We are now back on "standard" time. I was thinking that the whole world could just jump half an hour ahead and then we wouldn't need the "daylight savings" adjustment. (Most of the United States plays the "daylight savings" game during the summer.) We would split the difference, and what difference would it make, as long as Greenwich Mean Time jumped also? Would the atomic clocks have to be reset? Would it throw off the world? The sun will not have changed in its rising and setting, only the hour we choose to call it.
I am reading David Abrams' The Spell of the Sensuous. Oddly enough, it seems to be quite a bit about time in conjunction with place, place in conjunction with speech, and speech in conjunction with the experience of other species. Parts of the book are clear and lovely in his descriptions. He opens early with an experience of stars in the sky reflected in the square pools of rice paddies and fireflies in between also reflected in the water. He describes how Australian indigenous people can believe they sing the country into being as they travel, and it actually makes a kind of sense to me as the mysticism of place and evocation of reality as one is experiencing place.
Abrams believes language evolved from place and our human need to convey orally our place-based story, a need which has been cut out with the invention of alphabetic symbols. Take the earliest written Hebraic reference to God, the unpronounceable YHWH. Christians immediately throw in the missing vowels, the "a"s, so that it comes out YahWay (or YahVay) when spoken. Abrams brings it back from Christians' pedantic usage to remind us that it was never meant to be a spoken word; instead, it symbolized the breath: the breath in with a y sound and the breath out with a wh sound. The breath is God. God is in the breath.
November 2: VOTE DAY. A most significant day. The choice between Kerry and Bush, while pooh-poohed by quite a few, is critical. The choice between a person who will not push his religious beliefs onto other people and a person who does —in every regulatory manner possible.
The stratus clouds reach almost to the eastern horizon and the sky is golden between their gaps. Have I missed the significant coloration of the clouds or is it to come?
There have been reports of mailings to voters on official-looking letterhead: one saying that voting was going to be extended an extra day and Republicans were to vote on the first day, Democrats on the second. There are people gullible enough to believe that.
It is a testing of the world which holds its breath to see who America chooses. What to make of the great divide? In an interview with Tom Brokaw Monday morning, the President responded that he did not see a divide at all. Which says to me that there is half a country which Mr. Bush ignores, utterly ignores. Just as he ignored millions of anti-Iraq war demonstrators around the world on February 15, 2003.
I am hearing that Republicans are working very hard at local polling places to curtail people's right to vote. Certainly six hour waits to vote because of few voting machines in a precinct is one way to do it, among many. What a mockery of democratic principles we've become. And Bush dares to say he's bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Rose clouds hang close to the horizon. I consider getting my camera —I just thought of where I should have gone fifteen minutes ago…to Berlin Pond to catch the clouds reflected. Too short a time now to catch it. This one is for the mind's eye.
November 4: Truth lost. Justice lost. Environment lost. Depression increased. And that's the election.
CafePress has initiated a website of Sorry Everybody of photos of various people telling the world that they're sorry for only being 49% of the voters. And they got such responses that they have posted another site called Apologies Accepted.
November 5: The media drumbeat harping on the exit polls reportedly showing that over 20% of the people voted for "moral values" and voted for Bush. Dear God. That is such an oxymoronic action. To vote for someone who consistently is untruthful and who has no problem sending young men and women to fight and die … or come home wounded…maimed…emotionally debilitated and then get the medical care shaft from the Army and the Veterans Administration because they are short-funded…by the President's own budget…and these people in this 20% believe that he is a "moral" person. Not my kind of moral person.
Let's talk about the moral value of feeding people, of caring for people, of developing and keeping decent-paying jobs for people, about the value of a good education available to all who desire it, the value of neighborliness regardless of the color or sexual affiliation of your neighbor, the value of loving your neighbor in deed and not only in word and not only because they believe as you do.
One cannot be for a "right to life" and be for the death penalty, be for the Iraq invasion, be for killing abortion providers. At the rate things are going, our good fundamentalist Christian neighbors will also be for the death of anyone who doesn't believe in their particular version of God, just as their fundamentalist Muslim counterparts are.
I believe that I am on this earth (perhaps by the grace of God as perhaps we all are) to live a life that does not harm other life —although I can see right now that every time I eat plants and animals, I am harming other life. Well, I am made as I am made, and I see the world of species as all interdependent upon each other. No matter what level, we all turn into food for something else.
Another division: the issue of marriage between people of the same sex. I don't set a great deal of store on marriage in general; the fact that it has become a method of classifying particular rights of kinship is more political than spiritual. Hark back to ancient days when marriage was a union of properties and when wives were property (and still are considered so in far too many places in these times). The Hebraic law against laying with a person of the same sex —always addressed to men, you might notice —was for the proscription of treating another man as a woman would be treated, in other words, as property. It was a step down in servility for the non-dominant male of the couple. If you can find a Biblical proscription for the laying together of two women, I'd like to know of it.
Why isn't there a national voice of the liberal religious community that is called upon for perspective as often as Dobbs of Focus on the Family is? That is what needs to be built: an opposing group that will have an equal voice in the media jungles.
And Howard Dean can take on Grover Norquist.
November 8: I lay awake thinking of a name for this idea of a group:
American Christians for a Just Morality.
Its goals would be:
To take "war" off Christ's back
To promote Christ-described values of loving your neighbor as yourself
Of putting aside greedy ways of doing business and living life
Serving others selflessly
Retreating to prayer and meditation for self-sustenance
Bringing justice for those to whom injustice has been served
Accepting the power of God in one's life and not abusing it
Not abusing the use of power over anyone
Believing all people truly are created equally
Developing and encouraging loving and nurturing families within nurturing broad-spectrum communities
Equal treatment under the law and laws that treat people with equal justice
November 10: I am reading in the book "Sabbath: Restoring the Sacred Rhythm of Rest" by Wayne Muller (1999, Bantam Books) and I will close with this long quote:
"The theology of progress. Only when we get to the end can we lie down in green pastures, be led beside still waters, and allow our soul to be restored…This is the psalm we save for death, because in the world of progress, you do not rest in green pastures, you do not lie beside the still waters, there is no time. Never in this life, only in the next. Only when we get to the promised land.A bright sunrise. The crescent moon in the south just before sunrise. Two bright planets near it, seeming to pick their luster from the gleaming moon. A few bands of soft stratus cloud glow salmon pink. The sun rising behind a thin stand of pines on the brow of the ridge. A glaze of frost waiting to be melted.But…what if we are not going anywhere. What if we are simply living and growing within an ever-deepening cycle of rhythms, perhaps getting wiser, perhaps learning to be kind, and hopefully passing whatever we have learned to our children?
What if our life … roughhewn from the stuff of creation, orbits around a God who never ceases to create new beginnings? What if our life is simply a time when we are blessed with both sadness and joy, health and disease, courage and fear -- all the while we work, pray, and love, knowing that the promised land we seek is already present in the very gift of life itself, the inestimable privilege of a human birth? What if this single human life is itself the jewel in the lotus, the treasure hidden in the field, the pearl of great price? What if all the way to heaven is heaven?"
Such is the beginning of this new day.