These Are the Champions

 

As I watched Opi, sweet Obi, our cat, old and frail and growing thinner by the day, lick the light stream of water from the kitchen faucet—he likes his water fresh and flowing—I knew he would soon leave us and join Zoom Zoom, the cat who traveled to and from Hawaii with us. Zoom Zoom spent the better part of a year on my desk, getting off only to use the litter box—thank heavens for that. He even ate on the desk. (I had a long, wrap-around-the-corner one.) Those wild pigs that marauded in the night were more than he could handle. A mouse that big? No way.

Zoom Zoom and Opi--a desk can get really crowded.

In Eugene, Oregon, a group of five women, a like-minded group, who had similar spiritual understandings, studied ancient mysteries, went to lunch together, celebrated birthdays, and parties where we dressed up. Someone sang or recited a poem they had written.

Now there is only one—me.

Those women walked the earth; they lived their lives—some lost spouses, some divorced, one remarried—they raised their kids, and developed their place on the Spiritual platform of life. One taught us how to die; she knew it was time, she stopped eating and died.

Joy dropped from them like diamonds.

I will be forever grateful to have known them.

You’ve heard of the butterfly effect.  Ray Bradbury wrote of it in a short story. Arrogant time travelers went back to the dawn of life on this planet to see dinosaurs.  One person slipped from the wooden pathway that kept curious onlookers from disturbing the ecological system and accidentally crushed a butterfly. That small step altered history forever.

We don’t know how we affect the people around us—the air, the water, the plants, the animals, the planet.

What did John F Kennedy say?

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings."

See why there was such hope then? See why the young people rushed from their college studies to join the Peace Corps? See why we believed we could send a man to the moon?

We had excitement. We had hope.

 

Well, it’s been a wet week in Junction City. And I had been putting off painting the Tiny House because it was too hot to paint outside. You could call it Resistance, procrastination, or "I don’t want to do that," but I committed to doing it.  We debated about the color. I couldn’t find one I liked. Okay, we agreed on a color.  I bought the paint, brushes, roller, long handle, and the following day it rained. For three days it rained.

I negotiated with someone to paint it for me, for it has a high peak, and I’m not so steady on a ladder anymore. I’m not ready to join my friends on the other side.

It isn’t painted yet.

And then yesterday, old friends came in the form of BOOKS. Daughter Dear came into my office carrying a box, and asked, “Do you want a box of your old books?

“Sure,” I said, not knowing that they had been buried with my husband’s old research materials and shop supplies.

Wow! What a find!  There's that Orchid lei book my son-in-law gave me for Christmas in Hawaii. I had looked all over for that book, but not in the right place, obviously. There was the Kumulipo, A Hawaiian Creation Chant, translated and edited with commentary by Martha Warren Beckwith.  I excitedly found that book in a bookshop in Hawaii years before we moved there. I knew it existed and never thought I would have one. Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg, one of the all-time great writers on writing, and Seabisquit by Laura Hittenbrand. What a writer! The first paragraph in the Preface of Seabisquit has my vote for being the best written:

“In 1938. Near the end of a decade of monumental turmoil, the year’s number-one newsmaker was not Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hitler, or Mussolini. It wasn’t the Pope Pius XI, nor was it Lou Gehrig, Howard Hughes, or Clark Gable. The subject of the most newspaper column inches in 1938 wasn’t even a person. It was an undersized, crooked-legged racehorse named Seabiscuit.”

“In the latter half of the Depression, Seabiscuit was nothing short of a cultural icon in America, enjoying adulation so intense and broad-based that it transcended sport. When he raced, his fans choked local roads, poured out of special cross-country “Seabiscuit Limited” trains, packed hotels, and cleaned out restaurants.”—Laura Hiittenbrand.

And you know I love horses.

Diamonds appear all around us while we feel hamstrung by a man who wants to rename New Mexico for heaven’s sake. He’s like a bird who steals other birds’ eggs or an old dog who pees on everything and says, “Mine, mine, mine.”

 

"Our problems are man-made; therefore, they may be solved by man.”

We need a champion like Seabiscuit, who helped people out of the depression.

