Self Discovery

Too close to bedtime Tuesday night, I downed a glass of Barefoot Bubbly and a frozen strawberry sorbet bar.  A little later, I swallowed an Ibuprofen, hoping that would take enough of the edge off my recently rampant arthritis discomfort to facilitate a decent night’s sleep. 

AND… I woke up at about 2:00 am with a raging case of heartburn.  The feels-like-I-swallowed-a-bottle-of-drano kind of heartburn. 

To ward off another of those middle of the night panic attacks brought on by physical misery when one is half asleep, I cracked open my iPad and delved into the archives of “Coming to Terms.”

I ended up in a place on my blog timeline that I had completely forgotten about.  It was December of 2016, and apparently I had decided that I wanted to complete 1300 posts by the end of my 13^th year of blogging.  I had actually set my sights on that goal two months prior, in October, where I revved up and posted 36 entries in 31 days.  I was trying to set myself up for a relatively attainable less than 30 posts in each of the two final months of the year.  Then November of 2016 happened.  The shock of the election, along with a 40^th anniversary trip to Canada (where we seriously considered never going back to the US) derailed that goal and set me up for the nearly impossible task of putting up 40 posts in the month of December.  

Impossible.  Unthinkable.  Absolutely unattainable.

But I did it.

A remarkable feat five years ago, to be sure.  But when viewed through the lens of how much I’ve struggled to drag myself to 40 posts a year of late…well, it blew me away.

So of course I had to read them.  

And they were decent.  Good, even.  I seemed to have a remarkable amount to say, and a still-viable voice with which to say it, five years ago.  I could even make a post about a Christmas shopping stop at Sears articulate and interesting, if not compelling.  

I don’t know whether to be beaming with pride in my past self, or deeply disappointed and depressed by what I have become.  Perhaps the two extremes will neutralize each other, so I can go on with my milquetoast life, rather than heading toward the nearest bridge to throw myself off.  

Maybe what I should make of this is this:  I have the potential.  It hasn’t gone anywhere.  I just have to tap back into it.  Which will take discipline, perseverance, creativity and imagination—four things of which, for whatever reason, I have found myself in short supply lately.

And I’ll need to crawl outside my head long enough to observe things that inspire me to write about them.  I need to get back in touch with the world.  And maybe that’s been the problem, in these pandemic-battered, fear-driven, contentious times.  The world has become so ugly and so dominated by negativity, strife, selfishness, anger and violence that I have pulled in my head like a little turtle.  There’s only so much of that crap you can expose yourself to after awhile.  And only so much ranting and scolding and proselytizing one can do before it becomes obvious that you’re screaming at a hurricane.  

 

 

At some point, you shut your mouth, turn your back, and walk away.  But...should you?   

I don't know.  I only know that being silenced is almost as suffocating as shouting into a gale.

And now I have to figure out what I want to do about it. 

 

My Advice...

 COVID-19 is now entering its third year of vexing the planet. 

I distinctly remember St. Patrick's Day, 2020.  It was the cliff from which I fell off into the abyss of anxiety in which I mostly floated, sometimes almost drowned, for weeks after the onset of COVID. 

We had our last lovely dinner together as an extended family--corned beef and cabbage at my sister's house.  Afterward, I stressed for two weeks at every twinge, just knowing I had contracted the dread disease and was going to end up in the hospital, or worse.  It was a terrible time.

I haven't written all that much about COVID issues since.  Which seems odd, since it has certainly dominated the world, the news, and our daily lives in these 2+ years.  I suppose I couldn't support endlessly beating that dead horse here on my blog, since it was all over every other aspect of social media.

But now, I think it's worth noting that the world seems to have decided it is done with COVID.  At least, the western world.  Mask mandates are being terminated all over Europe and North America.  Government agencies have all but given up on vaccination efforts, since we're now at the point where the benefit of vaccinations is very nearly neutralized by the damage done through the increasingly violent political polarization surrounding them. 

