Understanding According to Tolle

People have been repeating the words of Jesus for years, and who has understood them? Maybe one or two Buddhists. (Eckhart Tolle)

The Evolution of War

Here's an interesting view of politics from Keith Witt.

Carl von Clausewitz famously said “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” From a developmental standpoint, it’s actually the other way around: politics is war by other means. The 1800 election between Adams and Jefferson was the first ever peaceful transition of power in a democracy. Since then, instead of waging war against those we disagree with, we wage political campaigns, (which is a huge improvement though we sometimes have to hold our noses to participate).

The man who discovered morning

I don't exactly believe in horoscopes, but I love to read my horoscope at Freewill Astrology. Rob Brezsny is the author; I wonder if he believes in horoscopes. But he often has something meaningful and fanciful to say. Here my Libra horoscope for the week.

A reporter at the magazine Vanity Fair asked David Bowie, "What do you consider your greatest achievement?" Bowie didn't name any of his albums, videos, or performances. Rather, he answered, "Discovering morning." I suspect that you Libras will attract and generate marvels if you experiment with accomplishments like that in the coming weeks. So yes, try to discover or rediscover morning. Delve into the thrills of beginnings. Magnify your appreciation for natural wonders that you usually take for granted. Be seduced by sources that emanate light and heat. Gravitate toward what's fresh, blossoming, just-in-its-early-stages.

Happy Thanksgiving

I attended a spinning class this week. The instructor (my daughter) played her Thanksgiving soundtrack. The above is one of the songs.

Google "gratitude" and you'll get hundreds of quotations. Here are just three.

There are days when I walk through the center of Stockholm when I get this sudden feeling of happiness - a sense of belonging and at the same time gratitude that I'm so privileged that I can live my life in my city. Bjorn Ulvaeus

I hope all reading this can honestly replace the word Stockholm with the name of the city they live in. I'm glad to live in South Bend. I do think it's interesting that the writer talks about walking instead of riding. I'm much more likely to appreciate places when I walk.

It is through gratitude for the present moment that the spiritual dimension of life opens up. Eckhart Tolle

We learned about gratitude and humility - that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean... and we were taught to value everyone's contribution and treat everyone with respect. Michelle Obama

After the Revolution

When Alexander Hamilton was 26, and approximately two years before the end of the American Revolution, he was already thinking about how the nation should be governed if and when it achieved freedom. According to Ron Chernow, when American entered the revolution, “People continued to identify their states as their 'countries,' and most outside the military had never traveled more than a day's journey from their homes.” (157) While the war somewhat diminished this lack of unity, Hamilton saw how this separateness made finding enough soldiers and money a problem for winning the war and accomplishing other goals. So in 1781, Hamilton begins to address this issue. Here is how Chernow describes it.

[Hamilton] introduced a critical theme: the dynamics of revolutions differed from those of peacetime governance; the postwar world had to be infused with a new spirit, respectful of authority, or anarchy would reign: “An extreme jealousy of power is the attendant of all popular revolutions and has seldom been without its evils. It is to this source we are to trace many of the fatal mistakes which have so deeply endangered the common cause, particularly that defeat which will be the object of these remarks, a want of power in Congress.” where revolutions, by their nature, resisted excess government power, the opposite situation could be equally hazardous. “As too much power leads to despotism, to little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.” (158)

This seems relevant to the issues of the day and it is still difficult to achieve the right balance.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow. Penguin Books, 2004.

Alexander Hamilton

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I spent Saturday afternoon in Chicago watching Hamilton, and like so many others, I loved it. The music captures the emotions of the story: sorrow, excitement, commitment, passion, longing, jealousy, longing, conflict, and more.

I came home and started reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, the book that inspired the musical (731 pages plus six pages of acknowledgments and 49 pages of notes). Lin-Manuel Miranda, was reading this book on a vacation—I picture him in a hammock—and was inspired to write the songs for this play. So far, Chernow's book does paint a picture of an exceptional man. I can see how Miranda was moved, but being inspired to write a musical is indeed an exceptional response. Who could have predicted that a rap musical about one of the lesser-known founding-fathers would be so successful? (President Obama says rap is the language of revolution.) Miranda tells the story of our American history in a way that engages. He says, "You want to eliminate and distance between audience and your story." History teachers cannot teach history like Miranda does, but Hamilton reminds all teachers that a list of facts doesn't stick well. Hamilton provides emotional engagement that makes the facts of history relevant and important. And as a bonus, it's enjoyable.

