LOOSELY SPEAKING...

Diving Into the Past

Lately I’ve been reading about the collapse of the Roman republic in the last century BCE. Some historic documents (Cicero’s Letters to Atticus) and some thoroughly-researched historical novels (Colleen McCullough’s ‘Masters of Rome’ series). The parallels with today’s situation in the US are compelling.

Politics then as now was rife with corruption, mangled by the continual battle between conservatives trying to prop up the system that supported the ancient aristocrats, the Patricians versus the ‘New Men’ who supported the middle-class Plebeian merchants: No one was speaking for the Proletariat, the poor who simply got through life without much hope of rising out of slums and poverty.

It was about money and the power to control how it flowed. It was about personal dominance of the System.

Elections were routinely bought with bribes and intimidation. Laws were instituted by pedagogues who could harangue and sway voters with their charisma and with knowing where and how to poke at the voters’ sentiments and hopes, how to manipulate their desperation. And anyone with great wealth could buy themselves such haranguers to advance their interests.

A lot of our modern cultural and political institutions in the West, of course, are the legacy of the Romans. Our cultural as well as personal core-beliefs derive from the Romans. Not just the Romans, but the Greeks and the Abrahamic religious traditions which also underlay the Roman ways.

The thing is, once one traces back one’s own beliefs to their origins, back to the time before all their choices and decisions were influenced by beliefs learned or just picked up along the way, one can begin to question whether or not today, as an adult in the world as it is now, one still actually believes those old learnings to be true. That’s the first step to discarding the obsolete and now false ‘truths’ and affirming the new understandings and beliefs that came from being more experienced and better educated–not necessarily formally educated–and more in touch with reality.

As children we believed what we were taught, what our parents and other authorities told us was true. Through no mean intent other than to raise us according to their own beliefs, even wanting the best for us, they taught us some things that were simply not true, were wrong, that were misunderstood by themselves. Now, as adults capable of deeper thought and better context for understanding, we have this marvelous ability to reconsider the truths of our lives, to amend, to correct, sometimes even to re-affirm.

Individuals and societies can and need to do this work of deep delving because to not do it is to continue in non-sustainable habits and behaviors. To choose non-sustainability just because it’s familiar and rooted in tradition is to choose to blight our own lives. Reality is what it is, not just what we want it to be: We can fight the current of Reality, or we can flow with it. Going against the flow isn’t a struggle with the river, it’s a struggle with our selves.

2026 by CL Redding

The Joy of Reading

I’ve always been a reader from around 6 years old, finding immersion in other times and lives and worlds such wonderful adventures out of my own reality and whatever its limitations and frustrations. I devoured Laura Ingalls Wilder’s ‘Little House books,’ and read ‘ALICE IN WONDERLAND’ and ‘…THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS’ and all the Pooh books over and over again. Over the course of childhood I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Nancy Drew, and authors like H. Ryder Haggard–‘KING SOLOMON’S MINES’ and ‘SHE.’ Jules Verne, HG Wells… So many that were fantasy and science fiction classics in the 1960s.

At the school library I checked out a book every day and read it that afternoon (so much more interesting than doing homework!) I also read all the assigned books a year early because they were assigned to my older sister.

In 7th grade I was choosing books I’d never heard of, going by their covers. One was the first ever that I’d read with an unsettling ending because it had a pretty pastel watercolor design on the cover. It was LORD OF THE FLIES. Lesson learned! I went for the beach and ocean jewel tones next: THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA.

A few years later, I found my way to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, and there are parts of me who’ve never left!

It was almost always fiction, though in high school I found my mom’s old college biology textbooks and they were fascinating!

I’m not here just to brag, but to give some idea of the influences on my life that came from reading. I have a pretty good vocabulary and have a pretty good idea of how words can be made to flow together like music and also what makes a false note or simply fails to achieve that transcendence that takes the reader out of their own skin and into other worlds.

It’s a sadness that so few people read now, that glamour and glitz and visual storytelling–movies and tv–have replaced reading. These things light up different areas of the mind, and parts not used atrophy. It becomes harder to engage with a book than to fall into what’s happening on a screen, large or small. I appreciate that not everyone reads as easily as some of us, for whom reading is more like work than a simple pleasure. Even so–starting simple like a beginning reader can open that door to worlds of wonder.

When the lights go out and screens fade to black, there will still be books.

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.