Memorial Day serving as reminder...

Memorials, that we shouldn't forget ...

Two constellations are depicted in  bas-relief ,

 the winged horse,  Pegasus  and Pisces the fish.

Many of the World War II veterans that I know are getting on in years.  Most of them don't talk much about their experiences, but I remember Stan telling us one  afternoon about participating in the liberation of a camp in Germany.  Grammy  M. shared memories of her service as a nurse in Guadalcanal.   Paul's Normandy Beach memories and Herb and Paul sharing their perspectives of how world War II ended...what it mean to them,  challenged my understanding considerably. Mac, a special force for sure, served multiple times from Viet Nam to special duties in Bosnia...


In the the city of San Francisco, in  a grove of Monterey pine and cypress trees overlooking the Pacific Ocean, is a curved wall of native granite stone, a memorial for World War II Missing Soldiers.

"INTO THY HANDS, O LORD"

Last fall I stopped and  read some of the 413 names  of those who were lost or buried at sea in U.S. Pacific waters between 1941 and 1945. This Memorial was erected in 1960.

And now among us are younger vets from tours in Afghanistan and Iraq...and their families....and their families.


Recently I took a continuing education class on the spectrum of PTSD disorders:

    * Acute Stress Reaction

  **  Acute Stress Disorder

 ***  Acute Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

****  Chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

 "Post-trauma risks include poor social support and life stress.  A greater risk for developing Chronic PTSD may be conveyed by post-trauma factors (e.g., lack of social support and additional life stress) than pre-trauma factors. " This is a bottom line conclusion  from the VA/DoD  Clinical Practice Guideline for Management of Post-traumatic Stress.

So the take home message for all us who want to have a right response to those who have experienced real trauma is that the love, support, understanding,respect, admiration and opportunity that a person has after big trauma has more bearing on how they will ultimately do then who they were before the trauma. 

The statue at the San Francisco Memorial represents  a poetic and historical female personification of the United States,  the woman Columbia. 

 She has a lot of work to do...don't we?

                                         

                                                         


MEMORIAL from late Latin memoriale ‘record, memory, monument,’ from Latin memorialis ‘serving as a reminder,’ from memoria ‘memory.’

Monterey, California the art of historical recreation...A Book Review

No More a Stranger  A Story of Robert Louis Stevenson  written in 1946  by Anne B. Fisher  is what she liked to call a "re-creation." She researched for six years to write this story of the four months in 1879 that Robert Louis Stevenson spent in Monterey, California.

I was almost put off by the romantic cover and already knew the basics and was not further interested in Stevenson's personal life, so I wasn't sure the book would hold me. 

 But ultimately this book is  a story of old Monterey, a town that is in many ways the belly button of  California history.   While this story is told in the third person and is a subjective narrative of  204 pages, the rest of the volume is sixty pages of chapter notes with photographs and sources, a bibliography, acknowledgements and an extensive index.

 I began looking at  the sources first and  saw  that the author  had worked hard to diligently unearth her chronicle and that she had faithfully annotated it with her written and oral sources and included contemporary photographs of many of the characters in the book.  It is a mark of scholarship standards of old to go to original source material and to truly show your source and I began to trust that a definitive picture of  cultural and historical significance was to be found in this story.

As the author says in her biographical notes:

Many readers of this book will wonder how much of the story is true.  It is all based on fact.  No character is imaginary-not even the horse.  Incidents happened as described, and anecdotes related were those actually told.  The only fictional episodes which enter into the story are some conversations which had to be filled in to retain the continuity. 

The people who encountered and helped RLS on his way were all hard working immigrant pioneers and the variety of people groups is well represented in this story.  In some ways this tale is about how much story itself is valued for quite a community had to rally around the twenty-nine year old "ink-slinger"  to keep him alive.  Even his $2.00 a week salary  at the local paper was from a secret hat passing  at the restaurant where RSL  found food, warmth and a friend in French proprietor Jules Simoneau.

No More a Stranger was first published in 1946 by Stanford University Press.
                                                                         ~

Boundaries in Blog Land

Ah, time to write...I'll just start a post and even though I 'll have to save it and add to it later, it will be like a  magnet to draw  together some of the thoughts that pass through so quickly unless I  pen them down as able.  Even if capture is incomplete, I stand a chance of some themes coalescing. 

Nothing got posted here in June. 