This video shows President Obama introducing a presentation to Hamilton before it is performed at the white house. If the introduction is too long, you can skip to 8.3 to hear the introductory song. This one is a great interview with Miranda by Chris Hayes.

Using History to Change Your Heart

I read The Warmth of Other Suns in 2013. It was a book that stayed with me. Therefore, I was pleased to see the Krista Tippet of On Being recently interview the author, Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson's book details what is called “the great migration.” Approximately six million African-Americans moved from the former slave states in the south to northern states between 1915 to 1970. These immigrants were not completely welcomed, but still, for most the north was safer and offered more job opportunities. 

Tippet's interview of Wilkerson is informative and moving. I encourage you to listen. For me, it adds to the thinking I've been doing lately about the importance of history and how it affects how we see ourselves, our country, and our world. 

People (mostly white people) often say that slavery and prejudice is in the past, that continuing to talk about it just makes matters worse. Wilkerson answers with this analogy:

When you go to the doctor, before you can even see the doctor, the very first thing they do is they give you all of these pages to fill out. And they — before the doctor will even see you, he wants to know your history. He doesn’t want to know just your history, he wants to know your mother’s history. He wants to know your father’s history. They may go back to your grandmother and your grandfather on both sides. And that’s before he will even see you.

You cannot diagnose a problem until you know the history of the problem that you’re trying to resolve.

Much of us this—I'd like to think the worst of it—happened before we were born. For some, it may have happened even before our ancestors came to this country. But if we are truly committed to this country, then we have acquired its history, and it still causes dis-ease today. It is tempting to ignore it because it's painful to look at it. As Wilkerson says, “It’s looking into the human heart and examining it and allowing ourselves to feel the pain of others. You don’t want to feel your own pain. Why would you want to feel someone else’s pain?” She continues, “So I think it’s an act of love and an act of faith to allow yourself to feel the pain of another.”

We are good at looking at our countries triumphs. How would this country change if everyone could truly feel the pain of those oppressed by history?

History, the Musical

I'm looking forward to seeing Hamilton in a couple of weeks. I the meantime, songs from the musical are running through my head, and I marvel at this new way to think about the past.

If it were an operating system...

I started reading this book by Stephen Dinan with skepticism. It has a new-agey feel that I don't trust. And sacred can have very trite religious connotations. But so far, he has some fascinating ideas seasoned with suspicious optimism. I especially like his description of how America has evolved. He says,

I see America's growth through the lens of the evolution of new levels of consciousness that expand our respect for the freedoms and right of others and which are then institutionalized in the form of law....I see the deepest and most enduring activities as those that lead to an evolution in our worldview and the societal systems that support it. To help understand these, again, I uses the metaphor of the evolution of computer operating systems. Here is my list of the major upgrades to the American operating system in the last 240 years:

1. America 1.0 (1776-1787): Nation is born. Articles of Confederation
2. America 2.0 (1787-1865): Constitution and Bill of Rights.
3. America 3.0 (1865-1920): Slavery is abolished.
4. America 4.0 (1920-1933): Women included as voting citizens
5. America 5.0 (1933-1960): New Deal legislation expands role of government to create safety nets
6. America 6.0 (1960-2000): Civil rights movement and women's movement expand full inclusion of more citizens
7. America 7.0 (2000-present): Emergence of truly global era, with globalized Internet, trade, travel, and movement of finance. (page 5)

I believe most of his book is going to discuss the best way to create operating system 7.0. (I'm on page 31.) I like this evolutionary metaphor. It reminds me of Ken Wilber's theories but with much simpler terminology.

Yesterday morning I posted a bit about the meaning for me of my personal history and the history of the times. Yesterday afternoon, driving and listening to NPR, I heard Gene Demby speak of a dramatic experience in his history. Demby was born in the U.S. to an American mother and a father from Ghana whom he never met. Demby speaks of the distance he felt from his absent father. Then he describes a trip he took to Ghana, not to find his father but to attend the wedding of a close friend. The climax of the trip was a visit to the Elmina slave castle. After sitting in one of the cells and looking out “the door of no return,” he says this:

I felt none of Ghana, the genealogical fact of it, in me in the castle that day. I felt linked to different forebears. Not to my absent father, but to the people who were wrenched from that part of the African coast, crammed into the hulls of ships and sold on another continent like livestock. Those people from far-flung tribes and villages who arrived in their new land and cobbled together families that slavers and slave masters tried to shatter centuries before anyone sounded an alarm about the "weakness of the family structure."

