Writer's Block: Tinsel town

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As a child, and during the 30 years of my married life, we always had a real tree, and Christmas was a big deal, especially for the kids. Now that I'm on my own, I made the concession to convenience (and cost) and purchased a little pre-lit artificial tree, which will go up as soon as I can dig it out of my storage space (it's in the back, of course.)

I love Christmas - it's a wondrous time of renewal and reflection. I try to get the decorations up as soon after Thanksgiving (not before! not before!) as possible, and they usually come down the day after New Year's or thereabouts. The only time I got rid of a tree early is one year when we had one that was so dry it was a fire hazard.



May this season bring you joy and cheer!

True Friends are Forever

I was up late last night, again. Really late. So I chose to sleep until I woke up, which meant Sunday Meetings were a no-go. Sitting at my desk in the quiet this morning, the little princess phone hooked to my landline gave a tiny rattle - that's all it does these days, so if I'm not near it and it's not quiet, I don't hear it. The caller ID had a strange number on it, so on a whim I picked it up.

As it turns out, it was a choice friend of mine, an Italian gentleman whom, along with his British wife, I had met in Kinshasa, DRC while I was traveling there on business. Lovlier people you could not meet, and I hadn't talked to them in 9 years. At the time they made their home in South Africa, and my friend now shuttles between the UK and Italy, he having lost his dear companion about 3 years ago.

I was sorry to hear about Ruby's passing, but thrilled that Romeo - yes, that's his name - felt moved to think kindly of me and pick up the phone after so many years. I'm grateful I was at home in just the right circumstances to receive the call, and to get caught up a bit. Now, of course, we can communicate via email.

It's a recurring theme with me, but relationships are all we get to take with us when we leave this world. It's why my friends are so much more valuable to me than mammon. I live daily in the anticipation of taking forward into the next phase of existence the joyous associations I've had in this life.

My Sunday has been thoroughly made.

Times change, but the Enemy remains the same.

A discussion on one of my favorite forums brought up the recent Swiss plebiscite banning the construction of future minarets in that country. This, in turn, reminded me how pissed off I have been about radical Islam, particularly since 2001. Looking at a website like www.thereligionofpeace.com, it's easy to get whipped into a lather and fall into the trap of deciding that Islam itself is the greatest enemy to global security that the world has ever known. That's the easy road, and history tells a different story.

Now, don't get me wrong - I'm no fan of Islamic theology, because I think it tends to be narrow-minded, exclusionary and oppressive. That said, people have the right to believe and live as they choose. But from a perspective of a thousand years, Christianity has probably been guilty of just as much terrorism as Islam... they just called it the Crusades.

There have been centuries of relative peace and coexistence between the world's great religions. But every now and then, men and women lose touch with their basic humanity, and just seem to go crazy. The enemy is not a particular faith, doctrine or ideology... the enemy is ignorance.

Ignorance breeds radicalism, intolerance, insecurity, hate, segregation and oppression. It fosters an us-versus-them mentality, and leads people to treat one another as objects rather than fellow sojourners on this tiny globe we call our home. The result is wars, want, crime, poverty, and increased susceptibility to disease.

There is no way off this pale blue dot, not for centuries at least. With incredible good fortune, and enough time, we might manage to terraform Mars and Luna, but even that wouldn't solve the root cause of human misery; the only way to avoid sinking back into the barbarism of the darkest times in history is to continue the fight against ignorance.

There's an old bit of doggerel, repeated in many forms over time, which says

He who knows not, and knows that he knows not, is a fool: Shun him.
He who knows not, and knows not that he knows not, is a child: Teach him.
He who knows, and knows not that he knows, is asleep: Awaken him.
He who knows and knows that he knows, is wise: Follow him.

Ignorance falls into the first category. It is not the same as uneducation, which can be remedied - it's more insidious, a willful closure of the human spirit to growth and expansion. Interestingly enough, each of us tend to move through all of these categories many times in the course of our lives; indeed, I can be a genius in the morning, in a stupor at lunch, an ass at dinnertime and a world leader in the evening.

Ignorance is our unexamined belief systems, developed in our earliest days, whispering to us that we're not enough, that we're not capable, that we have no value, and that the only way to remedy this is to snatch what we can in life, to the exclusion of those around us. Ignorance tells us that it's not enough for us to win - it tells us that everyone else has to lose.

For humanity to reach its ultimate destiny, whether that be here on our home planet, or somewhere out amongst the stars, each of us must come to a point where we understand that we are enough, just the way we are. Utopia is not unlimited wealth for everyone or freedom from disease, or a perfect climate year-round, not that these things wouldn't be lovely... it comes from people living in a society where they are at peace with themselves and with one another, regardless of their surroundings, people who understand that suffering is optional.

In the autumn of my life, I have chosen to adopt Richard Buckminster Fuller's dream, of a world that works "for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone." Defeating individual and societal ignorance is the key to the "spontaneous cooperation" part - there's no way we can achieve the dream if everyone tunes their spiritual radios to WIFM (what's in it for me).

We are not human havings, or human doings. We are human beings. What we are, how we behave, how we interact with our fellow travelers is what propels us upward towards the light, or drags us down into darkness.

Ignorance is the enemy. Let us fight it for as long as we have breath.