New Growth

The Fiddle Leaf Ficus growing at our front door,

the one putting out new leaves that I noticed

just last Saturday and took pictures… Why not,

I thought, follow their growth to fully filled out

leaves ready to do what leaves are meant to do…

It's a little like watching hummingbird chicks grow...

so that’s what I’m doing today… and celebrating

birth and life and growth and green and everything

instead of thinking too much about the man

in the airplane who apparently killed himself

and snuffed out the lives of a hundred forty nine

people who only wanted to get somewhere.

I felt like shit after hearing it so I went right out

and took some pictures of the fiddle leaf ficus

and decided to focus on life instead of death.

Forty-five years ago on a trip into the North Borneo rain forest in the Malaysian State of Sabah, I bought a couple of totems, baskets and a machete from Kadasun Dusuns whom I had hired to guide me and a few other people to the top of Mount Kinabalu. What a trip!  The two small hand-carved totems fit my writing today.  Although they still displayed old skull trophies in their longhouses when I met them, Dusuns were no longer the feared head hunters of Borneo. 

O.K., O.K., so the senator from Texas has sashayed into the bull pen ahead of all the other “sort of” and “maybe” aspirants to the highest office in the land.  Ted Cruz who has declared his intention to be president has promised to lead a triumphal march from fundamentalist Christian Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, to Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. He declares his ultimate triumph will be eradication of “every word of Obamacare.”  He also promises that in what he hopes will be a Cruz through his first four years in the White House, he will eliminate abortion, gay marriage, the IRS, and all gun control. He promises to deregulate all energy production, to break the government down to something Tea Party leaders can manage, and to kill whatever it is overseas that needs killing to protect the American Constitution. In his latest pronouncement on gun control he promises a time when, “y’all define gun control like we do in Texas: Gun control is when you hit at what you aim at.”  

The man is no dummy.  He graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School. He knows exactly what he is doing, and whether he believes what he says he believes or not, he is cock-sure that what he is doing is the right thing to do to get him picked by the Republican Party to be its candidate and to get him elected to the highest office in America.  Only a relatively short time ago after he won the runoff in Texas that put him in the Senate, his victory speech in essence declared himself to be the American dream and that the dream comes from God.  In his speech he thanked everybody from Ron Paul to his young daughters and Sarah Palin and, of course, his mother, his father, and the Holy Ghost. In a recent speech to to the Homeschool Iowa conference he told the audience, “We love our children and we take seriously the biblical admonition to raise them up to walk in the godly manner.”  

…And now to another proposal slithering out of the far right of American politics:  Today’s L.A. Times reports on the the efforts of Huntington Beach lawyer Matt McLaughlin who wants to get enough signatures to put his god-inspired initiative on the November 2016 ballot in California.  He calls it the “Sodomite Suppression Act,” which would criminalize sodomy and put to death those convicted of it.  No kidding.  There really is a lawyer in Huntington Beach by the name of Matt McLaughlin, and that lawyer, also not kidding, is serious about strengthening legally the resolve of religious organizations to continue to marginalize LGBT citizens of the United States of America.  Of course, McLaughlin's grossly offensive, inhumane solution for what he sees as the problem of ungodly sexual orientation is not likely to make it onto the ballot; but the holocaust he proposes should at least get him barred from legal practice.

Jeremy is home for spring break... Wonderful!  

He brought his Kombucha for the week. Double Wonderful!

Anybody who lives in or near San Diego should definitely 

go to the Museum of Photography of Art

to experience a very special exhibition:

7 Billion Others

Words... Not Necessary

Sometimes

 

I didn't make a picture of the moon tonight, but I saw it... and pointed it out to Steve.  Although it's a waxing crescent moon, we could see the faint whole of it, round and almost bright there in the western evening sky.  That object close by it was the planet Venus.

I went home from noticing this remarkable moon after having dinner with Jonathan, Margaret, Steve, Avima, and Jamie, and I searched among my journals until I found a little poem I wrote quickly on such as night as this a long time ago.   It was March 19, 1992, and I remember...

Let's stand by the rail and watch the moon set
full, etched silver on the black watercolor universe.
Tomorrow won't be held back
by anything we say tonight.

The Fiddle-leaf fig growing in a large pot outside our front door is known by botanists as Ficus lira. It’s a native to the area in Africa between Cameroon and Sierra Leone.  Our ficus is growing again this year in San Diego exactly the way it has added to it’s height every year. Out of the top tips of last year’s new growth small buds have appeared and are growing fast.  They remind me of the rapid growth of two hummingbird chicks that began life in a tiny nest a few feet away from the ficus. That’s life. Life is good.

Children shouldn’t play in the street.

O.K., I agree… I agree…

It’s dangerous for obvious reasons;

but don't waste my time telling me

an old man shouldn’t play in the street

because I’m not going to believe it…

He’s got to find excitement somewhere.

BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL

They are still here,

Nazis and other hate mongers

constrictors of freedom

raw naked under uniforms

official and unofficial

camouflaged danger lies sleeping

with one eye open waiting

for a signal that someone

of disapproved color or

misunderstood inclination

has wandered into the wrong place

unaware of eschatological 

impulses of power

THOSE WHO TRESPASS

will try to convince you

the determined campaign to destroy

innocence and wisdom 

is over

it isn’t 

and won’t be

until the well taught lessons

of suspicion and fear 

have been unlearned

I read in the newspaper this morning a dire prediction about long periods of drought... and thought and thought and was almost on the verge of beginning a rant about foolish waste of precious resources... but caught myself just in time and launched into a day dream instead.  Then I went out into the world and found images that make me happy.  Don't think I'm making all this stuff up.  This is the way the day went.  Life is good.

