It’s been a good day, can’t sleep now.  I couldn’t sleep last night.  The moon’s position, the alignment of stars, neurons firing for no real reason…, I don’t really know.  But it’s ok.  I will sleep another time.  I am trying, this eve, to position things in my house.  Looking for that elegant solution.  Maybe it’s there, maybe it isn’t.  It doesn’t really matter.  Someday I will wish I had all these moments back. It will haunt me that I didn’t spend them more intentionally.   But tonight, I don’t care too much about someday. I am just here today.  And today is ok.  And if I puts away a precious eve…, perhaps I will pay the tax of regret in some end of life perspective accounting.  I may say, “Yea, you are right.  I should have been doing more.”  So send me back and I will try to do better next time.  There is a point you come to in life when you realize you won’t change the world.  You won’t be a hero, or a martyr, or a player in the game.  You won’t realize those dreams you dreamed.  You will just be among the innumerable souls that came and took this ride.  Emm…   so harsh a thing to say….  So sad.  So pessimistic.  Yea.  But is it so bad?  Does a tree in the forest regret not changing the world?  Does a sunset wish it would be more effective?  Does a rain storm go away depressed if it doesn’t make a difference?  I don’t think so.  I think we are what we are and we do what we do.  And in the end….   I don’t know…, maybe it isn’t so much about whether we changed the course of history, or whether we were an anonymous soul living out a day to day existence.  Maybe it all boils down to whether we were simply conscious, or not, of the simple fact that we were alive.  That we had a breath to breathe in a moment of time.   Did we even know we were breathing it?  What did I do today?  Not much really.  But it was s nice day.  A very nice day.  

It’s all fear.  Tornados, and hurricanes, floods and fires, explosions and shooters.  It’s all fear: war and turmoil, economic collapse, bird flu, bomb in a shoe.  Cold war and privacy invasions, pensions lost, a freak early frost.  Global warming, killer bees swarming, frogs mal-forming.  It’s all fear: civil unrest, lump in your breast, cholesterol in your chest.  Fumes from cars, botchalism in jars, aliens on mars.  Who wants to kill us today? When will your job go away, what if your child is gay?  What did the Iranian’s say?  It’s all fear in the face of love: In the face of beauty: In the face of miracles and wonder.  Under the painted skies, and the infinite stars, and the twinkle in eyes.  It’s all fear to draw us away, from the light of the day and the sleep of the night - for a headline that sells us the morning’s new fright.  So we won’t dare turn away from the next thing they say, right after this message from the corporations who pay, to sell us the cure to the anxieties that ail us.  Insurance and pills, and defenses, and plans.  It’s all fear to distract us from the moment we are in, which is, mostly, lovely.   

I should be exhausted, but I am not.  Went greenhouse hopping in Laurence KS.  with my Master Gardener friend and new brother-in-law Steve, and his wife Lynette?  We bought some vegetables, herbs, and flowers.  I came home and planted them in my garden beds.  Got the last ones in just as light was fading.  Hands caked in dirt.  Back telling me it is tired, but there is an energy that I get from doing something I am passionate about that overrides the normal day to day fatigue of a 50 year old body.  Today was just very nice.  It started out with intense hard rain.  It ended up with beautiful pink and rust colored clouds.  A few years ago, I could never have predicted this passion for gardening.  Life is funny that way.  It puts new things in front of me, things I would not have imagined myself doing, and all of a sudden, I have a new obsession.  There is something else going on these days.  I find myself in a place where I have so many things I want to do.  So many project ideas.  A lot of them have to do what the garden.  Some with the shed, and a lot of them with the house.  I am aware that this is a precious condition. One in which I have more ideas and dreams than I can possibly manifest within the constraints of time and economics.  But what a wonderful thing to be so infused with notions and imaginings and so much potential for manifesting them.  It is a condition that is truly better than the alternative of having too much time and means, and no idea what so ever about how to use it. Live is good.      

Do you understand the value of horizontal space?  Perhaps if you have a workshop….  I imagine if you run a kitchen, or maybe you are a potter; you know exactly what I am talking about.  When people ask me about what they need in a workshop (I am a woodworker) my first response is that you can never have enough horizontal space. There is an adage that says “nature abhors a void” This adage becomes absolutely literal when you have a shop. If there is a void of horizontal space, on a shelf, or on a table, or on a box in a corner, nature wants to fill it immediately.  The whole of nature.  The very forces of elemental nature that compile the intricate reasons of existence.  The forces of nature that are bent into the stuff of religion, and tragedy, and nauseating philosophical preponderance…, the very stuff of being:  boiled down to a simple purpose.  The purpose of absolute refusal to allow a single square inch of horizontal surface to be left un-cluttered.  

 The American frontier was gone before I was born, though the dream of it resonated.   The reality of an unexplored wilderness, in 1963, was over.   I grew up in the west.  In New Mexico there was a frontier there for me.  A landscape untrammeled.  A horizon.  A visual expansiveness.   As I grew in the expectation of exploration, it became apparent that unless I could get a submarine or a spaceship, the frontier as I romanticized it, was little more than endless truck stops and rundown main streets.   The frontier was paved, or agriculturated, or forested.  It was all mapped. In New Mexico, when I grew up, Albuquerque was the biggest city in the state.  We had three hundred thousand or so.  That was, by the way, more people than lived in the entire state of Wyoming.  Still, by big city standards, Albuquerque didn’t even register.  Kansas City was the first “Big City” I got to know.  When I moved there for college I think there were about one and a half million in the metro area. Two things blew my mind about the developed frontier as a young man.  One was Jones Beach on Long Island.  I was on the beach with some friends one very cold winter day.  There were trash barrels lined up along the beach about a hundred yards apart and about fifty yards between rows, and the rows went on as far as the eye could see in both directions.  A friend who lived there said in the summer it was towel to towel people all along the beach.  I remember thinking there were not that many people in the State of New Mexico.  Another time a friend of a friend took a few of us sailing off the coast of Connecticut.  There was a harbor there and I remember thinking that there was more money in sail boats in that harbor than there was in wealth in the entire state I grew up in.  There were no more frontiers, but there were expanses of humanity and agglomerated cultivations of development that had exceeded the bounds of planned and spilled into the realms of wildly rampant.  Then I saw New York City. And Boston, and Chicago, and San Francisco, and LA.   And I realized that the frontier was no longer virgin landscape, but the hinterland of cultivation gone amuck.  The recesses of the once planned and now obsolescent urbanscapes.  The frontier accessible to me is not the remote reaches of the Brazilian forests, or the last remaining snow crusted peek, but the forgotten and neglected wilderness of urban America…, left to grow wild and unchecked. 

