Bob Dylan, Maryland, and The Home Stretch

Bob Dylan
You know those quizzes people pass around on the social media sites, asking how many things from a list that you have done?  I love those.  I always want to check them all off, but I have not been to Europe nor have I gone sky diving.  

Some of the quizzes are about mostly minor delinquency - like skinny dipping? Hitch-hiking?  Ever been arrested?  (I can check all of those off the list.) 

Some quizzes are lists of random things, like, have you ever been to Mexico, been on tv, or broken a bone?  I normally get most of those checked off but I have not been anywhere in Europe or Asia, or even Canada.  I have not been to New York but I have been to Philadelphia and Los Angeles.  I have not broken a bone.  I have not been snow skiing but I was a scuba diver. I had never been on television until March, 2025.  

March 30, 2025, Topeka Performing Arts Center, Bob Dylan and his band took the stage at 8 pm.  This time the whole family was there.  Me. Daughter. Son.  My third time. Daughter's second time.  Son's first time.  I can now depart this realm in peace knowing that both of my children have been in the living presence of the Old Poet.  I was breathing the same air as that irascible old man yet one more time. 

I had warned my kids that unless you genuinely know his songs, you aren't likely to recognize any of them!  I do not care about that.  The music itself was excellent, as always.  I do not think Bob Dylan can sing any of his songs the same ever again once they have been recorded.  I have tried to reproduce copies of my own water color or acrylic paintings.  It simply cannot be done.  You are not stepping into the same creative river the second time around. Besides, it is Bob Dylan we are talking about here. They are his songs and he can sing them anyway he feels like singing them!  And if his singing voice is so awful now, (never that great to begin with), who the hell cares?  The millions of fans around the world have spent long hours in his company, getting through life quite well with his subtle humor, his fierce outrage, and his joy.  He simply is not an apologetic person, even when he sings the blues. 

So, while we were standing in the security check line, there was a very young local tv reporter interviewing old people, looking for the oldest fans who had seen Dylan more than once.  It was only slightly patronizing but I forgave her.  In the first place, she had no idea who Bob Dylan truly is, what he has brought into the world, or why it is important.  It was probably funny to all those youngsters at the tv station that a bunch of old boomers would turn out for an 83 year old man no one can clearly understand on stage any longer.  All she had to do was look around at the generations in attendance.  Real art, genuine creativity, speaks to any and all who lend an ear, regardless of age. 

So, yes, I had my fifteen seconds of local fame on television that night.  At least two people that I know personally recognized me on their tvs.  The trouble came when I saw myself.  My glasses were seriously askew on my face.  I looked senile, as if my kids had dragged old Mom out of the Home and treated her to some old guy - Bill Dylan, was it?  Oh, lord.  

Those youngsters at the television station need to do better at fact checking.  They called Bob Dylan a Pulitzer winning entertainer.  No, my dears.  He is a Nobel Prize in Literature recipient. 

A lot was accomplished on March 30, 2025.  My whole family has seen Dylan perform live now.  I have seen my personal muse for the third and likely last time in this life.  I can check off another item on the Facebook quizzes.  I have been on television. 

Maryland
I was filling the gas tank at the truck stop and noticed a Maryland license plate on the truck next to me.  A young, stern faced man set about filling up.  I asked him how things were up in Maryland.  He was only a bit taken aback, but politely said things were fine.  Not willing to leave the guy in peace, I asked, if he did not mind me asking, what was he doing in Kansas? 

That opened the flood gates.  He was on a long trip across the USA going to as many National Parks as they could manage.  He had spent two nights in Yellowstone, visited the Black Hills.  They went to Custer State Park and they were on their way to Kansas City for Barbecue!  I was delighted he was willing to share those couple of minutes of his summer adventure. 

I always want to talk to people with out of state plates.  Sometimes I do, but mostly I do not.  I think I will make it a point to ask more.

The Home Stretch
I thought getting old was going to be awful.  It is not awful, at least not yet.  There are many things to enjoy.  I am set free of a host of insecurities and doubts, and far removed from the most embarrassing times.  Most of my heartache is far in the past, though I am reluctant to speak such a thing for fear of calling down the cruel realities life offers daily to every single living thing.  We can only live one moment at a time so we have no choice, really.  It is, always, take the next step.  

I found out that you can go to bed old but wake up elderly.  I am still getting around alright.  I can still mow and keep my own house.  I can safely drive.  I am tending my own affairs though I realize my memory can be slipping a bit.  When I was young, if I had ever spoken to you once, I recognized you again, even decades later.  Now, I am not sure if I am talking to the same nurse I saw last time I was in the doctor's office!  I have high anxiety when I am introduced to new people because not only will I not remember their name, I likely will not recognize their face the next time I see them - even if it is later in the same event. 

I cannot remember if I have done some things.  The pest control service man had been coming to my house for 15 years, then suddenly I had a new technician.  He retired without saying anything!  At least I do not remember he said anything about retiring.  I wanted to send a card, thanking and congratulating him.  The trouble is, I think I did send him a retirement card.  Should I send him another card and explain?  Or just send it and hope he has already forgotten I sent one earlier?  If I did send one already, that is.  See what I mean?

I am in the home stretch.  Such things are to be expected. I sometimes cannot remember if I fed both dogs, or if I fed them at all.  (I think they often get fed twice.)  I worry that I might not be able to see well enough to renew my license, though my vision still corrects to 20/20 with glasses.  I worry that I might do something stupid like leave the car running, or a burner on the stove.  

Getting old is not terrible, yet.  If I live long enough, it will be terrible. I simply cannot imagine living in an old folks home.  How goddamned awful that would be!  I am in no hurry to check out, but I also do not want to overstay my welcome on this old earth.  

I know I am coming down the homestretch, or as Bob puts it:  "The fourth part of the day is already gone."

Whoever or whatever created this world with all her creatures has a reason for the horrific reality of suffering and death.  I hope it is a damn good reason.

What's for Dinner?

It is a difficult time for half of the voting country, and a Make-America-Great-Again kind of day for the other voting half.  I cannot speak for the MAGA crowd, but I can certainly sum up the general feelings on my side with this quote from Justin Halpern's Dad:

"We're having fish for dinner.  Fine, let's take a vote. Who wants fish for dinner? Yeah, democracy ain't so fun when it fucks you, huh?" 

I still believe that as Americans, we basically all want the same things:  a safe place to raise our kids. A job that pays a livable wage.  Affordable health care (not interference from for-profit insurance companies). Safe schools.  Reasonable gun laws.  A working, humane, timely path to citizenship.  We all need protections from corporate greed and avarice, as consumers, tax payers, and employees.  We just disagree on which path to get to those things.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why it was the worst man in America that the MAGA crowd rallied behind.  When my brothers and cousins were enlisting in the military in order to have some small choice in light of the Vietnam draft - when my classmates and the boys from my hometown were either enlisting or being drafted, Trump's father paid for a bone spurs exemption, not once but a few times.  Trump then became a man who spent his entire adult life, among other things, stiffing the working contractors who built his big hotels and casinos and golf courses.  Small businesses that did not have the time or money to fight him in court.  It is information easily available online from scores of various sources, so it is not "biased  media".  

By chance or by election interference, he became President, this crass, fatuous, classless, pathological liar, cheat and confirmed lecher.  Somehow, all these enormous character flaws were dismissed by his followers, and that allowed him and his family to flagrantly enrich themselves via the office of the United States Presidency.  The same voting crowd tolerated the obvious, outrageous power-mongering and clearly illegal wheeling and dealing of the worst First Family in the entire history of the United States.  The Trumps did not even attempt to hide their lucrative personal gains made possible by their blatant disregard of the Constitutional clauses meant to protect the Office of the President from undue influence.  Not to mention the nepotism that turned the stomach of almost everyone.     