Dreams in a Dry Season

What a trip it would be
to take off running from the top of that high hill
and leap into the air at the last minute
before rushing over the edge of the cliff
and fly out over the green valley
to circle with hawks up and up...

To break out from the glide
and head off toward the towering thunderhead
waiting on the western horizon
and slide into the soft shoulder of high fog
and then turn straight up in the middle
through the storm to the topmost billow.

What a joyful ride it would be
to streak wet and glistening
through the driving rain shower
just above the tips of the willows
that toss their feather branches in the wind
to land feet first and running through the meadow.

Clyde and Orange Cat

The bee working a cactus blossom in Balboa Park

A squirrel who didn't mind my watching while it had breakfast

A Snowy Egret fishing

The lady over on Clyde's and Dave's street walking to market

A caterpillar on its way to becoming a butterfly

A duck not caring that I watched her preening

Then I was on the road again... thinking life is good.

That was then...

Those places where once I lived and worked

are the stuff of dreams and visions

of yesterday reminding me that life goes on

and everything is always the same and always different.

This is Now... and then?

My Friend, Artist Tom Fagan, lives in the shadow of Mt. Miguel.  Often during our visits I take pictures of him painting mountains or trees or other people.  Today was different.  Life is good.

Today's ramblings are... well... just that... You could guess that the third photograph isn't mine.  My Australian friends Bob and Christine Rodland sent it to me today... It fits my writing, so I couldn't resist including it here. I hope I shouldn't need to say I'm including it because I think it's funny, and I guess in a perverse way it fits what is meant to be serious writing better than the other two.

TODAY IS SUNDAY… and I’ve been thinking.

Many years ago I had the good fortune to develop a close friendship with Joseph Fletcher, the American professor and theologian who is credited with founding the theory of situational ethics.  Joe, who died in 1991 at the age of 86, had been ordained as an Episcopal priest; and although he had taught Christian Ethics at Both Episcopal Divinity School and Harvard Divinity School from 1944 to 1970 and was the University of Virginia’s first professor of medical ethics , he confided in me a few years before his death that he had begun to self-identify as atheist. 

Long before we met and became friends I had read his book Situation Ethics… “The New Morality” (1966) . The book had changed the direction of my life, but that’s not the point of this BLOG writing.  I’m paraphrasing here, but my friend Joe said the point is that the laws and rules and principles and ideals and norms are all contingent, only valid if they happen to serve love, agape, in any situation.  The difference between ethics and doctrinal rules, or for that matter, any rule, is that ethics is not a system, but an effort to relate love to a world of relativities through a casuistry relative to love. Ethics is more of a strategy than a system of rules.  It is the strategy of love instead of a system of love. 

Joe said, “It is necessary to insist that situation ethics is willing to make full and respectful use of principles, to be treated as maxims but not as laws or precepts —- Situation ethics… calls upon us to keep law in a subservient place, so that only love and reason really count when the chips are down!

In the “Foreword” to his book Joe told a story: “Let an anecdote set the tone.  A friend of mine arrived in St. Louis just as a presidential campaign was ending, and the cab driver, not being above the battle, volunteered his testimony, ‘I and my father and grandfather before me, and their fathers, have always been straight-ticket Republicans.’  “Ah,” said my friend, who is himself a Republican, “I take it that means you will vote for Senator So-and-so.”  ‘No,’ said the driver, ‘there are times when a man has to push his principles aside and do the right thing.’”

This poem of mine from a long time ago isn't a rant...

but it definitely fits this week, this time of discontent.

                           WE HIT EACH OTHER

                           We hit each other

                           with words mostly 

                           being too civilized

                           to draw blood

                           or leave bruises

                           unless of course

                           the people damaged, destroyed 

                           decimated and left destitute 

                           are of some other place

                           some other color or faith

...I'm trying to come cold turkey off ranting and worrying about stuff I can't fix by shouting at it, and I confess it's harder than I thought it would be.  This is only day two... I found some flowers out in Estelle's yard and they took my mind off Thomas Cotton's letter to "the Leaders of Iran" and all that other silliness happening back in Washington.  I've noticed, by the way, that his buddies on the Hill are calling him Tom, not Thomas... even in the newspapers and on the radio and on television they call him Tom... and I'm guessing some of them even call him Tommy, and that would never have happened when he was a boy in Arkansas. I'll bet that's one of the things that happened when he was up at Harvard.  His mother would not have called him Tommy or even Tom.  By damn she named him Thomas for a reason and that's what people should call him. I was calling him by some other names a couple of days ago, but that's in the past.  That's over.  Some of the people out in  California probably thought my cousin whom we called Bobby Joe was really Robert Joseph, but of course he wasn't.  He was always Bobby Joe.  And I'm pretty sure the junior senator from Arkansas is really Thomas Cotton. Oh, Hell.  I thought the hibiscus and some roses had taken my mind of him, but I guess I slipped off the wagon there for a minute.  Tomorrow is another day.  Maybe I'll check to see if there is a Rantaholic's Anonymous around here somewhere that I can join. ...but can you imagine anybody calling Thomas Jefferson something like Tom Jefferson or Tommy Jefferson.  I'll bet when the junior senator from Arkansas thinks about it he'll switch right back to being Thomas Cotton.