Everywhere

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

-- Albert Einstein

Still Don't Work

I've noticed...my anger is more existent (often even instantly) about things that still don't work, even after I've made specific, conscious effort.

Not A Constant High

The Christian life is not a constant high. I have my moments of deep discouragement. I have to go to God in prayer with tears in my eyes, and say, 'O God, forgive me,' or 'Help me.'

-- Billy Graham

What a relief; despite the oft slant-eyed-ness from our culture towards anything less than 'high' — nothing incompatible at all about highs and lows...all are part of the fabric of the human experience of life.

 

Randoms...

There are certain chairs I like to sit in — some because of how they make my lower back feel, others because of the view of the morning light coming through a tree. 

We often seem to imagine that lives lived before us we’re not as developed, interesting, or fun.

The assembly of humans who are manifesting desire for God can be a powerful thing (honoring of one another by trusting in the presence of God).

We believe what we believe primarily because of what we have experienced (how we grew up, life-altering events, etc.) — what does it mean when we encounter people with a different experience?

Prior Randoms...

Visual: Busy

 Visual - "Busy":

Winona Lake, IN

Icy Hot

When my wife Anne and I turned 40, we decided to run a marathon to celebrate reaching middle age.

Unfortunately, three months into race training, I pulled a hamstring. But rather than rest for a few days, I applied a generous layer of Icy Hot--(a mentholated ointment that heats up and soothes sore muscles) to my thigh and went out for a run.

Unbeknownst to me, however, as I was pulling up my running tights, a gob of Icy Hot came loose from my thigh and smeared itself all over the inner lining of my shorts.

Yes, this would end in tears.

Three miles into my run, I felt a sharp, burning pain in a highly sensitive region of my body. It felt like someone had dropped napalm into my shorts!

I started panicking! I had no way to wipe off the Icy Hot, and so I turned around, hit the hyperdrive switch, and started sprinting toward home.

Now, if I had read the product description on the jar, I would have known this was a huge mistake. The effects of Icy Hot only intensify as your body temperature rises! Soon, I was in blinding pain so, what did I do? I ran even faster, which, of course, only increased my suffering. I wouldn't wish this experience on my worst enemy!

That said, my Icy Hot story taught me an important lesson. It’s a metaphor illustrating how all of us deal with problems in our lives.

When we experience emotional or psychological pain, we often double down on our personality type's old childhood strategies to make the suffering disappear.

But the strategies we used as kids to protect ourselves and cope with our pain backfire on us in adulthood. We try to outrun them, and it only makes the situation worse!

Here's the deal, friends: we can't outrun our difficulties and expect things to improve. On the contrary, they will only increase.

The real solution is to stop running and face them. To see the truth of what's happening in the moment and do the hard work of disentangling ourselves from our personality's unhelpful behavior patterns.

Notice and question your personality type's antiquated strategies for dealing with life's problems, and see if you can't find new ones. Then, stop running and ask whether your behavior is helpful or rooted in the shadow aspects of your personality. This is how we use the Enneagram to realize freedom and become the best expression of ourselves.

-- Ian Morgan Cron

Backwards / Forwards

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

-- Søren Kierkegaar

Not Win or Lose

Our character isn't defined by the battles we win or lose, but those we dare to fight.

-- Robert Beatty

So, what determines what is worth fighting for?  

Is it character?

What is character anyway?  Is it content?  Is it agency?  Some combination of both?

Character addresses what is needed.  What is needed may be for the good that enriches life or the things that are wrong that need to be resisted.  Character strikes me as the substance within us that a) informs, and b) enables what is needed.  It may be represented by the disposition that is consistent with what is good.  It may be a response demanded by the moment.  It may be strategic; it may be an impulse.  

Either way, things seem to require both vision and fortitude to work for or against something that is needed; in other words, these things benefit from something we might call character — something that includes content, constitution, and courage.

Without such elements, we can often confuse things like the means with the end.  We can become focused on things like the result (winning & losing), rather than what is needed.  Character, on the other hand, will inform and enable something different.  

It is, after all, what distinguishes what should be fought for and what shouldn't.

Two Train Illusion

If you’re at the station, sitting on a train about to leave, you might notice that the train next to you is moving.

