Tales of a Memory Hunt

.

It is a somewhat strange image. I am on a path, holding my favorite hiking staff, the one I bought at a medieval fair in Wisconsin a few years ago. It is wood, dark walnut stain, spiral top with a leather grip, my name carved below the grip - it stands a bit taller than I. The air is neither warm nor cool - neutral enough to be nonexistent, so I am dressed in jeans and a comfortable long-sleeved shirt, running shoes and my trusty compression socks. There is a water bottle on my belt and I carry a light pack filled, I assume, with things I like to eat. I am in a forest glade, and while sunlight dapples on the area immediately at my feet, the myriad paths that lead away from the clearing are quickly lost in mist. It is not quite fog. The tops of the surrounding trees remain sunlit for the most part, but descend into the mist as I try to peer down each path. 

I know why I am here.  A note was slipped under the door of my consciousness, just as I was trying to slide into my afternoon nap.  It was neither long nor complex - ironically I don’t recall the specifics at the moment. A name, a face, a room, a vista, a flavor, a tune, one of those - or something closely related. So here I am on this path inside my head. You can take comfort from the fact that it is nothing like those pictures of the brain you encounter in books, or magazine articles, or on the Internet. Nothing grey and squishy, and if there are crevasses and convolutions they must be far above me, beyond the tree tops and what I assume is a sun up there. 

Having procrastinated as long as possible, I move on down the path.  This is not as simple as it may sound. The path has a disconcerting habit of bifurcating, and trifurcating, and whatever furcating comes next: No, not here. Maybe over there. It might have looked like this, smelled like that, felt somewhat similar to that other thing. This was the dominant color. No, maybe a shade more blue. A touch of turquoise. Maybe a bit of crimson. Now add just a bit of the smell of a Spring morning, a touch of Fall when you could still burn leaves, and maybe a hint of that first snowfall that started a bit after midnight when you were coming home late - or were supposed to have been in bed hours ago. Hold that. That seems about right. 

But, oh, wait. Through the trees. Over there. Is that a different path? A better one? Is there less mist over there? Doesn’t that seem a bit more like what I am trying to recall? Yes. No. Maybe. So I take my staff and poke around the edge of the path. It seems solid so, using little baby steps, I make my way through the trees and am soon standing on the other path. Now, right or left? Straight ahead or backwards? Sure, but which is ahead and which is backwards?  Maybe, if I return to the nap I can figure it out. OK.  Sleeping now, I think.

Yet, hold on.  What’s that? Over there, at the edge of consciousness. A note! Here, let me see. What does it say? I can’t quite make it out. Maybe if .  .  .   

.

A Bench by the Side of the Road

.

Just a bench without plaque or notation  

Of events either stirring or grand.

Nor is it a rough-hewn construction  

Inclining a traveler to stand. 

It rests at the point of conjunction  

Of many a well-traveled path, 

But gives no real hint of direction  

Of what future should follow the past. 

So I sit in the twilight of evening 

Watching fireflies welcome the night, 

And suppose that I ought to be leaving 

But somehow it just seems to be right 

To linger awhile while believing  

That one path or another will tempt me 

As the moon fills the sky with her light. 

‘Til then I will try to stay peaceful, 

While enjoying this lack of a load, 

And keep time with the call of the crickets 

As I rest on this bench by the road. 

.

Oppose Harm in the Voting Booth

.

This final tenet of Distilled Harmony has a vital place in the voting booth.  Oppose Harm is the last of the four tenets because in some ways it is a tacit admission that the first three were unsuccessful. We need to remember that the primary objective of Distilled Harmony as a belief system is to enable and encourage a kinder and more gentle world. It calls upon us first to foster harmony, then to enable beauty, next clarify our understanding of the world via studying and reducing the needless or deceptive “smoke and mirrors” of political and social agendas. 

Sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes in politics we find ourselves confronted with candidates who simply do not believe in a kinder and more gentle world, or even worse, believe that such a world should be the sole province of those who are members of the candidate’s specific demographic categories: ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, political party, etc.  These are the “my way or the highway” candidates who may pretend to want to “reach across the aisle” to advance a shared view for America but in reality believe that there is only one proper view of America and it is their special property. They are bullies.