 I wrote and then typing in the near dark early one morning, deleted one June post I had considered calling "Weeds for Words" about the seasonal mandate of the sprouting earth and how weeding, planting and pruning had usurped keyboard time.  Living in a garden and being outside is lovely and of course it is the keyboard that should be considered the usurper.  My handwritten journal has not suffered for entries but it seems to become more and more a sequestered reality.  A family death, concern for the next generation, strange dreams, stranger encounters, political observations, cultural clashes: I can bring  a proper light to such subjects, but the first dashed thoughts  usually need to at least marinate for a while.  I would never do in the world of journalism  where the rush to scoop beats many factors  of much greater importance.  

Boundaries are important. 

 Often times boundaries are viewed simply as restrictions, look at the implications of the word "sequestered"  used above: to isolate or hide away or to take legal possession  of...  but in fact,  clear boundaries can facilitate clarity and freedom.

I wrote recently to one of  the dear hearts of my life how impressed I was with her increasing ability to use words to describe her inner terrain.  It struck me  what a growth it is to keep the internal terrain in a gentle focus while juggling the multitude of external demands. Boundaries are inextricably tied to one's ability to do and give in the world at large and then retreat to recharge.  There is a difference between giving of yourself and not giving yourself away. 

Although I didn't post here in June, I read many other people's web log entries.  I try to be generous in my willingness to  respond and comment.  I suppose I have scattered an essay or two across the blogosphere at the feet of other's blogs... that's the opportunity available to us: sharing and encouraging and being encouraged and learning from each other.  I hope soon to reference to and highlight of few of the blogs I have found noteworthy.

 While writing and reading blogs I've thought a lot about the  dilemma of personal censorship.How does one  identify internal censors, blinders, screens, misbeliefs? How does one sneak up on one's self to get a good candid shot?  It's a good trick, to lay down some of your defenses while you write about them in all their ardent hiddenness at the same time.

The delight of self encounter in the very act of writing is good stuff.   Balancing requires that one neither be too easy or too hard on one's self...  

 Ironically, our internal restraints, judicious restraints,  are part of potential openness and relaxation, we must say "No" to protect the "Yes" we have already committed to.

And sometimes the best of the candid shots are for our eyes only... and our shots of others...our understandings of others...respect and compassion for self and others...it goes a long way.  But not restraint to the point of not sharing, not giving...

What exactly do I mean by judicious restraints and boundaries?  I don't mean internal police. I don't mean a ball and chain.  I don't mean political correctness.  So many negative stereo types exist...

Trust is an important part of judicious restraint. I see internal surrender that then allows us to be free because we can trust we are barefoot where we should be barefoot and well shod for other terrain. It's the restraint that knows how edgy reality can be and even when I'm not paying super conscious attention to it, it informs me where the edges are. It's a restraint that is at the ready, you can climb mountains with it and when you start to slip the instinct leaps in every muscle. It needn't rob you of moment to moment entering in; in fact I think it gives more energy for doing so.  


Yes, there is a beautiful field of wild mountain flowers that one can reach without  as the old saying goes, "throwing all caution to the wind."

Other adages come to mind, we learn not to throw out the baby with the bath water and  not to overcorrect on a curvy road.

The body is a great teacher of boundaries. We are "fearfully and wonderfully made."  The cells, as I  remember their description from long ago biology classes, have a wall that is a semi-permeable discerning membrane.  A healthy cell boundary knows how to let  the good stuff in and separate and excrete unusable components.


Our bodies know we should try to avoid toxic realities, not over extend ourselves, that we can't safely embrace or hold onto impurities.  There's no room for what doesn't support life as a  pure flowing exchange where it is nutrients in, waste out to build strong cells, strong tissues, further organized as organs of purpose...multiple purposes, co-ordinated with an over- arching goal of letting yourself be a real,vulnerable and safe, available  and composed,distinct and unique person; a valuable existence validated  by God's love.

What's Wrong with the Press of Daily News? A Book Review

Back in November I borrowed How the News Makes Us Dumb The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society, by C. John Sommerville.  It was sitting on the shelf in the guest bedroom in the home of a friend who was taking exceptionally good care of me on an overnight stay.

There were many books I could have chosen but I picked up this one because I didn't like the title.  I don't like being told I am dumb, even when I'm  aware of the severe limitations anyone of us has, myself most certainly,  in vast and multiple realms.  Shouldn't I be reading more news to learn more about the world at large?  Why did my friend have this book?

