Foresight 20/20; A Commencement Address for our Graduates

Parents, Friends and Neighbors, we stand here today to honor our 2020 graduates. 

It cannot go without saying that 2020 has been a strange year. I don’t think any of us was, nor could have been, prepared for the sudden arrival of a pandemic. Our lives have been turned upside-down. The norms and expectations of everything, including and particularly celebration, have been curtailed. The globalized economy has collapsed like a house of cards, and the highest levels of leadership have proven themselves to be insubstantial, even unfit, but certainly unready to meet such a crisis where it needs to be met – often treating this environment as though human needs are not an integral part of it.

Suddenly everything came to a halt, and we were mainly limited to being at home, really only going out for essential procurements or essential work. It doesn’t take long for people, so used to social commerce, to become bored, isolated, sad. On March 18^th, I awoke from a dream and these words lingered from it, so I wrote them down and gave them a title: 

Together, Alone

We hike along a way
we’d usually share abreast,
but right now, we each move
together, alone.

The distance is forced and,
as two pendulums in motion would,
we try to match our steps,
try to meet in mind,
mindful of the gap.

A contagion we can’t see
threatens to separate us;
to divide and conquer
by means of infection
is the metaphor of this age.

This disease might save us,
if we could embrace a truth
writ large by the threat:
we live webs of intersections;
as we go, it is together, all one.

© 2020 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

A year of promise begun in the Fall got the wind sucked out it in February and March. To borrow a book title from Judith Viorst, for many students this has been a “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad” year. It is of little consolation that a year such as this is not unprecedented in the history of our nation and our world.

In 1918, the world, already in the grips of World War I for a full year, was hit by an avian H1N1 virus that came to be known as the Spanish Flu. Troop movement is thought to have been the primary means of spreading this virus, and there were three primary waves of infection. Then, as now, public heath officials recommended the wearing of masks, proximal distancing, and quarantine as the primary methods by which to slow the spread of the disease and allow it to play itself out. 

In his commencement address to the 1918 graduating class of the University of Indiana, Mr. Rough and Ready, Theodore Roosevelt, nine years out of office as our 26^thPresident, said:

We need institutions of technical teaching, of technical learning in the country; but in my judgment, we need more the institutions that teach broad, cultural development, which this nation needs more than it needs anything else. We need the kind of learning acquired not because it can be turned into money but because it is worth so much more than money.

Let [each person] remember that no nation ever yet amounted to anything or ever will amount to anything if it consisted simply of money-getters, and if the trophies and proofs of its success consisted merely in the symbols of successful money-getting. The money must be there as a basis, but by no means as broad a basis as most of the very successful… among us have made it in their lives. [Money] is only [a] foundation, and the foundation is worthless unless upon it you build the super-structure of the higher life, the life with ideals of beauty, of nobility, of achievement of good for the sake of doing what is good, the life of service and sacrifice in any one of a hundred lines, all directed toward the welfare of our common country.

I hope it isn’t trite to say that though this year has been tough, we’ve all learned that doing good, in the simple way Roosevelt defined it, is something that can be done by going to work or school, or even by staying at home—doing the best we can, whatever any specific circumstances demand. We’ve seen what works, and what doesn’t work has been unmasked– as façade or out and out fraud – for all to see, if they are willing. We’ve learned that “Being together, all one” is part of our social contract, an act of cooperation we agree to do as a group even if we are self-isolating.

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That you have arrived at this day is not, per se, a miracle. You’ve been nurtured and encouraged by parents, grandparents, neighbors, teachers and coaches, ever since the day you were born. But that you have arrived at this milestone is an accomplishment—your accomplishment, a result of your hard work. Even, sometimes, boredom, contributes to growth, being the parent of invention.