 As Americans we are infused with idealism that one person can change the world.  We see it.  We know it is real; the stuff of legend.  In America, we are all legends in our own minds.  It is what we are taught.    Every child can grow up to be president of the United States.  If we work hard, we can do anything we want.  This is our operative myth; powerful and compelling.  Every once in a while there is a reinforcing realization, “A black kid with big ears and a funny name becomes president.”  A kid from Blue Springs wins American Idol.  Someone we knew in College is rich.  There are, in a century, twenty five opportunities to become President of the United States.  I don’t know how many children are born in the United States in a century, but I kind of figure the odds are slim. One percent of Americans control ninety nine percent of the wealth.  I don’t want to say something can’t happen.  I am idealistic and romantic by nature.  But I am also real enough to know that dreams of miraculous deliverance from obscurity are realized by a statistically discouraging few.  So the other side of the myth is what about all of us who live our lives in relative obscurity?   How do we come to terms with being anonymous?  We redefine.  We narrow our parameters of success  to manageable (realistic) parameters.  Success becomes relative to our circumstances.  This is sane, I think, and necessary.  We can’t all win.  I remember thinking in my college years. “If I can’t be notorious, I want to at least be authentic.”  I still think that way.  More and more I see myself as ineffectual on a cultural level.  The world is run by people on stage.  I am just in the audience, or at home, or off on some little errand.  I can piss and moan about what the bozos are doing.  But it doesn’t really matter.  They aren’t listening to me.  I have no effect upon the decision makers.   I have vanity.  I would love to be discovered and heralded as suddenly relevant.  I would love to wake one day and discover I have a voice in the conversation of important issues.  But I also have humility.  And I know that there are ten thousand other people who would say what I would say better.  Who have earned more right to speak up than I have?  And I am ok with that.  I am ok with letting the universe be what it is, and letting myself be anonymous in it.  A leave of grass.  A figure in a crowd.  Or a man at home making eggs and bacon for my daughters.  It is ok to just be what I am.  And to let the world be what it is.  I love the American Dream.  I love to see it realized, and cheer that on.  But I also love to come to feel the peace of acceptance.  The simplicity of simply breathing.    

“And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

 

Not if we are in the age of belief.  Where reason is dead.  Belief is paramount.    I believe.  I believe.  I believe. “So let it be said…. So let it be done”.  If you tell a lie, tell a big one.  Tell it often and with the deepest sincerity.  Tell the believers.  Tell the converted.  Let them carry the message in grocery store checkout lines.  At school, when the opportunity presents itself.  Of guns and ammo.  Of creation.  Of Liberal bias, of corruption and scandal.  Say it from the mountain tops (or the top of radio tower transmitters) Say it on FOX.  Say it often and never wavers.  And they will believe.  They will believe.  They will believe. 

A.G.E.I.N.G. in the age of eternal youth.  It’s kind of like this.  You start to wonder who that is in the mirror.  It’s recognizable, but it isn’t you.  You may be in there somewhere.  But you can’t’ really put your finger on it.  You don’t feel old.  Well you sort of do.  Your body feels old.  If it’s like mine.  Maybe yours doesn’t.  Mine does.  It feels old.  Here is just a word of caution to the young.  Never say, “God, whatever happens, don’t let that happen to me”,cuz it will.  It is assured that God is a lover of Irony.  Age just means we don’t recover so fast.  Use to shovel snow, got tired; next day didn’t even remember it.  Now, not so much.  Feel it for a long ole time.  Use to be sharp as a whip.  Now – not so much.  Ok.  So Y.O.U.T.H, yea, the young.  This guy across the street, this am…, snow storm of the decade, thinks he is gona jump in his car and just takes off.  Not so much.  A.G.E.  has to shovel/push him back into his drive way.  Not cuz A.G.E is so nice. Or wants’ to.  But because A.G.E. doesn’t want this stupid kid’s car in the middle of the street to stop the snow plow form getting through.  A.G.E. just gets that way.

Turning 50 (as if no one has ever done that before) proved to be an emotional event.  We make these milestones up.  Predetermine what points will be significant.  Arbitrarily agree on a reference point of demarcation.  Then when they come up we fall for it completely.  “Oh my god. I’m 50!”  50 means over the hill.  Ok, there are all kinds of antidotes to that notion.  “You are as young as you feel…”  “50 is the new in vitro fertilization…”   Yea yea yea…, I know.  So sue me, I am a sucker for the hype.  I guess I decided half a century was just cause to play along with the whole “holly crap my life is mostly over and I haven’t done enough with it”, the “stick a fork in him he’s done”, the “best years are behind you”, flavor of this particular demarcation in the sand.  It is very tempting.  I won’t go into all my self-pitying morose and woe –is –me aphelia I indulged in.  That is too personal.  I will just say it produced several drives across the metro with the cone of blubbering sappy dude activated.  But alas, now I am 50.  It’s official.  A full day’s worth.  And I have to get on with it. And, well, frankly, it’s not that bad.  Today, in fact, I can honestly say I don’t feel a day over 78.  (Not really).  I am a person who, though in actuality I am a born cynic and pessimist, I really want to be positive.  So I work at it.  I actually do try to see the positive. It is there.  I am not just trying to see fairy’s or pretend things.  I am just making myself see what is actually there.  And there is a lot.  I am actually very blessed.  Anyone who has seen my beautiful daughters, or met my amazing soon to be bride, can tell you that.  I am a fortunate man.  So tonight I am choosing to see 50 as the new 60/20 as in the new 1960’s and the new 1920’s, as in the decades that rejuvenated a century and inspired a world of hope and optimism.   

