A WISE OLD WIZARD

 

Actually this quote is from one of the Hobbit movies. Watching the Lord of the rings tonight. Being reminded of a wise old wizard. We can all find ways to do small acts of kindness and love. 

THE WORLD'S SMALLEST NAVIGABLE HARBOR

 Oregon has been bouncing around in my brain and this ia what popped out today. Or at least that is what they claim. Drive north from Newport, Oregon about thirteen miles and you hit Depoe Bay. Yes that's how it's spelled. The harbor has the same name and is about six acres in size. That channel under the bridge is the entrance to the harbor and it is not a straight shot. Video of two Coast Guard lifeboats entering the harbor. From above the channel looks wider than it is near as I can find out the useable channel is about fifty feet wide. Check out the parking area. it's not only for accessing shops and the harbor charters people can watch from the viewing area while the boats are coming in. 

I am not an expert on navigating any kind of boat. I think I was nine and visiting my aunt, they had a speed boat. That, and a row boat at scout camp. is my total knowledge of anything that floats. At low tide at least you can see the rocks.

Several companies offer boat charters and from mid December to mid January and then about six months later you can watch the grey whales migrate south to Mexico to calve and the come back north to feed off Alaska and Russia. The grey's travel close to the coast. You can even see them spouting from the shore. 

There are coastal fishing seasons for halibut, coho salmon, albacore and other fish. The average temperature of the Pacific off the Oregon coast is in the fifties and that harbor shot must have been during a reslly calm ten minutes or so. If you decide to go fishing wear something warm and bring a hat. Also sunscreen. The sun does shine off the coast. Hope does spring eternal on the coast. 

The harbor took some damage from the March. 2011 quake off Japan. Waves traveled more than four thousand six hundred miles to the US coast. 

Anaother fun thing in Depoe Bay is Ainslee's Salt Water Taffy. The taffy is cool but the real show stopper is the machine that pulls the candy then cuts it and wraps it. The machine is in the front window.It's been there like forever. I have no idea how old it is. They have thirty two flavors and they ship. Have fun. 

SANITY OR INSANITY

I will admit I've been mining my older journal entries. To be honest I believe I wrote some pretty good stuff. And I can't say it better trying to write something else on the same subject. It never seeems to work out all that well. 

Back in early sixties, pre War on Poverty, a priest with a sociology degree wrote a book that can really get undet your skin. The title is The Respectable Murderers: Social Evil and Christian Conscience. His chapters include the slave trade, the Holocaust and the wholesale bombing of civilians in WWII. His hypothesis is this. While we concentrate on the often horrible sins of the individuals. If you really wanted to push up the body count you needed to have so called respectable citizens behind you.

The Karl Eichmann mentioned in the essay is also Adolph Eichmann tried for war crimes in Israel and hanged. 

One of these days, sooner rather than later, I hope to write seomthing about one of the most popular and enigmatic religious writers of the mid twentieth century. Thomas Merton. Cistercian brother and priest he had a talent for examining social movements. As the sixties progressed he concentrated more and more on the Christian faith and it's seeming (in too many cases) unthinking or downright support of war and violence. Includeing the use of nuclear weapons. 

This is a bit of a read. Even in his day to day journals he was very precise in his use of language. 

I’ve been doing some reading as we run up to Christmas. It’s a time of joy, but also a time to remember that the message of the birth often gets lost or obscured. This was also on a blog site. The intro pointed out the inductees claiming conscientious objector status had to go through a psych exam, but those who were willing to kill were assumed to be “sane.”

Thomas Merton died in 1968. He had harsh words for our involvement in Viet Nam and the violence of the Civil Rights era. I can barely imagine his reaction to our support for the coups in Chili and Argentina followed by our covert and not so covert support for the death squads in Central America. Good, sane family men and women who went home to their wives and children, attended church; firmly convinced they were serving God and country.

A Devout Meditation in the Memory of Adolph Eichmann

One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the Eichmann trial was that a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt it all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing.
If all the Nazis had been psychotics, as some of their leaders probably were, their appalling cruelty would have been in some sense easier to understand. It is much worse to consider this calm, "well-balanced," unperturbed official conscientiously going about his desk work, his administrative job which happened to be the supervision of mass murder. He was thoughtful, orderly, unimaginative. He had a profound respect for system, for law and order. He was obedient, loyal, a faithful officer of a great state. He served his government very well.