So, that was the first time.  This time?  A man who kept classified government documents in the bathroom of his night club estate, where anyone who wanted could access them.  The same crowd of voters who were almost dying of personal outrage that Hillary Clinton used the wrong hard drive for her emails apparently do not have the same concern for boxes and boxes of classified documents left out where anyone who might need a quick buck could copy and sell anything interesting.  This time they knew exactly what kind of guy they were voting for. A convicted felon.  An obviously guilty insurrectionist. A man on public record speaking 30,537 lies in four years.  And they are okay with it.

How in the world can any thinking person believe rounding up people for wholesale deportation is going to be good for anyone?  Just a quick look to our own history will remind us of the enormous tragedy and loss in the dealings with Native Americans, enslaved peoples, Japanese-Americans citizens during World War II. 

Imagine if the MAGA government put the enormous resources at its disposal to actually fix immigration, to work with the entire elected House and Senate to actually fix the problems at the border, instead of opposing every single attempt anyone has made in the last 50 years?  Rather than causing untold suffering, they could chose to be humane, helpful, and even kind. 

I hope the mass deportations are as successful as his "build a wall" efforts were - that is, an utter failure.  Trump has some very radicalized minions who are certainly capable and very willing to inflict enormous suffering on people who are as hardworking and honest as the rest of us.  The immigrants pay in to a system they cannot benefit from.  MAGA people are willing for this horrible act to happen while not being concerned that the same politicians are actively dismantling consumer protections, riding roughshod over civil liberties, inexorably squeezing the life from the USPS, Social Security, Education, Environmental Protections - the list is endless and tragic.  It is all out there, plainly documented but somehow the MAGA people cannot see it.  They overwhelmingly voted against their best interests. 

It is too late now.  The people have spoken.  They want fish for dinner.  I respectfully decline.  

Quote from the book "Sh*t My Dad Says" by Justin Halpern, published 2010

A Product of Mud?

This winter I looked forward to spring each time I waded through the six inches of mud in the corral. As I slogged along cussing every step of the way, I recalled that I complained just as much the winter it never fell below freezing. I complained when it was bitterly cold and I had to enter the Portal of Hell to turn on the heater. Every winter I complain about something. 

Just to change it up, mother nature served up two seasons of extreme mud. Mud on my clothes, mud on the sidewalk and both sets of steps into the house. Muddy paw prints. My car was caked inside and out with mud. There was mud all over the back of my legs and clothes when I exited the car. I tried mightily not to complain but alas, I could not help myself. Spring arrived despite all of my complaints but I guarantee that before long I will be whining over how damned hot it is. (It is a boring life when the weather puts you in a mood.)

When I am not complaining, I am considering - pondering the big (and small) mysteries of life. Big mystery: what the hell are we all doing here? Small mystery: looking at the pink crayon gave me a headache as a child. I do not know the answer to either mystery and I do not know who or what can provide definitive answers. I have sampled various philosophies and different spiritualities in my adult life and, honestly, no one has THE answers. There are millions of people who believe they have the answer. They think they are the only ones who know. So much suffering and death have resulted from that blind certainty! It just does not make sense to me, so out of necessity, I come up with my own explanation. Here is what I am sure of so far: humans have total free will. We can commit the most horrific crimes against one another, against animals, against the earth herself and no higher being will stop us. Maybe these physical lives are for us to learn to choose to be loving instead of hateful. Maybe.

I do not know WHY I am here, how I got here, who is responsible for me being here but I am undeniably here and aware. I do not think consciousness simply evolved out of the primordial mud, so when I pray, I pray to the highest, most sacred. Some thing is responsible for me being here. A "creator" of some sort placed me here in this physical body that mysteriously has a strange allergy to the pink crayon. It seems entirely unlikely to me that because a few molecules formed in muddy water at the dawn of time, consciousness evolved - something with no physical properties evolving out of physical substances? Nope. A brain is certainly not the source of consciousness. That is one thing the Buddhists have determined in their long centuries of contemplative discipline.

This is as far as I have managed to get in my investigation. I am sorely limited by my IQ - and lack of education - and the small amount of spare time left over from complaining about the weather, eating, and fighting with people on the internet. Still, not bad for an evolved clump of mud.  

                            Would mere mud have been able to invent the sacred machinery?

If It Ain't Raining, I'm Bitching About Something Else

Rain and eye surgery have been the preoccupations so far this summer. So boring. So "elderly"! Also, so amazing! Profound medical knowledge and technology combined with a skilled surgeon has restored my eyesight to a remarkable degree already. It will steadily improve over the next weeks. It was disconcerting to be awake and know what was happening to my very dear and irreplaceable eye(s), but the surgeon completed the procedure in a few MINUTES. I am lucky to live in these remarkable and knowledgeable times.

I know my physical body is slowly wearing out but I feel strong and vital and young at heart most of the time. After the well-intentioned patronizing from the surgical nurses, I realized that I must safeguard my own self-perception going forward on this journey of retirement and old age. The nurses assume I do not understand technology and require someone younger to explain. (I am old, motherfuckers, not stupid!) If I have a little difficulty hearing, it doesn't mean I am mentally deficit as well - I just need the nurse to speak a bit more crisply - not more slowly - not more loudly. The surgical team dealt the worst insult of all. Because I have a cane, they put a second medical band on my wrist bearing the hand written warning: "Fall Risk". Fuck that! I still carry 60 pound bags of oats, 50 pound bags of dog food! I still carry the 5 gallon 40 pound water jugs. I can still push my lawn tractor sideways to move it if I need to. I am not some frail old lady - yet. Becoming physically old happens despite our most fervent desire to not wear out like tired elastic in an old pair of underwear! Those nurses will all grow old, too. Some day they will remember every time they treated an older person like a child and they will regret it. The WORST was insisting that I sit in a goddamned wheelchair after the surgery, then being wheeled out to the curb like a sack of yams! I was perfectly capable of walking and should have been allowed to walk out of there like an adult! (I assume their insurance liability ends at the curb.)

I behaved and did not give any of the nurses a hard time but I doubled my resolve to stay as far away from medicines and doctors as possible for as long as possible. Nothing makes you feel any worse than to be treated like an adult imbecile. However, if they had treated me as callously as people are routinely treated in the work place, I would be bitching even more about that.

I am thankful for the amazing level of knowledge and skill and true medicine available to us. If I regain the ability to clearly see the stars, it will be worth sitting in a wheel chair against my will.

A Tiny Step

The United States Attorney General is supposed to be the supreme lawyer in service to our entire country - not a personal defender for a corrupt president. I knew that writing to the Washington DC Office of Disciplinary Counsel, asking them to investigate William Barr as an unethical attorney would not produce tangible results. It was instead a gesture with the force of my deeply held belief that if our country is to survive as a democracy, we must have people who aspire to the highest ideals of the office in which they have been placed. William Barr should do his best to conduct himself as an ethical servant to the will of the people, not as a personal toady for a lying president. I have officially registered my resistance to the unethical actions of William Barr. That energy is out there. When enough people express their opposition in whatever manner best suits them, it makes it more difficult for things to occur unchallenged, out of sight, unethically, and immorally.

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The Response

The Stories We Tell

I read something entirely remarkable today: at least 16,000 fans of Game of Thrones have signed a petition demanding HBO remake the final season that ends the 8-season series. They are upset with the way it is ending. My first thought was, "Go pound sand, you entitled idiots! Write your own fantasy series and good luck finding the millions and millions of dollars to get it made into an A+ television series!"

Of course I understand the disappointment when a wonderful book is made into a film but things go askew. Maybe the actors are not talented enough to bring the characters to life. Brad Pitt comes to mind, ruining the character of Louie in Anne Rice's "Interview with the Vampire". I read Pitt changed his mind about acting in the film but it would have cost a fortune to back out of his contract. He sullenly honored the commitment and subsequently ruined that character. Tom Cruise was cast as Lestat, the main character, an ancient, beautiful, elegant, soulless vampire who decided to walk the world again in modern times. Tom Cruise looked nothing like the way Anne Rice described Lestat in the book, and the fans of the books were so disappointed - including me.

