Spreading Kindness

It’s often easy and quick to do something small to help someone, but we rarely do it.

Why it matters: We underestimate the value of small and random acts of kindness until we’re on the receiving end of one.

Let's hear from Axios readers who paid it forward recently...

"I was next up in a long, slow line at a service desk with a single clerk. The person being waited on was harrumphing his displeasure at the speed of resolving his complicated transaction. After a few minutes it was my turn, and I said, 'I have all the time in the world, would you like to take a moment to breathe?'" 

-- Key H., Jackson, Mississippi

"Last night, a lady I don’t know was lugging laundry and supplies to the laundry room at Oceanside RV Resort. I offered to put in the code to unlock and open the door for her. She was pleasantly surprised and said, 'A thousand blessings to you!'" 

-- Jackie R., Mesa, Arizona

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Pay Attention

Pay attention — both to what enlivens you, as well as to what deadens you.

How much of the time, for example, does what enlivens us create an increasing imagination for the world around us, while what deadens us creates preoccupation with only ourselves?

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Democracy NOT In Action

Democracy (NOT) in action — real history is nearly always helpful:

In Arizona, Pima County Superior Court Judge Kellie Johnson has restored a law put into effect by Arizona’s Territorial legislature in 1864 and then reworked in 1901 that has been widely interpreted as a ban on all abortions except to save a woman’s life. Oddly, I know quite a bit about the 1864 Arizona Territorial legislature, and its story matters as we think about the attempt to impose its will in modern America.

In fact, the Civil War era law seems not particularly concerned with women handling their own reproductive care—it actually seems to ignore that practice entirely. The laws for this territory, chaotic and still at war in 1864, appear to reflect the need to rein in a lawless population of men.

The criminal code talks about “miscarriage” in the context of other male misbehavior. It focuses at great length on dueling, for example— making illegal not only the act of dueling (punishable by three years in jail) but also having anything to do with a duel. And then, in the section that became the law now resurrected in Arizona, the law takes on the issue of poisoning.

In that context, the context of punishing those who secretly administer poison to kill someone, it says that anyone who uses poison or instruments “with the intention to procure the miscarriage of any woman then being with child” would face two to five years in jail, “Provided, that no physician shall be affected by the last clause of this section, who in the discharge of his professional duties deems it necessary to produce the miscarriage of any woman in order to save her life.”

The next section warns against cutting out tongues or eyes, slitting noses or lips, or “rendering…useless” someone’s arm or leg.

The law that is currently interpreted to outlaw abortion care seemed designed to keep men in the chaos of the Civil War from inflicting damage on others—including pregnant women—rather than to police women’s reproductive care, which women largely handled on their own or through the help of doctors who used drugs and instruments to remove what they called dangerous blockages of women’s natural cycles in the four to five months before fetal movement became obvious.

Written to police the behavior of men, the code tells a larger story about power and control.

The Arizona Territorial legislature in 1864 had 18 men in the lower House of Representatives and 9 men in the upper house, the Council, for a total of 27 men. They met on September 26, 1864, in Prescott. The session ended about six weeks later, on November 10.

The very first thing the legislators did was to authorize the governor to appoint a commissioner to prepare a code of laws for the territory. But William T. Howell, a judge who had arrived in the territory the previous December, had already written one, which the legislature promptly accepted as a blueprint.

Although they did discuss his laws, the members later thanked Judge Howell for “preparing his excellent and able Code of Laws” and, as a mark of their appreciation, provided that the laws would officially be called “The Howell Code.” (They also paid him a handsome $2500, which was equivalent to at least 5 years’ salary for a workingman in that era.) Judge Howell wrote the territory’s criminal code essentially single-handedly.

The second thing the legislature did was to give a member of the House of Representatives a divorce from his wife.

Then they established a county road near Prescott.

Then they gave a local army surgeon a divorce from his wife.

In a total of 40 laws, the legislature incorporated a number of road companies, railway companies, ferry companies, and mining companies. They appropriated money for schools and incorporated the Arizona Historical Society.