He was not bothered much by guilt. I have not heard that he developed any psychosomatic illnesses. Apparently he slept well. He had a good appetite, or so it seems. True, when he visited Auschwitz, the Camp Commandant, Hoess, in a spirit of sly deviltry, tried to tease the big boss and scare him with some of the sight, Eichmann was disturbed, yes. He was disturbed. Even Himmler had been disturbed, and had gone weak at the knees. Perhaps, in the same way, the general manager of a big steel mill might be disturbed if an accident took place while he happened to be somewhere in the plant. But of course what happened at Auschwitz was not an accident: just the routine unpleasantness of the daily task. One must shoulder the burden of daily monotonous work for the Fatherland. Yes, one must suffer discomfort and even nausea from unpleasant sights and sounds. It all comes under the heading of duty, self-sacrifice, and obedience.
Eichmann was devoted to duty. and proud of his job.

The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous.

It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missile, and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take off, then, it will be no mistake. We can no longer assume that because a man is "sane" he is therefore in his "right mind." The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless. A man can be "sane" in the limited sense that he is not impeded by disordered emotions from acting in a cool, orderly tier, according to the needs and dictates of the social situation in which he finds himself. He can be perfectly "adjusted." God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted even in hell itself.

And so I ask myself: what is the meaning of a concept of sanity that excludes love, considers it irrelevant, and destroys our capacity to love other human beings, to respond to their needs and their sufferings, to recognize them also as persons, to apprehend their pain as one's own? Evidently this is not necessary for "sanity" at all. It is a religious notion, a spiritual notion, a Christian notion What business have we to equate "sanity" with "Christianity"? None at all, obviously. The worst error is to imagine that a Christian must try to be "sane" like everybody else, that we belong in our kind of society. That we must be "realistic" about it. We must develop a sane Christianity: and there have been plenty of sane Christians in the past. Torture is nothing new, is it? We ought to be able to rationalize a little brainwashing, and genocide, and find a place for nuclear war, or at least for napalm bombs, in our moral theology. Certainly some of us are doing our best along those lines already. There are hopes! Even Christians can shake off their sentimental prejudices about charity, and become sane like Eichmann. They can even cling to a certain set of Christian formulas, and fit them into a Totalist Ideology. Let them talk about justice, charity, love, and the rest. These words have not stopped some sane men from acting very sanely and cleverly in the past.... No, Eichmann was sane. The generals and fighters on both sides, in World War II, the ones who carried out the total destruction of entire cities, these were the sane ones. Those who have invented and developed atomic bombs, thermonuclear bombs, missiles; who have planned the strategy of the next war; who have evaluated the various possibilities of using bacterial and chemical agents: these are not the crazy people, they are the sane people. The ones who coolly estimate how many millions of victims can he considered expendable in a nuclear war, I presume they do all right with the Rorschach ink blots too. On the other hand, you will probably find that the pacifists and the ban-the-bomb people are, quite seriously, just as we read in Time, a little crazy. I am beginning to realize that "sanity" is no longer a value or an end in itself. The "sanity" of modern man is about as useful to him as the huge bulk and muscles of the dinosaur. If he were a little less sane, a little more doubtful, a little more aware of his absurdities and contradictions, perhaps there might be a possibility of his survival. But if he is sane, too sane ... perhaps we must say that in a society like ours the worst insanity is to be totally without anxiety, totally "sane."

copyrighted in 1966. Published by Burns and Oates.
from Raids on the Unspeakable by Thomas Merton

THE VALUE OF A SINGLE HUMAN BEING

 

My feeble attempt to come up with a graphic to go with this entry. Just couldn't find what I wanted so I went with the stars. Literally.

From the movie Judgement at Nuremberg. Actually almost the only movie I remember watching when I was, well not a kid in my early teens. The film is based on one of the later trials.That of the German judges who supported or facilitated the rise and rule of the Nazi party. In the film, Ernst Janning (brilliantly portrayed by Burt Lancaster) is respected jurist with a long career behind him. Throughout most of the trial Janning had refused to enter a plea or speak. Stung by the efforts of his defense attorney this is his reply. It's actually on Youtube. As is Spencer Tracy's Judge Haywood's defense of of what we stand for.  At least in the movie. 

We've come a long way baby and it's no compliment. In fact it's been burn baby, burn over and over again in the decades since the trials.  A few, a pitiful few, are brought to the dock but that doesn't bring back the dead, heal broken spirits or bodies, or put roofs over the heads of refugees. Janning has kept silent all through the trial. Finally his lawyer's brutal cross examination of a woman victimized by what passed for "law" in Nazi Germany brings him to his feet. 

Ernst Janning: There was a fever over the land. A fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger. We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbors, and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that - can you understand what Hitler meant to us.