I felt the pull of this shared story, horrifying and beautiful, that shaped the lives of millions of Americans, including a black woman, her daughter and me.

I have copied the most moving sentences from his essay. The essay shows again the personal and societal legacy of past history. You can read it all here.

Finally, Digging in to History

In my most recent post, over a month ago, I touched on the legacy of history in our lives. On a personal history level, all lines of my family tree eventually lead back to Ireland. And still, I was surprised at how moving it was to finally visit Ireland. Not moving in that I found distant relatives and exact spots where my relatives had lived. Maybe it sounds silly, but it felt that the world I existed in had suddenly grown larger. In the United States I was sometimes aware of the many random experiences that had had to happen so that my parents could meet and give birth to me. In Ireland, I sensed that thousands more random events had happened there to create the circumstances that led to my conception and birth.

During high school and college, history often just seemed like a list of events that I needed to memorize. It was later that I began to find that history was full of doors to the present. A few weeks ago I read an article by John Krull where he reflects on some of our country's sins--“slavery, segregation, the extermination of native Americans, the internment of Japanese-Americans, too many other transgressions to list – about which we should feel shame, not pride.” It's a tricky equation. Why should we feel shame about slavery when we had nothing to do with it? On the other hand, why should we feel pride about the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence when we had nothing to to with that either?

Studying my personal history has an emotional and spiritual element to it. On a national level, I think there comes responsibility. How can we live up to the good and noble? How can we repair the harm created by injustice and cruelty? What difficult questions.

(slightly relevant cartoon: http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=136860)

Atonement

John Krull wrote a column precipitated by Colin Kaepernick and others who refuse to stand for the National Anthem. Krull is sympathetic to those who don't stand, but he himself stands to “rededicate” himself to making the country better. However, he is sympathetic to those disappointed by inequality in the United States. He writes

As I did [listen to the disappointments of some minorities], I thought – neither for the first nor the last time – that we Americans will be a long time atoning for America’s original sin, the racial prejudice that led to slavery, segregation and other violations of the human spirit. In his famous second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln prophesied that we might spend 300 years accounting for the 300 years in which we enslaved other human beings.

If Old Abe was right, we still have more than a century’s worth of work to do.

I was intrigued by this bit from Lincoln's speech. And sorry that so many Americans believe that the sins of the past no longer reverberate, that healing happens without atonement.

Help!

This summer, I had "issues" with my computer, and I didn't write much. I can see from using Google Images, that others understand my frustration.

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"We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars." Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time. 1988. p 37.

Tidying Up

When I first heard of this book, I thought it sounded too corny. And sometimes it is corny. But I suspect it is going to be life changing. I have read other books about getting the house in order, but this is the first book that really convinced me to get rid of my surplus belongings. I was introduced to this book at a time when I was installing carpet in my bedroom. I had taken everything out of the room, and inspired by Kondo, decided that some of it wasn't going back in. I have probably given away ten bags of clothes and miscellaneous items, and I have three bags of books and a bookcase ready to go. Most of this is from the bedroom, and it feels so spacious. I hope I have the stamina to do the whole house.

Just say her name and !!!

The morning after Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic convention, I posted the statement below on FaceBook. I thought the whole conversation that followed had much to say about how we communicate and what does and does not worked. Even the fact that I said I was awed was unclear: Was I referring to Obama or slavery?

Me: Awed by this statement from Michelle Obama last night: “I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves.” July 26 at 8:11am

Respondent 1: Me too. July 26 at 10:53am

Respondent 2: I agree.

Like · Reply · July 26 at 11:29am

Respondent 3: Totally inaccurate . Perhaps that's why she goes on vacation so often.

Like · Reply · 1 · July 26 at 11:56am

Back to Basics

I've been "Tidying Up" (more about that later) and found a bunch of charts like the one above. I've been using them to check off daily meditation and journal writing. I don't imagine that I'm changed for life, but it has been helpful for meeting some of my goals and enjoyable to check the boxes.

Oh Yes!!

Here's a song from today's spinning class.
And another...

It can be hard to find the right words.

What Enlightment feels like according to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:

The sky turns into a blue pancake and drops on our head.

I read this in Integral Mediation by Ken Wilber. Wilber found it in Journey without Goal by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Generous Questions, Part 2

Sometimes when I watch birds in my feeder, walk along the river, or even walk through a downtown full of strangers, I feel a pleasant source of unity with creation. How suffering fits into this is a puzzle. Thinking about annoying people, on a daily level, is even more of a puzzle. I think the generous question to myself is this: What needs to happen for me to feel that peaceful connection to all when I'm aware of myself making negative judgments?