These 27 men constructed a body of laws to bring order to the territory and to jump-start development. But their vision for the territory was a very particular one.

The legislature provided that “No black or mulatto, or Indian, Mongolian, or Asiatic, shall be permitted to [testify in court] against any white person,” thus making it impossible for them to protect their property, their families, or themselves from their white neighbors. It declared that “all marriages between a white person and a [Black person], shall…be absolutely void.”

And it defined the age of consent for sexual intercourse to be just ten years old (even if a younger child had “consented”).

So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as 10 able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man.

And in 2022, one of those laws is back in force in Arizona.

-- Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American

While many problems remain, including new ones arriving, it seems clear that democracy can work.  Look at where we are today regarding the contribution of other voices (not to mention legalization) to the making of better laws.

Doesn't Mean It's Not Heavy

Just because someone carries it well, doesn't mean it's not heavy.

-- David Kessler

If Not Challenged

I’m wondering…who I would really be if I were not challenged each day by what is around me?

Do I welcome it at the time?  Often no.

Am I grateful for it later?  Often yes.

An Invitation

The trouble is that we have made the Bible into a bunch of ideas — about which we can be right or wrong — rather than an invitation to a new set of eyes.

-- Eugène Ionesco 

Randoms...?

It is fascinating how often we can feel more free of some things…the next day.

Our comfort level with things seems proportional to the extent that we do them.

We seem to be more easily offended when we don’t feel accepted.

What If...the very thing that I suspect needs to be tested in me, is already being tested — and I'm just not recognizing it?

Prior Randoms...?

Average Monthly Mortgage Payment

The New York Times

Letters from an American

In the Hurt and Sorrow

Right where you are, in the hurt and sorrow, that’s right where the insight is, that’s where the answer is, that’s where the wisdom is. The transformation is there, the rebirth is there. And you’re not alone. Your friend, your lover, your family, your helper—someone from your posse will midwife it with you. The healing will come, and you will emerge, shaped in the merciful womb of the fiercest love. The pain of birth is excruciating. But someone who loves you knows how to reach in and grab you and hold on to you until you make it through. You’ll emerge lighter, less encumbered, ready for new stories, transformed by old ones.

-- Jacqui Lewis

Accept It

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.

-- Eckhart Tolle

Why is this so infuriating? 

...ah, but why is it also so true?

Long-Skate

As you may have detected, Wednesdays have become a little bit more of a long-skate day at the rink for posts on Saturday Mornings.

Today, my mind is going in a number of directions simultaneously; so, enjoy the bell-bottom jeans, disco lights, or the snacks — or whatever strikes your fancy (and, hopefully, not your fanny...!).  Here goes:

Most people seem to know only by means of distinction (at the very least, through contrast). I know about this because of what I know about that. This is different because of...fill in the blank. These things are like this, while those things are like that. 

But while appropriate for initial growth and understanding, that approach is actually a very limiting framework for knowing.  More than one thing can be true (even if they seem, at times, to be opposites).

It is more difficult to engage in mutuality (if not multiplicity). For one thing, it's not nearly as tidy.

Where one disposition is primarily either-or, the other is at the very least both-and.

...

We are more fearful of things that we haven’t been exposed to — at least that's what it looks like sometimes. If we've not really gotten to know something (or someone) that is different from what we normally experience, we can tend to avoid it. Obviously, these days have hijacked this reality to the extreme — we may even hate things we've never really even tried or, even worse, someone we've never even really talked to.

...

The narcissist says, when you support (if not adore) me and what I do, I will lavish you with many of the things you want and make you feel like you belong to something good.

But, if you cross me, I will destroy you…oh, and by the way, there is no room for middle ground in this arrangement either…including how you relate to other people and their cooperation, in this way, with me.

It’s all or nothing baby…and, I’m not kidding.

...

OK, last one...here.

When We Are Listened To

When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.

-- Brenda Ueland

Relational Risk-Taker

I've noticed...it is helpful to take note of oneself.  Here's one observation I've made — I am not much of a relational risk-taker.

