IT’S OUR FATHER, NOT MY FATHER!

       It’s impossible to look at media – print, television news, Internet news or social media – without seeing alarming negative headlines about politics, elected officials and world affairs.  This may not be the first time in history that people were so polarized in their views on the various issues and people who should be elected to fix them, but because of the Internet everything is amplified.  Not to mention the ability everyone has to edit and photo shop information to suit their opinion – which leads us to a phrase that is currently the darling of all sides, fake news.  This is certainly not a new phenomenon just a resurrection and intensification of an old tactic.  Anyone who has read about the French Revolution knows that the road to the guillotine was paved with libel, gossip and denigration. The pornographic little libellés disseminated about Marie Antoinette were the era’s fake news.  They were based on court rumors, gossip and political vendettas so we will never really know the truth.  Sound familiar?  

                           

Marie Antoinette in court portrait

       To me there is only one real definition of fake news and it’s totally subjective.  It usually comes down to whether the source agrees with your narrative.  Yes you can try to research the original source, but so much of it is just repeated conjecture.  I am reminded of a quote from Nietzsche, “People don’t want to hear the truth because they don’t want their illusions destroyed.”

                              

Political cartoon of Marie Antoinette as harpy devouring hogs!

       The level of name-calling and vitriol surrounding all social/political issues has become overwhelming.  As a 73-year-old who has never been registered in a political party – I think my designation is listed as “decline to state” – my beliefs fall more in line with what is defined as libertarian.  To quote Wikipedia, “libertarians seek to maximize political freedom and autonomy, emphasizing freedom of choice, voluntary association, and self-ownership.”  My idea of government’s role is far from the invasive bureaucracy that everyone sees as broken– they just see it as broken in totally different ways.

       The 2016 presidential election was a dog and pony show consisting of a large percentage of “gloss over the flaws of the candidate you found the least offensive, and beat up the other with any dirt reported.”  For my health and spirit I watch almost no news, read no newspapers, and try to skim past the material online.  (I actually think we should come up with a different term because “news” has become another word for opinion.) People sometimes question how I keep up with things, but trust me, just with the exposure to TV or radio in public places, checkout line headlines, Facebook and conversations between family and friends I get the gist without the endless speculation and repetition that passes for news.   I do read books, lots of non-fiction, and I tend to read several books in a row about a topic, country, etc.  One of my recent favorite topics is North Korea, which is a crime against humanity governed by one family that has enslaved a whole country for as long as I've been alive.   I also watch documentaries and often look for opposing points of view.  

       It has helped my serenity to avoid having exchanges with people on Facebook, but I have two examples of recent posts that were very heartening.  As someone who was a public school teacher, and has two daughters who've been public school teachers (one who is the long time director of a much loved public charter school where we were both involved from it’s inception) I’ve had the most curiosity about the nominee for Secretary of Education.  When a woman I know mostly from Facebook posted a negative article about the nominee, Betsy De Vos, ending with, “if you think that’s not the case please share you logic,” I broke my own rule and replied.  My point of view is based on my belief that this system has been broken for years, and President Carter’s formation of the Department of Education in 1979 has done nothing to improve it.  The Federal Department of Education operates a lot like skimming money in a Las Vegas casino, with the return being another set of rules where schools have to hire people to fill out more paper work, so I am one of those who think we could put a lot more money toward children by getting rid of it. From different sides of the fence we had a reasonable exchange, without agreement, but with respect and good will.

       Yesterday I read a post of a Facebook friend I have never met but who is a writer I admire.  She is a self-declared liberal, and following my desire to try to avoid political exchanges, I usually skip her political posts, but this one was titled “When We Hate” so I read it.  It was a well-written, openhearted piece about having compassion for someone you disagree with.  I pulled myself out of the comments section before I lost the real depth of what I had just read and got pulled back into the rancor, but not before reading her reply to someone, “we can be opposed to people and still say that person was kind and decent.”

                           

                               

       I am reminded of something my husband and I read recently in our morning prayers that include reading from Emmet Fox’s book of daily readings.  The section was on the Lord’s Prayer, which he takes apart starting with the distinction of “Our Father” not “My Father.”  “It forces upon our attention at the very beginning the fact that all men are the children of one Father…Here Jesus cuts away the illusion that the members of any nation, or race, or territory, or group, or class, or color, are, in the sight of God, superior to any other group.  The final point is the implied command that we are to pray not only for ourselves but for all mankind.”

      It seems that the world will continue to be embroiled in conflict of all kinds for the foreseeable future, and the only hope I can see for my personal serenity is to stay away from the chatter that dominates the public discourse.  I still read, think and try to speak sparingly about the events going on around me.  It’s not that I don’t care, I care as deeply as those passionate on either side of the spectrum. I think it is in agreeing on what action should be taken that things fall apart, but I don’t doubt the intentions of people of good will, and I pray for all of God’s creations.       

                 

Rufus - the Zen master!

                       

                

            

                  

       

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

                   
                                                                     

Ducks like muck!

   

       What can you say when instead of solving a problem you actually make it worse?  Last week I wrote about the satisfaction I felt when I worked hard and solved the problem of a rain soaked animal pen. It wasn’t by design that I was shoveling muck and hauling it to the compost pile on my birthday.  It was actually poor planning and procrastination.  I am reminded of a favorite Disney cartoon from my childhood.  The one where the ants work hard preparing for winter and the grasshopper dances around playing his fiddle.  I was always torn between thinking the ants were hardworking and responsible by preparing for winter, but also somewhat sorry for the grasshopper because he had a certain joie d’ vie that I admired.       