I don't want to scold myself. I just want to be mindful of negative thoughts—I want to live with the question so to speak.

Cartoon here.

No Other?

“Wherever there is an ‘other’ there is fear – that’s the individual self. If you’re identified with the larger whole, pain still happens but suffering is lessened as you’re not identified with it.” (Ken Wilber)

Generous Questions

I'm fascinated by a talk given by Krista Tippett at the annual General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Here's just a little piece where she ponders the value of a question:

...A question is a mighty form of words. Here is how I’ve learned to experience it. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise or fall to meet. It turns out it's not true what they taught us in school. There is such a thing as a bad question.

I struggled with this, but I’ve finally decided it's true. It is often true that a simple, honest question is precisely what's needed to drive to the heart of the matter. That remains as true as ever. But it is hard to meet a simplistic question with anything but a simplistic answer. It's hard, almost impossible, to transcend a combative answer, a combative question.

But I can state this positively. It is hard to resist a generous question. And we can all formulate questions that invite honesty, dignity, and revelation. There is something redemptive and life giving about asking a better question.

Here's another quality of generous questions, questions as social art and civic tools. They may not want answers, or not immediately. They might be raised in order to be pondered, dwelt on instead. The intimate and civilizational questions we are living with in our times are not going to be answered with answers we can all agree on any time soon.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke spoke of holding questions, living questions....Rilke said we should "love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

I always have a lot of question. Right now, in these trying times, I have even more. I want to work on asking myself more “generous” questions. Maybe, I'll put them in writing. And then, I shall just live with them.

Video and text of Tippett's talk is here.

Predictable Results

Yesterday, Adam Gopnik wrote this at the New Yorker website:

In light of last night’s assassinations, it is also essential to remember that the more guns there are, the greater the danger to police officers themselves. It requires no apology for unjustified police violence to point out that, in a heavily armed country, the police officer who thinks that a suspect is arhttp://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-horrific-predictable-result-of-a-widely-armed-citizenrymed is likelier to panic than when he can be fairly confident that the suspect is not. We have come to accept it as natural that ordinary police officers should be armed and ready to use lethal force at all times. They should not be. A black man with a concealed weapon should be no more liable to be killed than a white man with one. But having a nation of men carrying concealed lethal weapons pretty much guarantees that there will be lethal results, an outcome only made worse by our toxic racial history. Last night’s tragedy was also the grotesque reductio ad absurdum of the claim that it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun. There were nothing but good guys and they had nothing but guns, and five died anyway, as helpless as the rest of us.

Read the entire article here.

Trivial and Absurd

The sign from the South Bend Brew Werks speaks for itself. The book below it needs a little introduction.  Author Thomas Thwaites spends time as a goat and writes about it, and it is reviewed by Austin Bailey in World Ark. Of the book Bailey says,

[Twaites] seems ultimately to enjoy his few days of goat life, but fails to give it much meaning. In the end, Thwaites comes off more like a stunt man looking for validation than a serious thinker in search of a vacation from the human condition.

However, Bailey goes on to say the book contains lots of “interesting factoids."

For example, did you know that jockeys used to put goats in pens with horses the night before a big race to keep the horses calm? Jockeys would sometimes steal the competition's goat to upset a horse, hence the term “get his goat.”

Some days you just stumble across goofiness and entertainment.

Reflections on a Stationary Bicycle

Last Monday the instructor of my spinning class showed a video of a bike race in the Netherlands (Amstel Gold Race 2015) as we rode our stationary bikes hard enough to reach our maximum heart-rate zone.

In no other circumstance would I watch a bike race for forty minutes. But pedaling and perspiring along with my fellow exercisers, I was exhilarated by the energy and grace of the cyclists and the beauty of the countryside on the screen. Sometimes we got an aerial view of farmland with fields looking like pieces of a patchwork quilt in various shades of green. Then down one of these country roads snaked a row of bicyclists racing to the finish line. I suppose I could feel those racers a pathetic contrast to my stationary machine, but I didn't. I felt motivated and moved by their perfection.

And for some reason, I stared thinking of the layers of human life present in that moment on my bicycle, connection present in every other moment as well.