I read chapter 1 before I fell asleep and got interested enough that I wanted to continue.

My friend, an avid reader, told me in the morning that she had not read the book yet herself, but was quite willing for me to borrow it and read it first.  She said the title had already reminded her to keep her reading heavily weighted in the history, biography and literature realms. When I got home with the book, I got busy with other things, but this last week, after a particularly heavy week of news reading, I picked the book up and was again drawn in and questioning my own response to, and my occasional immersion in,  the available daily leads and speculations of the media.

It isn’t as one might suspect, a book about the alleged bias of the news, be it conservative or liberal editors in question. It’s not about techniques of linguistic or factual manipulation. It’s not about journalists using events or people to become celebrities themselves. Nor is this book focused on the sheer incompetence of some journalists or the daunting tasks of what it would take to be an expert in the multiple realms that journalist wind up covering. It’s not about the sound bite oversimplification of television news or the concentration of news to a few corporate chains. Sommerville says that while all these issues worry him, that all these critiques have already been written as well as futile recommendations to improve the news industry by people who believe that daily news is important.

Critique of the news media is certainly not new.  Sommerville suggested  a snippet of Thomas Jefferson's critique could be stitched on a sampler.  Wanting to see the context I searched  the world wide web and found that when John Norville wrote to Thomas Jefferson  in 1807  "It would be a great favor, too, to have your opinion of the manner in which a newspaper, to be most extensively beneficial, should be conducted, as I expect to become the publisher of one for a few years." he  received a reply in which Jefferson first recommended authors to read on government and history, then very specifically critiqued  newspapers:

 To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, `by restraining it to true facts and sound principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.  (see Jefferson's complete letter at http://www.britannica.com/presidents/article-9116906)

Sommerville's book isn't new either. It was released in 1999. The irony is the fact that the examples are not up to date and that actually helps demonstrate the thesis of the book. As he says in his preface,        “Items in the news always seem a little homeless and disconnected when we stumble on them later. We have forgotten what they once meant, what the bigger picture was. That is because the news industry succeeded in destroying the context of those items, which is the best way to make money off them."

Sommerville, also author of a more academic book on the history of the news industry, says that in the three hundred year history of the industry it has developed in line with its essential nature and now at maturity demonstrates its essential flaw. His concern is the way in which “daily news” deconstructs our experience of the world and blocks the higher mental processes.

The industry isn't likely to go away. Those news deadlined columns will  be written, the air time will be filled even if the story isn't known yet; the news is a changing tide with waves of conflicting information  flooding in daily. As it says on the back of the book,  this is a book for those "dissatisfied with the state of the news media, but especially for those who think the news actually does inform them about the real world."

So if the news can’t be fixed, and Sommerville does make a good case for that, and one wants to be aware and informed on important events, wants to be an informed citizen in ever widening circles, local community, state, nation, the world, what is one to do?  Here's part of Sommerville's answer:  “If news were just one of the many things that we read each day, it wouldn’t have the same impact. If we would read science, the classics, history, theology or political theory at any length, we would make much better sense of today’s events.” Page 16.
 
This book is really about changing our relationship to the news media and that starts with being more aware of  how the news media is a flawed vehicle of social bonding and how important it is to be in our world rather than simply observe it through the lens of the news industry.  Sommerville thinks we, the consumer, have acquired an addiction, and news people are just supplying the market.

It is a short book, 150 pages.

“It will take a short book to show all the ways that dailiness constitutes a bias all by itself. Of course dailiness is necessary if we are to have a news industry. And that is why the news can’t be fixed. Consuming this industry’s ‘news product’ actually makes us dumb.” Page 10  

Sommerville's last chapter,Virtual Society or Real Community,  makes it evident that he is a historian and a caring citizen of this day.  He is an encourager and has real suggestions for how you can "personally learn to inhabit your world instead of just observing it...  Let's not think what we must all do. That is the way of the news-addressing us in the anonymous voice of an imagined public..."

I'll be giving this book back to my friend this next week when I get a chance to see her again in person.  Maybe she will read it now...maybe you might too?  Or if you don't, maybe you will read a good biography or get into a subject in depth...plunge into your own life and interests in some way that your world and the world of those around you is richer.  Tell a good story...we all need to hear one.