But, perhaps, that train is sitting still and you’re moving. It’s hard to tell. Without the lurch of sudden acceleration, the only clue we have is that our relative position is changing.

For most of us, it’s disconcerting – we know something is moving, but we’re not sure exactly what’s happening.

Do we stay where we are… does anyone?

Whether or not we commit to movement, the world never stays precisely as it was. Insisting that it does is simply a waste of time and a source of frustration.

-- Seth Godin, the two train illusion

Where Are The Insects?

Ever noticed...where all the insects have gone?

25 years ago, an after-dark drive in the summer would result in the front end of your car being covered in bugs. Not so much these days....

Pesticides have depleted all kinds of insect populations.

Some people may not mind (including myself at times — after all, who enjoys mosquitoes or scrubbing bug guts off your bumper?).

But, insects are a vital part of our ecosystems.

...another thing we seem to be too willing to the roll the convenience-dice on.

Reimagines and Expands

Jesus does not replace. Jesus reimagines and expands, inviting an alternative and often innovative reading of Jewish tradition. 

-- Diana Butler Bass

So, IF Jesus were here today (but, he is, isn't he?), what would this mean for those who are trying so hard to hold on to the old?

Bass' observation is so freeing; not disregarding, but expanding...something that takes imagination— even to see something timeless (and, therefore, both new and old at the same time).

There is, after all, nothing to fear with what appears to be new, especially with the perspective that Jesus had (which His whole imagery around wineskins reveals)..

A Peace of Steam

...the title says it all.

Randoms...

Avoiding something doesn’t make it go away, particularly emotions.

Not everything that can be (or needs to be) received, can be received all at once — in other words, time is an important element regarding what can be received.

Most political discussions are completely one-sided — which kind of makes them NOT discussions.

In the end, what is the primary function of belief?

Prior Randoms...

Be Kind

It Goes On

In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: It goes on.

-- Robert Frost

2020 Census

AXIOS

Reporting dynamics aside, you can try to keep things from changing, but they do anyway. 

It is the nature of things, of reality.

Best of Yourself

You get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself.

-- Harvey S. Firestone

Endless Routines

I'm wondering...about another lingering reflection, from a recent Randoms...:

Do you ever feel like your life is just a combination of endless routines?

As we perfect all the little ways we go about things (even sub-consciously), sometimes it's not hard to describe it that way.

But, our routines are not the endgame.

While we need them, we also need the disruption of their being broken:

Living in a transitional age such as ours is scary: things are falling apart, the future is unknowable, so much doesn’t cohere or make sense. We can’t seem to put order to it. This is the postmodern panic. It lies beneath most of our cynicism, our anxiety, and our aggression. Yet, there is little in the biblical revelation that ever promised us an ordered universe. The whole Bible is about meeting God in the actual, in the incarnate moment, in the scandal of particularity. It is rather amazing that we ever tried to codify and control the whole thing.

Chaos often precedes great creativity, and faith precedes great leaps into new knowledge. The pattern of transformation begins in order, but it very quickly yields to disorder and—if we stay with it long enough in love—eventual reordering. Our uncertainty is the doorway into mystery, the doorway into surrender, the path to God that Jesus called “faith.” In her work on “crisis contemplation,” CAC teacher Barbara Holmes confirms what we and others have long suspected—that great suffering and great love are the two universal paths of transformation. Both are the ultimate crises for the human ego. Continue here....

-- Richard Rohr

 There's always more going on than meets the eye....

No Longer Opportunity For Faith

Where there is no longer any opportunity for doubt, there is no longer any opportunity for faith either.

-- Paul Tournier

My Benediction to the Beloved Storyteller, Walter Wangerin Jr.

This sounds like a guy I'd like to know (or be).

  

Last week, Walter Wangerin Jr. passed away, and a unique voice fell silent. His wife Thanne (short for Ruth Anne), his family, and a few close friends from Valparaiso University were with him when he died.

I first encountered Walter as a speaker at a conference in which we both participated. A slender man with a handsome, angular face and a shock of dark hair, he stalked the stage like a Shakespearean actor. I thought of the accounts of Charles Dickens sitting onstage in the great halls of England, reading his stories to a mesmerized audience.