As for Game of Thrones (GOT), I watched the first two seasons piece-meal because I was traveling, spending four nights a week in a hotel where HBO was available. After the traveling came to an end, I did not want to spend the money for cable at home. Lo and behold, streaming technology has evolved since then! Via my internet connection, and a much less expensive monthly fee for HBO, I recently decided to catch up on the entire GOT series in anticipation for the final season. I am very glad I did this. It is a remarkably well done story with excellent actors and top-of-the line CGI and other digital effects, superb costumes, sets and authentic locations. And most thankfully, because it is HBO, it is free to tell this enormous story in adult terms - adult language, violence, nudity and other adult themes. The universal themes and the wonderfully developed characters struck chords with people around the world.

I was thinking about the enormous effort required to create such a sprawling, fantastical world as the one brought to life in GOT. I went looking for statistics.

According to the article, "Game of Thrones: By the Numbers", Dona Feldman, published in Forbes magazine, April 11, 2019: there are some astounding GOT numbers.

Broadcast in 207 countries and simulcast in 194 countries and territories

Season 7 had 32.8 million viewers

It was filmed in 10 countries, with 105,846 days for extras across all 8 seasons and countries where it was filmed. (This boggled my mind until I realized it was similar to "manhours")

68,143 hotel rooms were booked during the filming of GOT

There are more mind boggling statistics in the article, found here:Forbes Article

The enormous creative endeavor of GOT spread work and money across the world, and required all manner of expertise. Imagine what is involved in support of filming this series - the countless crews and the support needed for all those crews. The food and lodging and transportation of hundreds of people and tons of equipment. Imagine all the trades and skills needed to create buildings, sets, props, special effects, stunt people for all of the battles and fights and thousands of movie "extras" to bring the world of Westeros alive. There were scores of horses the various characters and armies needed, especially the Dothraki - a warrior race, like a cross between Genghis Khan and Native American Plains horse tribes. All those horses required food and shelter, transport, veterinarian attention, farrier services, grooming, handlers, costumes of their own, and of course, consummate riders! The raw materials needed for costumes and sets - such things as fabrics, lumber, plaster and energy to power everything - required money be spent in every location, and surely there were suppliers and specialists located around the world.

There is a high tech aspect of a fantasy series like GOT. The three dragons that hatched from ancient eggs, grew from cute baby dragons into enormous fire breathing monsters of legend, were CGI and they were almost flawless. They were so real that they were the stuff of nightmares! The technical expertise to meld CGI with special effects, real actors, real scenery into seamless motion pictures is truly remarkable. The technical advances developed for movies absolutely finds it way to dozens of other commercial (and likely government and military) applications. The creative efforts of modern film making moves the entire species forward.

Game of Thrones is routinely referred to as a "cultural phenomenon" but I heartily disagree with that. From the first human being until the last, we are storytellers. Before we ever scratched our art and stories into rocks or painted cave walls, there were people in every tribe who memorized their history using knots on a counting rope, beaded leather strips, shells on strings, reed tapestries, pottery, or animal hides. Written language evolved, then we recorded our stories on baked mud, parchment, animal skins, papers and in stone. Now we record our stories using art and theater and technology. It is not a phenomenon that something as innately human as the stories and characters in Game of Thrones appeals to people all over the world, speaking dozens of languages. It is the story of being human.

The basic premise of GOT is that humans must put aside their tribal differences and unite to fight the White Walkers, a race of undead creatures that only exist to feed on the living. If the living do not destroy the dead, the human race will be utterly destroyed. Of course, most of the humans recognize the need to cooperate, but some humans only see a chance to enrich themselves, isolate in their rich cities so to be left to plunder the world when the other humans have all been killed or sufficiently decimated. It puts you strongly in mind of a certain American President and his greedy, short-sighted, compatriots absolutely rigging the odds in their favor to plunder whatever is left of our natural world for their own monetary gain.

George R. R. Martin, the author of the books that Game of Thrones is based on, was writing a different book when the first chapter came to him. He had to stop his other project in order to write the entire series. Stephenie Meyer, the author of the young adult books that became the "cultural phenomenon" of the Twilight movies dreamed of a young girl and a beautiful vampire sitting in a meadow discussing the challenges caused by falling in love. When Meyer woke up, she wanted to know where that story led so she began writing what became the Twilight series.

Twilight is a story about tolerance between whites and Native Americans, vampires and the Native American shape-shifting wolf warriors. First they must learn to respect each other to protect the half human/half vampire child born to Bella the girl and Edward the vampire, the two characters Stephenie Meyer dreamed. Vampires from across the world and the wolves had to unite to battle the ancient evil, all-powerful vampire rulers that tolerated neither the wolves, nor the inter-species child, nor vampires who wished to live in a different manner than the old vampires dictated. The message was very clearly transmitted to a generation of young people all across the world that tolerance and cooperation is clearly desirable.

I am not a big Harry Potter fan but I am certain that "cultural phenomenon" story came to J.K. Rowling, the author of all those wonderfully magical books, in some sort of an imperative-to-write manner as well. The Harry Potter books have been translated into 74 different languages to date. I think there are similar messages in that work, what little I know of it.

While I can understand the investment the 16,000-and-counting fans have in seeing Game of Thrones end in a satisfying way, there is not a single ending that will satisfy everyone! Instead of whining, I wish they would be still and contemplate the truly amazing evolution of human story telling, and be thankful for it.

Here's to our long human history of superb storytelling. Here's to Sunday night and the end of something amazing.

Of Course...

I am assuming this is from the Hubble website, though I have not taken the time to verify it.

If I have ever run across the term "solar noon", I surely do not recall it. It refers to the moment the sun's apparent position in the sky crosses an imaginary line of longitude locally, which is not necessarily noon on local clocks. I had simply never thought about it but of course it would be relative. I continued to read and discovered that the earth's spin itself is not precisely constant due to the shape of the earth's orbit, which also is not precise and constant. Humans have normalized the year, the day, noon and even time itself. That started me thinking again about the nature of numbers. We evolved numbers when we settled into agrarian societies so we could equitably exchange our goods. Taxing the population boosted the evolution of numbers and arithmetic. Numbers prove various geometries and physics in reality and in theory. Numbers provided Einstein a language to express and to prove the theory of relativity. Now we have evolved numbers all the way into quantum theories of fantastical and amazing possibilities. What is it about numbers that they can accurately express features of reality? How do numbers allow us to plumb the depth of physical reality?

Numbers must be the "language" of physical reality. We use them to measure speed, motion, distance, time, weight, light, gravity in the physical and use them to calculate possibilities - kinetic energy, rate of growth of all manner of things, rates of decay and decline. These are things that have not happened yet but we can use numbers to accurately determine what will happen in the future, or what is most likely to happen. And, as a species, we are so damned good at numbers that we can launch a spacecraft from earth, hurtling through space full of imperfect orbits and imperfect rates of travel and accurately land that spacecraft on a tiny asteroid also hurtling through space, also likely not traveling at a perfectly constant speed. If you honestly think about this for a few minutes, it is unbelievable - or highly improbable - and goddamned amazing.

What is the true nature of numbers? I have been thinking on this for a long time. It is a zen puzzle. What do numbers tell me about the nature of reality? I can follow the idea of numbers as far as simple equivalencies, that is, one sheep = one finger on the shepherd's hand. I can theoretically understand how numbers can represent massive, complex physical forces such as a nuclear explosion or a black hole. What I cannot grasp is HOW numbers allow us to know these things or WHY numbers can be extrapolated into quantum theories. That is a very, very long way from a shepherd keeping track of his flock!

The next question is what is the nature of our human consciousness that we can even entertain these theories and ideas in the first place? Did we invent numbers so we could understand the physical universe, or did we evolve to the point of recognizing numbers as the formulas of physical reality?

