ABANDON DUCK! ABANDON DUCK!

“Don’t leave the Duck unless you hear these words!  If you feel unsafe at any time, feel free to pull down the life-jacket in the netting over your head…”  

The captain’s name was Ishmael; the driver’s name was Joe for our tour through the streets and waterways of Singapore.  These two looked like products of the same era that produced the Duck itself, the amphibious vehicle that was left-over war materiel after the US pulled out of Viet Nam.   Roy was our tour guide, telling us what we were passing by on both land and water.  Roy also gave us the tour of Roy’s Life, his readiness to begin ‘uni’ now that his mandatory 2 years of national military service are over.  Happily, only boys must serve, so when they start ‘uni,’ the girls in their classes are all 2 years younger, and Roy has heard that girls like older men…  He doesn’t care for sciences or math…   I forget what his test scores were…  I was thinking, “Abandon Duck, Abandon Duck…!

Long Island Summers

I’d go back
for just a moment, 
perhaps as long
as one August day and a night,
enough, I think, 
to relish what I loved
about Long Island summers.

Scents of ragweed,
seared grasses, 
almost-too-sweet roses
in the heavy summer air…

Glittering waters,
hot, hot sand
and tiny shells
hiding in the drying
seaweed margin of the tide…

Early mornings
sun like a glowing peach
soft-lit hazy cool
’til nearly 10…

And thunderstorms
some afternoons
that bruise the air
and break the back 
of humid heat’s oppression…

Cicada-noisy nights,
lit here and thereby sudden 
silent sparks
of spectral yellow, green
and random
like imaginings 
or magic,
to be captured 
briefly 
in a jar…

It’s the fireflies I miss the most…

CL Redding 2016

Aftermath

The impassioned moment’s passed,
The fight’s gone out of me;
tolerance and hope set in
with a sigh
and by-and-by
this latest violence,
outrage, assault 
against the heart and soul
will pass–
and leave me living 
still 
and still possessed 
of most of what I had;

Life goes on 
sublime,
absurd,
expects the future still
makes plans 
invests
and wanders 
down the middle course 
again somewhere between 
the hopeless and the glad.

Disappointment 
gnaws away at faith.

Perhaps, 
because our planet turns
and we are used to nights and days,
Hope returns 
relentlessly
and carelessly extreme,
and sets us up 
for disappointment
once again.  
So–faith in disappointment
becomes the order of the day.

When we are gone,
our hopes and fears 
dispelled into the sky
that wavers still between 
the darkness and the light,
all argument and action, 
come to naught
but fleeting windblown moan 
and faded thought.
Our remains–
our captive images, 
our poetry engraved
beside the columns of the Greeks,
the remnant walls of Babylon,
mysterious great figures in the plains–
will testify 
to inspiration,
passion,
and the folly of our age.

Thus our entire legacy
not Wisdom is, 
but Art. 

CL Redding 1991

Asylum

Bullies have always relied on the courtesy, the squeamishness and the self-interest of witnesses. Bullies exploit the commitment of the general society to the basic social contracts of the Golden Rule, and all the other philosophical and religious strictures and beliefs that are the foundation of civilization.

Bullies surround themselves with gangs of the equally or even more insane, with thugs and sycophants, all whose only ‘virtue’ is to believe everything the Bully tells them to believe. This is the bully’s secure perimeter. This is the chorus that cheers and tosses flowers at every word of the Bully. This is the mob that supports and commits every atrocious act.

And while the Bully thunders erratically across the world like a wild storm, there will always be those who enable, who exploit, who think they will just ‘ride the whirlwind’ to their own advantage. Thinking to make the Bully a tool of their own, they simply become extensions of the machine.

It isn’t just now, it isn’t just here: malignant bullies have always been part of politics and the social order, every one glorying in its victories that make it look successful for a little while. Every one has fallen, sooner or later, to its victims.

The thing is, there are always more of the victims than the cronies, and sooner or later, there will be enough outrage to break the machine. Whether it looks like Bastille Day or Election Day, the power ultimately returns to the ‘little people’ disdained and discounted by the Bully. Punishment will come whether by rule of law that holds Bully and cronies and thug army accountable, or the mob singing songs of victory while it tears them into little bloody gobbets.

The tragedy is that even when sanity is restored, and the inmates of the asylum are once again safely put away, even though many of the Bully’s works can be undone, the lives lost, the families, lands torn asunder are irreparable and can never be put right. That is the legacy of every Bully’s malignancy.