Any volunteers?

I love you guys. 💗Thank you for the honor of your attention.

 

P.S. Why are the cats champions? Because they brought us joy.

One Evening of Joy in a Chaotic World

 

I pull myself back from a ranting session regarding the conditions of this country, walk into a room full of people, and find a soft fluffy cushion.

With a groan, I gently lower myself onto the floor—it used to be so easy, but I cross my legs at the ankles and sit entranced by the people in the room who spark like exposed electrical wires.

A hardwood floor buffed to a golden shine creates a frame for the soft, fluffy, beige rug spread at its center. A beautiful fragrance drifts past me, and I look to my right where a crystal vase of Star Gazer Lilies sits on a credenza against the wall. Besides that one piece of furniture there is no other except a few folding chairs and cushions. Every person has a beverage of their choice, coffee, tea, water, or vino, sitting beside them on absorbent coasters. The air becomes as charged as the people when folks introduce themselves and share what they are into. There is a machinist in the bunch, a physicist, a painter, a seamstress, and a mother glowing with love after the birth of long-awaited twins yet enjoying her evening out.

There are writers in the group; some write articles, or books, and some journal only for themselves. Others express that they detest having to write anything, even to the extent of getting in trouble with their boss for late emails. A professional glass blower is nursing a burnt hand while saying glass blowing is his calling. He feels transformed while doing it and hopes to continue into old age.

Others murmur that they, too, feel joy while doing some creative endeavor. Even the chemist who finds that growing fungi in a petri dish never ceases to amaze him.

The glass blower mentions that there is a stained-glass window in a Cathedral in France, where images in the glass look like sign waves of music.

“Could that be a recording?” someone asks.

Another suggests that secrets such as Leonard Di Vince painted on his canvases might be embedded in the glass, and the room sparks with enthusiasm about some of the mysteries scattered about the earth.

I’m sure the Muse is outside the door listening and waiting for a lull so she can come in and whisper in the ear of each participant.

Someone mentions a documentary they had watched, “How to Find Joy in A Troubled World” which brings the room down a bit, but when someone suggests we watch it, and we all eagerly sit up and turn our attention to the television the hostess wheels into the room.

For the next 90 minutes, we all sit transfixed as we watch a Buddhist monk, the Dalai Lama, and the Christian Jesuit Archbishop of South Africa, Desmond Tutu, tease each other, laugh and joke like two ten-year-old boys, and refer to each other as their “spiritual brother.” Archbishop Tutu even gets the Dalai Lama to jiggle in a supposed dance, and the Dalai Lama leads a meditation. They eat birthday cake and laugh some more.

We end the gathering while everyone is musing or laughing or crying, and although most people would prefer talking into the night, it appears that luminous clouds have appeared beneath everyone’s feet, and after hugging each other, we all agree to meet again, and we float away to our respective vehicles with the refrain of two men singing in our ears:

“No dark fate determines our future. We do. Each day and each moment, we are able to create and re-create our lives and the very quality of human life on our planet.

“This is the power we wield.”*

*From The Book of Joy by the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, narrated by Douglas Abrams

 

P.S. I am continuing with this Newsletter, and posting it on Substack. You can read them there if so inclined. No fee, just a sign in--which would help my site of course. Thanks for reading. May the Muse be with you,

What a Difference a Week Makes

"I think I could turn and live with animals*, 

they are so placid, and self-contain'd, 

I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, 

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, 

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, 

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, 

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago…"

–Walt Whitman

 

I stopped the quote there, for I believe animals can be unhappy, which Whitman says they are not.

We have a new animal, a happy animal, a dog my grandson named Zeke.

I just learned that the word animal comes from the Latin word "soul."

Zeke is a German Shepherd mix. Small for a German Shepard. He's a lover, sweet and gentle. My daughter chose him from The Greenhill Animal Shelter. 

He has three legs.

He had a genetic deformity in his right leg. The RV Outlet in Eugene, Oregon, paid for his surgery, a generosity for which I am incredibly grateful. They gave that dog an opportunity for a happy life and gave us a happy dog.

