LOOSELY SPEAKING...

What Lasts

In the chaos
constructed by human connivance,
greed, and blinkered self-deception,

I look to the trees
rising, indifferent
to human madness,
slow-reaching skyward,
slow-flowing sap to nourish
each twig and leaf
and tiny single cell…

I look to the seas
rolling on and on,
uncaring of Man’s designs,
against the sands, the cliffs,
or flinging wildly
partnering with rocky shores
to dance, force meeting gravity,
to graze the air and slowly fall…

I look to the skies
deep endless blue darkening
into airless infinity,
and a world of water vapors:
fields of grey, fleecy bundles,
towers mounding high.
anvils advancing without mercy
full of storm…

So many trees are broken
seas and airs polluted,
all the world is tainted
by the carelessness of man
unconsciously intent
on self-negation…

The Earth…

The trees…

The seas…

The skies…

will remain, recover
self-repairing
when Man has gone
or finally grown wise.

_{CL Redding 2025}

Voting for or voting against…?

It’s never actually ‘either/or.’ When we vote against what we don’t like, we are voting for the other candidate whether we like them or not. Those who voted against Harris because she was Biden’s VP, against the woman, against the not-white candidate, voted for Trump. Those who took it all for a lark or a snarky slap at and a vote against the Establishment voted for Trump because he was their joke.

He was no mystery, he held no secrets or surprises: We could all see what he was, and we knew he lied with his mouth even when he acted out his intentions for the future of the US. And sometimes he did state outright what he’d do in a second term. Nothing he is doing now was unpredictable or even unpredicted. He warned us himself!

When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

So what we are dealing with now is what those who voted against Harris, voted for. Anyone who is still making excuses for Trump or for voting for him… they chose what to see and what to ignore and what to pass as tolerable. They chose what to believe despite all evidence and action clearly laid out.

Anyone suffering from ‘buyer’s remorse’ at this time has a couple, maybe three options:

Continue to support him no matter what, riding his coattails wherever they lead;
Own the mistake and change horses and add some strength and momentum to the defense of the Constitutional democracy now at risk;
Go on hiding until it’s all over one way or the other.

Bottom line: Everyone living in the US, we are all in this, all playing some role, standing or lying down: every one of us making choices every day; we and our children and their children will live with the consequences of what most of us do now. Once again, we vote with our actions and our silences both for and against.

Wakeup Call

Morning creeps in,
My head is not ready for it.
It glows against the mountain
against the quiet clouds
tinging all things golden
as they brighten to full day…

I am not ready
wanting the landscapes still
of dreams
of comforter and bed
pillowing my head
in sleep, dayless,
consciousless…

Slowly,
relentlessly
day pushes out
the shadows of the house;
world sounds,
the silence
of the head and house…

Body nags
its various needs
like the cat demanding
that I rise right now
and admit the day
and make a start
though it wholly goes
against my heart.

_{Aug 2019 CL Redding}

To Eat or Not To Eat

Watching nature documentaries, another dichotomy of living in this world comes to mind: Predatory/Prey. There is very little life on Earth that does not have to kill to eat. Speaking with scientific dispassion, every organism has to acquire and transform other life forms to nutrients in order to live, to thrive, to perpetuate its own kind.

Like all the other dichotomies, there is a continuum between the predator and the prey, the nuances of choice between them particularly where there is choice and not simply the driving force of instinct. For a leopard or a shark the options are between one potential meal and another, choices based mainly on accessibility: the individual prey that can be acquired with the least expenditure of energy on the part of the predator.

The least predatory options for humans are vegetarianism and veganism… and I suppose also Breatharians are somewhere in there, maybe off the deep end of the continuum. The belief behind the eating of vegetables only is on one hand a nutritional choice, a matter of health, and on another, what might be called ‘predator guilt’ which makes it a moral and ethical choice based on ideals of responsibility and stewardship. These days there is also the ‘anti-industrial effect’ in which one does not choose to not eat meat, but refuses to contribute to the appalling heartlessness, cruelty and outright greed of the industrial slaughterhouse system.

And then there is something I call ‘the disney effect.’ It derives from the disneyesque presentation of animals as sweet, kind, and innocent, and treated badly by most humans. This perspective idealizes kindness and caring, is a largely emotion-based choice. It sees death as the worst thing for anything living and dreams of everyone living happily ever after. There is bad news for these vegetarians and vegans, as science is now beginning to realize that plants also have feelings, both physical and emotional, that we are only just beginning to be able to perceive. I suppose they could become Breatharians.