Because he said to us: 'Lift your heads! Be proud to be German! There are devils among us. Communists, Liberals, Jews, Gypsies! Once these devils will be destroyed, your misery will be destroyed.'

It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb. What about those of us who knew better? We who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country! What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded... sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows. We will go forward. Forward is the great password. And history tells how well we succeeded, your honor.

We mesmerized the world! We found ourselves with sudden powerful allies. Things that had been denied to us as a democracy were open to us now. The world said 'go ahead, take it, take it! Take Sudetenland, take the Rhineland - remilitarize it - take all of Austria, take it!

And then one day we looked around and found that we were in an even more terrible danger. The ritual began in this courtroom swept over the land like a raging, roaring disease. What was going to be a passing phase had become the way of life.

Your honor, I was content to sit silent during this trial. I was content to tend my roses. I was even content to let counsel try to save my name, until I realized that in order to save it, he would have to raise the specter again.

You have seen him do it - he has done it here in this courtroom. He has suggested that the Third Reich worked for the benefit of people. He has suggested that we sterilized men for the welfare of the country. He has suggested that perhaps the old Jew did sleep with the sixteen year old girl, after all. Once more it is being done for love of country. It is not easy to tell the truth; but if there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it... whatever the pain and humiliation.

Sound painfully familiar? It's been the refrain since 9/11. Fanned to higher and higher heights of near hysteria. Make Germany great again! Make America great again! Pound the drums. Point the finger.  Fear the other! Fear your neighbors! Fear the foreigners! Fear yourself! Be afraid until fear is all you have and it eats you alive.

And this is Judge Heywoods's response to Ernst Janning first, the other defendents as well. Janning, lawyer, teacher, writer, internationally respected and the former head of the German Ministry of Justice under Hitler. In that capacity he turned his back on much of what he believed and stood for. For the good of the nation; supporting measures that started out as temporary and became tragically, inhumanly permanent. 

"...The principle of criminal law in every civilized society has this in common: any person who sways another to commit murder, any person who furnishes the lethal weapon for the purpose of the crime, any person who is an accessory to the crime - is guilty. Herr Rolfe further asserts that the defendant Janning was an extraordinary jurist and acted in what he thought was the best interest of this country.

There is truth in this also. Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the Government of which he was a part. Janning's record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial: If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe.

But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary - even able and extraordinary - men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat through the trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen. There are those in our own country too who today speak of the "protection of country" - of 'survival'. A decision must be made in the life of every nation at the very moment when the grasp of the enemy is at its throat. Then, it seems that the only way to survive is to use the means of the enemy, to rest survival upon what is expedient - to look the other way. Well, the answer to that is 'survival as what'? A country isn't a rock. It's not an extension of one's self. It's what it stands for. It's what it stands for when standing for something is the most difficult! Before the people of the world, let it now be noted that here, in our decision, this is what we stand for: justice, truth, and the value of a single human being."

- "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1961)

What can I say? We've come a long way baby. In the totally wrong direction. Not just the wars of convenience, the Patriot Act or the TSA. Walmart is currently conducting an internal investigation of its own business practices. And what started out as an investigation into bribes paid to make it easier to build stores in Mexico is expanding to include other countries such as India and Brazil. 

When the story broke there was comment after comment "well, they do things differently in other countries and if this is what it took to get the job done...." Fill the political expedient of your choice and look out for nightmares. 

FROM THE ARCHIVES TATTERED THREADS

 

And slightly revised. From 2005. When I look at the map of our country this is kind of what I see. 

It looks like my cranky genes are rearing their heads big time. This has been simmering just below the surface and it finally had to come out.

William Raspberry was an African American writer with a forty year history of writing for the Washington Post when he retired in 2005. So I suspect this may have been one of his last columns. This piece was in the paper one Monday discussing the changes in our community life since the end of WWII. I believe I understand where he was coming from. While I’m not sure I want to give up ease of travel that the car gives us or the fingertip access to entertainment and information that television and computers give us, the loss of community that has crept into our lives over the past forty or fifty years frankly scares the bejesus out of me. 

And the chasms we have created since 2005 scare more than the bejesus out of me.

When my folks got married they moved into a little place on D Street in Springfield about four blocks from the main drag. Basically the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker were within a dozen blocks of the house. Folks walked a lot more and the meat cutter knew just how you liked your pot roast trimmed. They used an ice box for the basic needs, the milkman still made deliveries, there was a garden in the back, mom canned anything that wasn’t nailed down or failed to salute and if you needed to store frozen food you rented a locker at the market on main street.