There was a time in youth when you could see the garbage piling up in your mind.

There was a time, a moment, when you shuttered to think of the way you were at risk of pollution.  Internal pollution.  When you realized your mind was a landscape. That trash was congealed energy.  That trash was an external manifestation of an internal reality.  The crumpled Frito bag on the ground was a form of the image of the bag in your mind.  And that what you put in your mind stayed there, like garbage brought to the dump.  There is no such thing as away.  As in “to put something away”.  “To throw something away”. Nothing in the formation of synapse and neuron transmission is ever gone away.  It all stays in the place where we dump it.  There is a time in the mid to waning years of the life of a mind when we succumb to the reality of impaction. Of a density and volume of collected trash and pollution within us.   A resignation to the condition of over fill.  We see too much in this life.  We put too much in our heads.  We cram all we can into a space we imagine as limitless.  There was a time when the physical world seemed an endless frontier.  And a time when we saw it as finite.  I wonder, tonight, about the accumulation of a trillion images of garbage.  Stuffed back into the waste dump.  Pushed back so the lovely is forefront.  So the beautiful is supposed as prevalent.  What we see every day doesn’t go away.  The decay and the commercial; the evil and the mean.  The stupid and the vane - the vicious and the obscene.  It all goes in - and stays.  

They say write about what you know about….  I use to think I would know about loftier things.  In the arrogance of youth you assume your own limitlessness.  In aging you settle into the reality of work-a-day obscurity.  This past two weeks I have been making cabinets in my workshop.  I heat the shop in winter with a wood burning stove.  Burning scraps of previous jobs.  I spend the days in a solitude of meditative attention to details.  Like what fraction of an inch to shave off a face frame, which way should I orient a board to the router bit to minimize tear out and how to best keep my fingers out of saw blades.  I am in a place with my work where I know my own skills and competence.  I know what I am doing because I have experience to draw from.  There is a comfort in this.  I take it for granted, but I can remember all the nerves, apprehensions, and insecurities that use to accompany my work.  I remember feeling insecure around “real cabinet guys”, or “real trim carpenters.”  There is a point at which you confer upon yourself the mantel of craftsman.  I imagine it is like this with musicians, or dancers, or artists.  You come to a place where you don’t need anyone to validate you anymore.  You have put in your hours, learned your lessons, applied your own creative imagination and inventiveness, and accomplished your own objectives; you come to trust yourself.  In the moments when you realize this, you realize this is what you are.  No matter what you thought you would be in life, or where you thought you would go, this, for whatever reason is what you have become. 

Our outrage: our hypocrisy.  It is cathartic, at times like these, to vent outrage at what seem like glaring fault.  As a supporter of much stricter gun control laws, I can, today, point to what has happened in Newtown, and feel intense anger.  I can say what I have always felt about the insane availability of hideous implements of death.  I hate them.  I hate the fact that people are so adamant about defending them.  My outrage, though I do express it, almost always, upon a little reflection, comes back in the form of my own hypocrisy.  There are acts of violence committed with assault weapons and hand guns and bombs all the time.  Appalling instances- all of them.  Whether it is an elementary school in New England, or a dingy bedroom in the neighborhood.  There is, however, undeniably, also, a violence of inaction and acceptance that is just as devastating, and I am guilty of it. I tolerate a culture of violence.  I accept violence on TV.  I watch sports that are violent, I live in a culture of war and warfare.  I am reconciled to the fact that my nation kills people all over the world.  That my president, who I was so proud of when he spoke as comforter and chief in Newtown, is the same man who allows drone strikes to kill innocent people around the world.  In my tolerance of hypocrisy and violence I am hypocrite.   From Bugs Bunny, to Rocky, to Brave heart, to the lord of the rings, I watch it.  I am numbed to the endless portrayals of death and murder and slaughter on TV.  I am numb to “collateral damage” in wars overseas.  Violence is in me.  Imprinted and in residence in my psyche.  Perhaps a part of what I am.  I tolerate it. I Allow it a place in my day to day life. My inaction is glaring back at me when I see the faces of children on the news, now dead.  And I cannot escape my culpability, as an individual, as a citizen, as an American, for the sad and unwavering tolerance of everyday’s violence.

Consensus

We are beyond coming to terms with each other on matters of culture and politics.  We have degenerated into a quagmire of mutually held bewilderment at the other’s ways of thinking.  Emerson’s words come to mind, “Their every truth is not quite true.  Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know not where to begin to set them right.”  Both sides of the culture divide can say this, with full sincerity, about the other.  We are not going to come to a collective consensus.  We are not going to reason things out with each other because the very underpinnings of common values and common reasoning are eroded.  Termites have eaten away at the foundations until there is no substance left in the structure.  It looks like it is there, but when you poke a finger at it, your fingers pushes right into the rot.  We use to depend on reason.  But reason itself is undermined.  Facts no longer matter when a lie will do just as well.   In this environment, belief is supreme to evidence.  We use to have a basic civility.  But today there is no longer a hold on the tongue.  The people with the microphones say what they want without regard to offense, and we all learn our manners from them.  Our leaders are emboldened to blather absurdly.  Our neighbors and associates spout the latest telecast lies as if they were God given fact.  Each camp has its own proof and draws its own criteria for justification.  We argue points we won’t win, and shout at the people we think are idiots.  And they shout at us in kind.   But alas, reality is not divided against itself.  Reason and civility, while inadequate holds on the degeneration of argument, still fall subservient to reality.  There is still truth beyond the belligerence of opinion.  There is yet a reality beyond the scope of hyperventilated proclamations.   In the end, what is real will prevail.  All the protestations against the roundness of the earth by the proponents of flatness could not hold off the inevitable evidence.  Ideas and opinions that are grounded in reality will eventually be naturally selected over those that are based in fantasy.  But in the mean time, until the world burns up from too much pollution, or till God comes out or the sky to redeem his faithful, or until the cockroaches inherit the earth, we are destine, it seems, to suffer the plight of mutual bewilderment at each other’s reckonings.