This connective web contained the instructor and cyclists; our bikes and everything involved in

making them and having them ready for us when we arrived for class; and the technology involved in making it possible for me to watch men riding bicycles in he Netherlands whiled I exercised in South Bend, Indiana. Then, there's everything that went in to making the bike race happen. There seems no end to the actions of others that made that moment possible. It is always like that I think.

 

???

Enlightenment is intimacy with all things. Dogen

To Sleep...

I just started reading The Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington. Here are two interesting passages from the introduction.

...do you know what happens if you type the words “why am I” into Google? Before you can type the next word, Google's autocomplete function—based on the most common searches—helpfully offers to finish your thought. The first suggestion: “why am I so tired?”

I'm confident you will come away from this exploration with a newfound respect for sleep. But you may also find yourself beginning a love affair with it. We need to reclaim this special realm—not just because sleep makes us better at our jobs (thought there's that) and not just because it makes us healthier in every way (there is that, too) but also because of the unique way it allows us to connect with a deeper part of ourselves. Because when we are asleep, the things that define our identity when we-re awake—our jobs, our relationships, our hopes our fear—recede. And that makes possible one of the lease discussed benefits (or miracles, really) of sleep: the way it allows us, once we return from our night's journey, to see the world anew, with fresh eyes and a reinvigorated spirit, to step out of time and come back to our lives restored...

The Mystery of Love

In 1996 Mariana Cook interviewed Michelle and Barack Obama. Barack said this about Michelle.

Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is and where she comes from. But I also think in her eyes you can see a trace of vulnerability that most people don’t know, because when she’s walking through the world she is this tall, beautiful, confident woman. There is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her. And then what sustains our relationship is I’m extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It’s that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.

Joy

Yesterday's post was so grim, I need to show the other side of things today. I'm sure I've posted this flash mob before, but here it is again, today, bet flash mob I've ever seen.

Hell in Europe

I haven't posted much here for awhile, partly because I have been reading this tome. It my be the hardest book I have ever read. It's long, dense, and full of horror. Chapter 8, “Hell on Earth,” begins with this description of World War Two which is close to a summary of the book. I'm left marveling at the awfulness and amazed that Europe has recovered so well. 

For millions of Europeans the Second World War, more even than the First, was the closest they came to hell on earth. The death toll alone—over 40 million just in Europe, more than four times as high as in the first World War—gives a sense of the horror. The losses defy the imagination. The Soviet Union's alone were more than 25 million. Germany's dead numbered around 7 million, Poland's 6 million. The bare figures convey nothing of the extremities of their suffering, or the misery inflicted on countless families. Nor do they give any impression of the geographical weighting of the immense casualties....

Unlike the First World War civilian deaths in the Second greatly outnumbered those of the fighting troops. This was, much more than the earlier great conflict, a war that enveloped whole societies. The high death rate among civilians was not least a consequence of the genocidal nature of the Second World War. For, unlike the war of 1914-18, genocide lay at the heart of the later great conflagration. This war brought an assault on humanity unprecedented in history. It was a descent into the abyss never previously encountered, the devastation of all the ideals of civilization that had arisen from the Enlightenment. It was a war of apocalyptic proportions, Europe's Armageddon.

I was inspired to read this book after consuming a lot of both prose and fiction about WWII. The book provided an overall context, but it's a hard to comprehend so much suffering. What else can I say?

Decisions, Decisions

I have been rereading parts of Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. I guess it could fall in to the self-help genre, but what makes it particularly interesting to me is reports on research and studies that help us identify barriers to change. I have been reading it this time from the perspective of ways this research could help my dyslexic grandson improve his reading. As I watched him read and write today, I was aware of how many decisions he needed to make every time he read or wrote. “Is it this or that?” So much of it is not automatic to him. Over and over again, he must ask, “Is it this or that?” And over and over, he must struggle with self control. The authors emphasize that both self-control and decision making are exhausting. No wonder my grandson is reluctant to read and write; it's tiring work. And no wonder I'm procrastinating with a writing project right now. It's at the stage where many decisions are required.

Happy Sun-Day

The View

This window is at the Metropolitan Club Restaurant on the 67^th floor of the Willis Building (formerly Sears Tower) in Chicago. Directly under the window is the table where one of my daughters, two of my nieces, and I had dinner last Saturday night. The food was fine, but we chose the place for the view, not the food. We got to look down on tall buildings and Lake Michigan. Before dinner we were part of a swarm of people walking through Millennium Park. Coming from South Bend, Indiana, it was a dramatic change of perspective. That, I think, is a good and helpful thing.

