Author Archives: Patricia Z Smith

Squirrels: my garden wars

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The squirrels and I stare at each other across the garden. I used to yell and threaten assault. I’m over that. I’m also over verbal negotiations. They would sit on the top of the fence with evil in their eyes as I explained the bird feeder was not for them but for the robins, cardinals, random blue jay, three mourning doves, numerous sparrows, and a couple other little birds I couldn’t identify. 

I spoke with authority while they sized me up. They understood, I know they did, but the message coming back was they would make their own decisions regarding feathered creatures. 

The cylindrical bird feeder—guaranteed squirrel proof and large bird (vultures?) proof—hung from a 20” metal rod screwed to my ivy-covered fence. 

Did you know a squirrel can hang suspended in air on a diagonal across 20” with one hind foot holding to an ivy vine and one front foot at the base of a bird feeder scooping out seeds without setting off the shut-down mechanism that seals off the seeds from creatures that weigh more than your average bird?

I replaced the 20” rod with a 39” rod with a 1/2” radius, screwed it into the fence at a 45 degree slant, and smiled in victory. For 24 hours.

The alpha squirrel—yes, there is an alpha squirrel, a beta squirrel, a third-rank squirrel, and a small black squirrel that keeps its own company—then jumped off the fence onto the 39” rod about 8” from where it attached to the fence. 

Birdseed spilled to the ground as the rod wobbled and wobbled. A flawless distribution system!

The alpha squirrel then jumped into the fracas of grey squirrels fighting over seeds and bits of fruit, tails shaking, teeth nattering. “Oh, what fun. I’ll do that again.” Up the fence, jump, wobble, sunflower seeds raining on my flattened iris. 

I’m rather fond of the little black squirrel. He waits until the coast is clear and seems less greedy.

Up for this fight, I ordered 4” steel spikes on overnight delivery—spikes that fit into a plastic strip you adhere to a rod, fence, or wherever you don’t want cats, squirrels, or vultures. I ordered more than I could possibly use.

I “loaded” the spikes into the base strips and attached the strips to the rod with the plastic bands used for handcuffs—not only on the top of the rod but around it for 30 inches up from the fence.

I smiled in victory. For 24 hours. Then, passing a window, I saw the rod bouncing up and down.

As I stared, alpha squirrel, now named Brute, ran up the fence, assumed flight position, and vaulted over the spikes, landing on the top 9” of the rod not covered with spikes. The wobble was magnificent!

I ordered more spikes for next day delivery, and covered every inch of that rod. It may be receiving messages from 1000s of lightyears away. 

Brute, beady-eyed, paced the top of the fence, back and forth, squatted, took measurements, paced more, squatted again, and took more measurements: angles, distance, spike length, possibly even wind velocity and direction. Hungry supplicants waited below.

Suddenly Brute crouched and launched himself across the distance, landing on the top of the rod between 4″ sharp steel spikes no more than 1 to 1 1/2″ apart.

It was a courageous jump, magnificent even. With no place to settle in, he turned in one motion, leapt sideways against the wall, and slid down for food. He did this three more times before I turned away in mounting horror.

Those spikes are sharp and dangerous! Sooner or later a squirrel was bound to be injured. 

My feeling became nuanced. Squirrels need to eat too, they are probably kind to their babies, and their calculation and acrobatic skills were improving daily. That must have felt good to them.

For two days I checked for squirrel blood on the ground. I let the feeder go empty. I did not win, they did not win, and the birds did not win.

Perhaps a squirrel was injured—Brute.

Yesterday I put seeds in the feeder again. This morning the beta squirrel made itself skinny and wove slowly, carefully, with precision between the spikes to the top of the rod. No grandiosity, just skill. I named it Dr. Fauci.

Dr. Fauci can only make the rod shake a little bit because it has no safe space along the way to jump up and down to get the wobble going. Squirrel Romper Room days may be over as only a few seeds drop to the ground with each of Fauci’s painstaking efforts. It is a compromise I can live with.

I have not seen Brute, but the birds are returning.

[Note from 24 hours later: Brute returned and learned from watching Dr. Fauci to wiggle between the spikes. His weight alone makes the rod wobble enough to feed his insatiable followers.]

Lessons learned:

1) Squirrels do not obey verbal commands.