When my daughter first told me about him, I was reluctant to have another dog enter our two dogs and one-cat household, but within a day of having him here, I was in love.

One serendipitous part of this sudden experience was that a couple of days before my daughter learned that her dog Laffe has cancer, she felt called to look at dogs at the shelter, and while there she fell in love with this three-legged dog.

I was drawn to Whitman's poem, for this dog does not whine about his condition. He hops about, dropping joy on his three paw prints and us.

Regarding whether animals have souls, a subject I ran into this week, how in the heck would we know? People used to argue about how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, and arguments regarding philosophical thought still rage.

I vote that if humans have a soul, and I believe they do—then so do the animals. To me, the spark of life indicates a soul. (Hey, plants are alive too.)

Gary Kowalski took up the daring question of the soul in his book, The Souls of Animals) — an inquiry into the "spiritual lives" of whooping cranes, elephants, jackdaws, gorillas, songbirds, horses, dogs, and cats. At its center is the idea that spirituality — which he defines as "the development of a moral sense, the appreciation of beauty, the capacity for creativity, and the awareness of one's self within a larger universe as well as a sense of mystery and wonder about it all" — is a natural byproduct of "the biological order and in the ecology shared by all life."

Do fleas go to heaven? If they do, they are fed a replicated formula and keep their mitts off the other critters.

 

The Fantastic Human Being

 

 

Hello fellow Homo sapiens,

Imagine yourself like those two kids. You have it in you.

Throughout the ages, there have been controllers who put their fellow humans in boxes, huts, chains, on gallows, crosses, electric chairs, or made to drink poison.

Controllers have used manipulation, coercion, blackmail, belittlement, ostracizing, ignoring, blaming, threatening, propaganda, lies, excommunication, and deportation to control people and thus gain power. And we use such tactics to attempt to change people's thinking.

Yet look at those faces above. Feel their joy.

You know that Homo sapiens are hard to control.

Toddlers rebel against control. As parents, we tried to control them, schools tried, and governments tried—often with extreme tactics, yet out of this came individuals who fought for peace, advancement, freedoms, liberty of thought, and expression.

These people were artists, adventurers, philosophers, scientists, and ministers. Many had no desire to change the world, but they worked on their passions and passed them on.

They inspired and motivated others to action.

Think of the Buddha, Krishna, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Antony, John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr, and John Lennon. All were peacemakers. Most lost their lives to controllers who believed in violence, not discussion, and yet…

The Peacemakers changed the world.

I read that the actor Steve Martin became popular at the end of the Vietnam War when a "Wild and Crazy Man" made people laugh. He came at the perfect time and place. We needed absurdity. 

We need laughter now. Laughter is a little heart massage--or maybe it's a big one.

And cream rises to the top.

And individuals will improve on a phone until it is a hand-held computer resembling a Star Trek communicator.

I heard this story (Twilight Zone music here) that in space, there are spaceships built on the same design they have used for thousands of years. Yet if you gave one of those ships to a Homo sapiens, he would try to improve it.

That desire to Make Better is built into us.

We can't help it.

Perhaps that is one of our strengths as Homo sapiens. If we are lost in the jungle, we would try to protect ourselves by making a weapon. At night, we would build a hut. If that hut fell on us that night, we would make a better one the next night. We would search for landmarks to get back home. We would look to the sky and say," I think that star was over there the first night I was lost, maybe I'm going in the wrong direction."

Put restrictions on people, and some young whippersnapper will poke his head up and find a way around it. (Or a not so young person.)

Take the individual who worked for the government and believed that certain secrets should be shared with the world.  It was not an attempt to give them to an enemy.

He downloaded them on a microchip and placed it inside a Rubik's Cube. He had constantly fiddled with that Rubik's Cube; thus, the people he worked for and with were accustomed to seeing him with it. On the day of the microchip escape, he threw the Rubik's Cube to the guard as a sort of joke, that way he got past the detector.

"I define a hero," exclaimed actress Shailene Woodley, "as somebody who against the judgment of other people, if they believe something will positively impact the world and they choose to do it and honor their integrity, that's what I (sort of) consider a hero, no matter how big or small a feat they create."