In Defence of Science & Faith

Science and scientists have taken something of a battering in the US over the past several years, over the topic of climate change particularly, but also generally. It comes largely from people who really don’t understand what science is and is not. Maybe they have not really considered the sources of the many benefits of scientific endeavor that enrich their lives, but perceive it as a hostile force, attempting to disprove things they ardently believe, or contrariwise, prove things they ardently don’t want to accept as truth. They confuse common-use meanings for terms like ‘theory’ for how scientists define and use them. They confuse ‘science’ which is a method of discovery with ‘scientists’ who range along the same wide spectrum of competency, honesty, spirituality, etc, as every other human being.

Science is a process of seeking out fact and yet is always open to evolving and discovering new data, new revelations. Science is not the scientific disciplines that are founded on the information derived from the scientific process, but the process itself: scientific method.

Scientific method is a simple and elegant way of discovering facts about the physical world that allow us to create medicines that work, to engineer tools and machines that make our lives possible, to expand our understanding of the physical Universe. 

It requires each element of fact used to back up any hypothesis to have been itself already proven to be fact. It may not use as evidence anything not so proven. This leads to the popular confusion that scientists don’t believe in anything they can’t prove. The truth is, the best scientists are profoundly aware that there is much in the Universe that science does not yet have the means to examine. Just because they haven’t got answers to all the questions doesn’t mean they dismiss the questions. There is always the element of the Unknown, the reliability of our ignorance that is the very driving force of science. So, many questions are quietly shelved until science find the tools to pursue answers.

Science has been cast in a negative light in recent years, by those who would like to believe they can have the benefits of understanding without the discipline of determining greater truths through a pathway of smaller facts established by the rigors of scientific method.

There is the demand, for instance, that faith-based concepts and explanations be accepted as the equivalent as those established by science, and be taught in schools as part of a science curriculum. But it’s apples and oranges: Evolution, climate change, geologic time–these are the fruits of scientific study; Bible-based accounts of Creation and the explanations for fossils, for instance, are matters of philosophy with its array of tools such as faith, imagination, emotion and psychology.

Intuition, logic, analysis, speculation–these are tools shared by both science and philosophy. They are the place where questions begin, and also the hypotheses that propose answers. But from that point, it’s basic scientific method to establish facts, to determine predictable relationships and dynamics.

Our world comes out of both science and philosophy: Out of science come solutions for problems in the physical world: engineering, medicine. From all the tools of the heart and subtle mind, and faith come art: music, literature, painting and sculpture. From philosophy we establish morals and ethics, codes of law and social behavior: All that civilization requires to exist.

Science tells us what things are, how they work; Philosophy pursues why. As ever, it is the balancing of the physical with the spiritual that gives meaning and understanding to existence, and makes it possible to grow and become more than we began. Out of balance, we stagnate as human beings, as societies and cultures.


The Garden of Dichotomies

A friend of mine a while back, given to visions, found herself in a garden of strange shapes, all standing beside their opposites. A voice told her, Look at it from over here… And she went there, and looked, and saw that there were only unities in that garden.

Our whole world is dichotomies: night/day; male/female; darkness/light; human/being.

It has been said that this world is a school where we as entities come to live in bodies, to experience all these dichotomies, these options, and to learn how to make choices: choices that bring us to prosperity, to well-being, to connectedness when we need it and individuality when we need that. It is by our choices we find happiness–or not. And what is ‘happiness?’ That also is, of course, a matter of choice.

Our choice-making is, of course, based on what we believe about–well, everything. Life, the world, other people, ourselves…

Our beliefs are based on our interpretation of what we find in the world, how we observe it, and through what filters of awareness, of judgement, of previous investments or commitments. We believe according to what trusted authorities have told us is true. We believe what our logic and analysis tell us is true. We believe what our feelings tell us is true. If, in fact, what we believe is mistaken, Reality will let us know that we have chosen poorly. We can choose to pay attention to that, or to continue to cling to our most cherished beliefs no matter how they fail to bring us to happiness.

Every day deluges us with options and opportunities to go one way or another. Every dichotomy breaks down into further dichotomies. Each choice made also changes the landscape of next choices. Every choice has consequences, every consequence requires new choices. Every short term success may lead to longer term consequences, and there are always those ‘unintended consequences’ we never saw coming.

Are there right and wrong choices? Or simply choices that work, vs choices that don’t work? How you answer depends on what you believe. What you believe depends on who or what you accept as authority over your own ability to observe, understand, and choose.

And the longer one remains in school, the more challenging the lessons become.

Welcome to the Garden of Dichotomies!