2) Squirrels can stretch twice their natural length head to toe.

3) Squirrels discriminate.

4) Squirrels hold grudges.

5) You cannot outmaneuver a squirrel more than 24 hours. 

Not a Good Time to Place Bets

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We are on a bridge of uncertainty and do not know what is on the other side. Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers. We are learning we are the helpers.

. . . . .

Admit it, you’re not sure of anything right now. Okay, maybe YOU are sure of something but most of us aren’t, and a lot of us would not agree with your version of things because even we introverts are getting a little stir crazy and a good argument would cut through the fog of not knowing. There is a desire to violate.

For me that would be something like drinking a coke. Not really blasphemous, only slightly harming myself. No god will destroy the world because I drank a coke or will turn me into a pillar of salt because I looked at the destruction.

Okay, it’s not a proven destruction yet. We don’t really know what it is, and not many of us believe there is a vengeful god wreaking havoc on us because we don’t fit its description of obedient servants. We did this on our own and mythology does not serve us well.

What is real is that only a few people are overarching leaders with sharp minds, compassionate souls, and the ability to pull best actions out of scientific facts—and we need such people now. (Saluting you, Dr. Fauci.)

Our administration is not equipped—mentally, emotionally, morally—to deal with a pandemic. They stumble blind in a maze of ignorance, arrogance, and surprise that a deadly inconvenience is disrupting their presumptions they made America great again. They have put us in peril.

We are on a bridge of uncertainty and do not know what is on the other side. Mr. Rogers told us to look for the helpers. We are learning we are the helpers. 

We have become creative, turning to our friends and neighbors, and returning to ourselves—some of us perhaps going through the pains (and joys) of self-discovery and taking a fearless moral inventory for the first time.

We reach out and have come closer to others by not being able to touch each other. We slow down, turn to the arts, and try not to violate others, not to slice through the fog as a defense against not knowing.

We do not know when it will end, we do not know how many will die, we do not know how many others will be weakened, we do not know who is in trouble, who will disappear, who will have food for themselves and their families and who will not, who will be destitute, who will wake and say “I am not who I thought I was.”

We do not know if lessons will be learned and kept that will change how we live, if we will stop destroying our beloved earth, if we will be kinder to others. We do not know.

Some people are buying guns as though a virus can be shot. Who do they think will attack them? I sense these are the same people who believe in a vengeful god, and that monsters exist in all people and that deprivation will make those monsters rise against them for their food and toilet paper.

Still, it is the doctors, and nurses, and garbage collectors, and grocery suppliers that lead—and the food banks and fruit and vegetable pickers. At great risk, at great risk. They do best actions with the facts before them.

May we all do the same. May we learn—actually feel—the connected rhythms of life that include viruses and fears along with love and blossoming. May we endure and embrace and sort though to what serves best.

We will create what is on the other side of the bridge, using or ignoring the lessons we learn now. We can join hands safety. We can create harmonies that hold and stabilize through troubles.

If we do not, . . . oh, well, just one more planet in an unending cosmos that either knows itself or does not, that gives birth and absorbs death with startling nonchalance.

Elephants cry. These large beautiful beasts cry. Somehow that is relevant. I don’t know how.


Returning to you . . .

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Why does it take time to become a child again in seeing and playing? Why should it take years before you go forth without protection, to know you are safe in yourself?

. . . . .

It has been eight, nine, maybe even ten months since I have written. A lot has happened in the world. It has been confirmed repeatedly that the president of the United States is a dangerous ego-maniac and compulsive liar. Also, he is stupid in the way that narcissists know nothing except their delusions, impulses, and desires. Narcissism always catches up with you and is guaranteed to turn you into a toxic slab without the means or impulse to help other human beings.

So, we are left less than leaderless during a crisis. We have to work our way around a dangerous obstacle in the way of our care and the care of others.

I write this in a semi-sequestered state as someone well over the age of 60, which seems to be the assumed age where you start disintegrating and where, if you get Covid-19, your life could be considerably shorter than you anticipated–precious years you planned to watch your grandchildren grow into young adults, to publish the book in residence in your mind, maybe even go on a trek to Nepal or a walk in the African bush. Maybe, we think, there is still time to become wiser and do last forgivenesses.