In the history of American politics there are plenty of examples of bullies in all political parties. Some parties and religious organizations, mostly no longer with us to any meaningful degree, were actually founded to advance the agenda of one gang of bullies or another, like Charles Coughlin and his radical quasi-Catholic National Shrine of the Little Flowers, a vocal Canadian/American front for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party [Nazis] which swept into power in Germany in the middle third of the 1900s. Hitler’s Nazis, while not a unique instance, are perhaps the most visible example here in the West of what can happen when a “bully-centered” party is able to capture a country’s significant political and military power.

For those of us who hold Distilled Harmony as an important and viable belief system, the 2020 presidential election is a complex decision, but not for the usual reasons. While ballotpedia [ballotpedia.org] reports that 107 Republicans have filed to run for president, the site admits that there are a lot of pseudonyms and “fake candidates” on that list. And despite former Governor Weld of Massachusetts having thrown his hat into the Republican ring, no one seriously considers any serious challenge to Trump. For those of us who believe in the four tenets of Distilled Harmony, or values closely allied to those tenets, President Trump has removed himself from consideration. He ran unabashedly as a racist bully, and his administration has created a dark “Bully Pulpit” unlike anything Teddy Roosevelt could have imagined. Demanding absolute personal loyalty and pulling “truth” from the most malevolent corners of the Internet, he provides a textbook example for everything Distilled Harmony opposes.

Still, the Democrats are’t making it easy. As I write this, there are 271 Democrats who have filed with the Federal Election Committee as presidential candidates. Among those 271 are 25 or 30 who appear to be serious possibilities. While it is true that all of the serious candidates fall closer to the ideals and tenets of Distilled Harmony than our current President, they are by no means a cluster of Stepford Candidates, clones cut from the same cloth. They all do hope that folks who voted for Trump last time around are suffering from some degree of voter's remorse - “I didn’t think he was actually that much of a racist bully.” But there real differences among these serious democratic candidates, and I appear to be on all their mailing lists. While I do have some early favorites, I am nowhere near a final choice. I have a lot more reading to do - comparing policy statements and proposals and researching past behaviors as they relate to the four tenets of Distilled Harmony. Hopefully my eventual favorite will survive the primaries relatively unscathed and come Election Day I will be able to fill in the little circle next to the name of a genuinely harmonious candidate.  

Well, that is it for my “Voter’s Guide According to Distilled Harmony.” I hope you found it helpful. I will now return my attention to painting and poetry, both of which are more in harmony with sleeping well and lowering my blood pressure. By the way, did you know that almost all of Bob Ross’s paintings live in a small warehouse in Northern Virginia? And no, you can’t buy one. You are supposed to paint your own. :-)

.

Distill Complexity in The Voting Booth

.

Political campaigns often represent the dark side of this tenet of Distilled Harmony. In the usual context of Distilled Harmony this tenet asks us to examine the seeming complexity of life and distill it to its least complex truth. What do we mean by things like truth, happiness, love, honor? In the context of politics the notion of distilling complexity requires us to examine issues that are often presented - in the bills that actually eventually reach Congress - in quite complex language. We should attempt to distill that linguistic complexity in an effort to discern the potential impact of those bills on policy and law. Political campaigns are something else completely. Campaigns craft “slogans” designed to allow supporters to graft their own perceptions and objectives onto the often amorphous identity of the candidate. Some recent examples:

Bill Clinton: 1992 “For People, For a Change” “It’s Time to Change America”

Bush 2004 “A Safer World and a More Hopeful America.”

Obama 2008: “Yes, We Can.” “Change” “Hope”  

Romney 2012: “Believe in America”

And most recently:

Hillary Clinton: “Fighting for America.”

Trump: “Make America Great Again.”

One would be hard pressed to take exception with any of these slogans, yet they represent candidates who would implement radically different policies in pursuit of very different visions for America. The slogans obviously shift for incumbents urging us to “stay the course” and challengers who want to “throw the bums out!" but the shared intent is to craft a slogan broad enough to morph comfortably with the beliefs and values of a candidate’s core supporters as well as those of the all-important undecided voters. Quite the exercise in saying nothing specific but seeming to say just what your audience hopes you mean.