...sometimes I wish I was.

Belonging

In a homily offered on the final day of the Men’s Rites of Passage (MROP) retreat that served as the material for his book, Quest for the Grail, Richard Rohr shares these thoughts on the importance of this myth:

Whom does the Grail serve? The Grail serves the Grail King. Our lives are to be given for the world. We are called to be people who live for others. Once we hear the gospel, once we have been into the Grail chamber, we are destined to live in two worlds: the world as it is, which we might call power, and the world as it should be, which we might call love.

We have to take both worlds absolutely seriously. Love without power is only sentimentality, cheap and innocuous religion. However, power without love becomes brutality and that’s what every culture instinctively moves toward: self-protection and self-aggrandizement. Once we have learned the truth of the Grail, of love, we cannot believe the world of power is adequate or a correct response to reality. The heroic journey unites power and love.

We have chosen Jesus as our primary hero, and no one addresses issues of power and domination more directly. We could read the whole gospel as Jesus undercutting false power and standing insistently and constantly on the side of the powerless. He always takes the side of the victim, the poor, the oppressed, the little ones.

No matter who we are, we, too, have been invited on the heroic path. We enter the Grail chamber and know it is a radically trustworthy world, despite all the tragedies with which we may have to live. In this basic trust we can lay down our spear and our shield. Now we can live the truly nonviolent life.

Love is not given to us to help us solve our problems. Love, rather, leads us into our problems. It’s love that leads us on the quest and ultimately to a final, universal, and grounding love. It’s a love we can trust because we know it is not all up to us. We do not have to secure ourselves because we are radically secured—we are beloved children in a benevolent universe. 

When we truly and fully belong, it is natural to believe and to become. The tragedy of our time is that so very many do not belong—people who have no parents, no family, no community, no tradition. It’s no wonder that survival has taken the place of becoming. One true love is all that is necessary. It tells us we do belong, we are connected, and we are at home. We are in, precisely because we have been led through.

-- Richard Rohr

Randoms...?

We go places, so we can take people places.

What we appear to be most capable of extending to others is directly related to what we have received.

Among other things, it is often fear that gets us to pay attention.

How often do we operate from the oft-handy premise that goodness is being withheld (because that is not the nature of goodness)?

Prior Randoms...?

When I Pray For Peace

When I pray for peace, I pray not only that the enemies of my own country may cease to want war, but above all that my country will cease to do the things that make war inevitable.

-- Thomas Merton

Your Imagination

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

-- Stephen Covey

Staying Submerged

You drown not by falling into a river, but by staying submerged in it.

-- Paul Coelho

Meaning In Life

We cannot truly know full meaning in life, until we go through it. 

But, we can learn to recognize elements of that meaning from those we have seen go through it before us. 

The degree of intimacy and understanding then of those elements is influenced by the extent of that observation…and our participation with them.

We can describe life all day, but it is our true encounter with it that impacts us the most.  This is one of the problems with the simulated life — it is missing true encounter and therefore remains more like a game, than like reality.

Knowing about death, for example, and actually dying are almost really different things, at least experientially. This distinction could be descriptive of many things about life and our experience of it — knowing about vs actual knowing.

And some point, either by coercion or choice, we end up making the leap from being mere spectators of life to active participants in it and as that happens we become more capable of both engaging it and offering ourselves to it.  Without engaging it, we are largely, in effect, just withholding ourselves from it.

There are a lot of things ‘going on’ in my life right now; many of which I would prefer to avoid.  There are several significant things that I wish I could determine the outcome of — what is going to happen?  Which way are things going to go?  Should I stay in certain situations or should I strike out into new ones?  How will things turn out once I choose?  ...nearly endless questions of this kind.

But, the other day, it occurred to me that...finish here.

The Way I Planned

Just because things hadn't gone the way I had planned didn't necessarily mean they had gone wrong.

-- Ann Patchett

IT Factor

Ever noticed...when somebody has what is sometimes referred as the ‘it’ factor?