Perhaps the musing of this writing is to say, most of us resent having time taken from us by trivia or mistakes. Most of us? Perhaps we have differing definitions of trivia. Perhaps fewer definitions of mistakes. Trump is a mistake.

My definition of trivia is anything that repeats itself in banality. Flowers could repeat themselves infinitely and never be banal. Plastic wrap is banal.

Let’s get right down to it. Humans are not good at earth management. We tend to break things, crush things, shame each other and ourselves, have tirades, destroy beauty, and discount our senses. Well, we kill each other and other living creatures and plants is what it comes down to.

Now we are in a real crisis and I am semi-sequestered. Surely you are too, and we fear our time to get it right is shortening.

So I’ve decided to love in an undisciplined way, and I bring up memories of how I felt in my 30s. How I felt in my body, how I ran and whirled, how I sang, and still had body hair. But you know what? There is an even greater sensitivity and increase of pleasure now in observing what is around me–truly tasting, basking in sunsets, feeling nuances of poetry, seeing the smallest living miracles surrounding me.

Now I have a bird feeder, bird bath, and bee and butterfly patches in my garden. It is important to lure the birds, bees, and butterflies back. Each is a revelation. Tell me again how feathers and wings came to be!

I taste fine wine in my mouth by simply imagining it. I see colors across the room through my mind. Lime green, fuchsia, mustard, cyan, teal … Ah, they flash before me now.

Can one explain these things to others? I think not, but perhaps the joys of them can infuse me and be shared simply through my being. Yours, too.

Why does it take time to become a child again in seeing and playing? Why should it take years before you go forth without protection, to know you are safe in yourself?

Why did we have to miss so many years getting here?

Yes, I am aware I am jumping from subject to subject but you need to keep up. If I am indecipherable, it is not a fault. Don’t think I am blathering, because I am not. Pay attention.


Letter to a Young Woman: Is it safe to love?

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You wrote, though we scarcely know each other, entrusting me with two questions. 1) How can you go beyond past injury to love, trust, and commit to another? 2) How in our world of grief and pain can you love, how can you be happy?

Well, you said it more eloquently and passionately: “It is time for me to take risks being vulnerable with another human and trusting and ‘loving’ as best I can. The brave part of me says ‘No regrets! Love fully!! Fearlessly!!’ and that somehow makes me feel better, even though I know it could go wrong in many ways.”

You have fallen in love, and it has shaken your isolation. “It is time to take risks being vulnerable with another human and trusting . . .” A dilemma! 

You said “The more I have known and connected with other people in this world the more heartbroken I am. It is not that I am not happy, I am. But also deeply heartbroken.

“It is difficult to live and more difficult to love while living because you see others as yourself and so the pain feels SO real and urgent and many times we cannot do anything. Why do we feel if we really cannot do anything?”

Do you understand your question of being vulnerable to a loved one and your question of surviving the pain in the world are variants of the same question—is it safe to love? 

Oh, no, my dear, it is not safe to love. It is not. You will be hurt, perhaps brought to your knees. You will suffer small wounds and large. You will lose people, places, and things. You will be betrayed. You will lose beliefs, your sense of what is real, and of who you are. Oh, no, it is not safe at all.

You told me of your earliest wounds and your decision even as a child to be separate, to be a warrior without human attachments in order to be more brave in the world, in order not to have personal friends and family you would need to protect. But, dear, warriors of any value will have their armor lanced. Love will do that to you.

Love will also make you real. 

The Skin Horse told the Velveteen Rabbit, “Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

Do with this quote what you want. Perhaps this is not the kind of advice you were looking for. Perhaps by the time you read this, you will have already figured that out. You are meeting your lover. Perhaps I am late returning to you—expect it is never too late.

So, I will add a few meandering thoughts, important ones. You trusted me, surely I can offer you more words about being real in our world of pain.

Dear, there is so much grief, hate, violence, prejudice, hunger, poverty, illness, and cruelty that you have no choice but to love. If you do not love openly, vulnerably, you will perish, you will stultify inside your armor, and have no hope of saving yourself or anyone else in the world.

Caring for yourself—your first priority as a created living being—includes loving, and love includes laughing, playing, singing praises, and celebration. You came into this world with the right to joy.