A modest supposal

Here is the deal.  This country is divided in a way that is, in my opinion, insurmountable.  The level of separation in the most basic perceptions of life, morality, and good sense, are so acute we are not going to change each other’s minds, or win arguments with each other.  We are beyond that capacity.  So here is my modest Supposal.  Suppose the liberals and progressives were willing to yield on the abortion issue in exchange for conservative willingness to stop fighting attempts to address global warming.  (pause for both sides to blow off steam)  Ok, so hear me out.  (Try).  First, Liberals, progressives, feminists, and the like.   Here is the deal.  (and by the way, I am a progressive).  The right to have a safe abortion is, in my opinion, the biggest single issue that fuels the right wing of American Politics.  The Right wing, by the way, is the side that is mopping the floor with the left in almost every important indicator of mojo.  Abortion is not, in my opinion, the real issue behind the motivation of right wing political interests; it is just the biggest source of fuel.  Conservatives and Capitalists, and all manner of “ist’s, are able to use the abortion issue as a red haring to distract a huge segment of our population away from issues that smack of nasty politics and good old fashion  nearsighted greed.  They can do this, frankly, because, for a lot of people in America, Abortion is the number one moral issue of our time.  People for whom abortion is repulsive feel this as passionately as any of the progressives feel about the environment, or peace and justice, or any of the pet issues of the left.  If you are on the left, pick your most passionate issue.  The issue you feel is so important that it trumps almost everything else.  Now deal with the reality, that for a lot of people in America, Abortion is that issue for them.  Are you willing to compromise you most cherished values?  Neither are they.    

    If Abortion is the most important issue, morally, for a huge segment of America, they are simply not going to play ball with people for whom abortion is considered legitimate and defensible.  They will play ball with almost anyone else.  Corporations, polluters, religious fanatics, mean spirited racists and homophobes, anyone.  They will not play ball with you.  So you have to ask yourself.  Is the defense of Abortion your number one issue?  Is it the one thing you will go down fighting for no matter what?  Let’s look at that for a moment.  The big issue seems to be the woman’s right to have control over her body.  Given that, let me just offer, gently, that women can have control over their own bodies even if Abortion is conceded.  I know I am over a line here.  But hear me out.  What if we could concede to allow the elimination of legal abortion, and agree that what we are actually conceding is the ability to wait too long to exercise your control.  What if you accepted the limitation that you have to exercise your controls earlier than conception? Surely we can come up with ways to do that effectively.  After all, we on the left are so sophisticated.   It sounds untenable.  But consider what you would gain for that concession.  The cooperation of the right in dealing with the serious issues of global warming.  The cooperation of the right on the issues that may actually have a hell of lot to do with whether there is a future or not.    This may sound blunt, but if you are willing to fight to the death for the right to have an abortion, it is not unimaginable that the death you will fight to could be the death of mother earth. 
Or at least the very real possibility of the death of the biosphere. 

    Ok. Now for you on the right.  I know many of you intimately.  Despite the fact that I am a progressive, my circumstances have been such that I know you very well.  I know that for you, most of you, abortion is simply indefensible.  It is as serious to you as the death of you own children.  I know you are not going to yield this to a compromise.  It is not a compromise issue.  Ok.  So what If I said the left was willing to yield on abortion if you were willing to stop fighting the efforts of environmentalists to take measures to stop global warming?  How much do you hate the left?  Do you hate them so much that no matter what they say, you consider it hogwash?  Do you hate the left so much that you are willing to ignore 99.9% of the scientists and climatologists, and people whose job it is to study the atmosphere, just out of shear hatred?  Really.  I don’t get that.  I know a lot of you who can never compromise on the issue of abortion, and, frankly, you are good sensible people.  Most of you actually care a lot about the planet and what is going on.   Can you ask yourself what it is, particularly, that is so threatening about the claims of the environmentalists?  Is it so hard to imagine that human activity is seriously threatening the sustainability of the biosphere?  Is it that hard to conceive of the impact of the human race on the environment?  Maybe you think it will hurt business?  All the regulations?  Maybe you think the global corporations have our best interests at heart and what is good for them is good for us…Really?  Ok, whatever.   How important is that to you?  Would you trade it save a fetus?

     Is it too simplistic to quote the old adage that a house divided cannot stand?  There is no bigger house divided more acutely than this big house of cards we call America.  It seems to me the challenges we face morally, politically, environmentally, and ethically, are massive enough and seemingly insurmountable enough, that we may need to start to consider some alternatives to just fighting each other on everything.  How bout we start bartering issues in trade.  We give you something you want, you give us something we want, and maybe we all get to live on the planet a little longer.

“What ya gona do in the winter when there Ain’t noth’n grow’n in the garden?”