Take Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who asked the President to be merciful to scared people. Yes, she called him out in a Church Service, she embarrassed him, yet if she had said it in private, it would not have caused a ripple.

People get ready

There’s a train a-coming

You don’t need no baggage

You just get on board

All you need is faith

To hear the diesels humming

Don’t need no ticket

You just thank the Lord

Songwriter: Curtis Mayfield

 

“It has always been a coalition of the faithful that have brought about change.”—Bishop Mariann Edgar Buddes

 You know we want to be FREE. Being controlled isn't in our genetics. We're a lively bunch, a faithful bunch, we're tired of lies and mayhem. Let's get on that train.

Listen on YouTube to the Bishop Mariann Edgar Buddes’ 2022 sermon on her epiphany that challenged her courage. “Finding Courage in the Face of Injustice.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ne6SQH4qMYU

What Makes Life Worth Living?

I lie in bed thinking. And then I thought that this mass in my head was doing it. And then I thought, what a marvelous thing, that all those neurons, synapses and whatever, like electrical wires are coursing through the mass that resides inside my skill. Such a strange mass it is, a lump that if you didn't know what it was and found it in your yard, you would think you ought to buy it.

 We carry a powerhouse atop our shoulders, yet we spend most of the day whining and throwing chemicals at the powerhouse, spurring it to work better, run faster, be smarter, get with the program, and make us happy.

I'm not a spring chicken, and I suppose that brings with age comes a certain amount of urgency to get things done. I read once that if you want to know about death, ask a 70-year-old. They've been looking at it across the street for a decade."

 I say, yep, look at it, then get on with life—that's what you're here for.

What is my purpose? What is my dream? What is my passion? How can I be of service? How can I feed my soul good things when I hear so much bad stuff? How can I combat negativity?

These are the questions of the ages, yet one lone soul dared to stand up and say, "Our purpose is to live in joy."

Do you believe that?

This morning I heard Oprah quote Maya Angelo. "I come as one. I stand as ten thousand."

 For Oprah, it was her people behind her, those with price tags attached should they ever be sold. They were listed in a slave ledger, Donna, $900; Lydia, $800, an 11-year-old girl, $500.

Oprah will not let herself forget where she came from.

I grew up thinking that war was just the worst thing that could ever happen. I heard about Hitler, and I saw the pictures of skeleton people with skin stretched over their bones, people from barracks, emaciated, so when I hear someone say, "Let's kick their butts," or happy that we "Bombed them back to the stone age," my heart aches. I carry those remembrances.

Oprah daily sees a painting that has prominence on her living room wall. It's of a slave mother standing on the sale's block holding her daughter's hand.

 Should we remember or forget? Is this remembrance a constant damper to our joy? Must we flagellate ourselves with something we didn't do and can't erase from the past? Two friends and I once visited Dachau, the German  Concentration Camp whose slogan is "Never Let Them Forget."

 Yes, never forget, so we never, never repeat it, but isn't it time to move on, to be better people? 

It's time we lived in joy. Although neuroscientists say it is built into us to have a "Negativity bias." Dr. Rick Hanson says we have Velcro neurons for negativity and Teflon neurons for happiness. We can, however, gently retrain our neurons. "Aim for a thought that feels best," Abraham instructs us. If we hold a kind thought for 17 seconds, another kind thought will join it.

I don't know where the 17-second rule came from, but it's a great idea that one kind thought will join another.

Yes, when we walk into a room, I agree that we carry 10,000 people with us. But could it be that those people, instead of being slaves and victims, are warriors? They are our mothers and fathers. They are the ones who escaped tyranny. They are the ones who immigrated to this country to make a better life. They were the pioneers that crossed the prairies to build a home. They were the suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote. They are the ones who formed unions to give workers a living wage. They were our grandparents who farmed and fed a nation. They were the ones who wrote a Constitution to ensure that democracy shall prevail. They fought for gay rights, birth control, a woman's reproductive right to choose, and the end of child labor. And they are still out there building wells in Africa, trying to stop the selling and enslaving of women for sex. They are the ones who believe that not one person on the earth should starve and that people should not be judged by the color of their skin but by the strength of their character.