Yet Wangerin was neither reading nor sitting. He was performing in the purest sense of the word, weaving stories and concepts together in erudite prose, directing our minds and emotions much as a conductor directs an orchestra’s sounds—now meditative and melodic, now electrifying and bombastic.  Continue here....

-- Philip Yancey

While the intellect must be addressed in communicating Christian truth, it will not be truth for the hearer until the hearer is also touched deep within himself or herself.

-- Walter Wangerin Jr.

Randoms...

People who talk for a living and truth are not mutually inclusive.

Certainty can be a kind of false comfort.

At the very least, observe yourself….

Why does so much of our lives seem to be comprised of trying to just get through the moment, rather than being in it?

Prior Randoms...

3 great untruths to stop telling kids—and ourselves

Goal of Education

The true goal of education is to make people able to do good.

-- Richard Mitchell

As another school year begins, I'm digesting the observation above...and the more I contemplate it, the more dense and rich it becomes.

Life

 'Poem for the week' -- "Life":

              1

A moment of pleasure,

    An hour of pain,

A day of sunshine,

    A week of rain,

A fortnight of peace,

  A month of strife,

These taken together

  Make up life. 

              2

One real friend

    To a dozen foes,

Two open gates,

  ’Gainst twenty that’s closed,

Prosperity’s chair,

    Then adversity’s knife;

These my friends

    Make up life.

              3

At daybreak a blossom,

    At noontime a rose,

At twilight ’tis withered,

    At evening ’tis closed.

The din of confusion,

    The strain of the fife,

These with other things

    Make up life.

              4

A smile, then a tear,

    Like a mystic pearl,

A pause, then a rush

    Into the mad whirl,

A kiss, then a stab

  From a traitor’s knife;

I think that you’ll agree with me, 

    That this life.

-- Carrie Law Morgan Figgs

Receiving & Rejecting

It seems like we are always now in a mode of receiving or rejecting information — maybe we have been doing that all the way along. 

What makes us capable of receiving new information?  Why do we reject what we do?

When we consider what information someone else needs, perhaps we should consider when and how we received information and why we were able to receive it (or reject it). 

Was it a function of age, development, circumstance, disruption?  

Was it a result of something within us?  Outside of us?

Was it because of thought?  Or, something that engaged our thinking in a different way?

Contemplation of such may serve us well, as we participate in the information we pass along to others; by the way we engage with it in our own lives.

What is good for the other person right now?  ...may be a good place to start.

Excitement vs ...

Excitement comes from the achievement. Fulfillment comes from the journey that gets us there.

-- Simon Sinek

Cry More Often

I've noticed…that I cry more often over beauty than sadness.

Child of God, Awareness

The awareness of being a child of God tends to stabilize the ego and results in a new courage, fearlessness, and power. I have seen it happen again and again. 

-- Howard Thurman

TOP 10 - Glacier Nat’l Park, 2021

Polebridge, MT

We had a wonderful time again this year hiking in Montana — an amazing and visually stimulating week in Glacier National Park.  Here are my TOP 10 - Glacier Nat’l Park, 2021 pics.

...or, if you're bored, the rest here….

Randoms...

Teaching is planting seeds in the human heart.

We are all swimming in the truth everywhere — maybe we should spend less time consuming it (or selling it) and more time discovering it.

Too many churches effectively use good to try to cancel bad — it isn’t an equation.

Is half of what we do for other people what we would like them to do for us?

Prior Randoms...

Mystery of Joy

Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes....

-- Frederick Buechner

Truth Doesn't Struggle

Truth doesn’t struggle against anything. It exists, and it knows. 

-- Deepak Chopra™ MD

Best Advice

LinkedIn asked its more than a million followers for the best advice they'd give their 20-year-old selves in order to inject a little of the experience of gray hairs into the Energizer-Bunny-like stamina of workplace newbies. 

The resulting thread was a goldmine of useful advice. Some of the tips were quirky and personal -- get tested for ADHD earlier, beware "reply all," eat less pizza. Others, like "believe in yourself!" and "don't procrastinate," were more inspirational than actionable. But among all this advice, one particular bit of wisdom kept coming up again and again. 