Seems like there will always be a garden, though there wasn’t one just this past February.  Seems like the trees will always be green; like there are just suppose to be flowers.  It seems like it should always be warm outside at midnight; like shoes are always optional; like the day should last till nine o’clock.  I know it is just a season.  But seasons are funny that way.  They lull you into a trance.   An endless summer trance.  It’s always summer.  In the dead of winter it seems like it is always winter.  Spring and fall don’t count.  They come and go too fast.  Summer and winter are the real seasons. “ It will surely be unbearably hot forever”.  “It will be endless cold and misery forever”.  The mind has too much trouble seeing a whole quartet of seasons.  We know of seasons.  We can tell you what is going to come.  But at a certain level.  We always think the season we are in is all there is. 

My four daughters make me a rich man.  Before daughters, I use to hike mountains for grand vistas.  I use to drive myself to extremes for lighting in desert canyons.  I use to dream of solitude and still water in places no man had seen before.  I wanted to see the secret beauty this world hid from the lazy and the uninterested.  I wanted to listen to time like sandstone monolithic cliffs.  I wanted to hear stars explode against a backdrop of wild moonscape desolation.  But now I want to see my daughters smile.  I want to see them shine.  I want to hear them speak.  I want to watch them grow into amazing and wonderful natural phenomena.  I am blessed to be a father. 

Barack Obama, my choice last time, is, well, what can you say… better than the alternative, a little disappointing to progressives, perhaps a little surprising to hawks and capitalists. He, is, also, now, as President, directly responsible for murdering people. Call it what you want. Say it is in the name of National Security, or within the framework of a War on Terror. Frame it as Presidential decisions. The bottom line is that once you become President of these United States, you seem to have to kill people. Via drones, via the bombs you allow to be dropped, “or special operations”. It all boils down to blood on your hands. The decisions to kill people with machines and technology are not decisions the progressives can blame on a republican opposition. These are decisions that rest completely on the shoulders of the Commander and Chief, and Mr. Obama is making these decisions every day, and is poised to make more of them. One thing is for certain, no matter what you think of the job he has done as President. Mr. Obama, like his predecessors, has blood on his hands. That is a fate I hope to escape this life without having to suffer. It concerns me that America is the kind of a country where it is somehow inevitable that our leaders will have to kill. What does this say about us?

Perhaps the miracle is in the message.
Miracles being added on to stories about an extraordinary person do not seem to be uncommon. As we look back at the stories of Jesus, the miracles he is reported to have preformed seem dubious. Do we know, in Jesus, a person or a myth of a person? There is a sense in which I see mystical knowledge that makes it possible for me to consider that the teaching of Jesus is fantastic enough without all the added and contrived magic. A person who has reached a level of transcendence, or reached a trans-ordinary consciousness, or reached some level of clairvoyance as to be able to see reality with a penetrating understanding, whether by some extraordinary gift of mental capacity, or a giftedness of spiritual insight, or by a weird amalgamated confluence of cosmic and biological happenstance, may be, in fact, miraculous and fantastic, without having to be enhanced with fantasies of a virgin birth, or magical alchemy, or the capacity to raise the dead. I wonder if the addition of so much contrivance to the simple teachings of a mystic person is not because the simple teachings are so hard to grasp. The point is that he said some things that still cause us, two thousand years later, to ponder the truth and mystery of his words. Not just pithy little “stitch in time saves nine” truths. But truths that seem to reveal a whole other aspect of reality. An aspect I tend to think that we must intuitively sense exists, but one we don’t have, for whatever reasons, immediate access to. The teachings of Jesus seem to me to be so engaging not because he teaches of something beyond that we can never know, but because he points to a knowable alternative reality that coincides with the reality we are presently occupying. Or he points to a reality that is the one we occupy, just seen from a completely different perspective. To me, ideas that Jesus poses, such as: that to love your enemies is a virtue, or that to forgive people when they trespass against us makes some kind of sense, or his idea that we can trust the universe to feed and clothe us; these are far more engaging notions than the weird and freakish concept of a virgin birth, or a convoluted trinity of Man/ God/ Spirit salad. (Apologies to the devout). A person who sees that the reality we inhabit is far more complex and transcendent than what we settle for, and who tries to share that vision, is majestic enough without embellishment. To have a fantastic myth about the beginning and ending of all things is compelling and attractive. To argue about how a Mythological superhero fits into that grand theme is consuming. More consuming to some than others. But to have a teacher who can open the eyes to see beyond the veiled one dimensional nature of the actual existence we are in, and gives us a hope that we can actually access this reality while in it, that, in and of itself without embellishment, makes the teachings of Jesus compelling.