What actually is the IT factor?

While a bit hard to precisely pin down, we do know it when we experience it, especially in someone else. We might say something like ‘they is just something about them, isn't there?’ or 'when they're in the zone, they just really have it, don't they?'

It could be a unique a talent or skill, a quality, a unique knack for something, a presence, just a way about them, etc. — some might call it a gift.

Usually it includes some kind of relational power; in other words, it's not just for them — it impacts others.  People are often drawn to the person with an IT or to whatever their IT is (many times it's hard to distinguish between the thing and the person).

We might notice that we like that person or wish we could be more like them.

Perhaps, because something about it raises the question about what our own IT might be....

Parable of the Sower

I started worrying about what kind of ground I was on with God. I started worrying about how many birds were in my field, how many rocks, how many thorns. I started worrying about how I could clean them all up, how I could turn myself into a well-tilled, well-weeded, well-fertilized field for the sowing of God’s word. I started worrying about how the odds were three to one against me—those are the odds in the parable, after all—and I began thinking about how I could beat the odds . . . by cleaning up my act.

That is my usual response to this parable. I hear it as a challenge to be different, as a call to improve my life, so that if the same parable were ever told about me it would have a happier ending, with all of the seed falling on rich, fertile soil. But there is something wrong with that reading of the parable, because if that is what it is about, then it should be called the parable of the different kinds of ground.

Instead, it has been known for centuries as the parable of the Sower, which means there is a chance, just a chance, that we have got it all backwards. We hear the story and think it is a story about us, but what if we are wrong? What if it is not about us at all but about the sower? What if it is not about our own successes and failures and birds and rocks and thorns but about the extravagance of a sower who does not seem to be fazed by such concerns, who flings seed everywhere, wastes it with holy abandon, who feeds the birds, whistles at the rocks, picks his way through the thorns, shouts hallelujah at the good soil and just keeps on sowing, confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes at last it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters?

If this is really the parable of the Sower and not the parable of the different kinds of ground, then it begins to sound quite new. The focus is not on us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the condition of the fields, who is not stingy with the seed but who casts it everywhere, on good soil and bad, who is not cautious or judgmental or even very practical, but who seems willing to keep reaching into his seed bag for all eternity, covering the whole creation with the fertile seed of his truth.

-- Barbara Brown Taylor, on Matthew 13:18–23

Randoms...?

Art is one of the persistent things that still brings me joy about life.

You are who you are — that could be tempered by who you want to be, but largely you still are who you are.

Surely there is more irony to many things in life than we have come to let ourselves acknowledge — at the very least, we seem to have lost much of our humor about it.

Why does it sometimes seem like belief is too often more of an escape mechanism than anything else?

Prior Randoms...?

One of Webb's Jupiter Images

James Webb Space Telescope

Wild Horses Drink from the River of History

'Poem for the week' -- "Wild Horses Drink from the River of History":

Hours before dark, I follow the stony path

from the parking lot to the river bank. 

Along the shore I look for crushed branches and trampled grass,

the clearing where wild horses are said to appear.

Then, I hide behind a mesquite tree, hold my breath.

I want to know their secrets.

Finally the mares and foals emerge from the woods

and stand, ankle deep, among the dense reeds.

At once the entire herd bows their heads,

laps the cool water, takes the river into themselves. 

If I were brave, if I’d forget 

to move past the brokenness of my own family,

I’d approach these unclaimed, unnamed creatures.

I’d stroke their brown manes, 

feed them sugar apples and snow peas.

We’d share one fearless story.

Now the Mustangs dig their feet under the tall grass.

I step forward, snap a few pictures,

as if the camera could capture 

when my unsettled heart and theirs became one.

Overhead, the whir of helicopter blades

cuts through a questioning sky.

Suddenly there’s a thousand echoes,

galloping hooves ringing over badlands.

I turn and look back to the river

which flows on, relentlessly, carrying with it

every story of who or what has come and gone.

And the sun sets, dropping behind the mountain,

leaving a blue ridge, a dimming thread of gold.