You’ve spent so much of your life in school but, let me just say, school’s not over, yet – life is what some would call “Continuing Education.” I’m sure you’ve survived any number of “group projects”, during your time in Middle and High School, even College. When asked why students thought they were being given such assignments, at least 85% percent respond, “In order to lower my GPA.” As hated as these exercises are, there is a point to them; they are short experiments in the realities of cooperation. In these “controlled” experiments, the group you end up with must work together to produce a result. You get to choose who you hang out with at lunch and after school, but you mostly never get to choose who is going to be working with you on such assignments nor in any job setting. You and several or a bunch of others are thrown together to solve a problem and deliver a report or a product. Some members of the group have skills; some can organize, some are smart but flaky, while others might be excellent at avoidance all together. You have to find someone willing to take the thankless lead, and then together you have to plan meetings, benchmarks and goals, and each person has to agree to Do Their Part. This is nothing less than a social contract. Sometimes the results aren’t that great, but you can breathe a sigh of relief when your presentation is over, even if you were up until 2am making the PowerPoint presentation because you had to wait for one of your partners to email the data and another partner to email the text. This is a microcosm of real life; we all muddle along just like this, and every such experience offers an opportunity to observe people, and this contributes to your developing critical thought process. One thing you learn is that even people with the best of plans encounter issues that can cause them to change course. If there’s one rule of thumb you can live by, it’s this: Everything takes four times longer to accomplish than you think it should, from simple chores on up. And yet, there is art and grace to be found in all of this, and joy.

Perhaps, during our shelter-in-place, in our quiet meditations, we have made some important observations. Perhaps we’ve been able to breathe cleaner air. Perhaps we have been able to actually hear the birds singing without the continuous hum of traffic and construction to dampen their songs. Perhaps we have been able to see the moon and stars more clearly at night. Perhaps we have discovered – and maybe to our surprise – that a lifestyle of rushing around and being artificially busy is not required in order to live fully and productively. Perhaps we have thought about how much energy – personal energy, as well as resource energy – is wasted when everything and everyone is constantly turned on and in motion. Perhaps we have concerned ourselves with how isolation might be impacting others, because we know how deeply it has impacted us. Perhaps we have observed that all are not treated equally or based on truly demonstrated merit. Perhaps we’ve finally heard and identified divisive rhetoric and platitudes, and been upset by them. Perhaps, in thinking about all these things, we have thought of solutions to certain problems. 

What ideas have you had during this time that you think are worthy to pursue? Ideas that can help us do more than just muddle along? Such ideas are the capital on which every former society has been, and any newer society, can be built. 

In the words of a Fleetwood Mac song from my generation:

Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be, better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone

Right now, we are still in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting for the pandemic threat to be “yesterday,” and some of us marching to demand greater social justice. As difficult as it is to be missing out on shared celebrations with your peers, I hope you realize that you are experiencing history first-hand, and that this moment is but a spring-board to the next phase of yours and all our lives. You are on the ground floor, and everything goes up from here. In the parlance of business, disruption is the fertile ground for innovation. Carpe diem, seize the day! This historic moment contains the seeds of opportunity that you and all your classmates can cultivate toward holistic and positive change so desperately needed in our world, changes that don’t treat humanity as if it is detached from the environment or subservient to money, changes that honor individual personhood. 

As we slowly return to a “new normal,” I hope that you will be able to safely rejoin your classmates and extended family in celebration of your collective achievements, and that those celebrations will be all the more fully experienced and cherished because of the crisis we have lived through. 

In the meanwhile, we congratulate you and the entire Class of 2020, and hope that the springboard of current events will catapult all of you to success in the fields of your choice, with the best wishes and continued support of all of us. We are confident that you and your generation have and will further develop and employ critical discernment, and with it the capacity to concentrate on those issues pertinent to the “common good,” and we have high hopes that every new construct you have imagined can be realized to make the world “better than before,” where each person has a place and a vital role. You have heard the phrase, “20/20 hindsight” – it is our hope that you and everyone in your generation will look on the year 2020 as a challenge to look ahead, to make leaps forward and to lead, leveraging your knowledge of the past and, now, new perspective and energy toward building a better, safer, more loving world for us all, a world with just a touch of 20/20 foresight.

Best to you always, 

Elisabeth Eliassen
your neighbor and fellow citizen

© 2020 by Elisabeth Eliassen and songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com

This address is for all students who were unable to partake of a commencement gathering with their fellow students and families. I wrote this specifically for a young man, a neighbor, who grew up with my kids. I want all our graduates know that they are special and that they live in a special time, and that they can shape the world. I pulled out the more personal comments directed toward our young friend, but the message is the same for all.

Meditations in Fast Times: Introduction

“Meditations in Fast Times” was a devotional writing experiment I took up for the Season of Lent in the year 2014. Each day during the season, I wrote a poem as a meditation, using as my inspiration and intertextual basis, T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, as well as incorporating the daily office, current events, and other readings—some the same as those Eliot used while composing this seminal work and other writing.