Gabby Speaks

As you probably know, Gabby Giffords is the former member of the U.S. House of Representatives who was seriously injured in an assassination attempt in 2011. In 2013, she and her husband Mark Kelly started a political action committee called Americans for Responsible Solutions devoted to promoting gun control legislation. I donate a little money to their PAC and receive email updates from them. The mailing yesterday was mainly a plea for money, but with it Giffords included an op-ed she had written that was published in the New York Time on April 17, 2013. In that article she expressed her disgust at the Senators who blocked “common-sense legislation that would have made it harder for criminals and people with dangerous mental illnesses to get hold of deadly firearms.” In yesterday's email, she said her 2013 article “is as relevant now as it was on that day.” She writes,

Some of the senators who voted against the background-check amendments have met with grieving parents whose children were murdered at Sandy Hook, in Newtown. Some of the senators who voted no have also looked into my eyes as I talked about my experience being shot in the head at point-blank range in suburban Tucson two years ago, and expressed sympathy for the 18 other people shot besides me, 6 of whom died. These senators have heard from their constituents -- who polls show overwhelmingly favored expanding background checks. And still these senators decided to do nothing. Shame on them.

Giffords is not radical. I think she is a gun owner herself. So when legislators listen to her tell her story and then vote no, I think she is right when she says that senators “fear the NRA and the gun lobby.” There is something wrong when a few gun deaths by terrorists is a huge issue and the rest of the thousands of gun deaths are not. Time to send a little money and take some of the actions recommended at their site.

What You Don't Know

My friend Lisa writes about getting new high tech contact lenses that do much to alleviate an eye condition she has long suffered from.  I especially like this paragraph.

My new clarity isn’t all about 20/20 vision. It’s also about realizing that no one knew, those months and years, how frustrated I was at my poor vision and how often my eyes hurt and how many times I debated, knowing that removing the old lenses would immediately relieve the irritation but also reduce my already poor vision even more. And mostly my new found clarity is about realizing that probably everyone I meet has some hidden pain or challenge that others rarely or ever know.

6:30 Mass

From approximately nine years old through high school, I often attended 6:30 weekday mass with one of my parents. I don't remember liking it or  making a choice about going, but I didn't hate it either.  I remember how dark it was in winter and how cold my legs would be in my school dresses.  I love this account below.  Some of it puts words to my memory, some doesn't.

Communion
By Lawrence Kessenich

During Lent, season of discipline,
I drag myself early out of bed, ride
to Mass with Mom and Mrs. Crivello,
warm in the front seat between their
woolen coats, soothed by familiar perfume.

Headlights carve the ebony darkness.
The women talk in low tones
about people I don’t know, the thrum
of their voices reassuring. I doze
for seconds that seem like minutes.

In the half-acre lot, we park among
a small band of cars huddled near
the entrance of St. Monica’s. Inside,
stained glass windows, a feast of color
in daylight, are black. The church is barn-cold.

Candles burn, bells ring, prayers are murmured,
songs sung. The church warms slowly. I sit,
stand, kneel between the two women,
rituals washing over me like soft waves
on Lake Michigan in August.

Later, I carry the sacred mood
out on my route, dispensing papers
like Communion to my neighbors.

“Communion” by Lawrence Kessenich from Age of Wonders. © Big Table Publishing, 2016. 
You can order that book here and others at Amazon.

Practicing Patience

I posted the above video in earlier in December. It seems connected to so many experiences. Recently, I had a difficult conversation with a person who seemed very angry with me. When I went to bed that night, I just kept thinking about the conversation. My thoughts seemed out of control. The old, “I said and then she said,” blah, blah, blah, on and on.

The next day, I had a little better control of my mind. I stopped much of the thinking and just tried to be aware of what I was feeling. It turns out, in this case, experiencing my hurt feelings was much more comfortable than replaying my thoughts. This experience provided just a little piece of information to tuck away about how to deal with painful thoughts.

Voting Advice

From Ta-Nehisi Coates...

...In the American system of government, refusing to vote for the less-than-ideal is a vote for something much worse. Even when you don’t choose, you choose. But you can choose with your skepticism fully intact. You can choose in full awareness of the insufficiency of your options... 

An American Export

Iain Overton (author of The way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of Firearms, explains some of the global implications of America's gun culture:

The right to bear arms, and the sheer number of firearms bought and sold in this country every year as a result, has undeniable global implications. For a start, Americans in effect support the world's gun economy. In addition to the 8.6 million guns made in the U.S. in 2012, 4.8 million more were imported from overseas. The U.S. import volume of foreign guns more than tripled between 2003 and 2012.