Civility: treating others with dignity, compassion and respect can save lives

On September 22, 2010 at Rutgers University, a young man who had apparently been pitilessly spied upon, videotaped and broadcast on the World Wide Web ( later reporting did not confirm this) in private dorm room moments, left a one-sentence suicide intention note on his Facebook page and subsequently jumped to his death.

Whatever glorious potentials his life may have held for him are now ended and his parents and others near and dear must weather his loss the rest of their days.

Who are all the actors in this forlorn story? Transitions in general and developmental leaps in particular are times when many of us need help. Various aspects of coming of age, such as leaving home for the first time, living amongst strangers, intense exposure to new people with different backgrounds and values, becoming sexually aware or active, loss of a first love, school or other performance pressures, unwieldy group dynamics or being singled out for differences, can put a strain on the most well adjusted young person.

Who can calculate the added complexities or intensities of one's privacy being shared on social networks?

The danger that is created in such circumstances of vulnerability should never be underestimated. People sometimes enact in one moment of despair an irreversible end even if every other moment of their lives and the instincts of their being would stand against the threat they, in their pain, suddenly pose to themselves. For reasons perhaps forever beyond knowing, Tyler Clementi did jump from the George Washington Bridge to his death in the Hudson River. Tyler Clementi was eighteen years old.

The alleged tormentor, Dharun Ravi, is eighteen years old. As he faces his capacity for hard heartedness toward his roommate, what other depths of feeling will he reel through? He’s out of school now, but likely learning about how fast things can spin out of control and how unintended consequences can leap in a single bound from the shadows of our deeds.
Was Ravi’s alleged partner an active participant or did she just witness the travesty and do nothing? If she did just stand by, Molly Wei, may be realizing how dangerous it can be to be complacent about other’s bad ideas, and what it can cost to be passive or afraid to stand up for what is right.

And what of those individuals who tuned in and watched and wrote about the invasion of Tyler Clementi’s privacy without concern for him or the principles, ethic and laws violated? We err in commission, but there are also errors of omission.
Mr. Clementi’s family statement has been quoted in several news stories I have read:

"We understand that our family's personal tragedy presents important legal issues for the country as well as for us," said a statement from the family.

"Regardless of legal outcomes, our hope is that our family's personal tragedy will serve as a call for compassion, empathy and human dignity," the statement said.

We are already a land of many laws. Even if it weren’t illegal to invade another’s privacy, to do so is gross disrespect of others; and ultimately we cannot disrespect the lives of others without diminishing our own. What we need to enact is heart for others, not just for people like us, or for people we understand, but for everyone....for  we are the  people, that hold  such truths "to be self-evident, "  that is to say, to be part of natural law.  Person by person, will our social institutions affirm that development of character evidenced by respect for others is of primal importance and the foundation of any real education?   I hope so.

Life is fragile and civility, treating others with dignity, compassion and respect, can save lives.

I want to believe that the Clementi’s are not asking for the impossible.
                                                                  ~~~~

Tangled up in Time : Memory, Loss and Hope Make History -dedicated to 9/11/2001

A Memory offered in Memorium of the Lives Lost and Changed by September 11, 2001

I stopped in the town of Benicia the other day. Popping in there once in a while helps remind me of the child I was before I took my first hard blow.  I never lived in Benicia, but my younger brothers and I were, without our older brothers or parents, once left to stay a few nights with family friends. 

Benicia, California

 Until I was five years old, I had lived in the city, San Francisco,where I couldn't go anywhere without escort. Then I lived in a wonderful valley where I became well versed in the creek that marked the back of our property, the blackberry patches and apple trees in the empty lots, the uppermost climbable limbs of the buckeye trees that grew strongest at the west edge of the valley, the rocky bluffs and caves of the grassy hills between us and Muir Beach on the Pacific Ocean.  I was happy in Tamalpias Valley to roam around on my own.  As often as not I had a book with me.  What more could a kid want?

Visiting the town of Benicia in 1962 I found  no lack of nature to explore and the parents temporarily  in charge of us were content to let us wander about freely.  School had been out for ten days and  I had just finished seventh grade.  The little town was, back in the early 1960s, poor and small, already diminished from what it had been, but for me the small scale of the streets and houses made everything feel accessible. Life felt so available. I ran here and there, a miniature tourist, content to wander from the muddy flats and back up the streets of the town that hadn't yet had its hundredth birthday.