The truth about words is that they accumulate through time, first in the mind, then as markings on clay tablets, then on papyrus, palm leaves, amalgamations of plant fibers, parchment, vellum, then wood pulp. Words fill scrolls, palimpsests, books, and electronic storage units. The more basic truth about words is that their accumulation constitutes the collective memory of our species, for better and for worse. To the extent that we collect and care for our accumulations of words, they are our children. Words are also ancestors, parents and teachers to us; we interact with words in our nightly dreams and in our daily lives, we share words with one another. Words do not live by themselves; they live because someone remembers them, references them, ponders them, speaks them, exchanges them, agrees with them and lives by them, or disagrees and rearranges them to something that could be lived by in a proper context.

This last notion is vitally important, particularly in this “digital media era”, in which ownership of words (and everything else), is constantly at issue. Perhaps the most difficult aspect toward an understanding about accumulations of words is that they can constitute unique thoughts, in certain situations, while in others what they express is universal. Day by day, there are people who want to challenge the notion that one’s innermost thoughts are private. There are people who want to own the publically expressed thoughts of people long dead, and to have control over them. This is a deadly impulse. “My thoughts are not your thoughts; my ways are not your ways”, yet we should be able to freely exchange ideas and to have these influence our range of ideas and thinking in a communal way. There is a real threat that ideas will disappear from the landscape of information available to the average person, and this goes against everything for which the Encyclopédistes and founders of public libraries stand, when it comes to literacy, politics and social integrity.

Although the ownership and control of ideas is a philosophical position that has economic and social implications too deep to explore in this introduction, I will venture to posit that words and their accumulation are so fluid that it is impossible to own and control them the way some people would like. The accumulations of all expressed, notated and stored thoughts have, to some extent, made us into the people we are, now or at any given moment. The way in which a person thinks is a direct result of the words that have been passed on to the individual, throughout a lifetime of parental and societal nurture, combined with personal and highly individual exploration.

All words lead to all other words. One book is never enough—to read one is to be led to read another, if not ten or a thousand. It is very possible that I have, between what is inside my home and garage, a few thousand books. I may not have read them all (indeed, quite a lot are dry instructional manuals), but I have certainly consulted most of them, and the presence of each volume is an indication that I intended to read it, or it was given to me as a gift. Actually, all the books have been a gift; each is a gift of time and effort and thought someone else put into a printed accumulation of words. Literature is the fluid legacy of all thought throughout time.

T.S. Eliot understood this about the legacy of literature, and in his various writings sought to interact with the legacy, as well as put his own imprint on it, even to the extent of exerting a deliberate social influence on the intelligentsia of his time, through his writing, teaching and publishing activities. In particular, his poetry is an intertextual exploration and internal thought exercise. His writing is clearly infused with the ideas that came from a lifetime of reading, and his work references, mostly consciously—although perhaps also unconsciously—other writing and ideas that he experienced and admired.

For my own intertextual experiment, I used T.S. Eliot’s “The Four Quartets” as my primary source, secondarily considering current events from the newspaper and other literature that came to mind as I meditated on passages from Eliot’s seminal work.

The technique I used may be similar to the technique Eliot used, although he never described it. The first step for me was to take a copy of “Four Quartets” and annotate it with what I guessed to be source materials for bits of his text. (Of course, I had read all the texts that I associated with Eliot’s passages, which is why they would come to mind!) I also consulted the “Annotations to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets” by Servotte and Grene (iUniverse, 2010), Eliot’s “The Sacred Wood; essays on poetry and criticism” (Barnes and Noble University Paperbacks, 1966), “T.S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets” by John Xiros Cooper (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Helen Gardner’s excellent study, “The Composition of Four Quartets” (Faber and Faber, 1978), a work that is rather difficult to find, but a copy of which now rests on one of my shelves at home.

Reading the scriptural texts from the daily office, I would hit upon one that resonated with a passage from “Four Quartets”, and the meditations on those passages, often with reference also to an item from the daily newspaper, resulted in the forty poems that follow. I also annotated my own work, so that anyone reading it might know what ideas I had included in my thinking. Taken together, this collected work constitutes a species of dialectical journal, as well as a spiritual exercise.