                               

       It was my procrastination that had created a slimy mess in the animal pen, and, let’s faces it; there were no ants to the rescue in this scenario.  I had succeeded in removing a lot of the muck, but when it rained again the plastic and plywood I put up failed to keep the rain out.  The problem this created was amplified by the thick layer of straw that I had thrown over the mud, because when it got wet it acted like mulch and became “one with” the dirt.  I'm sure it was suitable for making adobe bricks.  In fact, it is now a swamp in certain areas, and the worst part is the swampy sewer smell.  Having to “re-do” so much of my hard, smelly work was no fun, but it is the kind of work, like weeding, or cleaning the shower, that becomes contemplative.  As I worked, my mind seemed to latch on to a story I’d recently read in Being Mortal, about a young doctor, Bill Thomas, who took the position of medical director at a nursing home with 80 elderly residents.  He had no previous experience working with this population and was shocked at their palpable despair and inactivity.  About half were physically disabled in some way and 4 out of 5 had Alzheimer’s or some sort of cognitive disability.  He ordered scans, tests, tried changing medications and after several weeks there was little change except increased costs for treatment and a harried staff.  With his fresh eye he decided what was missing was life itself and came up with an extreme (in the world of nursing homes) plan.

                               

Chickens fiddle in the sunshine while I work!

                                     

       How he got this plan enacted is a story in itself, but the shortcut version is he introduced plants, animals and children into the lives of the residents.  The part that reminded me of my animal pen adventures with the rain was the description of the day a hundred parakeets were delivered before the cages even arrived.  The driver released them into the empty beauty salon and when the unassembled cages arrived, the doctor, his wife, the nursing director and a handful of others assembled the cages, caught the birds and delivered birds to each room.  During this chaos the elders gathered outside the salon windows with their laughter echoing through the halls.  Thomas said, “We didn’t know what the heck we were doing.  Did, Not, Know what we were doing.”

       Of course, I realize that some experience or knowledge of what you are doing is usually helpful, but sometimes “knowing” things, having all the answers, stands in the way of the exhilaration of figuring things out as you go along, the thing that brings the joie d vie that comes from discovering or creating something.  It is fairly easy to have a zest for life when you are doing something that is fun, something you enjoy, but unpleasant things, not so much.  Sometimes I think I actually make things more difficult by waiting to gather more information before I act.  I’m not suggesting this as an approach that can be applied to all things, but I guess I just want to be the grasshopper and the ant.

       You can read more about Dr. Thomas and his Green House project online, but the moral of the parakeet story is that in a study done over the following two years the use of prescription drugs, especially psychotropic drugs for agitation, decreased substantially and deaths fell by 15 percent.  And “there was something beautifully subversive,” Thomas said, “about using a medication cart that had once delivered metric tons of Thorazine to hand out Milk-Bones.”

                          

Violets enjoy the upside of animal pen waste.

TIME ON MY HANDS

                                                       

                                 My January birthday, thoughts of a “new year”, combined with the book I’m reading, have created a mind full of musings about how I spend my time.  I’m reading Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.  To be honest, I read the beginning of it months ago, but put it down and picked up something lighter.  The topic is aging, frailty and the realities of one’s declining years, and since by definition I’m “elderly”, it was not relaxing reading!  For some reason I am finishing it now from a more detached state of mind, and am grateful to have the distance of good health as I navigate the realities that may face me.

       My intention when I started to write about the “stairway to heaven” was to help me be fully conscious of the precious present – the time I have, right now!  My birthday week provided several very different opportunities to seize the moment and look for the joy in the mundane.  I keep chickens, ducks and rabbits in a large animal pen in my yard.  Dabbling at a little “backyard farming” is a hobby, but as anyone who has ever done it will tell you, there’s work involved.  I can let my vegetables go for a few days, but animals give you an every day task.  Some days it just means a few minutes to feed, water and pick up eggs, other days it involves some heavy lifting.  I have plans to re-do the pen, adding more solid roofing (not just wire) over the whole area, not just the coop and hutch.  In preparation for this I took off some temporary plastic roofing panels.  Then it rained – for days

       It stopped raining the weekend before my birthday and was supposed to rain again that week, so I had a brief window to work.  First I had to muck out the mixture of straw, mud and poop that covered much of the pen.  This involved a wheelbarrow, a large shovel and a lot of effort. The weight of the water made my usual task of raking it out seem like child’s play.  Fortunately I have knee high work boots and heavy gloves so I could wade right into the muck.  As I was shoveling, hauling and dumping it in the compost pile, I had the same feeling I do when working out – satisfaction that I can still work this hard and pleasure knowing it would soon be over!   

                                            

       

          I finished on my birthday by putting up a temporary sheet of heavy mil plastic over the whole area.  I fit in my Monday weight lifting class and tea with my BFF Rose who gave me beautiful earrings.  My daughter Lauren came over to prune roses (a great birthday gift) and our son Max and our daughter-in-law Jess took us to a small restaurant for a lovely dinner.  I enjoyed every piece of my birthday – the ordinary and the special.  I am reminded of some of the things I just read in Being Mortal.  Studies show that life threatening illness at any age, and aging, give people a shared perspective on what’s important.  It is not achieving and acquiring but comfort and companionship that people want.  “… as your horizons contract – when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain – your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you.”  That’s how I spent my birthday, that’s how I strive to live – with consciousness and gratitude tor everyday pleasures and the people closest to me. 

     

                                                  

Chickens looking for tasty treats in the muck!