Personally, I, at my most predator virtuous, will choose to eat eggs from pastured chickens, root vegetables, berries, seeds and nuts. Leafy greens, peas and beans, sure, and the many forms of cabbage. Less and less I eat meat, even obtained from local sources not connected to the industrial slaughterhouses. More and more I’m shifting so-called meat animals to my personal designated “not for eating” category where I’ve long had dogs and horses: whales… anything with hands like mine… any thing that I’m now recognizing as any one. Purely because of the cruelty in the industry, I no longer eat cheese or cow’s milk. I’ve seen too many mother cows chasing down the truck carrying her new calf away so that humans can have that calf’s milk.

I have noticed however that the further from the living animal it gets, the easier it is to discount the morality and ethics of it all: Raw meat in the grocery store is easier to choose against than a nice rare steak in the restaurant when I’m hungry and already salivating. At least, that’s as far as I’ve come in my quest to be a responsible member of the community of living things.

And what about hunted meat?

In fact, as humans move into formerly wild ecosystems, as natural predators are eliminated for whatever rationales we apply, we must ourselves become the agents of management that keep the deer herds at healthy levels. We’re not very good at that, actually, because where natural predators cull the weak, humans tend to go for the trophy heads, selecting the strongest, the biggest, the keystone of the herd. Or quantity: the most kills as when colonial sharp-shooters took out as many buffalo as they could in a single hunt. But that wasn’t about meat or hides, that was about destroying the resources of the Indians to drive them to reservations and bags of flour.

There are cultures where breeding animals purely for the purpose of killing and eating them is considered immoral, unethical, and frankly disgusting.

As I’ve said before, each of our lives here in the world is about learning to make choices, learning what and why and how to choose from all the options on offer. The older we get, the more complex the options and opportunities become.

FIRE!

I watched a documentary series about The Great London Fire of 1666. I can’t recommend it for the writing, so cliche-ridden, so larded with tabloidesque expositions, delivered with such earnestness by a team of narrators who can’t be blamed for the material they’re given. Despite that, the information about the Great Fire itself is worth learning as far as it goes. It is relatable in a metaphoric way to the social/political crisis we’re currently in here in the US as the Londoners were caught up in that devastating fire.

Vast areas were destroyed by a force virtually unstoppable by any methods available to the people facing it. They didn’t have the tools or resources or understanding to get the job done, and were failed by the first line of defense: the Mayor of London, who, rather than upset the wealthy and powerful people whose support he craved, declined to give orders to pull down their houses to create a fire-break that would have saved maybe 2/3 of the rest of the city. Instead he is remembered for a glib remark, that “A woman’s pissing could put out this fire.”

Most of the greatest landmark structures of the city burned, including Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the centers of finance and trade. The economy was shredded, homes and livelihoods destroyed, the worst of human desperation, greed and opportunism came out to play.

The official death toll was noted as 6. But it was pointed out that some of the slum areas that burned were crowded with the kind of people that no one bothered to care about let alone count. Also, the fire burned so hot, driven by constant winds, that human remains would have been, along with buildings and possessions, burned to ash.

So, where’s the metaphor?

I see it in the similarity between indifferent, overwhelming natural forces–the fire and the winds–and the force of unchecked irrationality coupled with unmitigated greed and selfishness currently sweeping this country. Losses for many are immense and will be irrecoverable, though overall rebuilding will be possible with improvements put in place to reduce the chances of such a catastrophe happening again.

The buildings of London in those times were largely constructed of materials that neglect had made into literal tinder; after the fire, brick replaced wattle-and-daub. Houses could no longer overhang the streets in the unsustainable fashion of earlier times. No longer were obvious hazards overlooked or ignored or just taken as “the way it’s done.”

In the US, when our ‘fire’ is finally out, rebuilding of basic infrastructure will have to be done with ‘brick’ instead of our traditional, unconsidered ‘wattle and daub’ mentality regarding education, election rules and electoral manipulation, among other things.

So, the documentary was useful if not all that well-made. It did make me think about things that need to be thought about.

Involuntary Celibates… thinking about where it goes wrong.