Action beats deliberation.  Continue here....

-- Jessica Stillman

What If: The Body

Another lingering reflection, from a recent Randoms...:

What actually most informs us, our mind or our body?

What If...it is the action of the body that most informs us (as opposed to just the mind)?  

What if activity creates more wholistic engagement than anything else?

What if the mind is not our primary informer after all and that remaining primarily in that way (rational) of knowing and being, we are under-serving ourselves and others?

Rather Than Before It

Inspiration usually comes during work, rather than before it.

-- Madeleine L'Engle

Recognition

Ever noticed...how your recognition of something increases the more you experience it?

Fire & Ice

In the millennia since Christ walked with us on this Earth, we’ve often tried to box up the “wind” [of the Spirit] in manageable doctrines. We’ve exchanged the fire of the Spirit for the ice of religious pride. We’ve turned the wine back into water, and then let the water go stagnant and lukewarm. We’ve traded the gentle dove of peace for the predatory hawk or eagle of empire. When we have done so, we have ended up with just another religious system, as problematic as any other: too often petty, argumentative, judgmental, cold, hostile, bureaucratic, self-seeking, an enemy of aliveness.

In a world full of big challenges, in a time like ours, we can’t settle for a heavy and fixed religion. We can’t try to contain the Spirit in a box. We need to experience the mighty rushing wind of Pentecost. We need our hearts to be made incandescent by the Spirit’s fire.

-- Brian McLaren

Randoms…

Everything you do is another story to tell…about your story. 

The slower you go, the more you see. 

As people get older, they seem to either get more spiritual or more religious.

Why is it that if something is meaningful to us, we want to share it?

 

Prior Randoms...

Visual: Shadow Mirror

Visual - "Shadow Mirror":

Bowman Lake, MT

Impeccably quiet…in every way.

There’s nothing quite like silence, to allow you to really hear.

Including things like…all the noise going on in your head.  

Once you can hear it, you can go about the work of returning to silence…and all the beauty that surrounds you.

Earth Your Dancing Place

'Poem for the week' -- "Earth Your Dancing Place":

Beneath heaven's vault
remember always walking
through halls of cloud
down aisles of sunlight
or through high hedges
of the green rain
walk in the world
highheeled with swirl of cape
hand at the swordhilt
of your pride
Keep a tall throat
Remain aghast at life

Enter each day
as upon a stage
lighted and waiting
for your step
Crave upward as flame
have keenness in the nostril
Give your eyes
to agony or rapture

Train your hands
as birds to be
brooding or nimble
Move your body
as the horses
sweeping on slender hooves
over crag and prairie
with fleeing manes
and aloofness of their limbs

Take earth for your own large room
and the floor of the earth
carpeted with sunlight
and hung round with silver wind
for your dancing place

-- May Swenson

Curious, Not Judgmental

Be curious, not judgmental.

-- Walt Whitman (maybe…)

What, How, Why

We often run first into what.  What needs to be done?  

Once that is understood, the most natural next question is, how?  How do we do what needs to be done?

But, if we never get past what how and what are a function of, we may never get to why.  Why are we doing this, in the first place?

Without the centering that can come from  'why', we can spend a lot of time learning how to do something, without even knowing why...which often ends up somewhere we don't want to be.

Letting Go

Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness.

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

Come Alive

I'm wondering…what makes me come alive?

Perhaps one of the best gifts we can give ourselves (and the world) is to ask ourselves this question — what makes me come alive?

Working on answers to this question can lead us to personal freedom in many ways.  

So often, we side-step this question with what amounts to be another one, 'what does the world say it looks like to feel alive?'  But, this one leads us in another direction; an often unhelpful one at that.  

The real question is directly personal; what makes me come alive?  It may take a while to answer; that is OK.  

But, not asking it may leave us more in the dark than is necessary.

Mark of Maturity

Instagram: mariashriver

The true mark of maturity is when somebody hurts you, and you try to understand their situation instead of trying to hurt them back.

-- Maria Shriver

On Earth, As In Heaven

Eternal Spirit,

Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,

Source of all that is and that shall be,

Father and Mother of us all,

Loving God, in whom is heaven:

The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!