More insidious, though, is how the licit American gun industry affects the illicit Latin American gun market. The ease with which guns can be purchased in the U.S., and the fact that many sales may be conducted without background checks, has deep consequences. The majority of guns found in Mexico and Central America are from the United States. It is estimated that more than 250,000 guns flow south of the border into Mexico — a country with just one official gun retailer — every year. Roughly 45% of U.S. firearms licensees are believed to rely on Mexican trade for their survival. To the north, Canada estimates that 50% of the guns used in crime in Ottawa were smuggled across the border.

In 2014, El Salvador had almost 4,000 killings, a rate of about 62 homicides per 100,000 (in the U.S. it is about 4 per 100,000). Most of these slayings were committed with guns — and about 50% of guns traced in El Salvador that year came from the United States. The lifting of the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in the U.S. in 2004 resulted in more than 2,600 estimated additional homicides in Mexico.

Hmmm...

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” —E.L. Doctorow

“In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.” —Denise Levertov 

“Writing is…that oddest of anomalies: an intimate letter to a stranger.” —Pico Iyer

From The Writer's Almanac 

About WW II

Curiosity

“Donald Trump is criminally uncurious.” (Mark Shields)

 I was surprised to hear this unusual criticism of Mr. Trump, but I appreciate the sentiment. I usually appreciate curiosity, and I am reminded that I could stand to be a bit more curious myself.

American Values

Ted Cruz suggested that we “empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” 

The NY Police Department Commissioner responded with this:

 I would remind the Senator he lives in the United States of America. We don’t need a President that doesn’t respect the values that form the foundation of this country. There are more than nine hundred Muslim officers in the N.Y.P.D., many of whom also serve in the U.S. military in combat—something that Cruz has never done, so the Senator basically is really out of line with his comments.”

From "Bad Choices" by Amy Davidson in The New Yorker

Quotation of the Day

From Kevin Drum...

That's life. In politics, you're always wrong according to everyone who's not you—and the more extreme you get, the wronger you are. That's the price of being in the arena, or even just being a spectator cheering against the Romans.

"Death alone is certain"

Here is an excerpt from an On Being. Krista Tippett is interviewing Stephen Batchelor

Ms. Tippett: “Since death alone is certain, and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” You wrote, “Over time, such meditation penetrates our primary sense of being in the world at all.” And I wondered if you would speak, as we close, just about — in a very concrete way, whatever that means, yesterday or today, about how this observation, this questioning, penetrates ordinary life, an ordinary day in the world, your primary sense of being in the world at all.

Mr. Batchelor: Well, the meditation on death that you’ve just read out is actually an adaptation of a Tibetan reflection on mortality.

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hm

Mr. Batchelor: As a young man, I did this practice daily. I found, of all the Tibetan practices I did, it was the one that was most life-changing, to the extent that today, I find that my sense of being in the world is deeply infused with an awareness of how this may be my last day on Earth. And these reflections on death are not in the remotest sense morbid or gloomy.

Shameless Fairy Tales

Did you know the NRA has a website call NRA Family? There you can find fabulous classics such as “Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun)” and “Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns)."

Cheaper than a Prius

Here's an interesting and money-saving way to help the environment. 

Around 80 percent of the protein we consume comes from animals, he says, in the form of meat, eggs, or dairy. And those creatures need a lot of resources to become food. A third a pound of hamburger requires 660 gallons of water to produce, if you include the irrigation needed for the feed. Raising animals for people contributes to a bevy of environmental plagues, including deforestation, water contamination, loss of biodiversity, and desertification. Of the more than 25 percent of all greenhouse gases attributed to the food system, 80 percent come from producing livestock. (Maddie Oatman, Mother Jones)

This comes from a longer article that explains that most of us consume more protein that needed. Changing your diet--it's cheaper than a Prius or a windmill.

Happy Easter.

Managing the Paradox

Today I came across this article from 2012, written shortly after Sandy Hook by Dr. Ginny Whitelaw. Unfortunately it's even more relevant today.

For we’re dealing with a paradox here, and one that is core to the American psyche: that pits individual freedoms on the one hand and social safety on the other. Both are good and right and valuable things and, as we know from integral theory, both are facets of our humanity: we are both individual agents and social animals. We affect others through our actions AND we are affected by social context. Little wonder that if we ignore one side of our human equation and go to extremes on the other side, we get into trouble….
 Both individual freedom and social safety are valuable and, if we go too far in either direction, problematic. Too much focus on social safety and we get a police state that violates individual rights. We don’t want to go that far. But too much individual freedom, and we get nutcases wiping out swaths of society. And that, I submit, is where we are right now. We are not managing this paradox well.

