Midlife Meditation

This is not a political blog. If you've read much of it, you can be excused for calling bullshit on that statement, because, frustrated pundit that I am, I frequently use this space to comment on political issues. It's my soapbox, after all, and I can use it any way I please. Still, the primary reason this blog exists is that, at midlife, I find myself with much to think about, and writing has always been a good way for me to gather my thoughts. Having an audience is a side benefit, because it's a good feeling to know I'm not alone in my thoughts, whether they're spiritual, artistic, pedagogical, interpersonal, developmental or, as today, political in nature. One of the main reasons I'm not a pundit is the TLDR issue. I'm well aware that many of my posts are just too damn long for people to finish, and that they click away before they get to the end. In some ways, that's a good thing--I've never been good at endings, and tend to spin my wheels ...

Last week, driving through Washington state, I saw this bumper sticker: My first reaction was anger. I remember well how, following the 9/11 attacks, my country went insane with bloodlust. We wanted desperately to find someone, anyone, responsible and teach those monsters a lesson. We wanted to bomb their camps, invade their countries, obliterate every human being who was in any way involved with any organization that might have had something to do with this attack on America. And when rooting out the actual terrorists proved more difficult than we'd bargained for, and capturing the mastermind of the atrocity an elusive goal that was to prove, for more than a decade, unattainable, we found a different target, and rained down our fury on Iraq, a country that had had nothing at all to do with the attack, but did have a real jerk for a president. Just to be clear: for all the empathy I may have felt for that reaction, I opposed it. I was living in a community called the Pe...

  "Anything war can do, peace can do better." --Desmond Tutu   How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, but the light bulb really has to want to change. --old joke   I woke up to it.   I was living in the Peace House on September 11, 2001. I awoke, as I did every morning in those days, to OPB. It was around 6 a.m. Pacific time, and the first plane must have just struck, because the story went something like this: "We're receiving reports that an airplane may have collided with one of the World Trade Center towers." It didn't take long for more detailed news to hit the airwaves, and then the second plane struck the second tower, I turned on my television, and watched the towers collapse.   Morning prayers were solemn, frightened; none of us knew what to make of it. In the days that followed, I found myself sinking into a deep melancholy. The world had just changed in a horrible way. One morning I was driving on F...