And it's also worth noting that just because we want to be "done" with COVID-19, this does not mean that COVID-19 is done with us.  

My advice, as captured on Twitter:

I will now step off my soap box (and don my N95...)

Hands Off The American Flag, Traitors

Dear Far Right Wing Q-Nuts and Trumpanzees:

If you can't love this country with all its boogers and warts and people who don't believe exactly what YOU believe; and don't behave exactly as YOU behave; or have skin that isn't exactly the same color as YOURS; or speak exactly the same language YOU speak...

Then you don't get to claim THIS FLAG as your own.

 

Because this flag represents, in the words you like to throw into everyone's faces,

"ONE NATION, INDIVISIBLE, 

with liberty and justice for all."

And you don't believe one word, for all that you think every person in the country should slap hand over heart and recite them every day, hot tears of patriotism trickling down their cheeks.

(Much as you don't believe one word of any prayer you recite by rote to your version of God, but that's another rant...)

So get your hands off the flag of the UNITED States of America.

You can have this one--the flag of losers, racists and bullies...

 

Or this one, which many of you seem to prefer these days, as if an enemy perceived by those who don't share your political ideology must be a friend of yours... 

You traitorous bastards do NOT love the nation the Stars and Stripes represent.  

Wave your TRUE flags. And go to hell right along with them.  

Another Twitter Truism

Had to steal this one off my Twitter feed and put it here for posterity.  I’m afraid to guess how it will age.  Not well, I hope…

Never Thought About This…

 …but should have.  It is PRICELESS!

Deliver Us From Evil?

 

Recent worldwide events have convinced me that evil is not an outside force with which man is constantly tempted by some dark, destructive spirit.  Man is not engaged in an endless, holy battle to keep his soul pristine from the poison of evil invading from without. Does one ever encounter evil in earthly environs where human beings have not encroached?  No. Evil originates in the very hearts of humans, and needs only the slightest provocation to leap out of the depths of our mortal souls and torture the earth.  The true battle in which humans engage is the struggle to contain the inborn core of darkness we possess, to keep it from growing, escaping and overwhelming the earth and everything on it.  

We have lately all but given up that battle.  As the human race has been wont to do at regular intervals throughout history.

While religion (a human construct) begs “god” to deliver mankind from the festering wound of malevolence that is seeded deep in the core of every human heart.

Deliver us from evil?  We beg to be saved from…ourselves.

Because we’re too…lazy?  Too weak?  Too deluded?  Too ignorant?

Too CORRUPT?

…to own what we are, take responsibility and use the great brains given us by the Creator of All Things to block our proclivity for evil.  To recognize that there are other creatures to whom this world has been given as well.  We have been given the ability to see them, love them and protect them.  To save the earth and everything on it from…us.  

Yet we, more often than not, choose…

Not to. Aggressively.  Enthusiastically.

We exponentially compound the evil that emanates from us by choosing NOT to protect the rest of creation from it, though we know we can.  We are not powerless in the face of evil.  We have power we almost unanimously choose not to use.

It’s looking more and more like we will be the death of ourselves, and of more of the inhabitants of our beautiful planet, than we have any right to be.

And soon.         

Atheism IS a Religion

 I fell into an interesting rabbit hole on Twitter last night.  

It all started here: I replied to a tweet by an atheist which I thought was judgmental and deliberately provocative.

The worst thing about belief in a god is the creation of "religion." Humans--competitive, acquisitive, suspicious, fearful beings that they are, who nevertheless seem to crave "community"--tend to turn belief in their version of "god" into a club with members and enemies; with a hierarchy and a serfdom, where the serfs are cajoled, threatened, bullied and murdered into doing the bidding of those in power, so that those in power RETAIN power, and luxury, and the right to commit any atrocity without fear of repercussion.  Additionally, they use their “club” as a literal CLUB, with which to beat the snot out of members of any other club that does not believe exactly the same as they do.  Because THEIR club must be the right, the one, the chosen, The Only True Club. Anyone not belonging to THE Club is worthy of death in this life, and doomed to perdition in the next.