Third party candidates for president always pose the risk that by voting for them, you siphon off votes from the lesser of the two evils, and end up with the primary evil. Ala Ralph Nader pulling energy from the would be Gore supporters and giving Bush the margin he needed to steal the election (with the help of Jed and the Justices’) So all us Progressives ended up suffering the Bush Light era (which ended up being a Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld nightmare) So, when it came time to get out of that, no one was going to go third party. Obama had full support of Dem’s and Progressives. Then we saw Obama in action. We kept thinking, “Wow, that’s strange. Why would he do that?” We kept saying he had too much opposition form the Republicans. But then all the things he kept doing on his own accord were baffling us. Hum…. Why is he still allowing the drone planes to kill people in Pakistan? Isn’t he the commander and Chief? Why is he picking people from Goldman Sachs to run his financial departments? Why is his attorney General not fighting to end the endless internment of innocent prisoners? Why is he backpedaling on environmental policy? And why does he sound just like Bush when he talks about the need to protect American interest abroad?
Obama, as far as I can see, is towing the line for the corporate class, protecting the military industrial complex, and seems happy to keep, and even expand, the type of executive privilege powers coveted by the last administration. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” So, progressives like me, find ourselves in the dilemma of what to do. A vote for Obama in 2012 means we really don’t want the alternative, yet, as we vote for Obama, we feel betrayed by the person we are voting for. On the left, we are supposed to have our values. We are, after all, the real “values” demographic. That is why we are called soft and idealistic, by the Machiavellian Reich. I mean rite, I mean right. What is a progressive to do? My good friend Jeff hit me over the head with this questing one day. “ Do you vote, cynically, to keep the guy you hate more out of office by voting for the guy on the other side you are disgusted with? Or, do you vote your conscience and let the chips fall where they may?” I think my best answers to this question come from two comments I recently overheard. The first came when I was in the company of a man form England. In a quip about the Occupy Wall Street protesters who have taken over a Episcopalian church property in England, The English guy’s comment had to do with how much money the occupier’s were costing the church every day. I heard that and I thought to myself, “Hum…. I wonder how much it is costing humanity, every day, to continue our obedient silence as the forces of havoc, wreck the known universe.” The second came from an interview on Democracy Now with the first progressive third party candidate; Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party. When asked how exactly he was going to run for president, i.e., as a third candidate, or an independent, or what? He said he was running as a second party candidate. His point was that as much as the Dem’s and Republican’s go at each other, in practice, they are all doing the bidding of the one percent. So his point was that we effectively have one party running the country, the corporate military industrial complex filthy rich bastard party. That point made a lot of sense to me. If you vote Dem, or Rep, you are basically, for all practical purposes, voting the same party. The Plutocracy Party. In this light, the question is not whether you are voting for a particular faction within the Plutocracy party, as much as it is whether you are voting for, or against, the plutocracy party. When I put it this way to myself, the answer becomes a no-brainer. I am against the plutocracy party. I want the opposition to plutocracy to win. And I am obligated, by my progressive sensibilities, to vote against the bastards, no matter what the odds.

We watch the sun set from the interior of our cars. In controlled temperatures, at high rates of speed. Going somewhere. The earth turning and the play of light against our atmosphere is a background screen. When was the last time you stood in a field, or on a mountain, or in the desert and watched the entire sunset? For me it has been too long. Too many sunsets passed in staccato glimpses, or gone by with no awareness at all. The tempo of a sunset is agonizingly slow. If you are like me, to actually stay in one place, with one focus of attention, is almost physically painful. I have trained myself to move from one thing to another at a pace that has nothing to do with the pace of the turning of our sphere. I am out of touch with the natural rhythm of a day. With the still and quiet of dusk, and the settling at dawn. Is it any wonder I am out of touch, also, with the voice of a natural would. With the call of the wild. With the temperature and composition of this earthly home.

My new neighbor came out on his porch this am with a wonderful message. He said my tree is going to suprise me. "just wait" he said "It is going to look like it is on fire" When I bought this house, I had hoped it was going to be good. Now I am very pleased.

It’s the little things. Coincidence or God? And For the record, I don’t think of God as a humanesque, being. Or even something with a conscious awareness anything like what we can comprehend. (Sorry to my Judeo/Christian/Moslem friends with anthropomorphic notions of an old man in robe and beard. I mean no disrespect). So. Story. I drove to Liberty to get the hardware for my cabinet job. A plastic bag full of twenty four parts and pieces. Twelve hinges and twelve corresponding hinge base plates. Got the bag, got in my truck and started to drive back to the shop. Decided to pull one out and assemble it with the base plate just to make sure I got the right thing. (Doing this while driving). Wasn’t right. So, turned around and went back. Got the hinge guy and said they were not right. Turns out, the bag of parts and pieces was right. But I had pulled the one piece out that wasn’t. Out of 24. There was exactly one incorrect piece. So. That one piece would have required a return trip. An hour of time. Frustration. And some is cussing. Coincidence or God thing? Seems kind of God thing to me.

I took my mom out of the rehab, place today. First trip out since the broken hip. We went to Schlosky’s for a sandwich, got it from the drive up window and ate in a church parking lot in Liberty. She is losing her mind; literally: to Alzheimer’s. She is at the point where she fades in and out of lucidity. We had a really nice time. There was a moment when she looked down at her hands in her lap and she remarked that she was thinking, “wow, look at those old hands”, and then she thought,” oh, of course, they are old hands, I am old.” And I thought, yea. I know. I see myself and think, wow, look at that old dude. And then I think, yea. Because I am old now. Not seventy six with a brain eating disease, But forty eight with a sense of pending decomposition. I have this idea that the reason birds in flight are so fascinating to us is because, somehow, we, as humans, have experienced all the forms of consciousness. Not in this life. But in a kind of developed genetic memory. ( Sorry to my creationistm, and rationalist, friends). Still, it’s a pet notion. An evolution of consciousness thing. And if I give it a little space to breath. I can sort of see how we might know what we are in for with aging. Like someone who has been dunked and had their head held under water, knows what that is like. Or maybe like someone who has been through the transcendence of death, and knows that there is not that much to fear. Not in the way we know things, like what city we were born in, but in the way children know the conditions of their wellbeing, without really having any way of comprehending what all is going on around them. Or in the way a still quiet voice knows that someone is a con, or a thief, without the benefit of any reason to sense such a thing.

I have been feeling like a homesteader lately. I am puttsing around with stuff on the property. I am thinking about what to do with this portion of the universe that falls under my "ownership". (Seems a strange term when talking about a piece of land). My interests these days are very domestic. Learning to cook and garden. Learning how to live on less. My goals are about living smaller. Not larger. There is a commercial on the radio now that mocks just such a notion. But that is what interests me. I have downsized my living arrangements considerable from the 4000 ish square foot house and 1.1 acre of land I owned when I moved here. Though, my current abode (a modest 900 square feet) is roomy compared to the 500 ish square foot apartment I was in before this. I down sized my vehicle too. I had a big eight cylinder Chevy truck with a long bed and an extended cab. (I always hated that truck). Now I have four cylinders and a six foot bed, and a very small extended cab. (Sorry girls). My house is unendowed with certain amenities I use to have. A dishwasher, a shower, a garage door opener. I am managing without them. Granted, with four kids and a new interest in cooking, I am spending a lot of time washing dishes. This house seems, by my current sensibilities, quite adequate. The girls still have the big house and ample private bedrooms. And I admit that helps a bit. I don’t feel so much like I have to provide a second lavish house for them. This one provides comfort and functionality. It’s safe and comfortable. And for me, it’s manageable. The downsizing is by necessity, I admit. But ironically, it fits into the still quiet reminders of my inherent ethics. The ones I got a long way away from. Became a stranger to. These days are a sort of re-acquaintance with the person I thought I would become.