 See how long that list is?

 Long ago, President Truman, who became president upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, placed a sign on his desk as a daily reminder: "The buck stops here."

  "Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny." -- Mahatma Gandhi

 "I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something."–Edward Everett Hale

"We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."--Abraham Lincoln

 November 19, 1863

Happiness

 

Hey, if you’re a writer and you’re not happy, get over it.

 

You’ve been given a gift.

 

I once read this quote, and for the life of me, I can’t find who said it, but it has applied to me for years. “I’m a writer like a dog is a dog. It doesn’t mean I’m a good dog.”

 

I just read Seth Godin’s blog where he asked the question, “Is Mood a Gift or a Skill?” It’s fascinating how certain subjects come up when you need them.

 

 Some days, wrote Godin, we wake up with optimism and possibility. That would appear that our moods are handed to us. 

 

Other days, we must work to obtain a good mood—write morning pages (yes, Godin mentioned morning pages), meditation, music, who we hang out with, and what media we consume.

 

We want a Deus ex machina, “The God of the machine” to save us. (A plot device from Shakespearean plays where a seemingly impossible problem is solved by a god who was swung onto the stage by some contraption and thus saves the day.)

 

If our mood is governed by some otherworldly intervention, we are victims.

 

Being in command of our moods is a skill, and skills can be learned and perfected.

 

David Robson wrote in The Guardian that as a teenager, he was plagued with insecurities. In contrast, his mother said, “The problem with your generation is that you always expect to be happy.” He was baffled. Surely, he thought, happiness was the purpose of living, and we should strive to achieve it at every opportunity? He simply wasn’t prepared to accept his melancholy as something beyond his control. 

 

Later on, in life, he realized that his mother was spot on.

 

 “Over the past 10 years,” wrote Robson, “numerous studies have shown that our obsession with happiness and high personal confidence may be making us less content with our lives and less effective at reaching our actual goals. Indeed, we may often be happier when we stop focusing on happiness altogether.” 

 

Well, well, that takes me back to my favorite story on happiness.

 

A little cat believed that happiness lies in his tail, so he was always chasing it. The Wise Guru Cat said, “Little cat, little cat, don’t you know that if you go on with your life, happiness like your tail will follow?”

 

Other researchers think that those who focus, who do affirmations, pictures, those sorts of things to achieve their goals, actually harm.

 

 I take issue.

 

Those people are pushing too hard. The more you are determined that this thing that you want will come to you, the more resistance you are putting on it. You are saying I do not have this thing I want. You are chasing your tail. 

 

The Universe or whatever, The Blue Genie, sees you as not having it. And appearing ignorant when you say I do not have this thing I want. He hears, “I do not have.”

 

Weird, I know. 

 

All your affirmations ought to be that you DO have it. And if you affirm, picture, repeat, it ought to be fun, and with a light heart, with exuberance and joy. It is programming your unconscious, remember? It is not beating it into submission.

 

Genies don’t assume. They are literal. “I do not have this thing I want.”

 

“You don’t? Okay.” 

 

Instead, perhaps instead of reaching for happiness, we reach for joy. 

 

  I remember the day my sister, Jan, and I were standing at our mother’s grave site. This was years after she passed, and she had no gravestone until we kids decided to buy one. It was December. I had driven the 150 miles to visit Jan and to see our mother’s new headstone. It was snowing. We both had purchased flowers, and on the way out her apartment door, Jan grabbed the broom to sweep away the snow that she knew would be covering the flat stone that marked Mom’s grave.

 

After reading the inscription, we stood there talking about our wonderful mother and how we missed her. Suddenly the snow stopped, and above our heads, the sky cleared, and the lightly falling snow stopped. 

 

Dumbfounded, we looked up, and Jan said, “I feel joy.”

 

“So do I,” I said. 

 

At that point, the sky closed, and the sprinkling of snow began again. 

 

Were we happy? I don’t know. We were mystified, and we felt joy.

 

 These are the moments in our lives.