The way of your justice be followed by the peoples

        of the world!

Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!

Your commonwealth of peace and freedom

        sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.

In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.

In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.

From trials too great to endure, spare us.

From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,

       now and for ever. Amen.

-- prayer of Jesus, from the Anglican Church of New Zealand, which both honors and reflects indigenous Maori culture

It is incredible dishonesty in the human heart to pray daily that this kingdom should come, that God’s will be done on earth as in heaven, and at the same time to deny that Jesus wants this kingdom to be put into practice on earth. Whoever asks for the rulership of God to come down on earth must believe in it and be wholeheartedly resolved to carry it out. Those who emphasize that the Sermon on the Mount is impractical and weaken its moral obligations should remember the concluding words, “Not all who say ‘Lord’ to me shall reach the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven” [Matthew 7:21].

-- Diana Butler Bass

Randoms...

I am never less curious than when I am afraid.

There is not only some comfort, but also great value, in finding ways to make notes about what you are feeling.

In the end, everyone wants a form of their own creative expression.

Why is pleasure so often temporary?

Prior Randoms...

Different Cultures Define Happiness Differently

Writing in the International Journal of Wellbeing in 2012, two Japanese scholars surfaced an important cultural difference in the definition of happiness between Western and Asian cultures. In the West, they found happiness to be defined as “a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement.” Meanwhile, in Asia, “happiness is defined in terms of experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness.”

-- Arthur C. Brooks, Different Cultures Define Happiness Differently

Visual: Pink

 Visual - "Pink":

Between...There Is A Space

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

-- Viktor Frankl

Healing Is A Process

Healing can be a frustratingly slow process for me, especially when I'm in a hurry.

What If...that is the point of healing? — like, by design, it needs you to slow down…or stop.

Ultimately, we are not in control of all the mysteries involved in healing (physical, emotional, spiritual, etc.).  But, what we can do is learn to cooperate with the process of it, not to mention the pace of it.

Lose Their Way

People lose their way when they lose their why.

-- Michael Hyatt

Doesn't Mean It's Bad

I've noticed...that just because something doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.

A couple of nights ago, I felt very flat emotionally, perhaps even depleted — in other words, I didn't feel good. This was likely a result of an intensive two-day self-discovery process I had just completed. I expected (or, perhaps, was just hoping) to come out on a high. So, it was easy for me to feel that this flatness was something bad (disappointing, confused, a problem, etc.). 

As I elected to just observe (and not fix) what I was feeling, a metaphor came to mind.  What If...it would be more accurate to describe the experience of the two things (intensity / flatness) like the ebb and flow of a tide? 

Certainly, a tide of emotions had rolled in for two full days and there was really no more space left to be filled. So, as all of that continued to move, at this point perhaps more of a kind of retreat, it looked like just a bunch of open space...like nothing was left (of the emotion or of what had caused it).  By comparison, it might even feel like something bad had happened, in the sense that it appeared that now there was nothing there.  But, really there was a lot there, for one thing...space.  A space had been created in fact, by the discovery of many wonderful things. They weren't gone; they had just receded into another place or another shape for an appropriate period time.

Emotions are indicators — important ones even — designed to detect certain kinds of things.  How or what we feel is an indication of something, of something that has or is happening.  But, these indications, aren't the only things that are happening.  The things these indications are pointing to are also there (in both times of flowing or ebbing).

So, just because something doesn’t feel good, it doesn’t mean it’s bad.  In fact, it could just be the most natural indication that what is alive in me IS still active and moving in my life. 

75 Years of Marriage

Spiritual Wisdom

The two wheels of Scripture and Tradition can be seen as sources of outer authority, while our personal experience leads to our inner authority. I am convinced we need and can have both. Only when inner and outer authority come together do we have true spiritual wisdom.

What we usually consider “official teaching” changes every century or so. Most of our operative images of God come primarily from our early experiences of authority in family and culture, but we use teachings from the Tradition and Scriptures to validate them!

An evolutionary faith understands that nothing is static. The universe unfolds, our understanding of God evolves and deepens, and our moral development surely evolves as well.

-- Richard Rohr

Randoms...

