Mueller testifies…

What the House Judiciary Committee members don’t seem to understand is that Americans watching are not only listening to the answers, we are paying close attention to the questioners and the kinds of questions they ask, their manipulative maneuvers, their willingness to actually listen to Mueller. He is not the one being judged here by Americans who think.

Agendas are revealed in this process, and there were no surprises there: Dems went after underlining the Mueller Report’s findings that point to misconduct of the President; Reps tried contorted and confusing questions to damage Mueller’s credibility. They all asked, over and over, questions their fellows had asked already, and they got no new answers.

One thing I don’t understand is how the Dept of Justice (Barr under direction from Trump) requiring Mueller to stay strictly within the limits they have defined as to the scope of what the Committee can ask and have answered, is not just another occurrence of obstruction of justice, as witness tampering.

In any case, he didn’t answer many questions, being so bound. Essentially, all he said was, “Read my report.”

I point out that in the matter of impeachment, the House of Representatives can only impeach, and that to remove the President from office requires the Senate to accept the recommendation to take the President to trial. With the current Republican leadership in the Senate–Mitch McConnell–that will never happen. But if even one Republican of conscience, integrity, and true patriotism walked away from the Republican Party, McConnell would have no power to stop the process.

Understand, please, that I am not a Democrat, and find much of what they have done as a Party that puts itself above the interests of Americans, is as indefensible as what the Republicans do. It is a disgusting affair on all sides, but that’s the game of politics, and has always been. But the Democrats generally support accountability by rule of law, while the Republicans support the Republican Agenda at all costs. This was apparent in today’s proceedings, as it has been in Congressional proceedings since the Obama Presidency.

It comes down to the problem not merely of Party, but of what people think America is about. Some think it is about creating and supporting opportunity for all Americans, including those who come here as immigrants to participate in the American system, and become Americans themselves. Others think it is about creating and supporting opportunity for the already-successful to increase their success, wealth, and power to uncapped heights.

I get great encouragement from the coming-up generation of voters who could, if they all vote, make all the difference on the next Election Day.

I

The Damaged Heart

I’m sorry, 
I can’t love you
like a love should be…
Out here I stand
beyond the glass, 
the wall of distance
between my heart 
and the world…

Love’s such
a quiet subtle thing
so easily drowned out
by need and want
and hungers wailing
from a time–
the time when children
learn to love
by being loved.

I’m sorry
my missing pieces
make this puzzle
that is love
forever incomplete…
Yet I want to love, 
you are so very dear
although my heart is mute
and broken…

I know love
is something like
the yearning
crouched in here…
I wish, I wish, I wish 
that I could feel
all that I know is true.
I wish that I could give you
all that you should have from me
without the firewalls
that make my space
a seeming safer place.

I cherish you
as I have always done
I want to know
that this is enough 
for you to understand
all that you are to me.
I would not have
your heart, your love be broken, too.

CL Redding 2015

They’re at it again…

I know by the husky, come-hither cooing that the Eurasian Collared Doves are once more wooing…

Three years ago, they discovered on the covered deck of my house, afixed to the boxy light fixture by the sliding door, a disused robin’s nest. Not as large as a dove’s nest ought to be, but a nest. So they laid a couple of eggs in it, and raised a brood of two, as Eurasian Collared Doves do. I took pictures of the nest, the eggs, the hatchlings… Eventually, the little ones flew.

As that time approached, we had one of those fiercely windy days this area is prone to, and I worried some about them being literally blown away to the next roof over. I put up a wall of reeds around that end of the deck, and around the front of it, to catch any little bird blown out of the nest. In fact, they were getting so big, they could only rest one atop the other in the nest. In my anxiety, I put some hay in a small basket and shifted them to it, They were not impressed, not by the new nest, not by my gentle handling.

They didn’t blow away, as it turned out, and the winds died down, and the dovelings soon flew by their own power out into the world. And that was that. I cleaned up the area they’d taken over, and moved back into that end of the deck. I missed them a little.

The next year, the parents were back, and again, set two eggs in the little nest. Again, they owned my deck for the 4-5 weeks it takes from egg to flight.

This year, they started early, but the old nest was simply not adequate. They always add a few twigs before setting eggs, and so it became smaller and smaller. The first attempt was a failure, one hatchling fell from the nest, the second egg never hatched.

My son and I had made a bigger nest for them, in fact–a cone-shaped garden basket–and hung it in a corner of the deck further from my door and interference, and still tucked up under the protective roof of the deck. It is in a corner where one or the other had often tucked itself up on a precarious perch.

After that first failure, they occupied the new nest and made it theirs.

They have raised now two broods in that nest since spring, and are currently weaving in new twigs in preparation for the next. Apparently, there is no brief breeding season for Eurasian Collared Doves: they have been observed to raise 4 or more broods over a summer, as many as 6.

I now share the deck, and they have somewhat accepted my puttering about, watering plants and shifting the garden about. I keep the cat indoors when the fledglings begin to consider leaving the nest, and take my photos from a little distance away. They are less wary of me than they were.

Visit them here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskVKMjrb

Orcas and Others in the Wild

There seems to be a correlation between the state of emotions of the observer and the proximity of whales.  I learned this years ago, when I was observing the wild whales and dolphins in the inland passage between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia.    

In the wild, orcas simply did not come around or come close when the observer was angry, upset, frustrated, unhappy…  When the same observer was calm and happy, the whales did come around.  I spent 5 weeks one summer in a very angsty time of my life perched on a rocky bit of a small, uninhabited island in view of the northern end of Vancouver Island. There was at least one pod of orcas that spent a lot of time in that area. But they didn’t approach our location during the day. The only time any of the resident orcas came near was at night when we were sleeping. 

Several nights, we were visited by a youngster and a larger one, who came into the cove alongside our campsite. It was as if they were exploring, cruising along the coast. Once, waking to the distinctive sound of their breathing, I leaped up and ran out to the end of the rock just in time to see them go by. The rock was a big round boulder that offered no gentle incline into the water, but just dived straight down into the bottom, maybe 30 feet deep. The water was crystal clear, and in daylight we could see to the bottom, to see the sea cucumbers, and giant urchins moving across the rocks and sand.

That night it was very dark, and I could not actually see the whales.  But the phosphorescence in the water lit up briefly, disturbed by their passage.  Just as I got to the edge of the rock, the small one came up right there, blew, and departed, a spectral-blue ghost in the water, a comet of fading phosphorescence following its passage.  It was maybe 5 feet from where I stood. 

Even 45 years later, it is one of the most magical moments of my life!

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!