 They bought two items right after they were married. A sewing machine and a pressure cooker. Man that puppy was heavy. Processed seven quart jars or nine pint jars. And I'm not sure but that house may, I repeat may, still have had a wood stove for cooking. 

We moved to a logging town about forty miles from Springfield, Oakridge, right after I was born and came back to the same house eighteen years later. Richer by two sisters and poorer by a disabled,stove-up logger. Dad wore himself out working in the logging industry. When his legs and his back gave out he ended up on the scrap heap. Thank you FDR for Social Security Disability. We moved again four years later. We ended up about five blocks west and four blocks north from where we started. 

Ironically the house on Kelly was about four blocks from where my sister's first husband was raised. 

 All the basic shops are gone from Main Street except for a large fabric store. They’ve been replaced by second hand stores, small offices and vacant storefronts. The store that housed the lockers is now a nice little butcher shop where you can still point out the steaks you want, they grind their own ground beef, make their own jerky and the beef is raised locally.

The closest grocery store is still a Fred Meyer. It’s about a mile and half away on the other side of several very busy streets. Nobody walks there if they can help it, nobody really knows you and almost everything comes wrapped in plastic. There is a small bulk food department that is nothing to write home about. You drive there in your individual tinted window vehicle, you drive home behind your tinted windows and nobody looks you in the eye if they can help it.

We’ve been sold self-service in the name of convenience but all it really does is cut down the number of people they need to hire and pay employee taxes on. And checking out your own groceries doesn't get you a discount on the final total. The trick is to tell us we're getting it our way, when what they're selling is their way. Orwells’ Newspeak is alive and well. Marketing managers are fluent in it

Instead they use the money they save on people to try to convince me to buy stuff I probably don’t need, didn’t even know existed until I saw the commercial and isn’t worth half what they want for it in the first place, if that. When mom talks about what she and dad had when they got married it wasn't much but they seemed think it was enough. Madison Avenue was just getting into the game of convincing us that no matter how much we have it isn't enough. That somehow if we buy just the right combinations of stuff we’ll  somehow be smarter or sexier or some darn thing. We keep shoveling things into the black hole at the center of our spirits and wonder why all we keep hearing is the sucking sound as little pieces of our selves follow them in

I don't want to make those early days of mom's marriage sound better than they were. People spent a most of their time just making sure the basics got done. A lot of time was spent doing the wash in a wringer washer, hanging the clothes to dry and then ironing the blessed things. And man, you did not want to let my grandmother get near the laundry. Dad used to say she could shrink a house if she put her mind to it and no button was safe. The trick was to fold the shirt so that the buttons were on the inside, safe from the wringer. Most of the time anyway. 

There were just as many gossips per square mile as there are now. They just had to be nosy closer to home and most of the local nosiness stayed local. Now thanks to the internet we can be nosy half way round the world and the axiom that a lie circles the world while the truth is pulling up its socks is truer than ever. 

I really don’t know how the repair the tatters of the threads that tie us all to each other but I think we’d better start mending………real fast

And now those chasms are looking like the Grand Canyon, the Marianas Trench and the hert of the Sahara Desert. Combined.

WORD PICTURES

Best title I could come up with. 

I made this original entry back when I'd only been blogging for three or four years. I was trying to explain where I come from. Maybe how my brain came to work the way it does. Sorry this is a long one but there's no good place to break it.

Shot of the lake above Hills Creek dam on a tributary to the Middle Fork of the Willamette River. The river is at the bottom of the valley Oakridge on the north side of town. Up until about four years ago I spent my whole life within a few blocks of that river. I'm still fairly close to a river. Now it's the Columbia. Hill's Creek was the final dam on the Middle Fork drainage. Mainly for flood control. 

Dad worked for Pope and Talbot as a logger and mom ran the house. Part of running the house meant ensuring that there was food in the pantry during the winter. My folks bought two things right after they got married. One was a sewing machine and the other was a pressure cooker. We still have the pressure cooker and it still works.

In a small logging town, actually any small town of the times, that meant keeping track of the garden, canning the produce and keeping an eye on the toddler (me) while you were doing it. Later, as sisters got added to the mix I got drafted into toddler watching duty along with mom. But it wasn’t all work. There was time to read. There was time to check out the dry creek bed down the street. When we moved to another place there was a culvert that ran under the rail road tracks across the street that just beckoned the imagination. There were also plenty of trips to the park at the other end of town on those hot summer afternoons. Oh, and television. Yeah, we had TV. Two channels, black and white, and if it blew a tube between paychecks it might not get replaced for a week or three. Imagine the horror these days. LOL

What we didn’t grow ourselves meant a drive into Eugene/Springfield and trips to the local orchards. The usual shopping list included corn, cabbage, cucumbers, apples, cherries, peaches and pears. The really good thing is that these don’t come on all at once. Cherries first, then peaches and pears, and apples anytime from August to November.