Blame is a many splendored thing.

My five year old has serious blame issues. She can be in a room all by her self and spill a glass of milk, and immediately blames someone else for it. Someone was saying something and distracted her, or someone put it in the wrong kind of cup, or someone shouldn’t have let her drink it there by herself. It’s really amazing how fast and definite the blame response occurs. With a five year old it is obvious and ridiculous. But with me, it is just obvious and ridiculous. Blame is an intoxicating device. It just works so well to deflect ownership and accountability. It is the perfect response to almost anything. There is always, as my five year old demonstrates, someone, or something to blame. And it doesn’t matter much if the blame is well placed or not. It only matters that it gives us cover. Blame is the exact opposite of accountability. Accountability is tough stuff. It requires we take ownership for our part in a situation. If we spill the milk, we recognize immediately that we alone did it. We then are responsible to what is necessary to clean it up. There is a principle I have been wrestling with a lot in the past years. It is an idea of absolute ownership for my response to everything that happens to me. Absolute. 100 percent. The idea goes like this: Ultimately, I am accountable for my response to everything that occurs to me. Clearly, I am not in control of very much of what goes on in the world at large. And of the events that take place in my little sphere or conscious interactions, I have only minimal control. It is also clear to me that in terms of my response, I am, in this one area, absolutely accountable. I own my response. If that response is blame, I own that. If it is accountability, I own that. I actually do have the capacity to choose. I admit, that most of the time my responses are knee jerk reactions. But that does not diminish the fact that I can choose from a mired of menu options. And one of the options is always personal accountability. I am imagining that all sorts of scenarios are going through your mind right now. Well, let me throw an example out. Let’s say I am in a bank cashing a check, and it gets robed and I get shot in the hand. I can’t work my trade anymore and I have tremendous hardship as a result of something that wasn’t my fault. Ok. Clear enough. Assuming I wasn’t trying to be a hero, or doing anything to put myself in harm’s way unnecessarily. I was just a pure and simple victim of the situation. How am I accountable for that? The absolute accountability idea is based on an awareness that we live in a world we do not control. Events occur, have occurred, and will occur, that will effect us, no matter what we do. The point is not that we are accountable for events beyond our control, but that we are absolutely accountable for our responses to what happens to us. So, here is how blame fits in to my little mishap scenario. I would be, by all rights, perfectly with in the norms of reason to blame all subsequent hardships on the events at the Bank. That is an option. But what are the benefits to me of using that option? Well, there are many. Blame gives me an excuse to cover almost anything I don’t want to do as a result of the incident. If I am lazy and don’t want to go to job retraining, I can blame the incident. If I feel bad about my lot in life, I can blame the incident. If I am irritable, and unpleasant to be around, I can blame the incident. Here is the beauty of blame. As long as we have something to blame we have a blanket clause for just about everything. If, however, I choose accountability for my response to the event, then suddenly, I have to deal with what I am doing in the here and now to make my life what I want it to be, given the constraints of what has become the new reality of my existence. This is a hard pill to take. But the alternatives, when examined, all involve not doing what we can in the moment. The blame alternative distracts us from the task at hand. Which, as I see it, is always to move within the conditions that are present in the moment? To use that mobility to make the next moment as close to what we want it to be as we can.

In looking at the beginning of the history of Jesus, what strikes me is that in the two thousand plus years since his arrival on the scene, and in the fourteen hundred some odd years since the Koran was written, neither Jews, Christians, nor Moslems have budged from their basic positions regarding Jesus. Jews still hold that Jesus was not the Christ. Christians still believe that he is, and Moslems contend that he was among the profits, but not the messiah. Nothing in all the subsequent history of the world has moved any of them off their base. No technological,
Theological or philosophical advances have changed this. No event has shaken it up. No body of evidence has proven conclusive. No sum total of testimonials, or impress of lives lived, or collective actions, or demonstrations of faith, have proven sufficient to bring us any closer to a resolution of this issue. You might think that if something is manifestly true, let alone presented as True, by the creator of the universe, who seemed quite invested in demonstrating this truth, that two thousand years would be ample time to see it recognized as such. It seems clear at this point, that these religious traditions are content to be unmoved indefinably. I can’t help but wonder if when the sky is ripped apart and something steps out of the heavens, if it proclaims itself to be the messiah, but not Jesus, will the Christians accept this? Or if it is Jesus on his second tour, will the Jews finally give way? And what if it’s Mohammad or Siddhartha or, God forbid, the Old man god of the Baals?

9-11-2001
Essentially what happened was that a band of criminal psychopathic religious kooks devised a plan and hatched it. Not, mind you, a Country. Not a formidable economic power. Not a strategic military threat. Just a bunch of religious extremists holding out in the most remote of places. They owned no tanks. No aircraft carriers. No nuclear weapons. They didn’t have a Pentagon equivalent. Or a nation’s industry devoted to the art and commerce of destruction. They were not a super power. Or a super power wana be. Or a big ole economy thinking they should have more of the pie. They were just a bunch of guys with beards, and Korans, and some really twisted notions about how to strike a devastating blow against Goliath. They were quite successful at that. Three thousand plus people killed and the absolute devastation of some of the most expensive real estate property in the world. Ok. Bully for you. (Let me just interject something here. It does not take a rocket scientist to devise a plan to kill a lot of people. And if you have, at your disposal, people who are willing to kill themselves in the process…than it gets a whole lot easier) So, bully to you. But I am not impressed.

