"Never Talk Religion or Politics."

 

 

A rule of etiquette—in business, at the dinner table, at the barbershop, and elsewhere. This phrase, “Never discuss religion or politics with those who hold opinions opposite to yours,” has been cited in print since at least 1840.

And what do I do? I break the rule. (Family member—I wasn’t at the barbershop.)

Here was the rebuke: “If catastrophe befalls you, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”—

Whoa.

What if you really do want to know what they think? I read about the Ancient Egyptians, so the story went that when a stranger came to their village, they asked them what their religion was, for they were receptive to all kinds, and really wanted to know what this new person brought to the table.

Linus, from the Peanuts comic strip in 1961, said, “There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people…religion, politics, and the Great Pumpkin.”

I’ve only broken two of the three.  

 I looked up the author of the quote at the top of the page.

It was Richard Bach. I love that man. He wrote Illusions, my most-read book. (Also Jonathan Livingston Seagull.) I found this:

 

Okay, Dokey, guys that lets me off the hook. I will continue to read, learn, wonder, and invite others to jump in whenever they take a notion.

Hop in and tell me what you think.

Comment

I should let Peaches, the Pink Party Poodle for Peace, do the speaking for a while.

dogblogbypeaches.blogspot.com/

See ya later,

Jo

"To wonder and invite others to wonder with me."

Are You Struggling to Keep Up?/Hold Your heart in Both Hands

 "And God didn't make little green apples..."

 

Hold Your Heart in Both Hands.

Place your hands on your chest; for women, place your hands under your breasts, lift strongly so you feel like you are lifting your heart, and while holding your heart in both hands, say a prayer to your heart.

The heart-holding exercise was the advice of an elder to his younger generation.

I tried it, and it's peaceful, sweet, and uplifting.

 

Think of this: Sixteen days after conception, your heart began beating for you.

What a magical machine. It has tissue that wants to pulse. It wants to beat so badly that if it is shocked out of life, another shock will reestablish its pulse.

Now, how magical is that?!

Your heart began beating while it was still a tube and continued beating as it morphed into a chambered vessel.

The beating of our hearts is so constant that we don't think of it most of the time.

But think about it: the heart is like a momma ewe caring for her baby lamb; it is there nourishing all the body parts that are coming into being and then continues to beat for sometimes 100 years.

The heart has been used in prose, poetry, and love since, probably, the beginning of literature. It is associated with characteristics such as courage, honesty, perseverance, loyalty, and, of course, love.

The heart has taken a beating recently. It has always been so, but more recently, the pressure on it has been relentless. Usually, in life, stress comes and goes; illness and strife come and go. Then strife lets up; it gives our hearts, minds, and bodies a chance to recuperate. Lately, the unrest has been upon us like a storm that won't stop.

I came across a comment by a writer this morning who felt like her brain had become broken. She thought she could hardly write a coherent sentence.

What are our world conditions doing to us?

Are You Struggling to Keep Up?

It feels as though we are on a treadmill.

AI wants to write and think for us, and Pilot butts in every chance it gets.

Young people (especially) don't like the sex they were born into; people prefer to go it alone rather than enter into a relationship, and women have to hold fast to the freedoms they fought for, while hearing that they deserve to be "spanked."

Race seems to be an issue when I thought we were making giant strides to eradicate our resentments against people different from us. The government wants to pass laws regulating morality and books, and ensuring that authors use the correct words. Medical care has become controlled until the poor doctors must not know which way to turn and give us so many tests (to cover their butts) that the "Art" has virtually disappeared from "The Art and Science of Medicine."

We've put a person in control of our health who, it appears, wants Nature to take its course with viruses, germs, and communicable diseases that regularly pass through a population. (The use of the diphtheria vaccine, that horrible disease that strangled many infants and children in the 1700s  (One out of every ten children infected died from this disease) became eradicated by 2009. This shocked me; I thought it was long before.)

I see some who brush off the present concerns, others are overwhelmed with it. Some have felt that our establishment is so rotten that it deserves to be torn down and begun anew. There are so many rabbit holes we are tripping over them. And therapists are so overwhelmed some are leaving their profession.