An unfortunate truth; if you lie enough times, some people will actually believe you.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to have a lot to do a lot.

Vulnerability has power (and, don’t you just hate it when it is used to manipulate people?).

In the end, what is character??

Prior Randoms...

There Is No Debate Over Critical Race Theory

The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided.

Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now.

The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory “a monstrous evil.” And over the past year, that “monstrous evil” has supposedly been growing many legs.  Continue here....

-- Ibram X. Kendi

This was again obvious (to me, although apparently not to most of the crowd) at IN AG Todd Rokita’s 'Parents Bill of Rights' town-hall meeting recently held in our town — which in essence amounted to something on the order of,  “Let me patently pander to your worst fears, under the auspices of having a discussion.”

Vaccination Rates

AXIOS

AXIOS

Why make note of this?

Because this is more than just information; it is telling us something.  Who is (isn't) listening?

Lifetime's Work

Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort.

-- Fred Rogers

Want To Do

There is a quiet, yet persistent, urging within me to do more of what I really enjoy doing — what I notice I most naturally do, what I want to do.  

But, invariably, I run up against the question of 'why?'.  And, too often, the only answer I can come up with are reasons not to.

It is conspicuous that it is too easy to not come up with the reasons why I should; what does that indicate?  What is my 'why' question really about?

Is it related to the dynamic of criticism / rejection one often feels when they put themselves out there?

The reality is that I am not doing things that I am probably really more made for (or, at the very least, want to do; that I enjoy doing). Instead, I am doing something that I am able to do (most likely — as gross as it sounds — because it is the easiest way I can envision to make money).

I suspect that the answers I am looking for in this will only be discovered, as I do more of what I really want to do.

Tomorrow, I will be taking another step towards discovering more about what shape responding to this urging could look like for me....

LT: Selfless vs Selfish

The selfish fear change. The selfless lead it.

-- Simon Sinek

Rigged

Ever noticed...when and how claims like 'it's rigged' are made?

Attention of the Heart

Attention of the heart is the primary aim of spiritual work.

-- Simeon

We have nothing to give to others that we ourselves have not first received.

-- Harold L. Senkbeil

Randoms...

What actually most informs us, our mind or our body?

Despite that the conspiracies of men are relatively small and short-lived (many only imagined) — they still seem to have significant influence in many lives.

Be aware of things that deaden your senses.

Politics is pretty much all about money — when will Americans (especially Christians) realize how much they’re being played by those who use it simply to stoke fears about power? 

Prior Randoms...

At Its Best, American Patriotism Is Blessed with Two-Dimensional Vision

In the pre-dawn hours of May 15, 1918, Private Henry Johnson was pulling sentry duty with Private Needham Roberts in a French trench that faced the German line just west of the Argonne Forest. Johnson and Roberts were members of the 369th Infantry Regiment from New York. The 369th, known as the “Harlem Hellfighters,” was an African American regiment, one of the first led by Black officers and NCOs in the US Army. The regiment had joined the French line as replacements, and its soldiers were given French equipment to face German front-line veterans of four years of trench warfare.

At 2 a.m., Johnson and Roberts heard German trench raiders clipping wire, preparing to surprise the Allied troops, spread mayhem, and seize prisoners in hopes of gathering intelligence. Johnson started throwing grenades into the darkness, toward the sound of the Germans, while Roberts ran back to the main line to alert the French. In the melee that followed, Johnson expended all of his grenades and grappled with the Germans in hand-to-hand combat, armed with a 14-inch bolo knife. He killed four Germans, plunging his knife into the head of one of them, and wounded 20 more, all while sustaining over 20 gunshot wounds. He also saved the severely wounded Roberts from being taken prisoner.

From then on, the 369th never lost a man to capture. It endured more uninterrupted combat time than any American regiment in the war, and its fighters were the first to reach the Rhine. Johnson and Roberts were also the first American privates to receive the Croix de Guerre from the French government in World War I.

But when Johnson returned home...continue here.