Elisabeth T. Eliassen
14 June 2014
Alameda, CA 

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To see the first of the 40 poems see this link, and work your way forward through all 40, if you are interested!

http://songsofasouljourney.blogspot.com/2014_03_05_archive.html

La Habana, en versos libres: I. Dias Uno

Sharing gum on the plane,
preparing for sweetness,
drinking Fanta in the sky.

Applause erupts
as the wheels touch down;
“Thank-you for flying Sky King”,
Welcome to Habana.

The Chinese made tram,
carrying us from tarmac to terminal,
is new and smooth,
the Aeropuerto Nacional
is old and worn.

One guard only
scans the luggage
and shrink-wrapped goods,
but two guards

mind the spaniels on duty;
maybe petting is not allowed,
although they seem friendly.

At the Hotel Plaza,
mojitos await at the counter,
but the rooms are not ready
until after four o’clock.

A walking tour ensues
over La Habana vieja,
footsteps treading over footsteps
in this place bursting with sound
and with color
in the fluid heat.

Opulence interrupted,
nonetheless,
this city has been alive;
though the faces and facades are worn,
vital blood and sugar still flow,
likewise the rum,
sold through open window shops.

The staccato of the tongues
and car horns
is like the beat of ageless drums;
this old town is kept new
by the child
beating on the drum
for our pleasure,
corazón of our corazón.

Lunch at Hotel Inglettera
incurs petty robbery loss,
while the salsa plays
and the Buccanero flows;
opportunities overflow
even in the most crowded room.

Transports from other ages
race all over town;
the racket and the fumes,
with the heat and humidity,
they roll over one,
as they settle on each edifice
and make their mark.

More to see,
more to do,
more to say,
but first to sing,
in this place
of unending song.

© 2013 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen

Save the Post Office -- Write a Letter!

About a month ago, I was helping my parents with the last detail of their move from our town to a town in Arizona: I turned in their Post Office box keys. But, before I could do that, I had to take out whatever mail was still there in the box. A week had gone by, and the box was stuffed to the gills, to the point that there was a half-full overflow Postal bin that I had to collect at the counter.

I sorted through everything at home, after I turned the keys in. Out of that half bin, there were twelve pieces of actual mail; the rest was ads and direct mail catalogs.

I sighed at the waste.

At one time, I worked in the Direct Mail industry at a merge/purge shop. You could add your name and address to the seed names list, and receive copies of any catalog you wanted. (People on the seed names list receive the catalogs, or other mailing pieces from the direct mail campaign, so that they can check to make sure the mailing was done properly.) After a while, I took my name and address off the seed lists, but added that information to the Direct Marketing Association’s Preference File. This file is used to suppress the names and addresses on it from mailing campaigns, so that people won’t get tons of unwanted mail. People might get catalogs from companies they like, but then those companies either sell or exchange your name and address to other like companies—just an extra way to get either more money or more names.

What I found out was that I didn’t want to receive a whole lot of catalogs because I didn’t want to constantly buy things.

There is, after all, only so much room for furniture, cooking utensils and clothes in one’s life. All the things we own, including our image, require care and upkeep. And there are catalogs that sell products and implements to handle the care and upkeep of our image and our stuff. Of course, this all adds up to more stuff and things and gewgaws and wobbity-wobbits and round-to-its and widgets and just plain junk.

The other thing that happened, while I was working in the direct marketing industry, was the rise of the now ubiquitous personal computer, followed closely by the advent and eventual explosion of internet. Quite suddenly, it seemed, everyone could get in touch by electronic mail. Wow!

So, what happened? People stopped writing letters and our United States Postal Employees have become slaves who annually shoulder millions of pounds of bulk third-class mail, bills, circular ads and not a whole lot else.

Now the cry is out to abandon our United States Postal Service, opting instead for all mail being handled by privatized services. The claim is that this will cut bureaucracy and save the taxpayers and the government millions upon zillions of dollars.

I say that this is a bad idea. The US Postal Service has been one of the longest running services that people have been able to depend upon, often when there was nothing else to depend upon. Because the service is run centrally, it has established distribution hubs, transportation routes and flight patterns. There are regulations about what is proper to mail (nothing liquid, perishable, potentially hazardous, etc.) and there are regulated postage fees. You generally have an idea when your mail will be delivered, and you sometimes really count on that!