Funny, nowthat I think of it, they go in order of ease of processing. All you have to do is stem and wash the cherries. And they are canned pits and all. Peaches are scald, slice, pit and can. Pears are the hardest. Those little beggers are slippery. Apples will keep a couple of months if you keep them in a cool place. Oh, and fruit you can just do a half hour in a hot water bath. Pressure peaches and you get sauce. It still can behot and steamy work even if you aren’t keeping a weather eye on the pressure gauge.

And the corn, oh the corn. That was a trip. You blanch the corn in boiling water and then you cut it off the cob, pack it with a little salt and process it. We finally got smart and just moved the whole operation out into the driveway. We took the cutting operation outside because it’s a lot easier to hose down a driveway than get all those little corny bits out from under the cupboards. Corn flies.

The cabbage went for sauerkraut. That was usually the last up because the gal we bought the cabbage from wouldn’t sell kraut cabbage until after the first cold snap. Claimed the cabbage made better kraut that way. And who were we to argue. We may still have the kraut cutter. It looks like a washboard with blades.

The cukes went for pickles. I used a fork to poke holes in more cucumbers than I want to think about.

 And did I mention that the garden in Oakridge included strawberries, raspberries and boysenberries. They all went into the freezer or the jars. The neighbor kids were welcome to sample as long as they ate the ripe ones and didn’t mess with the green ones. About ninety percent of the time the kids went along with it. That’s good odds anytime. And there was always someplace around the edge of town where you could pick blackberries. With luck more berries went into the buckets than into us. They went into the larder, too.

There was a method to our madness. Once word got round in the family that we made good kraut, pickles, jams etc. guess what got passed around at Christmas? If all else fails, give goodies.

Some years when times were good in the summer the folks would order a quarter of beef. That’s literally one quarter of a steer folks. There isn’t a lot of steak on a quarter of beef but I don’t remember eating a lot of hamburger when we were kids. I think the tough cuts ended up being trimmed, cubed and canned.

You want tedious? Try nursemaiding a canner full of meat. Two hours at ten pounds pressure for each batch. It’s not like you have to watch it like a hawk just make sure it stays above ten pounds. Worth the trouble at the time though. It was fully cooked and ready to use; just open the jar.  And most important, it was there in the winter when the budget was usually pretty tight.

 Dad had coworkers who’d go to the coast in season and come home with a limit of salmon or other fish. Into the jars it went.

Oh, and the freezer was a full size <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Kenmore chest style freezer from Sears. Now that I think about it, just about every appliance came from Sears.  That monstrosity was about three years younger than me and it was huge. It was really something when I could finally get into the darn thing without having to use a chair, much less get at the stuff on the bottom without standing on my head.. It was big, clunky, and defrosting it was an all day operation.

Not thatyou spent all day on that job. We chipped, pried, wiped and dried between doing other things. I was in my mid forties before that sucker gave up the ghost. Something necessary finally crapped out and we couldn’t get parts for it. Heck, by then my sisters were married, raising their own families and we didn’t need something that big anyway. But, for heavens’ sake never give up on something while it’s still running.

I don’t want to make things sound better than they were. We didn’t get a dryer until Roberta (middle sister) was nearly out of diapers. That means the laundry got hung out winter or summer, sunshine or clouds. If it wasn’t quite dry, it got hung over chair backs and the like until was. If it was too wet it got hung on a laundry rack by the stove. Try drying heavy duty work jeans on a laundry rack. It takes awhile. I think we finally replaced the wringer washer when we moved back to Springfield when I graduated from high school.

There were times when dad’s clothes were so muddy mom had to hang them on the line and wash them down with hose before she could wash them. A fun job in the middle of winter.

Logging is not a life for a man going into middle age. It’s a life that wears you out, and it does it fast. If and when there were discussions about tight finances or fears for the future; and I know there were; they didn’t happen where we could hear them. Nature finally took any decisions or fears out of our hands when one of his knees went out. We moved back to Springfield, dad ended up on disability and mom ended up cooking for other peoples’ kids in a dorm kitchen at the U of O. I’m sure there were times when my sisters’ weren’t sure if I was their big sister or a substitute mom. Somehow we managed to get through it all.  We weren’t always smiling about it, but we did manage.

