I might be truly able to describe what this trip meant.  Scotland is not a country with a different language—not too different anyway.  The culture is much the same as here.  But the landscape is so much more dramatic than Indiana.  I would round a corner or step up higher on the trail and enter a scene that would stop me in my tracks.  Now, back home again, this world seems new and fresh.  Wonderful trip; good to be home.

Music for Sunday, "Loch Loman" on Bagpipe

Many of these scenes in this video look very familiar to me now--one I think even shows the foot path of the West Highland Way.  I discovered that there a lot of theories as to the meaning of this song.  One common interpretation is that the singer is going to die because of Jacobite uprising in 1745 (a bit of history I haven't quite figured out), and so, the low road was death.

Green Reads

Wendy Becktold writes in Sierra about owning sorting books:

Clearly, there are just too many books.  E-readers were supposed to solve this problem, but they are hard to bond with and aren't necessarily better for the environment.  I'd have to read a minimum of 40 volumes on one for it to be the greener choice, according to a life cycle assessment by Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris in the New York Times.

What serious reader can't read 40 volumes?  Becktold does this idea for book shelves.

More than "I Have a Dream"

This is one of my favorite passages from this speech: 

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check that has come back marked "insufficient funds."
 But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children. 

I turned on the radio for the last piece of the Diane Rehm Show today.  There was a good conversation going on with Isabel Wilkerson (!), David Garrow, and Anthony Cook about how well the “bank of justice” is doing today.  I plan to go back and listen to the first part.  (The listening link isn't up yet, but I assume it will be there soon.)

West Highland Way

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.  (Pico Iyer, “Why We Travel") 

I have posted the above passage before.  It has touched me deeply.  But now, as I prepare for hiking the 95-mile West Highland Way slightly northwest of Glasgow, I can only have faith that this is true.  I have been upping my walking miles for months and getting things sorted out for weeks, and I have felt a lot of stress.  In a few days, I expect my heart to open, etc., etc.

Daisy, Daisy...

Two years ago--before I knew there would be a new movie version of the story--I reread The Great Gatsby.  I hadn’t remembered what a grim story it is.  I continue to read reviews of the film but can’t bring myself to see it.  Today I came across this interesting critique of Daisy Buchanan: 

Daisy isn't awful, [as many reviews proclaim] she is trapped and scared -- and that is how Mulligan plays her, timidly. Raised a debutante in Louisville, she is expected to marry as a teenager, and she does, to the alcoholic, racist, chronically unfaithful Tom Buchanan. Daisy hasn't had the chance to go to college, or travel the world in the army, as the male characters have. She has a baby before she becomes an adult, and thus is hardly prepared to be an attentive mother. If there are opportunities out there for Daisy to live a more exciting, fulfilling life, she is only dimly aware of them. Is it any wonder she idealizes her first, adolescent romance, with a sweet young officer? Her brief affair with Gatsy is probably one of the only things Daisy has ever done fully by choice. Look at her wrists, bound by diamond cuffs. She is shackled by her own privilege. 

(From the blog of Dana Goldstein)

Haiku by Wendell Berry

And I Beg Your Pardon

The first mosquito:

Come here and I will kill thee

Holy though thou art.

Song for Sunday

It's interesting to see what some of the "professional"
bloggers  post on their sites.  This song was posted on http://www.3quarksdaily.com/  The clothes are fascinating.

Facing the Past, continued

When will we achieve the dream of Martin Luther King, Jr.?  Joshua DuBois offers a different perspective from the last post.  

My first instinct has always been to answer that open-ended inquiry with an equally squishy response, one that we will hear again and again from politicians, preachers, and activists during the next week: “We’ve come so far, but we have so much further to go.” I’ve said this line myself, as recently as this past Wednesday, in the pulpit of a Black Baptist church. 

It’s a phrase that sounds practical, realistic, and even useful. But the problem is: I think it’s wrong. And more than just wrong, it is perhaps the primary barrier to real racial progress in this nation…. 

A Night in the Sky

A week from today, I'll be flying to Scotland.  As I get ready for the trip, I'be been thinking of Sylvia Boorstein's description of spending the night on a plane.  It's comforting.

Facing the Past

“Can America face up to the terrible reality of slavery in the way that Germany has faced up to the Holocaust?” ask Susan Neiman in “History and Guilt,” an article in the online magazine Aeon.  Neiman, born in Atlanta and living in Berlin, questions whether the United States has faced its history of slavery.  I think not.

Neiman, living in Germany, is impressed with how Germany has dealt with the guilt of Hitler’s reign.  According to Neiman, the Germans even have a word “for coming to terms with past atrocities”:  Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  There is also a slogan: “Collective guilt, no! Collective responsibility, yes!” 

The Way of the Cross

Alice Walker is shown here wearing a silver necklace.  When an old friend saw this photograph, she was upset that Walker was wearing a cross.  Walker responded, "This necklace...was made by a Native American artist; it represents the four directions.  There have always been four directions, you know, long before there was a cross."

She goes on to tell about an African American artist who gave her a "cross," and explained, "I think for most folks the cross is something people die on, but to me, when I was making the necklace and pondering its four directions, it seemed to represent choices."

Here is Walker's favorite definition
of the cross:  "the cross represents the place where spirit crosses matter."  Maybe her favorite definition is more lovely than mine though their meanings are similar.   To me  the cross represents the intersection of the vertical and horizontal or depth and breadth.  These definitions can mesh with the traditional Christian meaning of the cross, but they add a more universal meaning.  Here are two of my favorite crosses

.
The quotations from Alice Walker come from her book The Cushion in the Road.

What is race?

I believe I first saw this video on Facebook.  In a speech to the Florida Press Association and the Florida Society of Newspaper Editors, Leonard Pitts talks about the experiment in the video and more.

[Y]ou may remember that I made reference to a social experiment I once saw on television. What Would You Do? is one of those hidden camera shows in which they set up a situation and watch to see how average people respond. In the segment I wrote about, a young white actor sets to work trying to steal a chained up bicycle in a park. He uses a hacksaw, a bolt cutter and even an electric saw. The cameras watch for an hour. A hundred people pass by. A few mildly question what he’s doing, but most don’t even bother. Out of that 100 people, only one couple calls authorities. ABC also tried the setup with an attractive blonde woman. Five white guys stopped – and helped her steal the bike.
It was when they did the experiment with a black kid that things got interesting. And you know where this is going. Within the first minutes, there’s a crowd of people around him. They challenge him.

They lecture him. They whip out cell phone cameras and take video of him for use in court. They call the police. And afterward, when they are asked if the color of the young man stealing the bike had any bearing on their actions, they all swear it did not.

As one man put it, “Not at all. He could’ve been any color, it wouldn’t have mattered to me.”

So when you ask yourself what I mean by “race,” I mean that. That is race.

I recommend the whole speech.