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Long Nights  

Blog December 2017

The days are so short now; the darkness closes in by late afternoon. In former times I used to rail against the disappearance of daylight; I felt robbed. Now I let the skin of my being lean into the warm nighttime of my cozy home as it stands within the starry universe. It’s easier to feel that I belong to something spectacular when I don’t have to see the tawdriness that daylight exposes. It’s possible to loosen my fixation on clock time and to feel a relationship with a continuum of life that plods forward like a caravan of camels making its way through the ages. What is one short night in comparison to 13.8 billion years of existence? The answer is: everything! Everything is here now, just as it always has been—love, cruelty, birth, pregnancy, death, despair, kindness and shoving compassion aside for temporary gain. Life is constant in all its faces. These nights I burrow into a solstice time she-bear cave, in the middle of a starry heaven shining starlight throughout my world.

 

Ideals Still Hold

Blog: September  28, 2016

This presidential election is getting to me. An unnerving despair is obscuring my usual faith that humanity will eventually figure out how to live together. I came of age when the Beatles were first singing “imagine all the people living life in peace… you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one”. I experienced myself as part of a significant population group who cohered around the conviction that together we could and would bring improvements to the status quo. We were a force to be reckoned with for several decades. We weren’t perfect, we made some blunders and miscalculations, but we were consistently inspired by the common good and projects to bring that about. But politics in our country have taken an ominous turn.

Only eight years ago Barack Obama was voted into the presidency — a triumphant moment for those of us still holding the ideal of a world where people could live as one. Now, just eight years later, the Republican party nominee for president shamelessly spouts his cataclysmic viewpoint mostly based on outright lies and has gathered enough traction to possibly be voted into office.

Sometimes it feels like the Trump candidacy is a B-level summer horror movie, but summer movie season is over. It’s Fall, the movie screen should be serving up more substantive fare — how about the idealism, promise and hard work of Hillary. To help the audience lighten up, perhaps there would be a cartoon about Trump suddenly becoming Pinocchio and his nose growing longer than Trump Tower is high.

My hope is that more discussion of detailed political plans will prove interesting enough to grab some headlines and thoughtful decision-making. Simply put, the real issues are about the environmental situation, the suffering of so many, an interminable war and all the bitter, disaffected people who see violence as the only solution. It is true that things must be identified and seen as unworkable before they can be consciously discarded. So perhaps we did need to see the Trump show, but maybe people have seen enough to just walk out.

I wonder if we as a culture are regressing or just going through a time of exposing the underbelly to light so that it can be transmuted? There has been so much change over the last years and history demonstrates that change produces chaos, which eventually leads to a fresh plateau of innovation and stabilization. We transcend the old and bring forward what is still viable into a new order.

Outside of prognosticators, employed to fulfill corporate agendas and desires to manipulate people in particular ways, what is really going on in people’s heads and hearts? One thing is for sure, I’m sick of feeling out maneuvered and somewhat traumatized by the sheer hyperbole of it all. I need to speak out.

For decades Hillary has been a dreamer for a more humane and heartfelt world. Her book, It Takes a Village, speaks of the necessity for us to interact with each other as a family. Even in a sexist and largely misogynist cultural mindset, she has endured as one who dreams and works for a better world. She has become tougher and more careful over the years because she’s had to learn the ways a woman navigates under fire. As the first presidential debate demonstrated, her opponent and many media talking heads have no shame in their attempts to vilify her or hold her accountable to standards that would never occur to them if she were a man. Regardless of who gets the most votes in this election, I intend to stand up for the light of wisdom and the ideal of a world where we all will eventually learn to live together in harmony.