Beautiful....the annual peek

 

     Our annual visit to Lana's garden. A good season for the Iris. Take a break from everything else and enjoy.

          It's a ridge top hillside and it gets more challenging to work as one ages. She's had a few episodes of back "issues" but she's painted a beautiful nature's palette. I'm the lucky guy's study look directly onto the hill. 

           Peace. Stay strong. 

           See you down the trail. 

In the season of waiting....

 

        There was a time when it all seemed so right. Don't we hold dearly to some shred of those hopes, even now? It is the season.

      Jim, with the drum, gone at 27. John, with the camera, gone at 33. Even still they wait with me, through another season of anticipation and watching and the seemingly eternal passion of yearning. Those days on Muncie's South Ebright and Ft Wayne's Rose Lane, Colson Drive, or the cold drafty year in the old farmhouse in Cumberland and the "new" house on Lawnhaven visit again, Christmas ghosts, like snow around the foggy lamp post. 

     With so many of others we've learned to invite losses and disappointments to our hearth. It's a good thing, to remember, to reflect, better even, sometimes, with tears. I think it all gets framed up somehow in a hall of time. We deck the halls, with joys of the past. We sip melancholy, we wade into time, and smile at old dreams. 

    We get to an age when those missing from our table, or those who are slowly departing somehow fill us with feeling, a muted trumpet, crying. The young fill us with cheer and kindle our aging imaginations.

    Those who celebrate this as a holy season lean into the circular, recurring nature of it all. More than catharsis, it is like the birth we celebrate. This season is a cosmic in-breaking, a moment poignant, which scatters. Past, present, future fuse, and then go again to their own places in the unconditional, the unending, that beyond the names we give it.

    We wait, all of us, for a spark, that moment when everything truly is right. Out of it, we come away, again, with another shred of hope, held dearly. It gets us by. 

    I live on a ridge along the Santa Lucia mountains, a coastal range that nestles our village between the rocky bluffs of the Pacific. There's a lot of space and few people so it's easy to give over to my interest to see what's up with Mother Nature in this time of winter fallow. I went for a drive.

On grazing slopes, new members of herds. Rain season has just begun so green is still to come. Furrows are laid, so plans are underway. The vines await

    The tidal currents keep their solstice approaching rhythm.

    The week before Christmas and it seems even the land is waiting.

This is the western edge of the US. As I look east we face culture shift and political uncertainty. It is a time for vigilance. 

This season heralds a better way. Goodwill, Joy and Peace will benefit all. We wish those for you, all that your heart can hold. 

See you down the trail. 

   

Waiting, In the Interval

        Between seasons. Between change. Between atmospheric rivers. Between the America we knew and where it goes. We live in the interval.   

        On the California central coast this is the season some call Irish.

    If you know Ireland, you know this is an imposter. It is reminiscent, however. 

    Just being California winter is plenty good. From the perch here, it seems entirely too many citizens are loosing their grip.

    This includes the Alabama Supreme Court and at least 6 activist US Supreme Court Justices, all of those who have surrendered heart and mind to the MAGAban, those who give comfort to Russia and their mad czar, and those want to kill the almost two-and-a-half century experiment in a democratic republic. 

    We are between sanity and them. 

    If the MAGAban sycophants were to gain control, we likely would slip into a struggle that no one deserves. That we need to address these realities is a signal  we are in descent. 

       There is much about this America that is troubling; beliefs that are badges of ignorance gone malignantly arrogant. Uneducated and now unhinged. 

       The hijacking and the weaponizing of faith is misbegotten. Christian Nationalism, the atrocity of Hamas, and Netanyahu's abuse of the history of the Jewish state to conduct a war of genocide are three footmen of hell. There is plenty of evil creeping about.

        Nations respond to attack, but a counter attack that targets civilians, and ignores pleas for restraint is a case of two wrongs do not make a right.

        Authoritarianism, theocracy, and a new feudalism are active threats and sadly too many are poorly educated and/or manipulated to understand how they have become tools. 

        Again Russian agents are manipulating US citizens and attitudes. The MAGAban Republicans are part of the attack. They also put our children and grand children at risk of going to war to stop the aggression of the same Russian czar they support. It is madness.

        We stand between continuing the struggle to realize our aspirational promise or a regressive mania that seeks to discard human rights, freedom of thought, choice, belief and expression. 

        The poisoning of faith is insidious. We have seen it before. Dietrich Bonhoeffer a Lutheran minister was an outspoken critic of German Nationalism and the rise of the fascists. He was executed by the Nazi government. 

        Bonhoeffer asked humanity to think deeply and weigh the consequence of what is said, thought and believed. "Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are."

        Be it a philosophy, faith, or a personal code requires examination, giving respect, and thinking of others. This is more diligent than being a follower, scrolling your screen, posting emojis or rants. It requires getting out of echo chambers and silos.

    Look closely and you will see in Christian nationalism, Christian Trumpism, and MAGAban Nationalism, the seeds of the destructive evil that coopted faith, churches and the German regime.

     Things change. We can make choices. Big decisions are ahead.

       We live in the interval.  

        See you down the trail.

Meditation in Grey

 

        77 years ago Mary Helen gave birth to the first born of she and Karl. That was in Indianapolis. Today that boy took a walk in California.

      It was a meditation. Each step was a celebration. Each sound was praise.

    Peace.

    See you down the trail.