The history of Benicia is one of  greatness passing through and as quickly moving on. Benicia was   established by three men. The year was 1874.  Dr. Robert Semple, who was a newsman from Kentucky, a Bear Flag revolter and a politician and Thomas Larkin, the first United States Consul to California, a traveler, storekeeper, a trader and man of Monterey renown.  Together these two bought land from Comandante General Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo who asked that the town be called Francisca after his wife, Francisca Benicia Carillo de Vallejo.  But Yerba Buena had just become San Francisco and claimed the name. Francisca could not be used.  The lady's middle name would have to suffice.  

After the cities of Vallejo and San Jose,  Benicia was chosen to be the third capitol of California and reigned as such for 379 days, from February 11, 1853 to February 25, 1854.  Around that time the founders had a falling out and went their separate ways leaving the town to create its own destiny. 

Inland waterways are an opportunity for confluence. It was at Benicia in the 1860's  that Pony Express Riders who had missed their connection on the Sacramento River Delta steamers could  ferry across the waters blocking their trail. In the 1870's  a leg of the transcontinental Central Pacific Railroad established a major railroad ferry across the Carquinez Strait from Benicia to Port Costa.  Benicia became home to the largest ferries in the world, transporting entire trains across the inland waters of the San Francisco Bay.

It was in Benicia  in 1901, where the world's first long-distance power line was stretched across the Carquinez Straits.  When wheat was the big crop, it was stored in Benicia, but when railroad bridges replaced ferries and the early 1900 wheat crops declined, Benicia declined too, mouldering without economic purpose on the back waters of the bay.

 Not until World War II,  did the little town grow again when it served as a military arsenal. The war boom economy doubled  the population quickly to 7,000 residents.  The arsenal closed in the 1960s.  Later in that decade, oil refineries were built northeast of the town's residences. Eventually, as more bridges were built connecting the bay area's various ports and towns by roads, the little town of no longer as important trains and ferries became what all towns near big cities are destined to become, a  bedroom for 28,000 locals and commuters and a weekend diversion destination for city dwellers. 

But that is not the town that was back in those few days of my summer vacation.  Then it was just a  small modest town with no great current boons, but the confluence of its waterways and flying birds, its child  friendly streets, cushioned me with hospitality while hope and longing opened in me in the first bright days of the summer of my thirteenth year.

  

And then on the third afternoon of our visit, my father and older brothers returned unexpectedly. I blindly ran to the murky waters that day in disbelief, wanting to shake off as dream or lie what we'd 

been told. Our mother had died.

Here I am tangling my history up with the early history of this little town. I don't often tell my story. I know for everyone its often a  struggle to keep clear angles of perspective in this life. I make an effort to pay attention to current events and history.  So I've reminded myself, with a little history lesson of a few of the events that have come and gone and shaped this town, of some perspective, and yet it's true that even at my age, as I briefly walked about the edges of Benicia the other day, what I can see best is what had once  happened there to me. I can't even hear the name of the town and not remember, palpably receiving that first wrenching.

How true might this be for those who lost family and friends in New York, Pennsylvania, the Pentagon. Today is September 11, 2010, the anniversary of a great tragedy of terror and the loss of many lives.  So many people heard that day or the next,  how they would have to go on in  their world carrying love lost; heard that they had entered a forever- changed- reality.  At some level, we all did, didn't we?

I offer this tangled memory of mine in  memoriam with my personal acknowledgement of how deeply the loss of loved ones is, how enduring our losses are.

I was also reminded at the water's edge the other day by these lovely little mallards sunning on a log amongst relics of Benicia's past, that there is One who does have all his little ducks in a row. 

We need not grieve as ones without hope. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude ~ Part Two: The Butterflies for Anonymous

In response to my review of One Hundred Years of Solitude on May 16, 2010 Anonymous said...
I could not disagree more.
Cien Años de Soledad is a beautiful, magical work, a mosaic of good and evil of humanity and life. In tropical rain season, yes there will be mud, but also beautiful plant life. Living in the tropics is a different life experience, and a different culture with its own beauties. Why not comment on the young man who is followed by a flock of butterflies wherever he goes?

I have not read Gabo's work in English translation, but I fear he has been much misunderstood here.

Dear Anonymous,
Thank you for responding with concern for a book, an author, and a sense of culture that is important to you.