Push the Button

Reality can be very forgiving: We can go for years, even lifetimes believing something that isn’t true simply because our belief never gets tested against Reality. Much of what we believe is inconsequential–until that day when it matters a lot whether we have it right or not. Because when it comes down to it, Reality doesn’t care what anyone believes.

 “It’s not what I don’t know that gets me in trouble, it’s what I know that just ain’t so.”

I believe that was said by Will Rogers. I could be wrong, but it doesn’t matter unless I put money on it, or a life. 

Of course, Reality does test our beliefs sometimes subtly, and the only clue we have that we’ve been tested is when our answer to whatever the question is, doesn’t work. We assemble the intellectual Rube Goldberg device made of logics and reasonings, of evidences and bits of the puzzle we have collected, of things people we trust have told us, of what 10 million Frenchman swear is true! We polish it up, set it on the floor or the stage or a pedestal, then we push the button, and our construction makes a funny noise and falls over.

Frustration is the result of a failed Reality Test. Disappointment comes from unrealistic expectations, based on mistaken beliefs. At which point, you can sulk and go to bed, or go find some entertainment to take your mind off the failure–or you can take your machine apart, you can examine the pieces, take another deeper look at the logics and examine the reasonings, and make some changes until you believe you have it right.

Then, push the button again, and see what happens.

Seeing Through Ancient Eyes

We look at things so superficially, so at-the-moment, so very materially: Western society has forgotten there are other ways to see. But these ways require us to slow down, to see the world without all we have built and paved and altered. I recently watched two documentaries that are like taking a deep breath of truly fresh, clean air with all the scents of nature, after being cooped up for most of our lives in stale, dead airs. 

The first one, FIRST FOOTPRINTS: THE ORIGINAL PIONEERS OF ALL HUMANKIND, is about how the first modern humans arrived in Australia some 40,000 years ago: how they lived, and lived well in what to us appears the harshest of environments; how they passed on knowledge of the land’s Law generation to generation, and how the people today who are their direct descendants still remember, still know the Law, and live it. Through paintings and carvings 10,000 years old, and more, the history of these original inhabitants is remembered, still owned, still NOW: The descendants as they walk in sacred places speak aloud to the Old Ones who are, they say, still right there. They speak to them, tell them of the current moment, “Hello, it’s Margaret… I grew up here but I left for a while and now I have come back. These people with me are coming to see you, and then they will go home.” It isn’t mere ritual, it is real, it is present and alive. They are visiting family when they go to these places.

The second is called SEASONS. It is French, subtitled in English, but there is very little spoken as the stunningly lovely film reminds us what the world of Europe was like following the last Ice Age: a Golden Age of the forest.

Over 10,000 years, humankind imposed itself on this world, yet we are still intimately part of it, if only we pause, think back, and remember.

Both these programs remind us what we have lost touch with, but what is still there, can still be reconnected with, if only we have the will and awareness to do it. Both these programs inspire the will to remember, and to reach out and find it again. We have forgotten, we have ceased to see so much in our busy, clever, technical lives!

More or Less

To those who have much, more will be given. Those who have little will lose what little they have.

This New Testament assertion perturbs the part of me that naturally inclines to lift up the underdog, to demand balance and fairness. It is intuitively wrong, socially irresponsible! It seems very unlike other messages of Jesus that promise the Earth to the meek and the poor, that teach that the man of wealth will have a harder time finding his way to salvation than the humble man. 

But maybe it isn’t about that kind of thing. Maybe it isn’t about matters of body and society at all. Maybe it isn’t about fairness or any intent of reward or punishment.

Maybe it is about education. It is about the energies of curiosity, exploring, learning, growing in knowledge and wisdom. It is about the open mind, the consciousness that is willing to expand. That means being able to let go of cherished thoughts and beliefs, opening to new ones, better ones. It means being able to accept having been wrong, maybe even that we are always likely at least some wrong. 

Imagine swinging through the rings of a jungle-gym: you can only succeed in getting from one end to the other by letting go, reaching and grasping, and letting go again… Imagine there is no end to this jungle-gym, that it goes on infinitely, inviting us to never-ending discovery. 

To those who have much, more will be given. Those who have little will lose what little they have.

This is a truth that interfaces with our physical living, but it applies to spirit more than to body. While Body seeks survival, security, comfort, and reproduction, Spirit wants to soar, to be unlimited by things like gravity and entropy and all the physical laws that surround living things. Spirit disregards time and distances, it transports as instantly as ideas happen.