So 9-11 happens….

“It was the best of times…”
In the wake of the attacks. America showed what it is. A beautiful spirit. The courage and sacrifice of the rescue workers… The tenacity of the survivors. (God bless). The way the loved ones tried to contact each other. The vigils. The outpouring of love and empathy and assistance….We watched all that and we were one Country, One spirit. One people. That was beauty in the response to horror. That was the day you said, “America is a beautiful Country!” “God Bless America”

“It was the worst of times…”

Then came the response. Immediately the call to war. WAR. Against what? WAR... The drums started beating. WAR… it didn’t matter… We were going to go to war. No matter that it wasn’t a War worthy opponent. No matter it was a criminal act, not an act of war… By God, We are American, and when something like this happens, we go to WAR. And we did. And so much more.

The dead, it seems, are honored more by wisdom than foolishness. Perhaps it’s just me, but after all that has transpired since 9-11, it seems America has done more to itself than a band of psychopaths, could ever have hoped,. In their wildest dreams, to have accomplished.

Missouri is just a wet place. It’s basically a jungle. I am pretty sure that if all human activity was suspended, the cement and asphalt super structure of Kansas City and the metro would be overgrown and unrecognizable from space in two years. But that is just an estimate from a guy from the arid climate of New Mexico. I do battle here against the growth of God knows what. There are times when a weed whacker is like a toy water pistol in the face of a forest fire. There are times when I disparage standing in one place too long for fear a vine will wrap around my foot and pull me into the depth of some black soil purgatory. Sure, you have big tomatoes, and your corn fields are impressive, but at what cost? Have you seen the size of the spiders here? Do you know what it is like to come up against a six inch long stick bug?

“The paper holds their folded faces to the floor and every day the paper boy brings more” Do you tune in, at some level, to the news? Do you watch TV? Or get your news off the radio? Do you ever wonder what the sane people in Germany were thinking during the rise or the Third Reich? You know they could not have all been crazy. People must have been watching what was going on and were thinking “this can’t really happen…” Hum…. My friends on the left don’t take the Palin’s and the Perry’s very seriously. My friends on the right…. Some of the nicest people, think the Tea Party is spot on. For what it’s worth. The top rated news programs in America are not ABC or CBS any more. And, sorry folks, they are not Maddow or Schultz…. Can you say O’Riley? Can you say “Fox News?” Think about it. Are you insulated from people you don’t like? What if you had a foot in both worlds? I can tell you from experience with that, the inertia is not on the left. It is not on the side of sanity. It is not about reason. It is about belief. And belief is highly malleable. Belief is putty in the hands of the skilled manipulators. If you are banking on facts and reality…. You might want to move your assets around a bit. The wave is about belief. Not about what is True. You are about to be swamped by it. You might want to make some adjustments in your paradigm calculations.

“I guess I could be pretty pissed off about what happened to me, but it’s hard to stay mad when there is so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I am seeing it all at once, and it’s too much, my heart fill up like a balloon that’s about to burst. And then I remember to relax and stop trying to hold on to it. And then it flows through me, like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every- single- moment of my stupid little life.”

From American Beauty. Can you say "brilliant frick'n movie"

Nothing can compare and it can ruin you. The color of the ordinary places. The light. The textures. It’s like everything in the normal environment is enhanced by a magnitude. (I am not sure what magnitude). You want life to be like that. How could you not? It’s beautiful. Your life is beautiful. The things around you are beautiful. They are still the things around you. The things around you right now. But they have a depth and brilliance, and a vividness that is lost to the normal. Dulled to the normal waking senses. All is dull afterward. All is flat and two dimensional. All is lifeless and banal. But you know there is more. Right under your nose. You know what is there. You saw it. You know. But you can’t access it. Not in the ordinary. And the sensations are fleeting. They can’t be sustained. So we come back to the dull. To the lifeless existence of the ordinary. The light is not what it can be. The texture is not what it can be. Maybe for good reasons. I don’t know. Maybe in death the vibrance becomes the norm. I don’t know.

Hanging out in my basement, of all places, has proven to be a creative space. It’s an old house basement with old house smells of damp walls and spider dust. I’ve made several passes at it with a shop vac. There is still a lot of cob web and egg sack to suck up. The basement is an open box; four walls, a couple posts, three small windows, the stairs, a brick chimney base, plumbing pipes, wires, the furnace, and some shelves I put up. After rearranging the upstairs and eliminating the place I had my day bed, which is where I sleep when the girls are here, I set up my bed in the basement with a table, some light, and a place to read. It was remarkably comfortable and loft like. I started considering making the entire basement a big bedroom, writing, reading, and loud music place. I have a powerful electric guitar amplifier that I can play my little CD player through. It gets as loud as I want. I tested the obnoxiousness of it by cranking it very loud and going outside around the house to see just how bad it is. Not bad. I am very isolated here. As loud as I can stand is not a problem with neighbors. Just another little aspect of the perfectness of this house for my circumstances. Night time is lighting time. Small lamps, candles, ambiance of quazi medieval retro hippie funk. I am what I am. It has been a very long journey for me to pass through the valley of the shadow of a tortured marriage. A journey of self-loosing. Of giving up aspects of innate characteristic for a cherished outcome that was always a fantasy. I am beginning, a year and a half out, to unfurl a bit. I image myself as a tree that was potted up in a big vessel and stuck in some commercial location as decoration. And now I am suddenly and unexpectedly transplanted in to a place of fertile soil. My roots are all tangled in on themselves and bound up tight in a ball. But they are starting to discover that there is room to grow. There is a rush of creative possibility. A growing sense that I am still here, Still discovering, still imagining, and unexpectedly, organically, alive.