It isn’t and wasn’t a perfect life. It was just…..life. And it has never been boring. And if you were bored? You didn’t say anything where mom could hear you. She had sure fire cures for boredom. LOL Now that I think about it, she still has cures for boredom

BEST OF ANY SONG

"EXACTLY why I gave up organized religion years ago. Religion is an entirely human construct, designed to encourage and exploit the more negative aspects of the human psyche. They are bound and determined to put the Creator of All Things into this infinitesimal box and make it as human as they possibly can. Then use it to control those of lesser social, economic or educational status. I understand that some people find strength and solace in connecting to the Creator in this manner, and I will cut them some slack for that. It's not for me to tell other people who and how to worship. The problem is, the religionists don't cut people the same slack. That's where they lose me."

October 13, 2021 at 9:10 AM 

Comment left by a friend on 'Don't Fear the Magic.' I was raised Methodist. Went to Sunday School. Sang in the choir. Sat through more boring sermons than I care to remember. I discovered the British theologian Pelagius back in the eighties. I mentioned him during and extremely rare pastoral visit. "He's a heretic!" No reasons given. In many ways I'm still trying to understand WHY but the message was very clear. Off limits. Which in a way suited me just fine. I've never felt inside four walls what I've felt under the trees or on a windy day on the Oregon coast. Or just listening to birds as they are waking up as the light fills the sky. 

Over time I found my way to Quaker paths of some of my ancestors. On the way I came across Quaker Pagans. I've even run across a Quaker Catholic or two. What they all seem to have in common is trusting in the Silence. And that's probably why there aren't very many of us. Mystics are rare and trusted by almost no one. After all we can't prove what we've experienced and language is a total failure when it comes to describing that tap on shoulder, that whisper on the wind, that really strong imrepression that dad believes that sapliing should be planted "over there." Ran into that more than once in the garden. 

CHERISH YOU MOTHER

I found this image on this blog. All I have is the first name, Rick. 

When I first read this poem  back in 2014 I'd never heard of fracking, but the Gulf was still reeling from the BP oil spill. Too bad the the fine they had to pay for their negligance didn't put  BP out of business. The drought down south isn't letting up The forcast on ice melt is worse Nobody had heard of the Polar Express. (sixteen below in Eugene, ulp.) And I hadn't run across a movie called Bitter Harvest or the book, The Poisoning of Michigan that details the whole sad, sorry chain of events that lead to the whole sale poisoning of an entire state by PBB's (polybrominatedbiphenols). Somehow, someway I need to figure out how to do some entries on this, because the story isn't over. The plant that produced the chemicals is closed...and one of the worst superfund sites in the country. Finally started the clean up of a plant closed in the late seventies in 2012.

I AM YOUR MOTHER

I am your mother, do not neglect me!
Children protect me-I need your trust;
My breath is your breath, my death is your death,
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I am your nurture; do not destroy me!
Love and enjoy me, savor my fruit;
My good is your good, my food is your food,
Water and flower, branches and root.

I am your lodging, do not abuse me!
Tenderly use me, soothing my scars;
My health is your health, my wealth is your wealth,
Shining with promise, set among stars.

The Creator is our maker, do not deny,
Challenge, defy or threaten this place.
Life is to cherish, care, or we perish!
I am your mother tears on my face.

Adapted from a prayer by Shrley Erena Murray, a songwriter from New Zealand, in a Methodist Womens’s study guide for mom's UMW fellowship.

 

IF THE UNIVERSE

 were the size of a football field, including the end zones, what we understand would be about the width of one of those yellow lines. It's like those shots of a galaxy with an arrow pointing to an invisible dot and labeling it "you are here." It may not be obligated to make sense to us but we keep trying. Perhaps that's what is means to be human. Not that we get the answers to the questions but that we keep working to put the pieces of the puzzle together. 

DON'T FEAR THE MAGIC

From Tilly to Himalayas it is totally magical. The Singer sings and the Dancer dances and Creation answers. 

 Picked this up in Irving Stone's bio novel about Charles Darwin, The Origin. Hutton published his book in 1795. Apparently he wasn't that great a writer so his revolutionary conclusions that the earth was a heck of a lot older that the accepted version didn't get a lot of notice. It was a generation later when Charles Lyell, apparently a better writer, picked up the flag when he published Principles of Geology. And got a taste of what Darwin went through a quarter century later. 

Hutton and Lyell both saw the earth as developing slowing over millions of years as sediments were laid down and mountains rose carrying their ancient passengers with them. To this day you can find the fossils of ammonites on top of the ridges in the Himalayas. It took Lyell some time to digest Darwin's work but he revised the original Principles to reflect the new theories. 