I get into my car, head up switchbacks

that lead me to the open highway and down towards the city

where lights shimmer like the past of distant stars.

-- Lois Roma-Deeley

From the author: 

“I’ve come to love the Arizona landscape. It is, to me, as mystical as it is beautiful. For example, I’ve often observed a wild mustang herd. This poem took as its point of departure one day when I saw several of these majestic creatures drink from the river, while others rested under the cool shade of tall trees. I was not more than a few feet away from them. They seemed aware of me but quite unafraid of my presence. This moment seemed otherworldly. It became something like a path leading to the past but also stretching toward the future.”

Doesn’t Mean

Just because it isn’t predictable, does not mean it’s not reliable.

-- Jason Miller

This Prayer...of Faith?

Have you ever prayed a prayer like this: 

Dear Father,

I come to you with this salutation — aware that I don’t really understand much of who you are or why I greet you in this particular way. There are more than a few times when it feels like you are more of an assembly of ideas, than anything else. And when that occurs, I feel aware that I need to pick something, as an access point to that conflation of ideas about what and who you are, God.  I wonder what that means about me and my ideas about you.

My tradition has made me feel that such ambiguity (about you) indicates this kind of honesty is a problem; because lack of clarity about you, God, must translate as an imperceivable faith (at the very least a lack of it).  Imperceivability about faith is a big no-no.  Faith should be obvious, overt, unwavering....

At least, we're talking though, God...aren't we? 

But, can we stop for a minute and consider what faith really is?

Obviously, this is no small task (maybe that's why we prefer quick and simple versions of faith definitions); the ages are full of people — faithful people, by the way — who have asked this question.

So, for one thing, I'm not alone...when I ask such a question from time to time.

And that, by the way, is a critical ingredient.  Faith is not a constant (nothing is); it ebbs and flows, like everything else in life.  Sometimes, I am full of faith...the crystal-clear kind.  At other times, I scrape around for even shreds of it.  What of the sublime is not like this?  Joy?  Kindness?  Mercy.  Even, love.  Everything is a full range of experience.  It has been said, "There is a time for everything..." — a time even for things that are polar opposites of each other (or appear to be).

Faith is like a condition, a state of being.  Something is known; something that is unknown.  Held; and also illusive.  It involves trust, believing in something that doesn't always feel verifiable.  It has an object (or, if you prefer, a subject).  

Finish here...for more, including the below:

Patience

Patience breeds perspective.

-- Simon Sinek

Labor Day

One hundred and forty years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.

Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity.

By 1882, though, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government toward men of capital, and workingmen worried they would lose their rights if they didn’t work together. A decade before, the Republican Party, which had formed to protect free labor, had thrown its weight behind Wall Street. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”

The workers marching in New York City carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”

The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “[e]very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”

In other words, the growing inequality in the country was a function of the greater value of bosses than their workers, and the government could not possibly adjust that equation. The New York Daily Tribune scolded the workers for holding a political—even a “demagogical”—event. “It is one thing to organize a large force of…workingmen…when they are led to believe that the demonstration is purely non-partisan; but quite another thing to lead them into a political organization….”

Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer Cleveland, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

In 1888, Cleveland again won the popular vote-- by about 100,000 votes-- but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”

Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribune noted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”

As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).

They could, though, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday.

In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”

-- Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American

Biggest Single Impediment

All religious traditions have universally insisted that religious life cannot be done with the mind alone; that is the biggest single impediment to spiritual becoming.

-- Cynthia Bourgeault

Electricity Prices

AXIOS

Randoms...? (from Others)

Feel compliments as deeply as you feel insults.

-- James Clear

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

-- Carl Rogers

You don’t need to feel good to get going, you need to get going to give yourself a chance to feel good.

-- Brad Stulberg

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.

-- Pema Chödrön

...any thread?  Prior Randoms...? (from Others).

What a Wonderful World or Sultans of Swing?

 OK, don't either / or me — both!

Attention

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

-- Simone Weil