You suggest that I write about the man who had butterflies follow him. That is actually a very good idea. He is very important to the story as a whole.  As that man, Mauricio Babilonia, is sneaking through the Buendia family garden where he has nightly been lifting up wall tiles to gain entrance into a scorpion-ridden bathroom where he trysts with a young girl of the family, he is shot.

"A bullet lodged in his spinal column reduced him to his bed for the rest of his life. He died of old age in solitude, without a moan, without a protest, without a single moment of betrayal, tormented by memories and by the yellow butterflies, who did not give him a moment's peace, and ostracized as a chicken thief. " p. 297

In fact, it was the butterflies that alerted Fernanda, Meme's mother, as to why her daughter was bathing every night.

"Fernanda went into her bedroom by chance and there were so many butterflies that she could scarcely breath."

So she takes action and gets a guard stationed in the garden and tells him to watch for a chicken thief...knowing that it is Meme’s lover who will be shot. In this context, butterflies are not a symbol of hope, of metamorphosis; of transformation...they are in fact described as suffocating.

I suppose the one character that I liked was Ursula. It was Ursula that drug me through the book...the mother who took her money from making candy and enlarged her house to be sure there was room for all the family. Sadly though, in those rooms, the sisters cursed each other, the father abandoned his faith and went crazy pondering pseudoscience and all manner of incest and torment ensued.

The butterflies do figure prominently to the very end...for it is the man who was born of the couple in the bathroom who is the last member of the family.

As he did not know who he was, who his parents were, he unknowingly beds his sister who then dies in childbirth. He is distraught and winds up in a prostitute's bed that night, leaving his baby unattended. When he returns he sees his child is

“a dry bloated bag of skin that all the ants in the world were dragging toward their holes along the stone path of the garden..."

The last page of the book is devoted to him learning about his family from the gypsy's parchments. He recognizes his own story

"…he found the instant of his own conception among the scorpions and the yellow butterflies in a sunset bathroom where a mechanic satisfied his lust on a woman who was giving herself out of rebellion.”

He starts skipping ahead in the parchemnts, looking for the predictions of his death.

“Before reaching the final line, however, he had already understood that he would never leave that room…”

Then but for a few more sentences, that’s the end of the book, end of the family, end of the village…. and hence my response to this tale…four hundred pages to argue life is meaningless.

It is with that that I disagree.

Hello Anonymous Commenter and Lurkers, This Post is for You

Dear Anonymous,

 I wonder if you are one return visitor or if several students studying English have visited.

Even though you don't have a profile, you could sign your first name to your comments and maybe even tell what country you reside in, or where you are visiting from.  It would be interesting to know what your main course of study is.   It would make your comments more meanful and personal for me.

I would be curious to learn how reading a  blog helped you accomplish an assignment  for college?  Are you searching for particular subject matter?  Is leaving a comment part of the assignment?  Notice the spelling of the word  a s s i g n m e n t.  One reason I wonder if "anonymous" is one  return reader is because this word is always misspelled in the comments the same way and I get comments with almost identical wording.  I should have saved all the comments I haven't published, I could have done a whole post with them.

I mean to post more of my writing here on WRITE PURPOSE but then I have second thoughts.  When my children were small I did not let them play out in the street  where they might be run over or stolen.  That's a little bit how blog land feels.  In some ways, anonymous readers  are part of that feeling. So maybe if the lurkers and anonymous commenters say hello it will help me risk more in this public place.   What do you think?

Sweet December...Burma

I thought I was posting about Sweet December and Burma on this blog...but I had actually opened a window over at Bread on the Water so I hope you'll drop in over there and read a bit about Burma...a land where many of the rights we take almost for granted are seriously compromised.
The Burmese people it has been my privilege to meet are some of the sweetest folks I've met...well go on and read what I posted earlier and maybe you will even have a word to share with me in response. I always welcome your comments.

The Guard was Down

You have seen today's headlines...dressed as a diplomatic guard a man asks to use the toilet facilities in the lobby of the World Food Center in Pakistan. Hidden behind his vulnerable sounding request was 16 pounds of explosives. As I first read the story I am thinking in normal human terms, this person has a primal need, we all have these needs, someone took pity on him. It takes me only a moment though, as touching as my first thoughts may have been, a guard had to let him pass.

People need to eat and five people who made it their job, their focus to feed displaced and hungry people in Pakistan, have been murdered. The survivors, those workers who live on and the neighbors of the compound in the surrounding residential area in Islamabad are traumatized. Whether the guard let his guard down or was part of the plan...all human relations are challenged by such treachery.