It’s in the idea that sex is a male’s biological and social right. It’s in the idea you know what is right for females, what women want, what will get them to want get together with you. So you try to dress up in that garb: the Nice Guy. And women seem to disdain that, don’t find that sexy or interesting. They see a friend in that garb, not a lover.

And you–you have no idea how important a male friend is a woman, in this world where a woman is constantly on guard from the male biological imperative. But to you, it’s a rejection of your maleness instead of a welcoming of your friendness. The problem is, it isn’t friendship you want or offer, it’s a counterfeit, so the women are deceived until your frustration makes you drop your guise and show the truth: That it’s never been about them, but always about you and what you want, what you’ve been led to believe you deserve.

That women don’t respond as you expect is the greatest evidence that you are mistaken at every point.

Not your fault: you’ve been poorly advised all along by guys and maybe girls as well who also had the wrong information. Since you were a child, you’ve been misled about all of it.

Girls get the wrong stuff, too, a lot of us, as we all have for generations. That doesn’t help us or you. But some of us figure it out at least well enough to make it work at least… well enough. And it always seems like a kind of adversarial thing, the thing between men and women.

So here’s the deal: To be attractive a person needs to be the best version of themselves that they can. It’s not about what you look like on the outside, it’s who you are on the inside. It’s not what you can get someone else to see or think about who you are, it’s about who you actually are.

When you’re interesting, people will be interested. Not all people, but the ones who are interested in the kind of interesting you are. You can’t predict that, you can’t control it, you can’t make it happen, so don’t waste your energy. Just–follow your interests, learn your own heart and your own mind. Explore wonder! Love the world, love yourself, the world’s and your own mysteries and unknowns! Let time do what only time does. Be patient. Trust that you don’t have to understand everything, not the world, not the other people, not yourself.

We all walk alone until we don’t. Not all dreams come true. That’s no reason to stop dreaming.

For Better Or For Worse

I was reading some news from the UK today and it struck me how lucky that nation is to be so enriched with citizens bringing ideas and culture from so many parts of the world. It’s how the world grows, how it’s supposed to grow.

I know there are many who deplore the changes to their traditional idea of their country, who mourn for the loss of uncontested values and beliefs, and I understand their resistance. They are so deeply attached to their histories and what they see and feel as their past glories; they don’t want to accept that those things that live in their hearts belong to the past, and maybe would not be very glorious by modern understandings. Love of parents and grandparents does not have to entail love of everything they believed and fought for.

I feel that way about certain changes in language that upset me every time I’m reminded that that’s how a living language works. I believe that language is for communication and I distrust every change that, to my mind, actually limits or confuses or interferes with the easy flow of communication. Language is, in a sense, my country, my allegiance, and some of the modern shifts frustrate and even anger me.

But I don’t have the right to insist everyone use that Oxford Comma, that no one can use words that actually, originally mean their opposites. I could make a fuss about the use of ‘I’ when used as an object, but it’s a losing battle. So all I can do is say a silent “Thank you!” when a writer properly places a comma after or before the name of the person being addressed, or when a speaker uses ‘me’ where the appropriate plural would be ‘us.’ I appreciate that sweet moment of connection with another citizen of the country of Language.

It would be a wonderful, beneficial thing if all of us who cling to a past that will never come again could come to this understanding: To stress over the inevitable changes nothing while making one’s own life harder. Choosing battles comes into this of course, and the decision of what is ‘inevitable’ and what simply isn’t, and what is worth fighting for.

What’s going on in the United States at the moment is a prime example of resisting the changes desired by a small but profoundly self-interested, non-ethical, immoral cabal who have all the power money can buy. That is the only power they are considering in their hostile takeover of the US, and that, of course, is why, soon or late, they will fail.

Sometimes, resistance to change is not so much about values and traditions of the heart. Sometimes it is just about not wanting to have to relearn how to work with the world. I spent the years of childhood learning how the world works, what to expect from my own attitudes and interactions with it. I learned how to type on the qwerty keyboard, I learned how to use the technology I grew up with. I accepted the better conveniences of so many technological innovations that came along…

But they have kept on coming way past the point where any ‘convenience’ they introduced was much outweighed by the burdens of forgetting the old and learning a whole new system–especially those dependent on muscle-memory. It is distressing when nothing anymore has permanence.

It still does not give me any right to insist that no one should be allowed to surf into the future on the oversized flat screen of their desire.