From there I fall into the rabbit hole of relativity - and I do not mean Einstein's theory (proven in our lifetime thanks to astrophysics.) I mean mundane things like putting on my necklace. The pendant is hanging on a chain that forms a circle which theoretically-speaking has no beginning or end. It seems illogical then that the pendant will always face outward no matter how I place it over my head. If I open the circle and put the pendant on "backwards", then it will always face inward regardless of where it hangs relative to my neck. It is not rocket science and I know how to make sure the pendant always faces outward. What kills me is that while I cannot turn the circle of the necklace inside out or put it on backward, the pendant still maintains it relative position to the theoretical center of the circle. It is the same necklace even if I take it off, lay it in a straight line and pull the ends together in a different direction. Whether I put the pendant on the chain face up or face down dictates whether it faces outward or inward relative to my body and relative to the theoretical center of the circle EXCEPT if I take gravity out of the equation. So, what is the relative moment here? What precisely determines whether my necklace hangs correctly or incorrectly? Gravity? Whether I am standing on my head or standing on my feet. Easy to say it is when I slide the pendant on face up and forget about gravity. But then I think about the fact that the pendant itself spins in a circle around the axis of the chain, forward and backward, as well as along the length of the chain now an infinite circle. It seems counter intuitive to me!

I think perhaps this is how multiple universes can be nested together in the same space. If I entered a universe consisting of the infinite circle with the pendant facing outward relative to the theoretical center of the circle and with a constant force pulling the pendant downwards, nothing different could ever happen, no matter what. The pendant would always face away from the center when constant gravity pulls it . To change it, either the constant force of gravity could be suspended or made opposite, or the circle would have to be broken apart, the pendant turned 180 degrees relative to the line and the circle reformed and then a universe with the pendant facing inward exists. Or maybe there are multiple pendants on the chain, some facing inward and some facing outward, some with a constant force causing them to hang up or down, depending. Though they travel the same circle, they are not aware of the fundamental differences of neighboring pendants. Maybe they are even theoretically aware of other pendants but everything is backward or opposite and so cannot be seen, only theorized.

And sometimes I even go further down the rabbit hole in this thinking, wondering about the relative force of gravity pulling something up or down (or in any direction). What markers would indicate a direction? In this case, it is the pendant relative to the theoretical center of the circle. Without the pendant, it would not matter and likely no one in that universe would notice. If the pendant was identical on both sides it would not matter and no one would notice.

This is why understanding "relativity" is such a monumental achievement, in my small necklace-wearing mind...

The Physical Gears of Time

Solstice Sunset

If a human being could be born with an innate realization that her life is fleeting and miraculous - that it is beautiful beyond all measure - if she were born knowing the earth is a magnificent physical gift from an unknown benefactor - then perhaps she would not waste long years worrying about things that do not matter.  She would know that life is the journey and the journey is the lesson.  On the other hand, if she were to pay better attention in school many things have already been discovered and presented in successive age-appropriate lessons.

I lived at Spiritcreek for several years before I realized the full moon is always opposite the sun in the sky.  Oh, I understood the phases of the moon but I had never spent any effort observing the mechanics of those phases in real life.  In over four decades of full moons, it had never occurred to me to turn to the opposite horizon at moon rise or moon set.  I spent long hours of my life watching the moon through a bedroom window, or through a car windshield, or from an outdoor vantage point contemplating the mundane to the sublime.  In wonder, heartache, loneliness, grief, and in happiness, excitement and anticipation, the moon had long been my philosopher's stone, my silent, mysterious companion.  I paid no heed to the waxing and waning moon advancing and retreating in relation to the sun's position, though.  My understanding of the phases of the moon moved from theoretical into practical observation in single flash of recognition.  Oh yeah, I thought to myself.

Human time-keeping grew organically from the observations of the moon and sun and the slow progression of constellations across the night sky.  We gradually came into awareness of when to move to warmer shelter, when to move away from floods, when the herds would return, when plants were ready for harvest.  This timing is intrinsic within our bones even though we do our best to ignore it with our unnatural 24 hours of light and noise. The movement of the physical entities in the universe is a cosmological time piece.  The spinning orbits are the movement of a clock measuring time on a scale we cannot even imagine though we have a word for it:  infinite.  

We are mortal here because we incarnate into a time universe, a ticking universe.  We each have only a short measure, an individual span.  There must be universes where time does not exist - it is where the idea of infinity originates.  Long before we knew the science, we recognized a year and saw that it was divided into four reassuringly repeating quarters.  Long before we were clever enough to build a machine for it, we knew how to keep time.  We are made of time, immersed in time.  We live and die by time.

This year I had the opportunity to celebrate the winter solstice with a group of like-minded gentlefolk.  We were meditating together just an hour past the local moment of solstice, blessed by the full moon.  The next winter solstice full moon will not occur until 2094.  It is safe to say I will not be here for that one, at least not as the me I am right now.  I have marked the winter solstice alone for almost 30 years, mostly because I could not find anyone else interested in celebrating this most fundamental passage of time.  It was a pleasant and unusual experience to share the solstice this year.  There were other groups of people also gathering locally and the world over.  Humans are remembering something important when we recognize this natural timing and attach no other significance to it except to wish others well in the coming year.

It is a good sign...

              

Solstice Moonrise

Is Laughter Truly the Best Medicine?

One of the best things in life is laughter. I am talking about those nearly hysterical, stomach aching, tears-in-your eyes bouts of laughter. If you are lucky, there are people in your life who enter into the hilarity easily and often with you. My daughter is one of my main constituents. It does not take much to set us off.

My friend and coworker Bernie and I often had one another in tears at work, which made it even better because we tried mightily to not let it get to that suffocating level - we were at work in the cube farm! We always failed. Bernie and I maintained a file of newspaper articles we collected of the weirdly absurd - stories we were certain would make the other laugh out loud. Over the years, as it turned out, all of the articles involved drunk people. (What are the odds?) Bernie was a quiet and good-natured man but his laughter was so infectious that once he started genuinely laughing, I was lost. Bernie passed away far too early in life. I miss my good friend. I wish he were here right now so we could laugh ourselves into stomach aches and tears.

Another colleague/good friend, Mr. Hamm and I have lived through a fair share of these snorting, suffering, catch-your-breath episodes, most often in a car... traveling 75 miles an hour. If we had crashed, we would have died laughing, literally!

The first time I remember laughing "hysterically", I was very young. We were at an amusement park in Wichita, Kansas known as Kiddie Land. My mother and father dotingly put me in a tiny train car that traveled on a miniature track in a series of circles. For some reason I found the entire experience so much fun that I began laughing and could not stop. I remember feeling a tinge of embarrassment. Perhaps it was a portent of things to come because, believe me, since then there have been dozens of times I needed to stop laughing but simply could not. Not to save my soul.

I still remember the President of our company division and his secretary carrying on two conversations at once that took a turn. This happened decades ago, before HR was much of a factor in the corporate world because the secretary had a new Playgirl magazine at her desk for some reason. She had just mentioned to the President that there was birthday cake in the break room, and almost simultaneously he had asked about the magazine. She pushed the closed magazine toward him as he asks "Anyone we know?" She retrieves the magazine to begin flipping the pages, solemnly saying "Gee, I don't know. Let me look." He says, "I mean is the birthday cake for anyone we know?" Those two began laughing and could not stop for at least 10 minutes. This could never happen in modern corporate times!

There was a time when I exercised every molecule of will power not to laugh, even biting my tongue. I was in the backseat of the work van, a coworker was driving, and our supervisor was riding shot gun. We had closed the hotel bar down the night before which may or may not have contributed to this fantastic chain of events. After a hearty breakfast we were driving toward the job site in what was essentially an old beater of a van (nothing too good for the survey crew!). We were bumping along over cobble stones, or old red bricks to be more precise. Riding in the van was like riding in a paint shaker anyway, then to add a lumpy, potholed road to the mix and we were vigorously bouncing in our seats. The supervisor was speaking when suddenly, without warning, he vomited all over the dash. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to laugh so desperately! But I was new in that job and it was the boss who just lost his breakfast. I was biting my tongue and hugging myself so I would not laugh.