Let me know if I'm wrong, but I am tired of conspiracies—yes, there are some—but come on, give us a break. Talk of aliens used to be fun. They aren't anymore.

I try to find a happy spot, but I struggle with the search.

I have heard that the heart has an electrical field that extends beyond the body. Our electrical fields interact with the electrical fields of others.

How is that affecting us?

Choose wisely.

And give that divine heart of yours a chance to be happy.

Jo

What Fills You with Liveliness?

 

“What fills you with so much liveliness that you want to do the work yourself?”—Jane Friedman

 

 Hawaii house

  

This morning as I stood at the sink with my hands in soapy dishwasher, an image flashed in my head. It was another day with my hands in soapy dishwater.

I was in Hawaii and worried that we were on the verge of running out of water. It freaked me so much that I get images of it to this day—and I’m not in Hawaii. I’m in Oregon where everyone in the family would laugh when I say I conserve water, for I have left the water running more than once, but hey, that’s when I left my mind someplace else.

In Hawaii we used a water catchment system where rainwater was collected from the house’s roof, shuttled into a pipe, and carried to a storage tank in the backyard. From the tank it flowed magically into faucets in the house. We had hot water too, after we replaced the rusted-out water heater with a new on-demand Propane heater that gave us instant hot water. On the first day on our new property, though, I took a cold shower in the sunshine in the yard on the glorious green grass.  (Using plastic tubs of cold water.) I left invigorated as though I’d had a brisk swim. However, I didn’t want to do that every day, and Daughter Dear said, “One of the great pleasures of life is soaking in a hot bath.”

All this water shortage was El Nino’s fault.

El Nino is a complex weather condition related to the wind and the ocean water. During an El Nino, California gets the rain, and Hawaii gets the drought.

Hawaii has a solution:

They provide a free water fill station with enormous nozzles that will fill a tank quickly—that is if you have the capability of hauling water. We put a small tank in the back of the pickup for that purpose. See why I love our pickup truck—for moving, hauling garbage to the free dump, and for being my office on wheels. It’s a general work horse.

During the rain shortage, I heard the rattling of a gigantic water truck delivering water to the neighbors on the ten acres next to ours. They had horses and thus a great need for water. That showed that you can have water delivered by the truck load to fill your tank.

We added a second storage tank on our property which Husband Dear and a helper built. After leveling the ground, adding a sand base and a plastic liner, Husband Dear and assistant built the tank up to eight feet. Husband Dear worked from inside the tank, and with the helper outside, they built up the tank using metal panels. That left Huband Dear inside a tank with a ladder being the only way out. Or a helicopter.

The ladder worked.

I wrote about our experience on the Big Island in a small book, The Frog’s Song, published by Regal Publishing. It should have a subtitle like “Living off the grid for one year.”

No, The Frog’s Song is not a children’s book. It is the story of one husband, one daughter, one seven-month-old grandson, two dogs, and two cats, who took leave of their senses, put their house up for sale, and moved to a tropical Island.

Pila of Hawaii calls moving to the Island a “Sojourn of Rejuvenation and Discovery.” 

Pila was convinced that Hawaii is where an individual must physically connect within a kind of initiation to prepare for the turbulent years ahead.

Daughter Dear and I felt “called” to the Island, we didn’t know anything about the sojourn, it simply seemed imperative that we move there. A year later, it seemed imperative that we leave. We moved to California for two years recovering from our “Sojourn,” before moving back to Oregon. We kept questioning what we felt on the Island, why we had such energy shifts, and why some places felt good while others felt odd. And then we learned that the Island is often called the Dirty Laundry Island because your issues come up to be healed. Whoa!

 (It turned out that leaving the Island was necessary for my husband’s health—more in the book.)

At the City of Refuse—one of the most tranquil places I have ever encountered, we heard an elder tell his story. As a child an elder sat down a few children and asked them, “What lies beyond the horizon?

“The sun, the water, nothing.”

To them the Island was their entire world.

“No,” said the elder, “There is life beyond the horizon.”

 I took that as a message and another reason to leave the Island, especially with a year-old child. Don’t stay cooped up on an Island when there is life out there.