The privatized business community claims to know better how to run just about any enterprise. But we all know that serving the “bottom line” would require cost cutting in areas ill suited to cuts. I would not be surprised to see disrupted and irregular service, no guarantees of arrival time for time-sensitive material, along with no recourse for disputes. Workers rights would undoubtedly be infringed upon and there would be sharp rise in worker’s compensation claims, due to workers having to deal with irregular packaging and potentially dangerous packages. This would lead to sharp rises in insurance premiums and health care. A complete dismantling of regulated pricing would be a detriment to the public. In short, dismantling of postal regulations could pose potential danger to the public, as well as anyone working in the postal industry.

The business side of mailing aside, I would like to say a few words about history. One of the reasons we know so much about life and thought in previous generations is because of two types of artifacts: letters and ephemera (all those little bits of paper that have doodles, drawings, notes, ads and other things printed or hand written on their surfaces). Since the invention of the telephone, everyone has been writing and actually thinking less. The invention of the typewriter, eventually morphing into what we now call keyboarding, has had the mixed impact of allowing more people to communicate by means of clear and even text, but to the detriment that few people are able to write legibly by hand.

When people talk to one another, the tendency is to think less before speaking. Letter writing takes more time and thought put toward a flow and organization of ideas. Because so much of our communication is ephemeral, dissipating into the ether either by digital deletion or by vocal immediacy, it goes unrecorded. What record will remain of the existence of this generation? Ephemera in the form of catalogs? A few poorly edited newspapers? How will people know what YOU thought about LIFE? Will it be as if you never existed, after you are gone?

Oh, no, no… That is unthinkable. But I want you to think on it.

I am advocating a year (or the rest of your life) of less distraction. Don’t give up your computer, don’t stop social networking or blogging. Do take the time to think, and to organize your thoughts. Do write a letter to someone you love and appreciate. Share your struggles, your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams.

History, and the United States Postal Service, will thank you.

Meanwhile, if you want help the environment by receiving less mail, register your preferences here:

https://www.dmachoice.org/dma/member/home.action

Social Contact or Social Contract? Thoughts on 9/11

There could have been many titles for this entry, but this is the title I ended up with.

This blog has been quiet for a week, as I took some time for reflection on life, on tragedy, on love and the notion of an everlasting.

I remember exactly where I was on September 11, 2001.

Just the day before, my entire family had traveled home from Seattle by plane, following a cruise to Alaska, the kind of trip none of us had ever taken before. During the cruise, a horrible virus ran its way through the passenger list, and I had been hit hard by it at the end of the journey, while our toddlers suffered mild cases of seasickness. Despite these things, we had all had a wonderful time, but we had returned home late at night, and I was very ill by then.

The next morning, my husband was feeding the children when a phone call came. When he got of the phone, he turned on the television to see the news. He called to me from downstairs and said I needed to come right away, as something very important and very disturbing had happened and the happening was actually still in progress. The repeating loop of the collapsing towers made me dizzy. I reeled back up the stairs to my sickbed and said, “turn it off.” I could not think or breathe.

We all know what that event was, and we have been beating our breasts over it ever since. Arguably, this event galvanized Americans like no other event since the Civil War. It has been ten years, and we still vent pain, rage and sorrow over what took place. We want to lay blame, but I conclude that the blame has mostly been laid in the wrong hands.

We ourselves are to blame.

As a nation, we have traded the national treasure of our ideals in equality for a complacency that looks the other way when it comes to real social justice and equity. We have put our trust in leaders who are just plain crazy and obviously out for all that they can amass for themselves themselves. The leaders have been bought off by huge megalocorporate business entities that promote societal mores of greed and worship of money. The megalocorporate god giveth jobs and then taketh them away when no one is looking, or hideth them from certain kinds of candidates or offshore them. We thought they were working for us, because we are their people and they are our megalocorporations. Little did we know that we were being sold up and sold out, just as is happening nearly every nation in the so-called “third world.”