The driver looks over, his shoulders rolling with laughter already. "I would have pulled over."

The supervisor, poor guy, feebly offers, "I thought that was just a burp."

That was it for me. No power in the universe could have prevented me from laughing at that point.

So many times the story simply does not translate to either the written or spoken word. You simply had to have been there, and I am thankful for every time I was there.

An Emotional Hangover of Sorts

Well, the disappointment over our government seating a man such as Brett Kavanaugh to the country's highest court is rather acute this morning. We made our best logical arguments but in the end emotions won over everything. It feels as if common sense and decency lost to a mob mentality, or perhaps it was just a bunch of old white men in Washington flexing their power yet one more time, the rest of us be damned.

To me it seems that people can not stop feeling long enough to think, to carefully consider and understand the larger context but I could be wrong. Maybe Kavanaugh supporters see the big picture, too, but they just do not give a good goddamn. When the best arguments fail, all that is left is for people to find out for themselves.

I felt this way when Brownback was elected as Governor of Kansas, both times. All the arguments against his extreme agenda fell on deaf ears. I resigned myself to sit back and tick off all the things I knew would happen. Kansas lost its excellent credit rating. Our schools had to be funded by court order. Our economic growth fell below the rates of Nebraska, Colorado, Missouri and Oklahoma. An enormous fiscal deficit formed that will take years of recovery. State services remain curtailed and are a true aggravation for even something as simple as needing a phone answered in a state office somewhere. It is not the State employees' fault. There are so few to serve so many. Most tragically, the most vulnerable people, the young, the ill, the elderly had their lives severely impacted by Mr. Brownback's run as Governor. Cuts to all manner of medical and social services were implemented, disqualifying families from critical services, placing others on long waiting lists, and most certainly making life even more difficult for the working poor. Supply side economics simply do not work but people forget that, time and time again. The point is everyone lives with the consequences of the majority rule. If "your side" does not win, it is at least a palatable loss if the majority rule was won fair and square.

State economics aside, through various underhanded shenanigans, the radical conservatives in Washington have been systematically chipping away at all the checks and balances that have made our form of government work pretty damned well - up to now. For twenty years or more this decline has been picking up speed. Now we have rampant gerrymandering, dark money, and 24 hour cycles of Fox News propaganda steering the national debate in whatever direction they require to accomplish whatever foul deed they are up to next. Some very powerful special interests have managed to wrest our democracy away from us while overseeing the largest transfer of wealth in human history - right in plain sight of every adult American citizen. At least half of us are okay with it. Ironically, it appears the half who are suffering the most are the same people who are okay with it.

Now we are well on the way to a truly radicalized Supreme Court. People have no idea what that is going to mean. They do not understand that their lives and the lives of their families will be changed in very real ways - sooner AND later. Who will stand for us, we the people, before the highest court in the land now that it has been bought and paid for by the greediest, most unprincipled pack of sharks to ever run the free world? No one. The Republicans in Washington wanted THAT man, that particular man, for a pre-determined reason, and we will find out soon enough what that reason is. It will be ugly.

As for the national discussion of the issues of sexual abusers and sexual abuse victims, the Republicans in our government literally got away with doing the most underhanded move of the last 50 years in American Government. Well, there are consequences for that, too. I just wish the half of us who are appalled by the blatant disregard for the Supreme Court, and for simple decency, did not have to suffer with those who think it is okay to subvert our government.

How long did Congress investigate Hillary Clinton? How much time and money? And what was the result? How many people are going to jail due to that investigation? But the same rabid people cannot take the time to genuinely and fairly investigate the very disturbing claims against Brett Kavanaugh - the very same man whose public behavior clearly and unequivocally demonstrated that he is temperamentally unfit to be a Supreme Court Justice? There should have been a full, genuine, apolitical investigation carried out in the best interest of our country. If innocent, Kavanaugh could have been exonerated. If Dr. Ford was lying, she could have been held accountable. (NO ONE wants to see an innocent man accused of crimes he did not commit.) Now we will never know and a there is a very real possibility that a wholly inappropriate man will be awarded a lifetime position on what should be the highest, most unimpeachable source of law interpretation for all Americans.

If you are okay with all of it - with the blatant whitewash and misuse of the FBI carried out by the Republicans in Washington this week, then I am sad to say you deserve everything coming your way. I will be sorrowfully ticking off the boxes as the ugliness arises, quite likely for the rest of my life.

Confessions of a Human Bein'

For the last several nights I have fallen gratefully into my bed and slept like the pious old woman I am (in my imagination). I have slept on the bare mattress and the bare pillows because the clean sheets are laying atop the dryer, on the other side of my enormous mansion. It would take safari preparations to make it all the way to the utility room - just steps from the refrigerator where I can be found throughout the day and oft times in the night. My mother would NEVER have slept on a bare mattress.

Truth be told, I think the mattress is beautiful. It is red and very fancifully embroidered in pink, lavender and silver. I do not mind waking up to the art nouveau busyness of it. Most of the time I make the bed the same day I wash the sheets but sometimes I do not. Sleeping on a bare mattress is not a habit but it happens and I always feel guilty. Just a tiny twinge of guilt regarding the lesser sin of sloth. It is a gram of guilt on the scales of my life. (Disclaimer: I will not discuss the metric tons of guilt of my life here so do not be disappointed.)

Everyday there are small things that get added to the dark side of that scale, like cussing around people who do not cuss. Using politically incorrect words as terms of endearment to my children... and the dogs, and the horses. The darkest, most vile PIC words are reserved for the machinery that fails when I am trying to get work accomplished.*  I do not believe I have EVER regretted cussing - even when I got my mouth washed out with soap. Cussing is the rhythm guitar of language. It is essential. 

I allowed my young son to keep a one hundred dollar bill he found on the street but I never made the effort to return the money. That one bothers me enough that I need to make amends for it but have not decided how to go about it. Maybe drop a hundred dollar bill on the same street? I should have taught my son by example but he was so excited that he found it. (Who wouldn't be?!) It was next to an older man's foot and my little son said, "Excuse me, sir, but is that your money?" My daughter was there. She said the guy would have lied and claimed it if my son had been alone. After a brief visible internal conflict, the guy admitted it was not his money. I could have turned it in to the police or advertised in the local paper but I simply let my son have the money.

I did not take my faithful and beloved old dog in to be euthanized before the end. He was eating and drinking and getting around, but visibly declining in health and suffering. I cooked special food for him for the last four months of his life. I had it in my head that if he stopped being able to get around, then I would take him to the vet. He was clearly determined to stay on his feet. Maybe he knew that was the metric I was using to make my final decision. The last day he was not doing well at all when I fed him supper. Later in the evening I called for him to go into the garage because it was going to rain. He came one last time, but then he could not walk any longer. I tried to lift him so I could get him to shelter but I saw that he was dying. I stayed with him where he had fallen, my heart broken, guilt and regret crushing me. I will always be sorry and I will always be guilty for that... and for an entire lifetime of decisions and actions and other stuff but I know I am not the worse human being on the planet. I am not even in the bottom 50% in this lifetime. Guilt is a good teacher and a mighty brake on the human ego and willful spirit but oh, it is burdensome.

On second thought, sleeping without sheets sometimes should not even be on the scale of guilt and regret - not even a gram's worth! Fuck sleeping without sheets.


*How could I fail to mention the monstrous cussing technology elicits?! I will probably go to hell for that.

I Think We Are Doomed

As human beings we all experience embarrassing lapses in judgment, forgetfulness, misunderstanding and miscommunication. I am right at the top of the list in all these areas. Sometimes I run across things that cause a major wave of despair in my American soul. We are perhaps the most arrogant people on the planet but I often run across proof of our very real stupidity. Coupled with our signature American hubris, our nation is doomed to fall.