One of the salient features of American patriotism is its willingness to reflect on America’s failures as well as its glories. As Smith writes, “Patriotism can be self-critical. Consider the belated recognition of war heroes who had been overlooked due to their race, but were then awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor decades after their actions. What does this demonstrate, other than an enlarged conception of who belongs in the American family?” American patriotism, according to Smith, should be sharply distinguished from the extremes of national self-hatred, cosmopolitanism that naively universalizes humanity, and a nationalism that breeds dangerous divisiveness and suspicion. Patriotism, unlike these intemperate attitudes, is found in a blend of reason and love. As Smith defines it, patriotism “is an expression of our highest ideals and commitments, not only to what we are, but also to what we might be.”

American patriotism is morally aspirational, self-reflective, and self-correcting. Patriots recognize their flaws and sins, and they resolve to learn from those sins. They do not overcorrect, nor do they abandon hope in the ideals established in the founding documents, those ideals that define the essential nature of the republic. 

-- John D. Wilsey

Everything Needs Fixing

'Poem selection' for the week -- "Everything Needs Fixing":

in your thirties everything needs fixing. i bought a toolbox

for this. filled it with equipment my father once owned

to keep our home from crumbling. i purchased tools with

names & functions unknown to me. how they sat there

on their shelf in plastic packaging with price tags screaming:

hey lady, you need this!  like one day i could give my home

& everything living inside it the gift of immortality, to be

a historical monument the neighbor’s would line up

to visit even after i’m gone & shout: damn that’s a nice house!

i own a drill now, with hundreds & hundreds of metal pieces

i probably won’t use or use in the wrong ways but what

i’m certain of, is still, the uncertainty of which tools repair

the aging dog, the wilting snake plant, the crow’s feet

under my eyes, the stiff knee or bad back.

& maybe this is how it is—how parts of our small universe

dissolve like sugar cubes in water—a calling to ask us

to slow our busy breathing so we can marvel

at its magic. because even the best box of nails are capable

of rust. because when i was a child i dropped

a cookie jar in the shape of noah’s ark,

a family heirloom that shattered to pieces.

the animals broke free, zebras ran under

the kitchen table, the fractured lion roared by

the front door & out of the tool cabinet

i snagged duck tape & ceramic glue. pieced each beast

back to their intended journey.  because that afternoon

when my father returned from work i confessed

& he sat the jar on the counter only to fill it with

pastries. how the cracks of imperfection mended by

my hands laid jagged. chipped paint sliced across a rhino’s neck.

every wild animal lined up against the boat—

& a flood of sweet confections waiting inside.

-- Karla Cordero

From the author:

“At the beginning of the pandemic, the concept of aging and death became a haunting obsession. With an attempt to regain control during a world crisis, I began fixing every crack and bruise around the house with a hope to expand the longevity of these items. This poem gave me the opportunity to reflect on the kinds of living material within my life and how there is a limitation to my fixing, realizing how we must marvel at the magic and evolving beauty of aging. This poem led me to think about the kinds of repairs I made in my life as a child, and about a father still finding purpose in the fractured and imperfect. I began to think about the biblical story of Noah, sent by God to repair a fractured world and how there is still beauty to be found in the outcome of chaos.”

Optical Illusion

More Like You

Your relationships improve drastically and the tension in your mind decreases significantly when you can simply accept people for who they are instead of fixating on how they should change and be more like you.

-- yung pueblo

Risk of Acceptance

One of the more significant tensions we feel (or, at least I do) is...if we manifest our true-self more obviously, what risk does that introduce to our prospects for acceptance, especially from those people that are close to us, whose acceptance we feel we need?

For me, I suspect this works itself out in a way that keeps me a little...under wraps.  How much can I really expose about what I think or feel or want?

But, there is a surprise in this dilemma — often what keep me slightly under wraps actually contributes to the dynamic of what feels like acceptance or not acceptance.  Authentic vulnerability expressing who we are, is what actually draws others to us.

...unless it doesn’t and drives people away (which does happen), but not nearly as often as we might think.

Growth or Safety

You will either step forward into growth or you will step backward into safety.

-- Abraham Maslow

The American Renaissance Has Begun

In 1982, the economist Mancur Olson set out to explain a paradox. West Germany and Japan endured widespread devastation during World War II, yet in the years after the war both countries experienced miraculous economic growth. Britain, on the other hand, emerged victorious from the war, with its institutions more intact, and yet it immediately entered a period of slow economic growth that left it lagging other European democracies. What happened?

