Weblog 115
April 20, 2008~ 12:15am
The world is a great ball of tangled wire. Sometimes we get poked or scratched by it, caught in the tangles, imprisoned in the grid till it's all we can see- and we just feel trapped. 'Work' can do this; certainly, modern life can do this...
and there seems to be shadows everywhere- and boxed in things and barriers, and oh......and just airlessness. That's the time something wonderful can break right through and create an escape hatch or a window- a moment of escape into the true mystery of being alive. Today brought two such things to me.
This first instance needs a preface. I've recently been alarmed by wasps that have found their way into my bedroom in the last few days-- one a day, and it's always just as I'm reading, that something catches at the corner of the eye and when I look, sure enough- a wasp- dark and shiny reddish-brown with dangling long legs, slowly circling the reading lamp. (My own personal remedy for this is to screech, throw off the covers and run for the hairspray. Two or three good hits of the stuff renders them stickily unable to fly- probably to breathe as well- and then I scrape them onto the floor with anything at hand, and SQUOOSH them with a shoe. Sorry. My love of living things does not extend to stinging insects.)
Anyway- early this morning when the same thing happened, I examined possible points of entry, like the double hung old wooden sash windows that have a faulty lock and allow the top half to slide down about half an inch- (and yes, there are old wasp hives just outside.) But what to my wondering eyes should appear- but a mama Mourning Dove who'd made a nest in the little groove beside the skinny window sill.
Her big black eye looked up at me, her soft, grayish feathers patiently sitting there at peace with the world and waiting. That delighted and calmed me.
Then tonight while we were outside at my daughter's and watching the grandchildren careen around the yard, a HUGE WILD TURKEY came out of nowhere and roosted in a leafless tree across the street. JUST A HUGE THING! The resident birds did not like it one bit, and dive-bombed him till finally, stretching enormous wings, he lifted up, flapped audibly till he'd gained a few yards, and then spread those wonderful wings and just coasted toward the sunset. Lovely.
Life can surprise all the time. Life can lift just as surely as those turkey wings and send you into beauty....
...like that above. Something astonishing like that will appear out of nowhere, and it's all you can do to keep your heart inside the chest, because it wants to lift off in a kind of intense joy.
You'll get no argument here that life isn't a congested, scribbled over, straight-angled mess you see at the top of the page, but it's also the geisha, also the dove, and the turkey big as a wagon, lighter than air. We need to keep these kind of visions in our very own "View-Master"- (remember those?) And to save those images for when we really need them- or when we're sitting in that place inside the head that feels most peaceful to us-
and on the porch of that private, mental space we save for quietude, take them out, one by one. Take out those lovely moments, and let them- like Sandburg's grass- do their work.
April 20, 2008~ 8:15pm
I call the above image, "We Walk In Blood"--
There is a trial opening tomorrow in SanFrancisco. It's a class action suit stemming from the inordinate number of suicides that have resulted from troops who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Eighteen veterans kill themselves each and every day.
It's estimated that 300,000 troops are suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, and the help they seek from the VA Administration is either inadequate- too difficult to obtain- or generated by paperwork that for all intents and purposes appears to be designed to make the assurance of benefits as difficult as possible.
We saw this coming. Too many troops held over for longer extensions of duty, and often at the last minute being sent back into hell for yet another deployment, has stretched our military personnel to the breaking point. This situation didn't just suddenly appear. This has been the modus operandi for a nation at war without mandatory draft for five years now. Is it any wonder there are self-inflicted deaths? Shame on us. Shame on all of us.
I hope they win their case.
April 22, 2008~ 5:30pm
This morning, I followed a moron on Route 51. I followed a moron who would NOT go beyond 30 miles an hour so the wiser traffic behind me kept cutting over and around us. I, of course, was stuck. The most irritating part about being behind this particular moron was his bumper sticker- "BRING BACK THE LATIN MASS"- that said it all to me.
I would 'imagine'(something the moron never engages in, I'll wager)- that this same 'driver/moron' will be casting a proud Republican vote in the November elections. Caution.....conservatism......covetousness...those are its hallmarks and his bumper sticker and his driving-style both spoke volumes.
I however, was buoyant all day because I knew that when work finished up I would be making my way to the local polls and casting my vote for the most inspirational man to come along in a generation.
I was smiling all day. Hope does that.
Today is Pennsylvania's presidential primary, and though Hillary has close personal ties to our governor and LOTS of entrenched 'beholdens'- and even though a Hillary blow-out has been predicted for this state- I've said all along that Obama would come very, very close-- and perhaps even manage to WIN in Pennsylvania.
His campaign speeches in and around Pittsburgh have been full of the kind of quotes I've come to expect of a man of his eloquence-- and I cheered his sharp response to that slick commercial showing the red phone ringing at 3:00 a.m. in the White House-
"Let me ask you a question. There are three candidates left.
Who do you want answering that 3 a.m. phone call? The person who got Iraq wrong, or the person who got Iraq right? The person who paid attention to the intelligence, or the person who didn't?"
I think that says it all. Obama used his head when all around him were losing theirs- to paraphrase Kipling, and for me that's the one thing that is pivotal in deciding who I want to be the next president.
There is no more dire a mistake this country has made in the last 40 years equal to the invasion of Iraq-- and all our present ills flow directly from that initial font of disaster. Obama did not agree with that invasion, and I'm sure he watched with the same disbelieving horror as did I, right from my own living room, watching a president run roughshod over cooler heads and pushing ahead anyway-- as he has done all things-- by ignoring, denying, or by crushing opposing views. I am sick to the soul of that kind of government, and it's indeed time for a change- a real change-
Obama in 2008
-a return to sanity. A return to truth in government. I want to be inspired again. And this man does it.