Far from the Velveteen Rabbit, let me tell you the words of a Holocaust survivor: “I beg you, do something. Learn a dance step, something to justify your existence, something that gives you the right to be dressed in your skin and in your body hair. Learn to walk, and to love, because it would be too senseless, after all, for so many to have died while you live, doing nothing with your life.”

Those in need do not wish of you to be sad. That simply makes one more sad person in the world.

They wish of you to be touched with sunlight so you can bring to them light and laughter along with equality and opportunity. They need reminders of the truths beyond their pain. They need hope and shared happiness. You spoke to me because you believe I know something.

Well, this I know. The bravest thing you can do, what a true warrior would do, is bring your courage and talents, your innate joy, your vulnerability, and your commitment of love for yourself and for others into your actions. Bringing them into actions makes them real in the world. It helps create the reality you long for.

It took decades for me to stop vacillating between sorrow and joy as though they were polar opposites. They are not. With time and intent they meld. I carry grief in my heart at every moment for the pain in the world. It is entwined with my joy and celebration of existence. This is what comes with time and intent.

It is what is real inside the Real You. Give yourself time. Allow mistakes, they are inevitable and boundless. Do not fear difficult times or sorrow, and do not force laughter. It will come naturally from your soul when it is freed from armor. 

The same will happen with crying. It will come naturally and not lessen your courage. There may be times when your crying may be best done in private or with only a friend or two. That can be the nature of relationships and circumstances, but whenever you cry, honor yourself with those tears. They, too, are part of being real.

I realize as I am coming to a close that I feel you so closely as a young woman that I have not thought of young men or older men. It is more complex for most men, this meeting and embracing of conflicting emotions. Certainly, if you wish, you can share this letter with them. Certainly it pertains even more to them.

But for now, remember that you cannot curve yourself to fit men or any loved one. Well, you could try but such a terrible hazard to your freedom! Such a threat to your joy! Be careful with that. You may choose to give a great deal to a man, but do not let one take parts of you.

With love,

patricia

Life, Loss, and my Dog

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Shall we talk of loss kindly and politely as though these things happen all the time, as often as tying shoes and drinking water? Shall we try to bring loss into form when it is the absence of form, the disappearance of form, replaced by a hollow that nonetheless has its own sound, a slack key guitar twang or tremolo of a loon or ache of a squeaking gate to a chamber next to your heart? We relearn the location of our heart with every loss, every major loss, the ones that rise above noise level, the ones that remain open and enhance the purple of hyacinth in May and sunsets in October. 

Yes, let us talk of such losses politely and with poise.  

My dog has had a sudden spike in the negative indicators of his chronic kidney disease. I measure the wobbles of today against yesterday. I entice him with salmon hidden under ground chicken thighs and rice. Just please eat. Please eat. He still prances when he walks. He will be with me as long as he is happy, and he is still happy, but how did that expectation go from years to months?

My friends’ friends are dropping like flies. Mostly people I do not know. 

We are in a sieve. People slip through the holes, making room for the next ones. Gravity is persistent and greedy as it cleans the slate–pulling babies into the world, giving goodness ongoing chances, eliciting poetry, song, and dance. It pulls us from origin and returns us.

If there is a time to come to terms with the rounding of organic life from beginning to end, to make sense of it, to accept it, old age is our last chance. 

Poise, hard learned over time, helps us not to panic, not to scream, not to complain, but to accept—helps us say “Well, that was a helluva thing, wasn’t it?” Helps us say, “Glad I was here.” 

When we recognize there was no reason for us to exist at all, but that we were made nonetheless and allowed to flounder, squirm, love, breed, and give, and discover that whatever that didn’t need to make us did make us, and loves us in its own way, then we can hold the whole of being loved and feeling loved against the shortness of living, the violence, horrors, devastation, cruelty, losses. 

When we can hold love and joy and surprise, and wonder and amazement against a sort of in-born rot of ignorance, greed, and arrogance, then we can feel our place as carriers of the immensity, then we know we have had our turn. 

When we can say “I understand little but know I am in the presence of a nameless force that makes flowers and welcomes poetry,” we can yield. We can yield to continual loss that is, in fact, a filling of the story of our lives and a gaining of what it is like to live. 

My dog is barking at a delivery man, not so loudly as before, not throwing himself against the door, but barking nonetheless—barking in the way I would have always preferred, though not at this cost. 