I finally realized what ticks me off about the Creationist/(un) Intelligent Design crew. They drain all the magic and wonder out of Creation. It's almost as if the mystery scares the living daylights out of them. Instead of accepting the immensity and trying to grow to match the beauty, they attempt to shrink it down to a size they can accept. And not only insist that the rest of us go along but can get down right rude and insulting when we don't want to join them in their sand box. No thanks, your playpen is too damn small. 

Creator, singer, harpist, dancer: however the immensity of Creation was accomplished it is a wondrous, fantastic gift that we can barely understand because we can perceive such a tiny piece of it. That's the magic and we have eternity, one way or another to work it out. 

TILLY ON A CALM DAY

 

The Pacific on a relatively calm day. Maybe mid August. Fog tends to come in with the tide. No fog so maybe the Valley wasn't too hot that day. Even with a calm sea there can be ten foot swells.Access is strictly by helicopter and that is strictly limited. Especially when the murres and cormorants are nesting. The sea lions seem to be able to take care of themselves. 

TERRIBLE TILLY

 I've been going moderately bonkers trying to figure out how to approach "Terrible Tilly." The nickname of the lighthouse on Tillamook Rock located about a mile offshore from Tillamook Head short for headland.) The lighthouse doesn't have to more common tall tower. Built on a small basalt island. Hard to think of it as an island. The whole rock coovers barey an acre and part of than is under water at high tide. Combined height of rock and building is approximately one hundred fifty feet high. Her light was visible for nearly twenty miles. Which means those waves are about two hundred feet high. Tillamook Rock is located about twenty miles south of the mouth of the Columbia River. Before the North and South jetties were built sailing ships would wait in the that twenty mile gap until weather conditons were safe enough to attempt the river's mouth on their way to either Astoria or the main Port of Portland.

It's a great shot but the structure of the island was the bane of keeping the damn lighthouse functioning. It also meant that as ships became larger and could stand further out to sea the lighthose service decommisioned her in the late 1950's

The rock at low tide. That notch faces out to sea. When those giant waves hit the notch the force of the water tears into the basalt. Rocks large enough to crach through the building roof so often that it was finally replaced with concrete. Unless you are planning to commit suicide you can't within fifty feet of the island by sea. Shot from 1947. There's a crane below the small building. Everything. and I do mean everything had to be brought

in by breeches bouy or cargo net. Men, equipment, the building material for the lighthouse station,food, probably water as well. At least during the dry season. Some of the Oregon lighthouses were built of bricks manufactured from local clay near the building sites. 

In 1879 the first surveyor managed to make it onto the rock with a tape measure and the barest of equipment. On  his fourth try. The second surveyor made the jump, lost his footing and was drowned. A third surveyor managed to land himself and a crew to begin blasting about thirty feet off the top of the rock to created a level base for building. It was nearly a month before the crew could even get on the rock and even more time to get most of their supplies off the revenue cutter. This was October of 1879. They could have at least waited for summer when the weather is usually a little better.Tillamook Rock Light Station was finally completed in January of 1881. The main building sits on about a quarter acre and included a foghorn as well at the light beacon. From 1881 to 1957 the lighthouse and her four man crews battled wind, waves, debris and islolation to keep the beacon shining and the forhorn sending out its lonely warnings. The sound of a foghorn has to be one of the lonliest sounds on the coast. 

The shipping lanes are further out to sea now and Terrible Tilly was the most expensive, crankiest lighthouse in our part of the Pacific. She was decommisioned and sold in 1957. The sea lions and the birds have reclaimed their little piece of  semi dry land. They were there before the staion was built and will probably be there long after the wind and the waves reclaim the island. If by chance you want to take a look at the old girl. You can take the scenic route from Portland along highway 30 following the 

Columbia to Astoria, connecting with highway 101 and head south about twenty miles to Seaside and Ecola state park. Or take a more direct route on 126 hitting 101 just south of Seaside. It's beautiful country just plan on taking it easy traffic can get a little hairy at times. 

Well that's out of my system at least for now. 

BALLOONS AND MORE BALLOONS

I've never been to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Never really wanted to. But can you imagine being there in the first week of October when they hold their International Balloon Fiesta. Looking up and seeing all these beauties floating overhead? We do balloons here in Oregon but nothing like this. 

Or these. Not sure how they manage to not bump into each other. 

SAME SONG DIFFERENT VERSE

And sometimes you wonder if anyone is listening. 

 I've been dithering for the best part of two weeks trying to figure out how to present this. Right off the top I am not going to go one way or the other on present day Israel. I suspect that the founders of that nation might not be too happy with the results of over sixty years of nearly contstant warfare ranging from low level hit and run attacks to actual invasions. There's plenty of blame to go around. Face it. If there was no oil in the Middle East I doubt if anyone would have cared how much land was purchased for Jewish settlement. 