***
(Return To Weekly Archives)
The world is a great ball of tangled wire. Sometimes we get poked or scratched by it, caught in the tangles, imprisoned in the grid till it's all we can see- and we just feel trapped. 'Work' can do this; certainly, modern life can do this...
and there seems to be shadows everywhere- and boxed in things and barriers, and oh......and just airlessness. That's the time something wonderful can break right through and create an escape hatch or a window- a moment of escape into the true mystery of being alive. Today brought two such things to me.
This first instance needs a preface. I've recently been alarmed by wasps that have found their way into my bedroom in the last few days-- one a day, and it's always just as I'm reading, that something catches at the corner of the eye and when I look, sure enough- a wasp- dark and shiny reddish-brown with dangling long legs, slowly circling the reading lamp. (My own personal remedy for this is to screech, throw off the covers and run for the hairspray. Two or three good hits of the stuff renders them stickily unable to fly- probably to breathe as well- and then I scrape them onto the floor with anything at hand, and SQUOOSH them with a shoe. Sorry. My love of living things does not extend to stinging insects.)
Anyway- early this morning when the same thing happened, I examined possible points of entry, like the double hung old wooden sash windows that have a faulty lock and allow the top half to slide down about half an inch- (and yes, there are old wasp hives just outside.) But what to my wondering eyes should appear- but a mama Mourning Dove who'd made a nest in the little groove beside the skinny window sill.
Her big black eye looked up at me, her soft, grayish feathers patiently sitting there at peace with the world and waiting. That delighted and calmed me.
Then tonight while we were outside at my daughter's and watching the grandchildren careen around the yard, a HUGE WILD TURKEY came out of nowhere and roosted in a leafless tree across the street. JUST A HUGE THING! The resident birds did not like it one bit, and dive-bombed him till finally, stretching enormous wings, he lifted up, flapped audibly till he'd gained a few yards, and then spread those wonderful wings and just coasted toward the sunset. Lovely.
Life can surprise all the time. Life can lift just as surely as those turkey wings and send you into beauty....
...like that above. Something astonishing like that will appear out of nowhere, and it's all you can do to keep your heart inside the chest, because it wants to lift off in a kind of intense joy.
You'll get no argument here that life isn't a congested, scribbled over, straight-angled mess you see at the top of the page, but it's also the geisha, also the dove, and the turkey big as a wagon, lighter than air. We need to keep these kind of visions in our very own "View-Master"- (remember those?) And to save those images for when we really need them- or when we're sitting in that place inside the head that feels most peaceful to us-
and on the porch of that private, mental space we save for quietude, take them out, one by one. Take out those lovely moments, and let them- like Sandburg's grass- do their work.
April 20, 2008~ 8:15pm
I call the above image, "We Walk In Blood"--
There is a trial opening tomorrow in SanFrancisco. It's a class action suit stemming from the inordinate number of suicides that have resulted from troops who have served in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Eighteen veterans kill themselves each and every day.
It's estimated that 300,000 troops are suffering from depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, and the help they seek from the VA Administration is either inadequate- too difficult to obtain- or generated by paperwork that for all intents and purposes appears to be designed to make the assurance of benefits as difficult as possible.
We saw this coming. Too many troops held over for longer extensions of duty, and often at the last minute being sent back into hell for yet another deployment, has stretched our military personnel to the breaking point. This situation didn't just suddenly appear. This has been the modus operandi for a nation at war without mandatory draft for five years now. Is it any wonder there are self-inflicted deaths? Shame on us. Shame on all of us.
April 22, 2008~ 5:30pm
This morning, I followed a moron on Route 51. I followed a moron who would NOT go beyond 30 miles an hour so the wiser traffic behind me kept cutting over and around us. I, of course, was stuck. The most irritating part about being behind this particular moron was his bumper sticker- "BRING BACK THE LATIN MASS"- that said it all to me.
I would 'imagine'(something the moron never engages in, I'll wager)- that this same 'driver/moron' will be casting a proud Republican vote in the November elections. Caution.....conservatism......covetousness...those are its hallmarks and his bumper sticker and his driving-style both spoke volumes.
I however, was buoyant all day because I knew that when work finished up I would be making my way to the local polls and casting my vote for the most inspirational man to come along in a generation.
I was smiling all day. Hope does that.
Today is Pennsylvania's presidential primary, and though Hillary has close personal ties to our governor and LOTS of entrenched 'beholdens'- and even though a Hillary blow-out has been predicted for this state- I've said all along that Obama would come very, very close-- and perhaps even manage to WIN in Pennsylvania.
His campaign speeches in and around Pittsburgh have been full of the kind of quotes I've come to expect of a man of his eloquence-- and I cheered his sharp response to that slick commercial showing the red phone ringing at 3:00 a.m. in the White House-
"Let me ask you a question. There are three candidates left.
Who do you want answering that 3 a.m. phone call? The person who got Iraq wrong, or the person who got Iraq right? The person who paid attention to the intelligence, or the person who didn't?"
I think that says it all. Obama used his head when all around him were losing theirs- to paraphrase Kipling, and for me that's the one thing that is pivotal in deciding who I want to be the next president.
There is no more dire a mistake this country has made in the last 40 years equal to the invasion of Iraq-- and all our present ills flow directly from that initial font of disaster. Obama did not agree with that invasion, and I'm sure he watched with the same disbelieving horror as did I, right from my own living room, watching a president run roughshod over cooler heads and pushing ahead anyway-- as he has done all things-- by ignoring, denying, or by crushing opposing views. I am sick to the soul of that kind of government, and it's indeed time for a change- a real change-
-a return to sanity. A return to truth in government. I want to be inspired again. And this man does it.
(Return To Weekly Archives)
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