He does not think of these things, but pushes himself against me and allows me to nuzzle my face in his fuzzy ears in ways that are new. He stares at me and yields.

We will do this beautifully, my Phoenix. I promise.


How My Mother Showed Love: My dolls’ wardrobes

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My mother had the farmhouse door painted red, a protest to something though as a child I did not understand what. She also planted one Oriental poppy and nursed it through several seasons of Iowa winters. They were the same red, both testifying “I promised myself I’d never marry a farmer.”

I too was her proof of being special. What she could not reveal of herself, the world would see through the brain and beauty and poise of her daughter. She believed in genes and hated being underestimated. She had sold apples on the street corner during the depression as classmates walked by on their way to school.  

The house was not a typical white wooden farmhouse with creaks and openings around the windows and doors. It had wooden floors, but they were narrow slats of prime grade oak fit together as tight as Puritan’s lips.

The house was a top-of-the-line Sears prefab house built by a man from Minnesota who invested in Texas oil and wanted to live out his life on an Iowa farm. Seems he invested in the only spot in Texas without oil. Before he ever lived in the house, it was foreclosed to people who put a potbellied stove in the middle of the living room. 

The house was stucco with leaded windows, built-in china cabinets, and a solarium. My mother, in a misguided attempt to be modern, bastardized it with fleur-de-lys Wall-tex and blonde Swedish furniture. The ceilings were lowered with acoustic tiles, the copper chandelier replaced by a Nordic thing of teak.  

I, the child, cringed for myself and the house. 

I look now for the ways she showed love for me, and it is difficult unless I go inside her and feel the trap that held her from affection. Then I understand, then she is young, then she is lost, then she is determination, then she is a 20-year-old teacher in one room school houses who drove up a 1/4 mile lane to ask directions and saw a young man asleep in the yard after lunch and before returning to farm work. She felt ugly and saw a handsome man in the grass. 

Now, old enough to be her grandmother, I look for ways in which she showed love for me. She took her talent for sewing and knitting, and created cloths for me that made those bought in stores for the town children look second-hand. Still, I longed for store-bought clothes in their bright colors and round skirts. My fine clothes made me stand out.

She took her talent for sewing and knitting into creating whole wardrobes for my dolls— precursors of Barbie and much more beautiful. She made skating outfits, skiing outfits, Dutch girl outfits, cheerleader outfits, and a wedding dress with lace and net. They are now with her great-granddaughter and only slightly the less for time and wear. 

She took her talent for sewing and knitting into matching ensembles for me of wool skirts and intricate sweaters that made me stand out in college in ways that set me apart and that I liked. By then, I appreciated them and wondered, as I do now, at her craftsmen. 

My closet has jackets she made for herself, some with false labels of designer fashions—one in thick golden wool labeled Dior.

Who was this woman who knew clothes, who needed an Oriental poppy, who painted the door red, who scaped decades of shellac off the oak floor, the cabinets, the window seats, and stairs, but had no sense of interior design or art. The woman who made sure I got contact lenses when the town girls did because we were not less than them. The woman who did not allow me dance lessons but made sure I had piano lessons from the time I was eight. 

I ask myself, how did she show me love that was not tied to showing me off? I remember no hugs, no sweet touch, no “I love you.” That is because there were none. The trap inside her, the fear of touch, the possible coming undone of showing love. 

I remember the ski poles that went with the skiing outfit, the skates that went with the skating outfits, I remember the skating outfit itself knit in yellow with fuzzy baby blue trim and matching cap. I remember the wooden Dutch girl clogs. I remember the skiing pants in deep blue and the top in deep red with gold double-vested buttons down the front. 

I never learned to ski or ice skate, but she dreamed something, and made it for me. 

Knowing that is not quite enough, but knowing that and now being able to feel inside of her—the strictures, the determination against insecurity and feeling ugly, her resentment towards her mother for making her tend the five younger and more adored children—her resignation to being a farmer’s wife. Those two are enough. I shelter her in my arms across time.

I escaped. I think she wanted me to. 

End of our World: This is not a time to be stupid

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Formation of earth—explosion, fire, water to land, hot core, first ferns, beginning of eyes, of seeing, hearing, knowing—to humanoids arriving in the last sliver of a 10-foot-long timeline or last millisecond of since forever. Yet, this truth never convinces us how wispy we are. After all, we tickled out the timelines. We are the culmination, where the timeline always intended to go. We are creatures that know we know.