I needed graphite paper to transfer a detailed pencil drawing of horses to a canvas for a painting. I assumed it was available wherever art supplies or crafts were sold but not 100% certain. (I have wasted so much time wandering in those huge stores looking for things they do not have!) I researched online before making the trip to town. With the magic of Google, a billion returns instantly lit up my computer screen including the ubiquitous customer reviews. One woman had taken the time to complain that after "five or six" uses, the graphite paper was no longer effective. She used her real name.

Another time I was researching auto repair garages in Topeka, looking for a reputable place. I carefully read all customer reviews. One place had many satisfied customers and only a few dissatisfied reviews. One particularly dissatisfied customer had made a long, detailed complaint. The more I read the more I doubted I should take my car there, all the other glowing reports aside. That is, until I got to the next screen where it was revealed the time lapse between the repair at the garage and the failure was in excess of two years! The man was so obsessive about detailing his complaint that he actually documented a string of his own failures to avoid a catastrophe. Any reasonable person would have taken steps at the first sign of trouble - trouble that appeared two years after the fact. Not only was he a dumbass, he had publicly and carefully documented that he was a dumbass... AND he felt very strongly someone else was to blame for his own dumbassery.

It would be helpful if our phones and computers would ask "Are you certain you wish to make a dumbass of yourself?" before the Enter key is functional. Better if there was a committee review.

I Take A Turn In the Dark

For over two decades I have been awake every single night at 3 am or within a few moments of it. I do not know why. For many years I used the time to meditate. Because I had no training for meditation it was more simply being silent and open to whatever the Universe might choose to communicate. Several times extraordinary things happened but most often nothing happened. Now that I have the benefit of almost five years of instruction from a serious meditation teacher - one trained in the Tibetan basics for the Western mind - I often meditate during this time. The only thing I have noticed so far is that my thoughts have settled down a bit. Instead of tumbling and rushing randomly in a frenetic rush of chaos, they now seem to come more quietly and orderly. I am just beginning to have the mental discipline to not automatically go unconsciously down the rabbit hole with every random thought that catches my attention. Not always but sometimes I can avoid being pulled entirely into a train of thought. Tis but a bit of progress.

Sometimes I do not want to meditate or listen in case the Universe speaks to me. I apparently want to worry about the rest of my life and dying. I have been physically limited by bad knees for a long time but in the last five years I have been physically suffering - due to my knees and because I am getting old. Not just older, but old. I have to say, getting old sucks. My hearing is diminishing and my eyesight is deteriorating rapidly due to some sort of cracking process caused by aging and the beginnings of cataracts. The cataracts can eventually be removed but there is no remedy for the other process. My strength wanes. If only I were still physically strong, I would be happy. I can still change a tire, but not always. I need help sometimes. I can still pull down a hay bale but to clean up the barn and remove the old bales would take several days instead of a couple of hour's work. I can load feed bags in and out of my car but it is no longer effortless. I have to work hard at it. It is inevitable that these changes occur but it is scary and dismaying. Sometimes facing these facts and admitting that it is only going to get worse as time goes on makes me claustrophobic in the middle of the night.

Far better people than I have become old, infirm and died, some peacefully and some in the agony of cancer or other horrific disease, or due to a gruesome accident or crime. I believe I have lived before so for that to have happened it means I have also died before. I was with my mother when she took her last breath and a thrilling energy suffused the room. I experienced it as her joy in being released from the cruel physical ravages of late stage emphysema. I knew her thought at that moment was "That wasn't hard at all! What was I so worried about?"

We all know we have to go sooner or later and I have been thinking about the reality of that. Of course, I do not have any idea how or when, but whatever form the conclusion of this life takes, I will have to go along with it whether I am ready or not. When I was a child and first began riding roller coasters, there was always extreme regret as the cars began the gut wrenching, clanking climb up that first hill. My psyche would writhe in despair and regret, and I would silently wail, "Too late to get off now!" I was going for the ride whether I was ready or not. I sometimes think dying might feel like that - including the terrific rush of adrenaline and joy at surviving when the cars arrived back at the beginning.

Still...how much we must give up when we lose this world! Everything - our home, our loved ones, our talents and pleasures, and whatever wisdom we may have garnered in our brief moment on Planet Earth. Of course, we hear from people who have been revived from clinical death.  They tell of meeting loved ones who send them back because it is not yet time. Or they report an encounter with a merciful being, or entity that some call God. Some come back after witnessing a marvelously beautiful land.  I have not a clue how it will go or where I will be or what I will do when I get there.

 I hope it is as Gandalf explains to Pippin:

Gandalf: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.

Pippin: What? Gandalf? See what?

Gandalf: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.

Pippin: Well, that isn't so bad.

Gandalf: No. No, it isn't.

Loop Quantum Gravity Theories and Other Farm Related Discussions

My neighbor, a retired PhD, has been reading scholarly books about quantum theories, including an advanced college text book to help translate the terms and ideas. (My feeble efforts over the years have been to read layman's books such as "Einstein's Universe" by Nigel Calder; "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" by Gary Zukav; "The Elegant Universe" by Brian Greene; and "Introduction to Superstrings" by Michio Kaku.) I also spent a lot of time reading everything on Stephen Hawking's web page way back when I got my first desk top home computer. (Remember AOL?!) At any rate, I have not had occasion to discuss theories of relativity since my good friend Karl died almost 30 years ago. The discussions with Karl lent color and depth to much of my poetry written as a young woman and has fired my imagination since.

I admit I am intimidated by my neighbor's formally educated mind. I know my undisciplined and heavily existential bent is no match, but I do not let that stop me from making an ass out of myself. Here is my response to her summation of her recent inquiry into loop quantum gravity and string theories:

"You want to know something truly amazing? The more I get into the Buddhist world view, and the more I find out about the TRUE nature of what those monks had been doing in Tibet all of these centuries... our modern scientific theories coincide with their incredibly disciplined mental inquiry into the true nature of reality. At its purest, Buddhism is not considered a religion and the Buddha was not considered divine or a deity - but considered "conscious" or awake. It is amazing to me that the mainstreaming of relativity and quantum theories roughly coincide with the dispersion of the Tibetan monks across the world. I have been reading a lot about some of the contemporary Buddhist adepts in discussion with the best theoretical western minds and realizing they are discussing the same conclusions. Isn't that astounding?

Perhaps we are witnessing the actual evolution into a far more enlightened species as these ideas have spread across the entire planet and are consciously available in mundane reality to everyone. What if we are just on the cusp of a profound tipping point of conscious expansion - something akin to all those epochs of time while our ancestors slowly evolved until that one remarkable change produced homo sapiens with our big brains? What if we are soon going to take another leap of evolution and become an enlightened species as well? Hard to believe when the best the USA can do is elect Trump, but not every early homo sapiens unit survived... it was survival of the fittest. Maybe evolution is going to weed out the dumbasses for a millennia or two, starting with those who elected Trump? (I read a disturbing article the other day that blue collar white people are dying at an increasing rate in America - attributed to despair due to economics - but it's just because they are addicted to Fox News.) Only the brightest of the first homo sapiens survived, so maybe going forward only the most conscious will survive to reproduce. By that logic, Fox News is an agent of evolution!"

Her response to that was one line. (I think she understood it was a joke.)

So, that was yesterday. I woke in the wee hours this morning with a dizzying glimpse of ideas too big for my normal thinking. The faint echo of what I had been dreaming was the question of what exactly is the nature of numbers that theoretical physicists can describe the nature of reality using them? And here I was thinking numbers merely evolved as an easier way for humans to barter potatoes for beer or some such basic evolutionary need! It is like when my meditation teacher instructs us to "be aware of being aware". It is too goddamned mind boggling.