Bodies evolve slowly, life ascending from the very tiniest, the very simplest, to the more and more complex, the more able to understand and manipulate the world. Every life today stands on the figurative shoulders of billions of years of the experiences and lessons learned by the organisms that came before.

Spirit itself also evolves as consciousness expands experience by experience, realization by realization, lesson by lesson learned.  

I got to thinking about this while watching this series, ONE STRANGE ROCK. The episodes are presented by a number of astronauts who have seen the Earth from a rare perspective. I got to thinking about what kind of people are astronauts. 

 They can’t be slow, they can’t be ignorant, they can’t be bound by the limitations of mental processing or shy from emotional baggage. Which isn’t to say they don’t have these things, only that they are able to transcend them. As both human and being, they must be among the most highly evolved bodies and spirits among us.

That’s where I made the connection with that biblical assertion. It isn’t a promise or a threat, it is just the way it is: knowledge builds on knowledge, and is a foundation for further knowledge. Understanding allows for greater understandings. Curiosity and openness–the basis of all spiritual growth.

Looking Back in 2008

I think the initial turn-around started in the 1950s and 60s, with the generation of post-war parents who, coming from a heritage of privation in the war years, and the Great Depression, delighted in giving abundantly to their kids, proud and happy not to have to deny them anything!  In the 50s there was more stuff, new stuff like television, new technologies that seemed wondrous–and there was the money to buy it!

Clothing didn’t have to be worn until it fell apart, and more was store-bought than ever before–because we could!

Dr. Spock changed attitudes and approaches to child-rearing.  James Dean glamourized adolescent angst. Alan Ginsberg threw a whole new attitude into the poetic undercurrent of life.  Gender values were thrown totally askew from the traditional assumptions: things that had long been kept politely secret began to leak, creep, and leap out of the shadows to confront society with their existence–and the terrible question of their actual rightness or wrongness.  The Pill followed changes in attitudes about sexual behavior, and greatly reduced one of greatest of forces towards self-restraint, for women, at least. The evolving of study and understanding of the human psyche changed attitudes about mental illness and disorder: recrimination was replaced with compassion and no one was merely crazy anymore; therapy and medication replaced the darkness of cellars and cells where the deranged could mutter and scream away their lives without bothering the neighbors.  As well, a whole new world of excuses for unacceptable behavior sprang up: “I’m depraved on account of I’m deprived…” and a whole new bag of excuses for excusing responsibility.

Meanwhile, with a swell of patriotic fervor on the part of citizens who had lately returned from offering up their lives for the sake of their country’s policies, and no longer taking for granted the blessings of a free society, Jane and Joe Public began to get personally involved in government issues.  The established government itself, because of the sudden and vast improvements in the speed of information and communication, came under greater and more immediate scrutiny: dissent was on the rise as a political art-form, and our elected officials had less and and less to hide behind, less time to let a decision have its real effect before it was seen and judged by popular opinion. 

Technology bounded towards the era of the Jetsons; affluence leaped upwards for many Americans, Hollywood became fiercer than ever, pouring escapist and indulgent glamours over the landscape; Big Business was as busy in its own interests as ever, but the Individual was thinking more and more of his/her own significance-as were women, blacks, adolescents, and every other minority in the nation–and they/we were mobilizing!

The glamour of selfishness brightened: Looking out for Number One!

For reasons social, political and personal, not to mention economic, more and more households had two working parents: the kids more than ever were raised by teachers, television and each other.

Since the 50s, the Golden Rule had been in eclipse, and as the next generation of babies came along, their parents failed to teach this most basic and universal of social contracts, because they themselves had not learned it.  Oh, it may have been stated, but it was not being demonstrated.

I do not suggest that change is bad: it is inevitable, and necessary to any growing organism.  What I am suggesting is that several very important babies got tossed with the clean-up water.  We need to go out and find them, nurture them, and return them to society.

Self-indulgence carries a high price-tag.  Always.  Sometimes we are willing to pay for an evening’s partying with the next day’s recovery.  We are willing to pay the extra thousands of dollars for the cool car, the new technology.  But we have to draw lines for ourselves, and realize what we will not pay.  We can’t just say Gimmee Now without a regard for the price, or for when it will have to be paid, or by whom.

We who inherited the burdens of our current society from the short-sightedness, the ignorance, the simply mistaken assumptions and beliefs of our parents, and their parents–What are we creating now, to bequeath to our children, and theirs?
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I wrote that essay 10 years ago: We are a decade further into seeing the answer to that last question. Do you think we’re doing better?