The worship of money and power is home to roost, and it did not start with that fateful day of September 11, 2001, but it has been a thread embroidered in our national policy, foreign and domestic, for well over fifty years. It started well before Eisenhower’s warnings about the consequences of the military industrial complex, and before WWII. This is a fatal flaw that was seeded well before 1900, 1860, 1770 or even 1492. Indeed, the flaw has existed since before the fall of Rome, before the repatriation of the Jews, before the events detailed in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

George Steiner writes—and these words were penned in those days before 9/11:

Inhumanity is, so far as we have historical evidence, perennial. There have been no utopias, no communities of justice or forgiveness. Our current alarms—at the violence in our streets, at the famines in the so-called third world, at regressions into barbaric ethnic conflicts, at the possibility of pandemic disease—must be seen against the background of a quite exceptional moment. Roughly from the time of Waterloo to that of the massacres on the Western Front in 1915-16, the European bourgeousie experienced a privileged season, an armistice with history. Underwritten by the exploitation of industrial labour at home and colonial rule abroad, Europeans knew a century of progress, of liberal dispensations, of reasonable hope. It is in the afterglow, no doubt idealized, of this exceptional calendar—not the constant comparison of the years prior to August 1914 with a “long summer”—that we suffer our present discomforts.

There has never been an earthly utopia, and we cannot pretend that, as modern Americans, that we are color-blind and truly act with justice and fairness toward all. It is not human nature to be so, and I doubt that the human race can evolve beyond its brutish nature. Is there moral high ground for allowing our own people to be illiterate, unemployed and homeless? How can we talk about leaders in other countries who allow such realities on their own turf?

The events of September 11, 2001 are still unfolding. We cannot claim the role of virtuous victim for those events, neither can we justify those aspects that continue to unfold daily. In our name, our government has done terrible things, including arming our enemies to act against us. Islamoterrorism was created by our government, moving pawns over its giant chessboard.

Our government set this horror in motion. We have allowed our government to do terrible things. We are responsible.

We have all been taught that we have the right to say and do anything we want, and so everyone does, with little or no thought as to consequences. And then we are shocked when something goes too far or the consequences become too great.

People have been taught to talk themselves silly, and they do. Conversely, people not been taught to listen or to hear, or to critically think about their individual choices. The quiet of circumspection is missing from our daily lives.

We have bought into the myth of privilege and elitism. We have bought the lie that we are entitled.

Healing can only come once we understand our individual roles in this great tragedy that is our world. Healing can only come when we agree renew and actually live a social contract, rather than wring our hands and obsess over our social networking and ever-present media.

Healing can only begin when we address the following questions:

What is enough? When is enough enough?

Goethe was a brilliant thinker. And he was being brutally candid when he said:

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

As we remember September 11^th, may all that is Divine rain down peace on all who have been touched by violence and all of us who are left to face the events that continue to unfold.

For, those events are still unfolding.

Reflections on Reality, Love and Family

There have been so many things, lately in the news, that have made me reflect on the concept of "reality."

For example, when you read an entire arc of written history and find that the ancient notion of Trinity has been purposely derailed from being Father-Mother-Child to Father-Son-and-[(female in name origin only) Holy Spirit], you tend to suspect that the proper order of things has been usurped to fit a human agenda that can often seem less evolved and fit for holy work than one would hope for humanity (which claims to want peace even while raising their weapons to conquer).

The historical model Father-Mother-Child really needs a more modern amendment to  acknowledge the actually exisiting model of [Responsible&Committed Parent(s)-Grandparents-Guardians-Villagers]-Child(ren—history reveals this to be the reality of what has actually happened, through times ancient and modern, in thick and thin, in times of war and peace.

I just wish that reality what actually happens didn’t have to constantly obscured, diminished, denied, denigrated, fought over and legislated, so we could all get on with the actual (and more important) holy business of loving each other—from within the sacred choices we have made about our identities—and caring for each other and our beautiful planet, which is, after all, supposed to be the whole point of this existence.

Maybe someday there will be a holiday called “Stipulation Day”, where everyone could remember the day we all said, Okay, we’re ALL so COOL! Let’s CELEBRATE that we’re all taking care of each other, and that this is the way it should be!


(sigh)

But, the problem with holidays is that we have parades where we all line up in separate groupings. We reduce everything to sentiments that are printed on cards and balloons. Over time, we forget what the holiday was ultimately all about, and why it was needed.

Perhaps a better solution is to make everyday a Sabbath day, where there is time for work, time for play, time for celebration, time for reflection and time for rest. Is it possible? Could life be like that?

Meanwhile, I feel so VERY LUCKY to live in a part of the world were there is so much more consciousness about the multiple definitions and dimensions of family and neighbor--and life.