My neighbor dropped this little gem on me yesterday: the idea that space is made of discrete particles. Meaning, in my admittedly limited understanding, space is not mere emptiness but consists of quantifiable amounts of the smallest indivisible space "particle". I guess that means we can take infinite space and chop it up into its own "space" atoms. So, if you can dismantle a space particle into even smaller units of something else the way you can break an H2O molecule into hydrogen and oxygen, what would the smallest unit of space be?  And what would its components be? What is less than space?

I will be thinking about this on the drive to work every morning for months!

Invoking The Grandmothers

I usually avoid writing anything specifically political because that is not the purpose or focus of Spiritcreek. Politically charged issues carry a heavy and painful weight in these "generally wretched times" that I would rather not mix into the silliness of this particular blog. Despite certain issues weighing quite heavily in my mind, and my conviction that we are literally in an extended battle for our country's soul, I have refrained from opening my big mouth - for the most part. Ah, the best laid plans of mice and women...

When Mitch McConnell and the Republicans voted to silence Elizabeth Warren, when they refused to enter Coretta Scott King's words into the record - in the very highest halls of the Land of Free Speech? - I nearly exploded. 64 years of being interrupted, man 'splained to, talked over, ignored, ridiculed, dismissed, cussed at, yelled at, lied to and argued with came to a metaphysical boiling point. No, Mr. Mitch McConnell, you soulless bastard. No, Mr. Lindsey Graham, you whining, big-mouthed short man. No.

Elizabeth Warren does not speak for all women, but she damn sure speaks for a very solid percentage of American women, and quite likely a solid percentage of real men. Her voice is the only feminine political voice we currently have so get used to it, you old bastards! YOU are not the only people allowed to speak in this country.

Women are sending postcards to Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell and Mr. Lindsey with this message: Nevertheless, we persist. When I sat down to address my post cards last night, the names of my grandmothers came instantly to mind. Maybe for the very first time in my life I felt the actual spiritual connection to my ancestors. I know the maternal grandmothers' names far, far back, but I included only the generations of Kansas women. Marilla Jane, Mattie Fern, Mary Ruth, myself and my daughter - five generations of women who, living or dead, are mad as hell. Well, I am not certain spirits can actually be angry but they can certainly weigh in on matters of spiritual significance. My grandmothers weighed in on this deal in a very clear way.

Marilla Jane would not have been able to vote until she was 47 years old. Mattie Fern could just vote by the time she was 21. Mary Ruth voted her entire life. I first voted at age 19 (in 1972). Our votes matter. We are equal under the law and our voices will not be silenced by a bunch of old, soft-handed white men who think far more highly of themselves than anyone else thinks of them.

I know there is a fine line between the meanings of the words invoke and evoke, but I had to look up the definitions to determine whether I evoked my grandmothers, or invoked my grandmothers. Evoke means to draw forth, usually memories or feelings. Invoke means: cite or appeal to (someone or something) as an authority for an action or in support of an argument. As it turns out, I did both.

The Easiest Things

It is the last day of the year and time for reflection. Contemplation. Comparison. It is a good opportunity to consider any needed course change - adjusting for local conditions as I like to call it. When I was a young woman there were many times I needed to make significant adjustments - in relationships, employment, locale. Those were gross adjustments. As I look back, the mature years of life have been mostly quiet - internal adjustments - fine tuning.

I gave the Christian religion a serious run but it simply did not hold up to the wear and tear of real life. The Christian arrogance of the "true believers" chased me out of adult Sunday school when a young man confidently concluded that my best friend was condemned to hell for being homosexual. With the full weight of all the generations of imperious Christian fascism, he concluded the "debate" with the church's ace in the hole: "It's scriptural!" His tightly sealed lips drawn into a self-righteous frown of stern finality, as if he had just won a debate with Satan himself, showed me most clearly that I was wasting my time with such bullshit. Of course, I did not and do not paint all Christians with that particularly distasteful brush. There are true Christians in this world, and they are gentle, loving people who do not bludgeon others with scriptural hate and intolerance. They are the true followers of Jesus.

Leaving organized religion behind for good was a fundamental course adjustment. The beginning, middle and end of significant relationships were course-altering events. Jobs and friends and neighborhoods and other such details all influenced my journey. When I turned forty, an enormous dissonance plainly revealed itself. I had been living unaware on the very mountain I had been searching for most of my life. It was when I made the conscious decision to locate the mountain that everything changed, though I did not know it for many, many years. It was a simple decision - a mere thought, actually. It was a brief moment I had while sitting on the floor praying. I only recognize that moment in hindsight. It was the merest fraction of a degree course correction that brought me to my current place all these decades later.

Sometimes I imagine my course extending far ahead into future lives, though I cannot imagine what a single one of those lives might be. The Tibetans say it is not an individual, central soul that extends through all lifetimes but that reincarnation is more like "dice, stacked loosely atop one another". I admit I felt faint when I first experienced that statement. It took a couple of years of chewing on that idea, worrying it around like a dog with an old bone until I felt comfortable with it. If that is true, my understanding of it as I sit here today is that our physical lives as we know them are simply small manifestations welling up from an infinite sea of life force and consciousness, loosely bounded by karmic forces and chance. There is so much more!

Knowing something intellectually is a far cry from being able to practically use the knowledge, but knowing something intellectually is also the first step of any journey, even an infinite journey toward understanding. The concept that there may not be a Chief Engineer carefully attending to every, single, minute detail in my life as I once imagined literally blasts my carefully structured "understanding" into infinity. It is almost more than I can safely imagine.

The sacred mountain is within every single human being. It is surely within every single living being, and within things we in the West consider inanimate. It is our true nature. We have forgotten it. It takes a lifetime - maybe many lifetimes - to remember.

The times I have drawn nearest to that knowing, in both spirit and in the flesh, I have been in the sweat lodge. It is in that sacred space, that incredibly hot, claustrophobic, pitch black moment when it is impossible to avoid myself. There I am - every single thing I do not like about myself - what I am ashamed of, embarrassed for, and disappointed in. All the pain and anger I have brought on myself and others - the injustices that have been inflicted on me - it is all there, revealed in the dark as if illuminated by the brightest light. If I may quote myself, that is truly a "well, hell" moment. It is ugly and feels terrible. I eventually realized the point of that moment is to clearly see myself, to find what needs attending. It is also a chance to look beyond - far beyond. It is the easiest of all impossible things.

As is customary: Wishing peace on earth and goodwill toward (some) men - from the Crazy Woman, the Supreme Beings, and Jake the Bad Dog here at Spiritcreek.

What Happened?

Our country has changed, deep down in its soul, and I am not sure who she is any more. We are angry at one another. We have insulted and harmed each other through abusive national discourse and now sit glaring at one another, truly angry and unable to tolerate much in the way of reconciliation.

We have elected a loose cannon as President – a man whose business practices and personal mores are despicable – a man whose entire adult life represents the worst of America and her capitalistic excesses – a man who made himself rich trampling everything designed to protect people and things which require protection from unbridled capitalism and greed. He is the President we deserve, I guess, as we seem to be a nation of hateful, selfish people. We have lost the middle ground – all of us. For instance, no longer can we safely and sanely discuss a humane and just way to keep immigrant families together. It has devolved into a national brawl of the extremes. No one wants freeloaders clogging up the system, not even hard working illegal immigrants whose sweat and tears are just as real and as hard-earned as our own, we who are descendants of illegal immigrants to the last man. We need to sanely discuss immigration then make humane and fair changes.

The hateful discourse has hardened our hearts. I literally cannot stand any more of the Fox News rhetoric and that ilk. It is like Antabuse to an alcoholic. It makes me instantly sick. I feel bad that people I love seem to be blissfully unaware they have been emotionally manipulated and – yes – how racist, homophobic, and all the other unfortunate “ist” and “ic” terms for undesirable human behavior that Fox rhetoric genuinely is.

Alternatively, people who consume Fox rhetoric cannot stand the stinging barbs of satire and irony the “liberals” and the Left use in their rebuttals in the national discourse. They have had their fill of being abused in this way because they do not consider themselves racist or homophobic. In their daily lives and actions most of them quite likely are neither racist nor homophobic. It is a question of degree, I think.