In his book “The Rise and Decline of Nations,” Olson concluded that Germany and Japan enjoyed explosive growth precisely because their old arrangements had been disrupted. The devastation itself, and the forces of American occupation and reconstruction, dislodged the interest groups that had held back innovation. The old patterns that stifled experimentation were swept away. The disruption opened space for something new.

Something similar may be happening today. Covid-19 has disrupted daily American life in a way few emergencies have before. But it has also shaken things up and cleared the way for an economic boom and social revival.

Millions of Americans endured grievous loss and anxiety during this pandemic, but many also used this time as a preparation period, so they could burst out of the gate when things opened up.  Continue here....

-- David Brooks

If you want to be part of the solution and not the problem, get vaccinated ... It’s mind-boggling to me how we can see people all around us dying and getting hospitalized and the common enemy is the virus, and we’re still fighting with each other.

-- Dr. Anthony Fauci

Independence Day Calls Us to the Holy Work of Repair

When I was a kid, we spent two weeks each year with my grandparents in their old summer cottage on Long Island Sound. Every night around sunset, my grandfather lowered the American flag, folded it gently, and put it away. He raised it again the next morning.

Even with his attentive care, the flag became tattered by the salt spray and the wind. After subsequent generations failed to handle it with such faithfulness, the flag became threadbare. We eventually stopped flying it. All that remained was an aluminum pole that rattled in the breeze. It finally snapped in a storm.

As we approach this Fourth of July, I am thinking about those tattered and threadbare flags that led to an empty flagpole. I am thinking of the reasons my grandfather, a veteran of World War II and the Korean War, flew the flag with both humility and honor. I am thinking about what the flag represents, the ideals of liberty and justice for all, the idea of our common equality bestowed upon us not by our society but by our Creator. Those ideals have at times in our history become threadbare, putting us in the position of raising flags that no longer carry any meaning at all.

Around Memorial Day this year, another holiday with flags raised high, many Americans learned about the 100-year-old Tulsa Race Massacre...continue here.

-- Amy Julie Becker

Randoms...

The sooner I start eating addictive things, the more I want to eat....  :)

Those who disregard the past, are condemned to repeat it.

Because of our sense of personality, the endgame isn’t actually what we think it is — we spend so much time and effort toward the wrong thing.

How much of the time is pleasure or pain the catalyst of our habits?

Prior Randoms...

The US’s greatest danger isn’t China. It’s much closer to home

Recently:

It is just too easy to maintain our need for an enemy:

The rivalry with China is palpable but history teaches us lessons about how it’s easier to blame others than blame ourselves.

China’s increasingly aggressive geopolitical and economic stance in the world is unleashing a fierce bipartisan backlash in America. That’s fine if it leads to more public investment in basic research, education, and infrastructure – as did the Sputnik shock of the late 1950s. But it poses dangers as well.

More than 60 years ago, the sudden and palpable fear that the Soviet Union was lurching ahead of us shook America out of a postwar complacency and caused the nation to do what it should have been doing for many years. Even though we did it under the pretext of national defense – we called it the National Defense Education Act and the National Defense Highway Act and relied on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration for basic research leading to semiconductors, satellite technology, and the Internet – the result was to boost US productivity and American wages for a generation.

When the Soviet Union began to implode, America found its next foil in Japan. 

And on it went: The Japanese Power Game,The Coming War with Japan, Zaibatsu America: How Japanese Firms are Colonizing Vital US Industries, The Silent War, Trade Wars.

But there was no vicious plot. We failed to notice that Japan had invested heavily in its own education and infrastructure – which enabled it to make high-quality products that American consumers wanted to buy. We didn’t see that our own financial system resembled a casino and demanded immediate profits. We overlooked that our educational system left almost 80% of our young people unable to comprehend a news magazine and many others unprepared for work. And our infrastructure of unsafe bridges and potholed roads were draining our productivity.  Continue here....

-- Robert Reich

So, be aware of those who pedal such things; they are not doing it for our sake — they are doing for their own personal gain.