Years ago in Davos, Switzerland I heard a woman crow that her astrophysicist husband had done the math and it is impossible that advanced life exists anywhere else in the cosmos. Please, if you’re going to be stupid, do it on your own merit, don’t borrow from someone else. 

But we are all delusional. We may read timelines but know nothing of what was before. We may split atoms, chart elements, discover there are no smudges, only separate units going infinitely into minutia and infinity. We may study weak and strong forces, gravity, magnetism, inertia, and pheromones, but we only learn what they do, not why they do it. 

  It’s easy to believe something really really weird is real, but hard to think how it could be.–7-year-old girl

We resist the bald truth that there seems to be no reason for us, that we may exist only because we can and the value of our lives is a construct of evolution that we should be happy and reproduce–or seek happiness and therefore reproduce. We resist it by creating myths that are not nearly so interesting.

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?—Mary Oliver 

The chill is still on for this spring. I sit inside by a fire with my dog beside me. I pet him behind his ears as we stare at flames as humans and gentler wolves have always done. Fire has been fire since the beginning of the timeline—atoms vibrate off each other faster and faster, faster than local gossip, faster than lust, touching our skin, our hopes, our tomorrows, taming and recharging us. 

There is nothing of his ancestors in my dog that I can see, his killer instinct limited to barking over his weight class and slamming himself against the door when men in uniform deliver packages or other dogs intrude on his territory. He is fed from cans supplemented by home-cooked basmati rice with ground chicken or turkey. He can carry a grudge but only for a little time. He is getting older and sometimes wobbles. I worry. A lot.

  A dog is one of the few things in life that is as it seems.—Mark J. Asher

You and I may never see hard evidence of complex life elsewhere in the universe, but we know that whatever created light and dogs isn’t going to stop with us. Whatever expands, creates, and melds substance with wave and intent is not going to stop now. 

If we demolish earth as a home for complex organisms, the universe will not care. We are a millisecond, a sliver. We will be hopped over for millennia until another life form emerges, new creatures that believe they know what they know. Perhaps they actually will, perhaps they will be kinder than we have been. 

God, I think, is what is alive in us. God is life—balance, rhythm, stop and start, nectar for bees, seeds for birds, buds for blooms. She is nesting, reproduction, line and form against line and form. She is what is physical and what is beyond physical, the transference from fire to air to face. She is movement, orbs, attraction, spinning atoms, laughter at strange times out of nowhere. 

Evolution will continue if we knock ourselves out of the running. Life does not need humans.

  Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, it’s not going to get better. It’s not.—The Lorax

We are a creative, beguiling, and misguided millisecond. If we wish for more than that, we can no longer be stupid on our own or borrowed from others.

Laughter in the Time of Despair

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Humor has as many varieties as love, God, and the weather. It cannot be pinned down, though philosophers and psychologists have tried through millennia. Aristotle, Plato, Sophocles, Kant, Descartes, Schopenhauer, Freud, and Kierkegaard are only a few, plus gaggles of comedians. 

Everyone has a theory. Some link humor’s beginnings to the aggressive play of young apes. Others believe it is bestowed as a divine gift of a beneficent god. Plato protested the “divine gift” theory, claiming laughter was demeaning especially of gods.

  If anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter we must not accept it, much less of gods.—Plato’s “Republic,” c.380 BC

Plato thought laughter overrides rationality and self-control, but what is rational? Things fall apart. Earthquakes, floods, fires, catastrophic illnesses, financial loss, wars, ethnic cleansing, soap in the bathtub, crazy people with guns, crazy people who don’t want gun control, love turned to disinterest.

Early theories of humor include the Superiority Theory claiming the cause of laughter is feelings of superiority and the Relief Theory claiming laughter is the release of nervous energy. Freud felt we laugh as a way to release the tension in our bodies from suppressed feelings—dirty jokes being an example. Ha ha.

The most commonly held theory today is the Incongruity Theory. We expect one thing to happen and something else is delivered up, violating our mental patterns. Somehow this is funny, though mostly when we see it rather than when it happens to ourselves. Then it may take a while, or never, to laugh.