Now we are truly angry at one another. Every issue blooms into a huge firestorm of hateful spite. I understood the genesis of the Black Lives Matter movement instantly. American citizens are killed with impunity by police all over the country and nothing is done to stop it. Even women and children are gunned down. It is an established fact that black people are harmed by institutionalized racism, even to the point of death but instead of Black Lives Matter engendering a dialogue between decent, rational, concerned human beings, it touched off a reactionary firestorm of All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter. Folks! These are not mutually exclusive schools of thought! The irony of All Lives Matter seems to blissfully escape the most strident defenders of that particular group. If indeed all lives matter then Black Lives Matter would never have sprung from the mean streets of our American cities. We would have come together to tackle this horrific problem of innocent people being gunned down before our very eyes long before the need for a Black Lives Matter movement ever came about.

I could go on.  Environmental issues demand our immediate and undivided attention.  We MUST do something quickly or our children and grandchildren will pay an unbelievably painful price for our selfish inaction.  Instead of combining our might and considerable creative resources to resolve these issues, we are divided and angry and nothing meaningful gets done except for the few who profit mightily at our expense.

My spirit quails at the thought of this madness as being deliberately engineered by the rich and powerful. People become rich and powerful by manipulating everything around them and through radical opportunism. Of course there are powerful groups – think tanks and various organizations everywhere - that clinically promote particular agendas. A little excursion into the history of our railroads is a nasty, despicable lesson on everything from genocide to wholesale government corruption, bribery, thievery and murder. Not much has changed since then. Our national consciousness has been bamboozled by the minions of the greediest and most corrupt to the point where we are literally at each other’s throat while they make off with all the money and destroy the planet while they are at it. We fight like cats and dogs and try to pin the blame on whatever whipping boy our national media chooses for the week. It does not serve you or me. We deserve better.

Not everyone wants or needs to be a billionaire. No matter what color we are, what our first language may be or what our religion, gender or political persuasion may be, we all want the same things. We want to work and pay our own way. We want affordable and equitable education for our children. We want and DESERVE affordable health care. We want competent and principled police forces. We want authentic and just representation in our government. We want equitable taxation for EVERYONE, including corporations and the rich. We need clean air, clean soil, clean water or we will not survive. We want to live in peace with the people we love for all the days of our lives. Americans can have that. We are already rich enough. We simply need to sit down with our neighbors and find common ground. We must work together to change our government, to rid it of corruption. Politicians must be held accountable to “we, the people”. We must stop listening to the voices that say this one or that one is to blame. WE are to blame. WE are the responsible party.

I do not know when or if civil discourse will return. This election we became painfully aware of our differences of opinion - among good friends, within families. The solution is to become aware of our commonality, to find the middle ground and value that far above our differences. Maybe that is the point of beginning.

Gratitude

There will most certainly be a last time I post to my Spiritcreek blog - either I will have dropped my earthly robe or I simply will not be interested/able to continue posting. The posts get fewer each year even though I still have plenty to say - I am an opinionated liberal redneck from Kansas, after all. My most loyal and faithful reader, Kit, is gone and sometimes it feels as if I am writing into the void. I can hear him in my mind's ear right now, giving me a hard time. (He was always so bossy!) But today is Thanksgiving, and this morning, through the programmed magic of Facebook, a photo of the foundation of my house appeared as a Memory from four years ago. Here I am today, sitting at my computer looking out the windows opening to the bend of the little creek, just as I had always imagined I would someday do. I paused for a moment to appreciate what is good and right in my world. First, however, there must be bitching and moaning!

On the first day of November I suffered a wound to my leg when a weed stalk ripped a hole in my skin. It certainly hurt but it wasn't until I got back to the house that I realized it required stitches. Aside from childbirth and a bar fight that required 17 stitches in my ear, I have never needed stitches. My stomach was full of butterflies anticipating the medical torture.

The doctor called it a "gruesome wound" - a bit dramatic but it was ugly. Getting stitches was not pleasant, especially since the doctor complained the entire time about people coming in late in the day. She was quick to add an accident like mine was different. I think she must have been under a lot of stress. I missed the good Dr. Keirnan O'Callaghan, the general practitioner I went to my entire adult life. He would never have complained to a patient. I am certain his stitches would have looked a hell of a lot more careful and precise than the Frankenstein attempt of the stressed Med Assist physician. (Good thing I am not overly vain.)

The worst part has been the actual healing. It has been messy and inconvenient and eventually required two days off work. I do not know how people with serious wounds - a gunshot, for instance - ever heal! I have spent $45 in bandage supplies alone. One little weed stalk hidden in the grass at the barn caused all of this. A few days ago, none the wiser, I suffered a puncture wound just inches from the big wound. It did not require stitches but I am still bandaging my leg and waiting for both wounds to fully heal! My body must certainly have passed some aging threshold because I have cut, sliced, scraped, abraded and scratched myself countless times but never sustained damage like this - not even when I wrecked the family Harley in Salina! 

The entire experience made me reflect on the ordeal of people who face major physical healing - combat soldiers for instance. What must they endure? I am grateful mine were minor wounds. I am grateful for truly professional, dedicated doctors like Dr. O'Callaghan. He was a class act I took for granted because I did not know any better. Now I do.

I am grateful for a million and one things - but the point is sometimes you have to bleed into your shoe before you realize how grateful you are for the things you have taken for granted.

The Mystery of Fate

Earlier this summer, while waiting for the traffic light to change, I noticed twigs with green leaves stuck in the holes in a sign post. I casually wondered what the circumstances might have been that caused someone to do that. Passing the corner several times a week, I soon realized it was not a random, meaningless human act but a living tree growing within the sign post.

I drive past this corner several times a week and I continue to consider the fate of this tree. The definition of fate is: the development of events beyond a person's control, regarded as determined by a supernatural power. Was it a supernatural power that allowed the seed to take root where the tiny shoot could escape the mower and the weed whacker by improbably growing inside the relative safety of the sign post? Most would argue it was mere chance, but chance is a synonym of fate.

Every time I drive by, a verse from a Paul Simon song comes to mind:
"It was a dry wind
And it swept across the desert
And it curled into the circle of birth
And the dead sand
Falling on the children
The mothers and the fathers
And the automatic earth"*

The "automatic earth" might refer to the processes of life established and programmed within the DNA of all living things, the impetus for the dogged determination of survival. Despite less than optimum circumstance, a seed, following it's automatic programming, germinates and grows in an attempt to fulfill its destiny. The destiny of the seed is to sprout given the merest chance. If this tree is left to its fate it may slowly and surely engulf the post within its trunk, or it may reach an unnatural limit within the confines of the post when it cannot sustain itself and perish. It may be killed by a human being in defense of city property. Any number of other fates could befall the tree but its seed could not choose not to sprout.

Corporeal human beings, inhabitants of the automatic earth, are powered by this same programming, though we believe we alone, of all living things, have free will - that our lives are guided by a higher purpose, or a higher intelligence, or have a different fate than trees... or insects... or animals... or bacteria. We can at least choose not to live but we honestly have no idea to what extent all living things may possess free will. Some world views acknowledge physical existence itself is not possible without some level of consciousness - that all physical matter contains consciousness. Perhaps by dint of consciousness any physical matter also falls into a spectrum of possible action that can be considered some form of free will.

It is tricky to think my way through such ideas. Far better minds have wrestled these concepts and it is all written somewhere. For all I know, my life as I have lived it is a human version of living despite unnatural confines, just like this tree. Or perhaps a chance of physical life is so precious to tree and human alike that growing within a prison is desirable. Rather than read what another person has decided, it is better to reach my own conclusions on such matters. In the end, I am not sure it matters either way.

*from "The Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon, copyright 1986

Attempting to assume its ultimate form despite the limitations