This is a repeat, because it bears repeating–a dozen times a day.  I routinely forget, mindfulness is key to my mental health.  The quotes may not be exact; close enough for an antique memory.

Whatever happens I will create no more problems.
I will create no more pain for myself.
—The Power of Now
Eckhart Tolle

If we don’t look into hope and fear, seeing a thought arise, seeing the chain reaction that follows, if we don’t train ourselves to sit with that energy without being snared by the drama, then we’re always going to be afraid.
—When Things Fall Apart
Pema Chodron

Practicing mindfulness I can recognize what is happening in the present without grasping or aversion.  I can practice mere recognition of what is gong on within me and around me without judgment or reaction.  This helps me to keep stability and freedom alive within myself.
—Touching the Earth
Thich Nhat Hanh

The though manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.  .  .  .

As the shadow follows he body
as we think, so we become.
—The Dhammapada
(Saying of the Buddha)

A new, more prosaic one:
It’s hard to remember your assigned to drain the swamp,
when you’re up to your ass in alligators!
(I picked this up many years back.)

Three cormorants,
lean, licorice decanters
balanced on the rusted roof of
a nineteen-thirteen Model T truck.

A nine-acre motorcar bone-yard,
seven thousand crumpled, crushed, corroded, carcasses
indecently exposed through toothless gaps
in a Lady-Bird-Johnson board fence.

A fat man
in bib-overalls and straw hat,
gripping the wheel of a squat, red, fifty-one Ford pickup
with gunny-sacks of wheat,
chased down a gravel road by a set-stream of dust.
On the grain sacks, a smiling merle mongrel,
her ears blow back like little banners.

Six young Mexican men
loitering around a sunburned, sixty-five Barracuda
on the side of the highway.
The hood is up.
Blue-green liquid streams down the asphalt.

A bearded kid
in a black, seventy-three Fury
with one brown door, open sun roof,
and dented fenders.

A gray-haired man,
with a pomegranate nose and Greek fisherman’s cap
driving a cream and tan, eighty-six Minnie Winnie.
A stern matron with chocolate poodle curls and pastel sweater
studies a road map.

In a Rest Area,
a powder-blue, eighty-nine Ranger
and matching over-size camper.
Through a window behind a sink,
a Lemon Joy detergent bottle, plastic orange scouring pad.
Buff wallpaper with brown wine jugs and baskets of bread.

A sixteen-year-old blond
sporting a ponytail
in a two-door, red, ninety-one Mustang with a white vinyl top.
At a stop light her lips move.

A sever young woman
with a slim nose, deep-set eyes, and straight raven-black hair,
controlling a gray and maroon, ninety-three Trans Sport,
a wailing baby in a mauve infant’s seat,
four, silent youngsters, anchored with black shoulder belts.

A lean, sun-tanned man
in a three-piece business suit,
aiming a forest-green Jaguar XJ12 with temporary tags
down the freeway twenty-five miles an hour over the speed limit,
talking on a cell-phone,
gesticulating.

According to Wikipedia the Supreme Court of the United State “has ultimate (and largely discretionary) appellate jurisdiction over all federal court and state court cases that involve a point of constitutional or statutory law.” As “the supreme law of the land” the Constitution–carefully reasoned, written, and explicit–assures grievances and issues are decided in a fair, impartial, if you will “cut-and-dried,” fashion.  What does the Constitution or statute say?  That’s it.  Case closed.  No-brainer.  Right?

If Court decisions falls back on the Constitution, the law, why do Liberal and Conservative administrations spend every last ounce of energy, every available resource, every dollar getting their gal or guy onto the Highest Bench while the loyal opposition expends equal efforts blocking them?

It’s said, figures don’t lie but liars can figure.  The law’s the law, but  Justices, judges, and lawyers–who never of course lie–receive exorbitant retainers to figure.  “Ay, there’s the rub.”

Legal eagles read the law through lens of personal experience, belief, and political philosophy.  So, to get what you want load the Court with your gals and guys.
And they damn well better do the job!  That’s why we busted our ass putting them there.

Today’s Supreme Court has four Liberals: two Jewish females, one Latina female, and a son of Italian immigrants.  The Conservatives include four white and one black male.  With civil rights, gun rights, voter rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights, gender issues, abortion, public education, racial equality, or separation of church and state on the docket, care to guess which way the Majority will vote?

Parenthetically, regarding Justice Thomas, seen from my Liberal bias a Conservative Administration nominating a black for the High Court appeared out of character somehow.  In my view, with impeccable character and credentials assumed, Justice Thomas’s nomination reflected political expediency: replace a black (Liberal), Justice Thurgood Marshall, with a black (Conservative); the coattails of Civil Rights; and most intriguing, “moral licensing,” a realization emerging from Social Psychology.  In his podcast, “Revisionist History,” Malcom Gladwell describes moral licensing as “the ‘token’–the outsider whose success serves not to alleviate discrimination but perpetrate it.”  With Justice Thomas in place, Conservatives say, “See, we put a black on the Court.  We’re not prejudiced.  Case closed,” and continue to nominate and appoint the barest minimum number of females and non-Caucasians, business as usual.

So why waste time arguing? As things are now, hand the briefs to Chief Justice Roberts, have Justice Thomas or Justice Gorsuch write the majority opinion.  The same would be so with a Liberal majority.

Of course Justices don’t always walk the Party line, but as in a casino, load the dice, stack the deck, and hire the dealers.  The house, the Majority Party, rarely loses.