More On Being An American

It’s one of the things that Americans abroad are most recognized by and very often criticized for: striking up conversation with total strangers!

Yes, we do that. We do it abroad not realizing that what we do at home is, in fact, not done in many other societies in the world. Americans consider it a good thing, a friendly gesture, a sign that there is no threat here. We rarely if ever consider that in some other societies it is, in fact, the opposite.

Americans are used to speaking our minds, even when our minds have not done sufficient quiet, interior work. It’s a fundamental right, encoded in our founding documents: Freedom of Speech! Everyone is entitled to an opinion, whether or not that opinion is of any actual value, even when expressing it exposes ignorance, prejudice, small-mindedness. We are free to make ourselves ridiculous with few limitations.

We don’t have the right to yell “FIRE!” in a crowded theater when there is no fire.

“Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising.” Wikipedia

When we address strangers in other societies there is that fundamental sense that we have the right to do so, that it should be a human right unfettered everywhere. But there are reasons why it is not so everywhere.

We have not had ingrained through our history that a careless word spoken to a stranger could be our death. We don’t care much if we’re accused of heresy because we don’t remember folk being burned at the stake for that. We don’t fear being drawn and quartered for making treasonous remarks about the head of state. We have rarely had to be that cautious about what we said to strangers. It may start with pleasantries about the weather, but when we’re itching to share an opinion about How Things Are Going, that’s dangerous territory in places where the foundation of society remembers with immediacy the reality of the absolute powers of religion and state. Someone who speaks up casually inviting you to share your thoughts and feelings beyond the weather could be a lunatic or a spy.

It’s not as if the US doesn’t have our own history of such personal risk particularly in marginalized communities like the sexually or gender or culturally divergent communities. Such carelessness of expressiveness is one of those privileges assumed by the dominant ‘white’ culture. But even here, it isn’t that kind of safe for everyone.

(Once again, I’ve fallen into that trap of the ‘privileged’ by using ‘we’ as if it’s really all of us. At least this time, I’ve noticed.)

On Being An American

My son-in-law, an Englishman by birth, has held a green card for several years. This week he took the test and the oath and now he is an American.

This is a strange time for Americans, as the dominating force at the top is the most anti-American we have ever had to contend with. Even during the Gilded Age of the turn of the 19th/20th century, it was not as bad as this. It was bad for the poor and the working classes, but right now all the programs that were instituted for support and relief of general society–which were fought for and hard-won by humanists and humanitarians–are under threat. Now it is a matter of deprivation of benefits that have become how Americans with less luck than to be born to security live with less desperation and more hope.

It is not a vague threat, it is an on-going, active assault on every program that serves anyone but the oligarchy. It is reckless, it is an insane attempt to undo everything that has in fact made the United States a world power, everything that fuels this nation’s potential for greatness in the future. Insane, because it totally discounts that the penthouse at the top, the apex of the pyramid where the view is so grand, is supported by the keystones and the blocks of the foundation, and by all the storeys from the ground up.

Gold is heavy: When it is all gathered at the top, when the foundation has been eaten away to a fragile filigree, who do they imagine will survive the collapse?

In the face of all this, why does anyone want to be an American?

I have thought about this lately quite a lot. I have considered whether it is time to walk away, to turn my back on what America has become. I’ve questioned where my sense of nationalistic pride comes from, whether it is more than the indoctrination of every school day starting with the Pledge of Allegiance–as if a child can be legally held to such a Pledge!

As a child I loved the patriotic songs, the commemorative holidays and events. I believed all the sweetened history, and believed that the US was in fact the best country in the world.

But when I was in high school, I began to see the inconsistencies between the glorious words and the hard realities. Things were no longer simple, no longer merely black and white, and the range was wide. I stood but stopped repeating the Pledge every morning. I chose not to participate in what seemed the height of hypocrisy. Then one day I took a step further in my thinking and realized that the Pledge is not a statement of what is, but of ideal, of intention.

And that is why, today, I am raising a glass to all the new Americans who have chosen to identify themselves with this nation,and dismissing my thoughts of deserting what was only mine by chance. I reject the current misadministration’s redefining of America, and continue in faith that the true spirit of the United States, set up by the Founding Fathers and so clearly defined by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, will outlast the wholesale tearing down of all that ever made America great.