They were feeding the displaced, those who themselves have no accommodations of their own, those who are daily hungry. To the memory of those killed, in their honor, I paraphrase from the Epistle of James: Pure religion is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction...

~~~~~~~~~

Classic Cars in Carmel Clunkers ? No Way.

It was a little chilly out, August 13th, and I had lots of other draws on my attention, but I did snap a few of the classic cars that were driving in the Pebble Beach Tour d'Elegance. Capturing moving cars was a section in my new camera book I hadn't read yet. Why post them here on my Write Purpose Blog? Well, I'm just glad that these automobiles were not deemed clunkers!

Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

This one had some trouble tracking the lane. Must have been a bit of work getting out to Big Sur and back.

This one apparently took best of show...it is a 1937 Horsch 853 Voll & Ruhrbeck sport cabriolet. It usually lives in Sparks Nevada. Can you imagine it got shipped out to the Kahleefohrnya coast!

My favorite of the parade and I didn't get the picture I wanted.

That's all folks.

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A Squeak for Voices Stolen

Stolen, it's a common word in our world. Riots break out in Iran with cries of a stolen election. Is it true? Can we know? Or has our trust been stolen in the sources of news that can reach us so quickly and sometimes mislead us. Should I trust the headline that says the election was "fair and healthy"?

Identities are stolen. Innocence can be stolen, but don't let them steal your hope.

Yes, your thunder can be 'stole.'

Or your pig...."he stole a pig and away he run..." What happened to that guy or the pig? "The pig was eat and Tom was beat and Tom went howling down the street." Perhaps Anonymous wasn't telling us an actual true story in "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son" but it's a believable story.

Much thieving occurs under the mighty drug of self delusion. What a classic character Tolkien created in the whispers of Gollum, "It's mine, all mine, my precious."

As Woody Guthrie sang in his Pretty Boy Floyd :

As through this life you travel, You'll meet some funny men
Some rob you with a six gun And some with a fountain pen.

I've been learning about some pen and ink "t" crossing and some "i" dotting that may line right up to spell a "thief" in my personal realm. Once I have the facts, I might squeak about it a little bit, although I suspect that pig has already been "eat." Most probably I'll arm myself with the reminder I need...or maybe I'll remind myself of the armour I need.
"Do not store up for yourselves treasure on earth, where moths and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal." (Gospel according to Matthew 6:19)

All right, I'll work on that. I may need to steal away a little quiet from this noisy world to hear aright, but I'll work on that. And it's also good to remind myself to keep my own word true in all realms; a form of not stealing from myself. Truth is alchemy - a transformer of the common into the precious.

If someone does steal your voice, if your one vote is stolen, that's a hard thing; which is one of the reasons it's hard to read about the elections in Iran and wonder who did have a say? There are over 42 million young people in Iran. From Tehran ( APF):

"The main mobile telephone network in Iran was cut in the capital Tehran Saturday evening while popular Internet websites Facebook and YouTube also appeared to be blocked."

If the elective voice of the Iranian people was stolen, I hope they won't lose hope. Because I am able, I'm just squeaking a little here for those who may may not currently be able to squeak for themselves or may be in danger when they do. No matter where you stand, bad things can happen in the street, look at Tom and the pig. You can read the Tehran APF story here.

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Culture Bandits

Some of us are more impacted visually than others, but the visual environment effects all of us. Culture and environment are inextricably entwined. Companies that make money without care for the culture they create can only survive if we feed our nickels and dimes into their pockets.

I like the gas station in town, it's actually full service and the guys that work there are kind and helpful. What I don't like is the advertisements in the window of the mini-mart.

Full Throttle Blue Demon is apparently a COKE creation and the 2 foot by 3 foot poster ad is uninspiring to say the least. Pair that with a Skoal "Bandit" ad and you have a picture of the confused way the commercial community lauds the wrong guys. When people go out and act like demons and bandits we lament their behavior...we do don't we? Why is good light wasted on bad guys?

I say vote with your pocketbook. If all of us resist buying products that are in some way not good for us, then there will be enough of us to make a difference. The culture you impact will be your own.

Why Do We Tell Stories?

Sometimes what wants to come out wants to be handwritten...here are four pages. If you click on the image it will enlarge and should be legible. Please tell me if it is not. When you finish a page, you can use your browser's back button to return to the post and then click on the next page.

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