A Holiday Wish: Ending the Deeper Dark

It’s snowing. Large flakes lazily fall. But in the distance, some light breaks through dark grey clouds.

 

News reports say tomorrow in the late afternoon, a snowstorm will develop. A large storm will be carrying over a foot of snow to the Northeast, maybe the biggest storm in the last few years.

 

Such storms generate great anticipation and emotion. Especially early in the season, there’s excitement along with trepidation. We wonder if the storm will really appear. Is the excitement, and danger, as real as we hope or fear? We often get so caught up in the human social world we forget the power of the universe that cradles us. Such storms can wake us up to this fact.

 

In normal years, we’d also wonder⎼ will schools be closed? This year everything is different. What will the effect of the snow be on remote learning? We will marvel at what nature can do, but many schools (and too many businesses) are already closed, at least to in-person attendance.

 

As we enter the darkest time of the year here in the northern hemisphere, we leave behind an even deeper darkness, a more intense cold. The pandemic, which is now killing more people per day than the 9/11 attacks, may by summer be ended due to vaccines and the policies of a new administration. The incitements to hate, violence, and attempted destruction of our voting system by the present President will be replaced with a true concern for others. For the last 4 years, DT has shown us what an utter lust for power can do to our nation, shown us the darkness and division that descends on people when a ruler is concerned only for himself.

 

But as we move toward the solstice and the darkest day of the year, we are moving also toward the spring. The winter reminds us we can endure and act.

 

I guess this is one reason I write blogs. It is a wish made physical and sent out into the universe to make explicit there is reason to hope, love, and care.

 

President-Elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated January 20th, although just saying it, making it real like that, excites yet scares me. I don’t want to jinx it….

 

**To read the whole piece, click on this link to The Good Men Project, where it was first published.

How Low Can You Go?

It is embarrassing. DT’s behavior is so obviously desperate, based on nothing but fear and a level of self-centered greed that should astound anyone who looks at it. And the desperation and blindness to anyone’s interests but his own is even getting to many of his most loyal supporters. But after 4 years of experiencing just how bad DT can be, we shouldn’t be at all surprised by his latest behavior.

 

Or rest our attention. I have been sleeping better each day with each step taken toward securing the constitutional peaceful transition of power. But who knows what despicable actions he might yet take?

 

In a recent tweet he attacked Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia for not using his “emergency powers…to overrule his obstinate [Republican] Secretary of State…” and claimed matching voter signatures to mail-in ballots would yield a “goldmine of fraud.” He also tweeted to Brian Kemp to “call off the [Senate runoff] election[s].” He was directly trying to stop an election. But the Governor and Secretary of State both refused to do so. Cody Hall, Kemp’s communications director, said the Governor does not have the legal authority to override (or cancel) the election. The only goldmine of fraud was coming from the White House.

 

Former Georgia Representative Allen Peake defended Governor Kemp and the way he handled the election results, and attacked DT, saying “I, for one, am tired of Trump’s whining. Man up, admit you got beat and do what’s right for the country.” And conservative columnist George Will earlier remarked that DT will end his presidency as he began it, by whining.

 

Trump likewise attacked Governor Ducey of Arizona for certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s win in that state. While holding a press conference announcing the certification, reporters dimly heard the tune of “Hail to the Chief” which was the ringtone Ducey linked to calls from the WH. Ducey took out his phone from his coat pocket, saw who was calling, shook his head and continued with the press conference.

 

Even some of the most ardent DT sycophants are breaking with the President’s overwrought and baseless claims and attacks on our constitutional system. The latest was Attorney General Barr, who said, in an interview with the Associated Press, that the FBI and U. S. attorneys have found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

 

Even Vice President Pence might, according to the Daily Beast, be backing away from DT. His name no longer appears with DT’s on their fund-raising appeals. And “sources” close to Pence say he “privately views the Rudy Giuliani-led legal operation to overturn the 2020 election through the mass disenfranchisement of votes as counterproductive and doomed.” Why not illegal and immoral? “The vice president doesn’t want to go down with this ship.”

 

As far back as November 6th, GOP began to push back against DT’s false election claims, beginning with Senators Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, and Pat Toomey, amongst others. And by 11/10, 9 GOP Senators and 5 Congresspeople recognized Biden won the election.  But, as of now, many congressional GOP still haven’t publicly acknowledged Biden’s win….

 

To read the whole post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project.

Happiness and Questioning: Replacing Malignance with Loving, Greed with Compassion, Ignorance with Insight

How can we have any sense of happiness in ourselves during a pandemic, when so many are sick, and we fear getting sick ourselves? And the nation, for another 47 days or so, is still led by someone most of us recognize as malignant, ignorant of the very idea of caring for the lives and well-being of others. When a nation is led by a person who speaks and acts as DT does, every day is an assault on our lives and our humanity⎼ on our sense of compassion, love, and beauty.

 

Or every day asks us how can we create, right now, a sense of strength and caring amidst the chaos and sickness? How can we, knowing what we know, find happiness in our lives? What can we do to liberate our heart instead of allowing a would-be oppressor to subvert it? What is the payoff and what is the price for not asking or answering such questions? There is a letting go, a release needed here that I haven’t yet found.

 

In the Winter 2020 Issue of Buddhadharma, the Practitioner’s Quarterly, Akincano Weber, a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, talks about “Radical Attention,” the attention needed to touch the earth in a specific place, or a specific person or situation, and discern in it a universal truth. He talks about approaches, “life-hacks” that can help us do this, one of which is skillful questioning.

 

Think about questions. Did a question ever stick in your mind and you couldn’t let go of it? They can act as hypnotic suggestions. Ask the right question and you receive what? Attention. Your mind is directed, not just to some place, but possibly to the act of searching itself. Questions can focus the mind very narrowly, on one place, or on every place, the tree or the forest.

 

To answer a question we must leave behind any exclusive focus on self-concern or we never get to the object of concern itself. We must immerse ourselves in wherever the question takes us, live there so we can feel what that place is like, think from that perspective, and then move on. Such questioning can open us up to other practices which help us keep in our mind and heart the larger whole from which we are never separate.

 

Love, obviously, can also do this, switch us from “me” to “you,” self to other. I am sitting now with two of my cats and watch them sleeping. One of them, Milo, turns over, exposing his belly, and puts his front paws over his eyes. This gesture of his just floors me every time. The cats lie there, trusting me enough to be vulnerable. They want to be with me. Suddenly, I feel totally different. Because I love them, I feel loved in return. They mirror back to me my own feeling. Because I am open to them, they reveal myself to me….

 

To read the whole post, please click on this link to The Good Men Project, where it was published.