More on The City of Refuge in the book.

I wanted to use The Frog’s Song as a title for my book after drawing the frog card three times from the Medicine Cards deck and learned that “The frog’s song calls the rain that settles the dust for our journey.”

To our surprise, the Coqui frogs of Hawaii sang us to sleep at night by singing their name, “Co-Qui.” To me they sounded like birds. Others on the Island consider them to be “Noise pollution,” and I guess in large numbers they can be quite loud, but I loved ours.  And I had to laugh when we returned to Oregon where at night, we heard the booming sound of a Bullfrog. (Trumpeting our return?)

“On the Big Island,” wrote Pila, “you are on ‘new turf,’ and the comfort zone known as your ordinary world no longer applies…You are at one of the few doorways in your reality where the Earth liquefies, and nothing is as it may seem.”  That is why Pila feels it is paramount for individuals to come to the Big Island and experience the energy in person at least once.

When Captain Cook asked the natives where they lived, and they said Hawaii, he thought they were ignorant savages. What they meant was that I live in Hawaii, “The Breath of the Creator.”

“Ha” = breath

“Wai” = life force, the water

“I” = I

“I live in the supreme wellspring of the life force of creation which is within me and all I behold is Paradise.”

Some say that Hawaii is not an easy place to live, for if you go there to run away from something, that something will present itself. Yep. And I know that the “call” to Hawaii, is a call not so much to a physical place, but to home—to the breath of the creator.

 

To say “ALOHA” is to stand in the presence of the breath, spirit and light, and to acknowledge and recognize all of this in another.” Pila of Hawaii.

Aloha,

Jo

All this from washing dishes this morning. 

 

Click for link to amazon 

 

She’s Got That Right!

“One of the great cruelties and great glories of creative work is the wild discrepancy of timelines between vision and execution,” writes Maria Popova in The Marginalian.

Creative engineers, too, so I have learned. Their work can take 10 times longer than planned. And it’s a good thing the guys who put a man on the moon didn’t know the work that would go into that project.

But Popova is correct. If we knew how long a project that was so exciting in the beginning would take us, we might never start. So, the Muse gives us amnesia regarding that timeline.

Somebody also scrambles my brain regarding other times, but maybe I’m just unorganized.

You know how some writers try to dash off a book in a month? Well, good for them. (Sarcasm) Two years ago, I tried writing 50,000 words while the pink dogwood blossoms were on the tree. The tree beat me by four days, but blossoms were on the tree for 30 days, and I enjoyed every moment with them.

I wrote the 50,000 words that was my goal. That didn’t mean the book was complete or even readable. It meant that I had written a shitty first draft.

Now, two years later, the blossoms have again fallen from the tree, only this time, they went out in a blaze of glory along with the spring rain we had last week. Now the tree is gloriously clothed with green leaves.

And my memoir is almost complete, although each day offers up a new memory.

 

 “When we dream up a project,” says Papova, “we invariably underestimate the amount of time and effort required to make it a reality. Rather than a cognitive bug, perhaps this is the supreme coping mechanism of the creative mind — if we could see clearly the toil ahead at the outset of any creative endeavor, we might be too dispirited to begin, too reluctant to gamble between the heroic and the foolish, too paralyzed to walk the long and tenuous tightrope of hope and fear by which any worthwhile destination is reached.”

(She’s the grown-up.)

If eight years ago, someone had told me that A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (public library) would take eight years, I would have laughed, then cried, then promptly let go of the dream. And yet here it is:

It has great entries addressed to young readers, but it doesn’t look like a book young people would pick up. I think it is more for adults.

 

I love Anne Lamott’s entry:

“If you love to read, or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing life. Period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people, but books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you will find your North Star, and you will find you, which is why you are here.”

 

That’s what I wished to convey in my memoir,

 

TIME TO STEP INTO OUR STORY

From

The Painter with a Pen

Jo Davis

 

Bridge Over Four Miles of Water

Columbia, The Gem of the Ocean

"Oh my god!" I screamed!

I was 196 feet in the air, on a bridge over water. Ahead, the road disappeared as it appears to at the crest of a San Francisco Street. No, like Disneyland’s Splash Mountain: you're floating log reaches the crest where you know it will plunge down. You try to look over the edge but don't see anything but space.