 We have to face the brutal truth. Before, during and after the war no country really opened their doors to the European Jews despareate to escape or the survivors of Hitler's murder machine. The US sure as hell didn't. The quota for Jewish immigraion was rediculously low in the first place and never filled in any year even after the death camps were revealed. 

Anyway just blasted my way through the novel Exodus in search of a certain piece of information. Midway through there's like two lines referring to three army or SS doctors who performed medical experiments in Auschwitz and a prisoner doctor who helped them. In the first edition the author, Leon Uris, named the prisoner doctor. Anton Dering, a Pole imprisoned as a member the resistance. Uris claimed Dering had performed nearly seventeen thousand surgeries. Surgeries intended to discover how fast to you could castrate a man or tie the tubes on a woman. 

Dr. Dering who ended up in England after the war managed to dodge extradition back to Poland as a war criminal and was released. He joined the Colonial Medical Service and opened a clinic in Hargesa in what was then British Somaliland. By all reports he did an outstanding job and was rewarded with a knighthood. Be patient with me I'm getting there. 

He returned to England and opened on clinic on the North end of London. Again doing a good job. His patients loved him, Then the novel was released and someone brought that little sentence on page 155 his attention."Here in Block X Dr. Wirths used women as guinea pigs and Dr. Schumann sterilized by castration and X-ray and Clauberg removed ovaries and Dr. Dehring performed 17,000 'experiments' in surgery without anesthetics." Dering promptly sued Uris, his publishers, and the printers for libel. The printers settled for five hundred pounds and an apology. " Uris and William Kimber admitted the words at issue were defamatory against Dering, but pleaded that the words were true in substance and in fact, save for some particularized exceptions.." From the Wickipedia entry about the trial. Wirths was arrested after the war and committed suicide. The other two were not tried immediately but were finally brought to book. Served some time in prison.

Dering insisted on going to trial. The Times printed large excerpts of testimony on the front page. In the end Uris agreed to omit the number surgeries. (he had been working from outside sources for the numbers) but did not remove Derinings name from future editions. The jury found that Dr. Dering had inded been libeled and awarded him one half penny, then the smallest coin in the realm, for the damage to his reputation. 

So where am I going with this? Leon Uris turned around and wrote a novel based on the libel case, QB VII. The name of the courtroom where the trial, in the novel, is held. If you are curious the Internet Archive has several copies of the book. If you poke around you can find a copy with a fourteen day borrow. 

Anyway this is the long way aaround to what got this post bouncing around the old brain box. QB VII was made into a mini series with a fantastic cast including a young Anthony Hopkins doing a fantastic turn as the doctor with a past he'd managed to rewrite never imagining he'd have to face witnesses to the atrocities he'd commited. Again the one half penney award for the "damage to his reputation." Outside the courtroom the author of the novel in a novel. Titled the Holocaust BTW has these final words. 

"The men and women of this jury have played back to us what Europe has learned over the bodies of its millions of dead. That those who hate and starve and bomb other people because they fear the color of their skins because it is different from theirs, or their politics because they are different from theirs, or their religion because it is different from theirs are evil men. That if there is any common meaning to the words "good" and "evil" it lies in the difference between such men and ourselves. So long as we allow them to rule nations, to command armies, to minister to sects, we will continue to be their victims. 

Am I satisfied? It's a word that can't be used in connection with the issues this trial has touched upon. Because what happened in Europe between 1939 and 1945 is still happening in half a dozen countries around the world and it will continue to happen as long as evil men remain organized, and good and gentle men are deceived and put upon and paralyzed by them." 

It's still happening. Two steps forward, one step back and one step sideways. Hell we watched it play out in front of and in the Capital building, In this country. With evidence that the president of this country was and is guilty of treason, still walking free, playing golf. 

MY NEW BEST FRIEND

 

A of the first week of May. This is the elipical I bought last May. So far I've used it for a stepper. With a lot of success. Since it isn't weight bearing my goal was 20,000 steps. Finally hit that today with three twenty five minute sets in the morning and two in the afternoon. Also discoved I needed a stop watch and one of those cute liittle mechanical clickers. Watch the sun light up the maple outside my window, listen to the birds wake up and fight over the feeders. One on the window and one on the deck. 

But I get a really good kick out of this warning label every morning. It's probably an insurance issue. I mean just because I can't imagine anyone trying this standing doesn't mean some intelligent idiot would give this a try and break their damn fool necks.