To manage it better, we have to move beyond one-sided arguments and embrace what’s right and good about BOTH individual freedom and social safety, and use the tension between them to reach a higher level goal: a society in which we are more free because we’re safe, and more safe because we’re free. The process of managing this paradox would have us set some limits – what’s free enough? Or safe enough? And what are some thresholds below which we don’t want to sink? We might be able to largely agree, for example, that police confiscation of ordinary, non-automatic weapons would be going too far on the social safety side. And that two rampages in one year crosses the threshold on the side of overprotecting the individual freedom to bear arms.

This entire article can be read here, but for those not versed in "integral theory," it may be confusing.

A few days ago, I read Grant Park, a novel by Leonard Pitts (reading some of it in a hotel room in Chicago across the street from Grant Park). The book was gripping, but when I finished, I didn't know what to say about it. I liked it, but it seemed a bit preachy. The story begins in 2008 when Malcom Toussaint, an African-American columnist for a fictional Chicago newspaper, sneaks into the paper an offensive column about how tired he is of trying to explain racism to white people—“tired of white folks bullsh--.” 

After Toussaint's late night sabotage of the newspaper's front page, he leaves the office only to be kidnapped by two crazy white supremacists. Since I couldn't find easy words to say how I felt about the book, I turned to Google. Vinson Cunningham of the New York Times says it nicely. “Pitts never manages to avoid didacticism” he says, but

Despite too many wince-worthy lines, the novel’s plot — jump-started by Toussaint’s unwilling inclusion in a white supremacist scheme to ruin Obama’s election night — is nicely wrought, and sometimes manages to surprise. Toussaint’s two-pronged story is placed contrapuntally against that of his white ­editor — fired as a scapegoat in the wake of The Column — whose life was also altered irrevocably by the ’68 strike. The resulting parallel lays bare the extent to which Americans, black and white, still struggle to articulate the basic elements of our shared past.

With these caveats, I recommend Grant Park.

Chicago Trees in March

 

Maybe I'm getting eccentric.

Gun Safety, the Missing Data

By some estimates...about 3,000 children are unintentionally shot every year in the U.S. — eight every day. About 124 of those children will die. That’s according to data from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. 

 However, 

No comprehensive statistics exist to tell us how many children are shot accidentally every year. The lack of data is thanks to the efforts of the NRA and other gun lobbyists. They promote a line of denial, blocking government funding for research into these shootings on the argument that they are rare.

Read the whole article by Mary Sanchez.

“Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers”

Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

Here is a link to the veggie burger formula.

Be a Tree

Ann, the teacher of my yoga class, said something like this today: “When you just don't know what to do, try doing the tree pose.” Here's how.  I'm going to try it the next time I feel crazy.

.

“What [w]ould happen if I heeded the admonitions of beauty? “

From “Opinion” by Baron Wormser

Awe, Awe, and More Awe

This is a sign, from one of the walking paths at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, stopped me in my tracks. Yet, maybe there is this awesome history for every path we take.

"Renew Your Spirit"

From Peter Morales

We need to remember...when we find ourselves becoming bitter, we need to remind ourselves of our most treasured experiences. Actually, we need to do more than remember. We need to experience life’s gifts and possibilities once more. Renewing contact with what is most precious in life is really a spiritual practice. It is an essential practice. If we do not feed our spirits, they will wither. Even the good deeds we strive to do will become acts of anger and joyless obligation rather than efforts to share and to heal.

We all need to ask ourselves, “What does my spirit need right now?” Perhaps it is quiet time in nature. Maybe a visit to a new exhibition in a museum. How about some time in the garden? Why not attend a concert by a favorite artist, or take a walk with an old friend? The possibilities go on and on.

Desert

I just returned from a six day visit with my sister in Tucson, Arizona. She lives in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains and a mile or so away from Sabino Canyon, a great park for hiking in the desert and mountains of the area. I spend a lot of this trip moved and awed by this beauty.

Interesting contrast between sunlight and shadow.

 From brown to bright green.

 Full creeks in certain seasons

 And the famous saguaro cactus, found almost exclusively in southern Arizona and western Sonora, Mexico--a few strays in SE California.  It doesn't get those arms until it is around 75 years old.