Being amused may not be rational, but it is lifesaving. Sometimes humor simply rushes in to preserve our sanity and our ability to make it through another day. 

  Perhaps humor’s largest function is to detach us from our world of good and evil, of loss and gain, and to enable us to see it in proper perspective. It frees us from vanity, on the one hand, and from pessimism, on the other, by keeping us larger than what we do, and greater than what can happen to us.—Editorial in the “American Journal of Psychology,” October 1907

The siege of Sarajevo lasted from April 1992 to February 1996. Snipers in the Bosnian Serb forces killed over 10,000 people, primarily Muslims, in the city by picking them off one by one from vantage points in the surrounding hills. I was there in 2002. A young man and I were walking along a sidewalk when he started to laugh.

“My friend was killed in exactly this spot. We were right here. He was afraid of being shot so he made me walk on the outside. Bam, he’s the one they got.”  Laughter. “I warned him he should stop being so afraid.”

Oppressed people are experts of dark humor. Humor steps in when hope is small. It is a moment’s detachment from the dark, a kind of enlightenment. 

  Humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It’s as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.—Mark Twain, 1905

It seems this writing should have more humor in it, but I’m taking humor seriously.  

When my father was dying, I slept on a cot next to his hospital bed. One night he began laughing—a rollicking laugh through cancerous lungs. I jumped up.

“Dad? Dad?”

“It’s all been a joke! The whole thing has been a joke!” 

He was lit up, joyous. He saw an ultimate incongruity. He saw love, peace, and harmony before, after, and around his life’s pains, troubles, losses, illness, even his death. It made his life with its difficulties a divine joke. The injuries were of no consequence. At least, not anymore.

There is a reason the Buddha smiles.

  A bird sings in the silence after a disaster and we do not know if it is a rejoicing for the return of quiet or if the bird is checking where the other birds are—as family members check to see who is alive under the rubble. 

This is not a joke. They are just words as I finish writing about what we do not know but find life-giving. 


GOODNESS IS A CHOICE: a lesson learned from Trump

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Only recently have I come to believe goodness—with its accompaniments of honesty, generosity, and inclusion—is a choice rather than an innate state of being. One might even say “state of grace.”

Perhaps I am late to this lesson, grounded in the mystical as I am, but having the character of our president smashed like a poisonous cream pie into our faces daily, the lies, the meanness, the duplicity, has shaken my faith in innate human kindness. He has no inner moral compass and, as he rants, hatred and division grow. Vast numbers of people are reveling in their darker selves. 

In my mind’s eye I see a graph with a straight horizontal line that represents a more or less benign baseline, though it feels more alive than benign. Moving over, under, and along it is a second line that may be wobbly, or as erratic as an EKG printout, or as jagged as a stock market index. It can roam or slide. It can meander but, if watched carefully, you see it tends upward or downward.

This second line charts the acts of goodness v. acts of selfishness of any and every individual—sometimes me. Simultaneously it measures what the person believes and feels because actions, beliefs, and feelings are co-joined. A continuing “state of grace” is not a guarantee.

Above the horizontal mid-line is the area of the graph showing compassionate, constructive actions of goodness—an acting out in our lives of love towards others—respect, generosity, doing unto others as you would wish them to do unto you, even basic politeness. Below the line are varying degrees of the opposite—selfishness, ignoring, harming. 

The very existence of this graph shows that in my personal striving for truth—a construct I am dependent upon—I have moved from a belief of goodness as an abiding impulse in everyone to a choice of individuals. This was, especially at first, a profound disappointment. A mooring is gone.

Still, I have always thought that people who have done great harm and then decide to change their lives, outlooks, and actions are the bravest among us—the addict that rises into caregiving, the criminal who becomes a reformer. I understood they made choices. They knew what they were capable of and they chose to do good. I do not expect the same of our president.

Watching the evidence, I felt my certainty of human goodness slip away. We are feebler and stronger than creatures with guaranteed impulses toward goodness. Feebler because we are not imbedded with hard and true morals, and stronger because we can rise to goodness as a choice even if the benefits to ourselves are not immediately apparent.

