Downy Ideas

When I was young, I searched for milkweed plants in the wilderness between my backyard fence and the double set of railroad tracks we were forbidden from setting foot upon. I coveted the thick pods a touch beyond bursting with the seam open and white tufts sticking out in midst of a slow explosion. I tore the pods open and threw the downy seeds high into the air leveraging the wind to scatter the white angels. If they weren’t dry, though, the damp lump crashed into the ground where they lay unmoving, a dead bird lying on its back showing its white breast.

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What Does Your God Look Like?

If I had to render a guess, I would say most people’s gods look like the person they see in the mirror every morning with some strategically placed white hair and eyes oozing wisdom. If you are Asian, African, European your god is yellow, brown, white. If you are Hindu, your god may be blue with obvious Indian features. If you are Sikh, your god wears a head covering. But that is all exterior appearances. The Christians have even whitewashed Jesus.

The Desire of the Faithful

The very purpose of spirituality is self-discipline. Rather than criticizing others, we should evaluate and criticize ourselves. Ask yourself, what am I doing about my anger, my attachment, my pride, my jealousy? These are the things we should check in our day to day lives. ~HH Dalai Lama

I love the succinct statements issued by the Dalai Lama. They cut through the dogma of the holy books used to obfuscate the core values of the belief system. This is also a characteristic of Pope Francis when he proclaims, ipso facto, “Who am I to Judge?” or “The death penalty is never acceptable.”

The History They Did Not Tell Us

La historia que no nos contraron. ~Eduardo Galeano

Every country has a history, frequently sordid often shameful, hidden from la gente, the people. Sometimes the hiding is accidental because all participants watching the history unfold are gone, left the locale by choice or because last breath escaped, leaving a knowledge vacuum unless we choose to listen to the spilled blood screaming from the soil.

My Unsustainable Kingdom

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America. ~Arundhati Roy

When I was a young boy, the extent of my known world was the block on which I lived and I dare not cross the black asphalt river at the end of the driveway. My mind was constrained by the knowledge shard within my neighborhood on my side of the street. I could know all I had to know to thrive…or so I thought…from my comfortable porch overseeing my dominion.

Conservatism and Liberalism are Both Fool’s Errands

May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears. ~Nelson Mandela

If I had to break the conservative vs liberal dichotomy into concise definitions, it would be:

Conservatives desire to conserve the past.
Liberals desire to liberate from the past.

I understand both perspectives, believe each has merits. Folly begins at the extreme ends of both perspectives where the conservative believes the past can’t be improved and the liberal believes nothing from the past is worth saving. The folly creeps inward infecting the moderates with blindness.

The Grandest Illusion

All the stories in the Earth’s mind are connected. ~Joy Harjo

We tend to view stories as spools of thread with a disconnected beginning, a winding path to an end closing the tale. Neat. Clean. In a similar way, the current political view is of the US as a monolith able to exist outside all other nations. Both are fallacies. One is a dangerous fallacy.