That makes things more difficult for us, often resulting in "voter’s remorse": I didn’t think that was what s/he meant by “ ________ for America!” In this instance it is our task is flip the distill complexity tenet on its head and paint a little complexity on the simple slogans. We need to define our own priorities and then examine the candidate’s past performance in regard to those issues - what does each candidate advocate for America regarding our priorities? Healthcare? Education? Climate change? Immigration? Social security? Student loans? Where do we stand on these issues and what has each candidate done in the political or business arenas to advance our priorities? Is their "great, safe, changed” America the same as our "great, safe, changed" America? Or have they championed policies and behaviors and political appointees that contradict our view of the best possible America?

Once we come to understand that more complex view of the candidate’s view of America, then we can distill that complexity into a simple decision: open your wallet, attend the rally, mark your ballet. 

.

Monet by the Highway

.

The pioneers had it a lot tougher. Hard wooden seats, Conestoga wagons with no springs, few roads to speak of, and a two, four or maybe six ox power plant. Still, over the last couple of weeks I have come to sense a new feeling of kinship with those folks. I have spent what feels like many hours in the back of a friend’s car looking out the window at the freeways in and around Chicago. It has been an interesting experience. No complaints about the back seat. Worlds removed from a Conestoga wagon, it lives in a high end air-conditioned Mercedes 550 with an excellent sound system. I do occasionally share the seat with a large, rather rambunctious black lab who is far more interested in being in the front seat. But we all have dreams that will never be realized. Quite often the front seat conversation centers on people I have never met and places to which I have never been, so I look out the window.

There is a lot of stuff to see out the window.  There is no doubt this is a huge city - Wikipedia puts the population of the metropolitan area at around 9.7 million, third in the US behind LA and New York. The view constantly changes. Buildings both gleaming and gutted, billboards for every product under the sun - yes, every product! People of any imaginable size, shape, hue and attitude. A menagerie of pets, and occasionally other faces peering back at me out of other windows. Sometimes we wave. 

But I am often more taken by the flora than by the fauna and the architecture. Down in the city proper the flowers are most often enabled. Parks and fanciful concrete planters house the exotic end of the plant palette; crimsons and golds, purples and cobalt climb stalks to make a sculptor proud. But as you wind your way out toward the burbs, the spaces left alone reassert themselves. Hemerocallis - or day lilies, which probably started as a tasteful intentional border or pathway have invaded the ditches from whence they originally sprang, and garnered their most lowbrow name - ditch lilies.  Occasionally leaping across deserts of concrete to the median, everywhere they provide wonderful splashes of color against a background of myriad greens.  

The greens begin as unassuming tufts of grass along the edge of the highway, but soon climb up into foliage my mother could probably have named, in the colloquial, if not the Latin - probably “bachelor’s breeches," or something equally colorful. Bullrushes and stalks of foliage that must be kin to the buffalo grass of the early midwestern prairie, peak up in wild hedges 5 or 6 feet tall, often entwined with the deceptively attractive toxicodendron radicals, aka poison ivy, which thrives in the area. The "water-featured” ponds of the downtown office parks give way to their more rural inspirations often covered with enough lily pads and ivory-tinged blooms to make an impressionist salivate.   

More hardwoods than pines claim the further horizons that can be glimpsed between the now more scattered buildings. They often host wisteria, another weed turned high-brow ornamental. Fields begin to crop up. Corn seems to be doing well, and my guess about the lower plants would be just that - a guess. Too low for soybeans, too high for strawberries. “You can take the kid out of town, but you can't take the .  .  .  .  .  “ You get it.   

Clouds scuttle across a sky that is improbably a Carolina blue. Might have something to do with winds off the plains to the west meeting the winds blowing in from Lake Michigan to the east.  Towering thunderheads on one side, fluffy Bob Ross "happy little clouds" on the other. They are the kinds of views that make me wish I could paint. Instead I just settle back and look out the window. 

.