It always seemed to me that the concept of atheism was a rejection of and rebellion against the horrors of religion, rather than the pure, intellectual rejection of the existence of a higher power.  One would think that the “Only True Club” aspect of organized religion would be enough to send any thinking human being running away screaming from organized faith and the Being who supposedly inspired it.  So much evil has been written into human history through religion in the name of “god.” 

However, at some point, I came to understand that the atheist "community" has become a religion in itself.  An anti-religion religion.  Ten years ago, I wrote about that here: Losing Religion, Choosing the Alternative.  The piece discussed a trend of evangelical pastors losing faith and turning to atheism.  I don’t know if this was the beginning of the trend, but it was when I became aware of “the atheist movement.” Which is basically non-believers banding into a community where they support one another (good), discuss and define their non-belief (okay), and bash other belief systems for being anti-intellectual, brainwashed, misguided, worthy of scorn, and all in all just not as fine and enlightened as those who have seen the light of atheism (oh, JFC!!).     

How do they not get that they have adopted one of the worst aspects of belief in a god(s)?  Don’t they see they’ve turned into exactly what they reject about theists?

Obviously, the problem is not with God(s), or a Higher Power, or the Spirit of Creation, or whatever name you give it.

The problem is with humankind.  

We are a species given, for whatever reason (or perhaps no reason at all), amazing powers of thought, language, deduction, emotion, creativity.  It’s easy to see that we could very well be tiny representations of the Spirit of Creation in our world.

But all we seem able to do with those amazing gifts is, ultimately, use them as weapons—of hatred, of greed, of anger, of war. We refuse to entertain the notion that these gifts could be the glue that binds our species together; the conduit through which we are connected to the Almighty…the Universe…the eternal.

We SO want to anthropomorphize the Creator of the Universe.  We can only see through the filter of what we understand, because we’re the highest form of life with which we are familiar.  Atheists indulge in this every bit as much as theists.  An atheist on Twitter spat:

 “‘The creator of the universe cares about me.’ Is it possible to have a more arrogant belief than this?”

Okay.  DON’T  believe the Creator of the Universe “cares” about individual humans. Fine. But, then again, “caring” is a human emotion.  Why should the Creator of All Things function on that level?  My ten-years-ago self put it succinctly:

WHY are we so determined to place limits upon the Almighty that when the Almighty proves itself to be outside those limits, we can no longer believe? Why do we strive to paint God in terms a human can grasp, then walk away in disgust when we get an inkling that God is NOT that? The Creator of the Universe—of stars and solar systems and galaxies far beyond our capacity to comprehend—must be so much more. Why can’t we let God be God?

And if “care” is not the correct word, how about “connection?”  “I believe I am connected to the Creator of the Universe.”  I don’t understand the nature of the connection; my understanding is limited by my humanity.  But I’m not prepared to discount something just because I don’t/can’t understand it.  I’m willing to open myself to the possibility of connection with the infinite, to learn whatever it teaches me.  Rather than spitting in its direction and declaring, “You don’t exist because I don’t understand you.”   And then turning around and declaring to the rest of mankind, “You are idiots because you believe in something I personally have rejected (because I don’t understand it.)”    

I have no problem with people who embrace atheism.  I’ve commented to many whom I’ve encountered on social media: “If atheism works for you, that’s great. Be atheist!”

But I won’t be silent when any person disrespects the beliefs of groups who do not share their views.  I’ve repeatedly commented that no one has a right to bash the beliefs of others, if those beliefs help them to be better human beings and harm no one.  Let’s just say, my admonishment doesn’t usually set that well…

The problem with this is that most of the times this belief system makes people ignore science, pray for a cure that will never come unless you see a doctor and occasionally, fly planes into buildings.

…because so many atheists are no less judgmental, prejudiced, fearful and xenophobic than your average religious zealot.

And so it goes…