"Don't look down," I said.

"Yes, stupid, look down. You're driving. And you're doing down there whether you like it or not."

So, I screamed as the bridge-road took a 196-foot dive to a depth just skimming the water.

Sweetpea, lying on the seat beside me, couldn't see over the edge of the window and only knew that I tend to have outbursts once in a while.

So, why was I there?

Well, let me tell you, the Universe wanted to give me a thrill. And me, with my propensity for making wrong turns, it was an easy task.

I was in Astoria, Oregon, having just driven 350 miles from home, and could see my motel sign, a dip down onto a street below mine.

Ms. GPS was talking to me: "Turn left at Portway Street," she said. I spun around trying to see where Portway Street was and drove straight ahead onto the bridge's on-ramp. And then the little twerp GPS was silent. Did she tell me I had passed my turn-off? Nooo.

I was on the Astoria Megler Bridge, a 4.1-mile bridge, the longest continuous truss bridge in North America. It was built to a height of 196 feet at one point, so ocean-going vessels could sail beneath it without knocking their masks off. Or whatever they have on board that sticks up to that height.  

It was also built to withstand wind gusts to 150 miles per hour and a water speed of 9 miles per hour. The citizens of Astoria thought William Buggee, the architect, was crazy and said nobody would use it, but an average of 7,110 vehicles cross it daily, and Semis no less.

I had never heard of the Astoria Bridge, one of the best ways to have an adventure. I was fixated on that span of road ahead that was jacked up over the rooftops with a little bitty car climbing up its sloping entrance. "That doesn't look safe to me," I said, and then I was on it.

 

 Those aren't bugs up there, a tractor-trailer and a car.

   

<-----------------------------------

The mighty Columbia. I would call it "Old Man River," but that belongs to the Mississippi. Instead, it's Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. I have been curious most of my life about the mouth of the Columbia, and I thought the bridge was over the mouth, but my friend, whom I was visiting, said I was over the river, you can't see the mouth as it is out in the ocean.

But there was water all over the place, first a bridge over a bay into the city, then the river four miles wide and its famous bridge.

 

I grew up in The Dalles, Oregon, alongside the Columbia River. We swam in that river before we knew Hanford Nuclear Production Complex upstream was leaking toxic waste into it. We used to watch great flotillas of logs pushed by tugboats being transported downriver to lumber mills. One year, the river froze with big chunks of ice floating downstream. We watched the building of The Dalles Dam, which flooded out Celilo Falls, an area of the river that was narrow, rapid, and created a natural fish ladder where you could watch salmon throw themselves up the rapids and thus gain access to their home spawning grounds. Folklore says that once the salmon were plentiful, you could walk across the river on their backs.

 

The Native Americans had a treaty with the US government stating they could fish there forever. Well, they got relocated. There are not many salmon in the river now, but some make their way upstream using cement-built fish ladders around the various dams that change the once tumultuous river into lazy lakes.

 

But I got to cross that bridge and the Columbia from the perch high above the river, a glorious sight, and better than a roller coaster. Sometimes the best adventures come from a mistake. Mid-river, Oregon changes into Washington State, so I had to drive to Washington to turn around and retrace those four miles back across the river. 

 

 

 

Sweetpea, my little dog, was so excited when we got to the hotel, she ran in circles around the room, up and up over the beds.

The following day, my friend told me that she once walked that bridge with a crowd of other people. Pedestrian crossing is allowed only once a year in October. A shuttle carries the people to the Washington side, dumps them out, and makes them walk up that incline (as punishment perhaps) back to Oregon. Her comment: "There weren't enough porta-potties."

I picked up a small newspaper from her coffee table called, as I remember,"The Columbia,” where an article explained the value of tugboats. The ocean-going ships—those tremendous rigs, cargo ships, and such-need moving water rushing past their propellers to make them maneuverable. In slack water, they are sluggish. The day's heroes are the lowly little tugboats that usher the big guys into the docks.

Prettier than a tugboat, this little lady escorted me down the hill from my friend’s house.