The world presents plenty of evidence that good actions are not a given. We with food let people starve, we with opportunity shut out desperate people at our borders, we with fear let innocent people be bombed, we let animals be harmed and the earth be sacrificed. We choose not to see that we are the terrorists, the selfish, the withholders. Most of us justify ourselves blindly and shamelessly. 

Through our free will we determine not only how we will act, but, first, how we feel and what we believe. We make non-stop decisions that craft our lives. We cannot avoid this, but we can choose our options, decision by decision, action by action. We can build habits—venues is perhaps more accurate—of perceptions and actions that build the world we experience as real. We can curse what is dark and promulgate it or embrace what is light and share it.

Love is the resource, but free will determines if we access care, empathy, inclusion. It determines what we do about education for all, health care for all, financial means for all, care of our planet, and protection of the innocent. It allows us to see strangers as friends.

Goodness may be an option, but it is not a fantasy. It is real and the only viable option.

The Paradox of Existence: You can’t get there from here

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Time is an illusion–Albert Einstein

The way it stands is we experience ourselves as physical beings even though time and, therefore, space are illusions. Space cannot exist without a time to put it in and, if time and space are illusions, so are we. That is the Paradox of Existence, also known as the Trials of Illusion.

Our past is not here and our future is a filament of imagination—fireflies.

Even so, the illusions of time and space are usually enough for us. With them, we experience intention, dreams, thrills, expectations, miseries, mistakes, tragedies, bliss, orgasms, cookies, poems, snails, bunnies, paper cuts, families, and sense of self. 

There are great mysteries here, and we will not solve them by believing in time and space.

Curiouser and curiouser–Alice from a place much like ours

There is a storyteller in us or beyond us, or both—and the storyteller creates stories with us at the center, which allows us to feel real because the story makes time and space feel real even though stories have no physicality of their own. 

A case could be made that we imagine gods in order to believe in an Grand Storyteller with answers to what we cannot comprehend, such as where we come from, where we are going, who we are, and what is happening.

Or the case could be made that there actually IS a Grand Storyteller, an Ultimate Intention beyond time and space that we dress up as petty gods because it is the best we can do with such magnificence—and that Ultimate Intention creates stories, our lives, so it can “see” bits of itself. Perhaps It binge-watches Itself through us even as we strive to see It through the blinds of our limitations.

  Have I made up my belief that I can think?

We are incapable of understanding the whole of It, but we inch our way like worms measuring marigolds to fleeting glimpses of what is beyond the usual resources of our illusions. Through quantum theory, mystical initiations, and exploration of the microcosm and macrocosm we inch our way to pure energy, to pre-story, all potential energy.

The Paradox of Existence, however, means we cannot “hold” these fleeting glimpses of what is behind time and space in normal consciousness. Our normal consciousness can hold only one thing in its awareness in any (presumed) moment. Beyond time and space is the whole thing at once, all time and all space as one before it presumes a separateness.

Nor can we fully know ourselves since there is no substantive “me” to capture, examine, dissect, and hold to the light. Held to the light, we are pure energy.

   . . . and who would hold us to the light? 

We are of stuff we cannot hold in our hands or minds. We cannot be labeled or contained. We are ever-dynamic energy. Few of us hear the space between lines of poetry or the silence between notes of music. 

  Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.—T.S. Eliot

Not having receptors for the non-material, we become faith-based in that we are material. We equate non-materiality with death. We want things to divert us, move fast, and assault our emotions, to lock us into the sensations of being in space and time. We ignore what is not easily sensed. We embrace what seems obvious and ignore what is esoteric.

We don’t want to ride that bicycle. “Look, Ma, no me.”

Still, there is a still place that calls us. We long for “home,” we can feel misplaced, sometimes even evicted. The untouchable essence of who we are wishes to return into its source. 

We are worshipful creatures—we worship and we are to be worshiped. There is no apparent reason for us or rational explanation for us. That makes us miracles. We may be dreams that experience themselves as having substance or we may be manifestations of an Ultimate Intention wanting the company of bits of itself. Both are okay arrangements.

I experience a “knowing”—perhaps you do too—that love is real and core to the call “home.” It connects substance and essence, and cannot be captured or explained. 

Does love come in innocent—pre-story—and, through the stories of us, is tattered and reassembled, new, expanded? Are we the Grand Storyteller’s venue to Its own love?

  Let there be light—the Great Storyteller