A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.
Saul Bellow

 

 

“The way I see it, if we don’t all march in step, if we don’t do as we’re told, if we don’t follow or leaders blindly, there’s no hope of saving our freedom.”
Major Frank Burns
M*A*S*H

Children live in their body.
They bicycle and skateboard and rollerblade.
They play Tag and Hide-and-Seek and Hopscotch
and Ring-Around-A-Rosy and Baseball and Football.
Children run and jump and stumble and fall and cry and run again.
They laugh and chatter and shout and giggle
and interrupt and seldom seem to listen.
Children only stop from exhaustion
or when exhausted grownups force them.

Grownups live in their head.
Some bicycle and rollerblade and jog,
slower and s-l-o-w-e-r.
The bowl and golf
and sit and smoke and drink
and read and watch TV–a lot
and sometimes think.
Grownups rarely cry and don’t laugh like they did.
The chatter and shout
and interrupt and seldom listen.
Grownups stop easily.
They would like to live in their body but it’s tired,
worn-out from once belonging to a child.

Shortly after high school I left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormons).  Over the past couple of decades I’ve compiled a laundry list of questions and issues convincing me Joseph Smith Jr.’s story and church are bogus.  Following is my take on why and how he adopted polygamy.  Intereated in details?  Check out Doctrine and Covenants Section 132.

_________________

Hey . . . God

From Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph, to Moses from a burning bush and Saul on the road to Damascus, God spoke to His chosen.  Basically ignorant regarding scripture and theology, I can’t say how often the Old-timers “saw” the Big Guy “in the flesh”.  In the early nineteenth century; however an upstate New York farm boy, Joseph Smith Jr., struck up a face-to-face acquaintance with not only Angels and Jesus Christ but God Almighty Himself.  As recounted in The Church of Latter Day Saints canon, (Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price) Joseph and God seem to have chatted frequently on a first-name basis.

Joseph: Hey . . . God.
God: ‘sup Joe?
J.: I been thinkin’.
G.: I know.
J.: In the Old Testament Solomon was your prophet, right?
G.: Okay?
J.:  Now, I’m Your Man.
G.: Go on.
J.: And Solomon, he had all those wives, whose conkiebines.
G.: You want to fornicate.
J.: No, well, I mean  .  .  .
G.: I see you eyeing the sweeties.  You want to fornicate, Joe.
J.: Hey it’s a big job down here, deliverin’ Your word.  It ain’t easy.     People criticizing,      threatening.  It’s a lonely job.
G.: I hear ya Joe.  I was there.  You’d feel less alone if  you had  .  .  .    companionship.  Hopping in bed with one of My maidens now and then would ease the stress.
J.: Right!
G.: Go ahead Joe.  Fornicate all you want.
J.: Gosh thanks  .  .  .  But there’s a problem.
G.: Emma.
J.: Yeah Emma.
G.: You tell little Emma keep her bloomers on.  This is a man thing.
J.: Right!
G.: You, and the Brethren too, you can fornicate with, oh something like say ten virgins, and not sin.  Call it My “everlasting covenant.”  Break it you’re sunk!  That’ll keep the wives quiet.  Write it up Joe.  Tell ’em I said so.
J.: Thanks God, thanks a lot!
G.: Anytime Joe.

I wish you would praise me.  I wish you’d say I’m wise and wonderful, even when I’m not.  I want to believe I’m okay but I’m afraid.  I’m not sure.  I need to hear it from you.  Without your assurance an irrational passion compels me to earn your approval.

Do you see how hard I work, the indecency I endure?  I’m an entertainer, promiscuous, a prostitute.  Bisexual, indiscriminate, nymphomaniac.  To feel loved I’ll sleep with anyone—well almost anyone.  Accept insult, abuse whatever it takes.  I don’t whimper or protest.  I love my work!

You have reason to be puzzled, amused, annoyed.  When I play the four-year-old vamp in Mama’s dress; pull stupid stunts like a fifth-grade boy; trip over my feet like a Keystone Kop; beat up on myself like the Three Stooges, how bewildering I must seem

Beneath the acts and disguises I’m fragile as a butterfly and exquisitely cautious.  If you ignore or scorn me I’m crushed.  So I play the whore, the clown, the fool.  I humor you, make you laugh.  I seduce, trick, beg, and bribe you.

Confusing, irrational, silly as I seem, I strive for your approval the only ways I know.  Please understand–while I rarely do–with all my incorrigible antics, with all my strength, with all my heart, I work to earn your approval.  Because it’s absolutely essential!

Eight decades down the trail I remember what I knew before I “grew up,” before I learned to fear.  Relationship, love is all that matters.

I apologize.  You can’t know how I feel—or do you?

I put my last blog post on Facebook.  I’m saddened that on reading it a friend unfriended me.  Let me explain.

Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandella, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Colin Kaepernick are individuals with the courage to speak up, to challenge an Institution.  Getting Great Britain out of his country Gandhi nearly staved himself to death.  Taking on  prejudice and racism in South Africa Mandella spent decades in prison.  Importing Gandhi’s philosophy and Mandella’s cause to America, King paid the ultimate price.  Putting career, wealth and fame on the line at age 29, Kaepernick picked up Mandella’s and King’s torch during our National Anthem.  It is significant that Kaepernick chose not a raised fist but a bended knee, a respectful supplication for redress of grievance, an exercise of Freedom of Speech under the Constitution of the United States of America.

If you know or guess who my unfriended friend is, please pass this on with my assurance I still love the guy and consider him, even if politically challenged, a friend.

Mohandas Gandhi
Nelson Mandela
Reverand Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Conin Kaepernick

We should all be as brave.