Finding Peace on a Late Fall Day in a Leap Year

 

28 October 2020

 

"When we look at the ocean, we see that each wave has a beginning and an end. A wave can be compared with other waves, and we can call it more or less beautiful, higher or lower, longer lasting or less long lasting. But if we look more deeply, we see that a wave is made of water. While living the life of a wave, the wave also lives the life of water. It would be sad if the wave did not know that it is water. It would think, 'Someday I will have to die. This period of time is my life span, and when I arrive at the shore, I will return to nonbeing.'

 

These notions will cause the wave fear and anguish. A wave can be recognized by signs -- beginning or ending, high or low, beautiful or ugly. In the world of the wave, the world of relative truth, the wave feels happy as she swells, and she feels sad as she falls. She may think, 'I am high!' or 'I am low!' and develop superiority or inferiority complexes, but in the world of the water there are no signs, and when the wave touches her true nature -- which is water -- all of her complexes will cease, and she will transcend birth and death," 

 

- Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of the Buddha's Teaching: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy, and Liberation. New York: Broadway Books, 1999, pp. 124-125.

 

Temperature today stands at 52 degrees F.  The sky is clear and there is but a light breeze blowing.  I have thrown on a sweat shirt and a down vest and I am sitting outside at the outdoor table.  It is covered in a blue tarp in anticipation of a harsh winter. The cat stands at the glass slider looking wistfully at the outside that she is so sure she wants to explore.

 

These days the world is agog, mad with news of potential political change.  Signs festoon every lawn in the neighborhoods I traverse, mostly saying hooray and vote for our side.  The airwaves are filled with the latest bon mots from various candidates and their surrogates.  So much of what is being said really hasn’t much to do with the harshness of life encountered by the average person living through the throes of this pandemic.

 

Some days we have to stop focusing on our lives as waves.  Some days when the ginned-up madness proves too much we much refocus our mind to an acceptance of our being an integral and inseparable part of the ocean. Today it was eight birds sitting out on and in my fountain that returned my focus to the whole cloth of this short span we have here. A walk out among the multi-colored leaf quilted lawns of my neighborhood drew me away from the cacophony of the moment.

 

Make a moment of peace for yourself today. Make it a moment of unconditional peace. Feel the air around you.  See the things that nature is presenting right now.  Unplug from the demands of modern electronic and get focused on an hour in the natural world.  Life is short and the world does not wait for us.

Election 2020, Let Us Thwart the Will of the People by Claiming Original Intent Rules

We live in a country that is governed by a representational democracy. What that means is that we make no laws directly except through ballot measures for things such as bonds or constitutional amendments and the like.  Instead we vote to choose people to carry out our political will in governing our large and diverse country. They create the laws because we through our Constitution have entrusted them with that task. Our vote in a representational democracy is thus the most critical embodiment of our political voice.  

In a representative democracy the goal should be to encourage and aid all enfranchised citizens to vote. Actions during a health pandemic limiting the ballot collection boxes to one per county in dense urban counties is not consistent with enfranchisement. During a pandemic when the United States Postal Service is having delivery problems, limiting the counting of ballots to only those received by the closing time of the polls on election day, regardless of the postmarked date, also is not in furtherance of voter enfranchisement. Disallowing a ballot from being counted because of the lack of a postmark, when the ballot is unambiguously received before election day is not in the furtherance of enfranchisement. All of these are instead acts of voter suppression, of disenfranchisement. 

 

We are a diverse nation of people of varying intellectual abilities, varying language skills, varying physical infirmities limiting mobility and varying other constraints limiting access to our actively physically voting on election day in a fixed polling station. Given that all American citizens are deemed equal under the law, we, our representatives and our courts should be working to make voting easier. We should not be decrying established mechanisms for voting outside of fixed polling places as tools of fraud. If we believe that each and every citizen should vote, we should make registration up until election day the norm.  If we believe that every citizen should vote we should be counting ballots mailed in by the date of the election day even if they arrive up to three days later. If we believe every citizen should vote, we should be allowing ballot collection boxes be placed in multiple secure locations in urban areas.

 

We are in the midst of a pandemic, a crisis not seen in over a hundred years.  We are in a situation where exposure to the virus, which is spread by aerosolization of viral load in droplets of breath, in confined poorly ventilated places (like many polling stations) raises the specter of death and serious disability to a large portion of the voting public should they enter those spaces. Normal rules need to be varied to protect citizens who have the same right as any other citizen to vote.

 

Courts have always had the power to fashion remedies where the strict text of written laws fails to address anomalous situations, it is called equitable jurisdiction.  In a pandemic many laws and rules as codified are just not adequate to meet the circumstances head on. In a pandemic the respective interpretive tacts of originalism and strict constructionism can’t rise to the immediate reality.  Thus, learned jurists, and panels of jurists are trying their best to fashion remedy impediments to our core Constitutional right, that of voting in a fair and free election. This is not election fraud.  This is not stealing an election.  This is instead protecting the essential of our constitutional rights.

 

I am afraid that with the elevation of Justice Barrett to the high court, she an adherent of the originalism doctrine, the issues of the pandemic will be turned into a political weapon for the right. I believe based on what I have seen so far from her, and from the other Trump justices, we are screwed in terms of promoting voter rights in this election.

 

 

A Short Book Review: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

 5 October 2020

One of the things about reading e-books from library services is the AI behind the service tracks your interest.  If you are into revenge port such tracking is not your friend is a bad thing and your name might find its way into a file on a police tracking system.  If you are into escapist fiction, while you are probably okay with the police, those in your circle who favor serious literature might look down upon your reading of one more variant of A Year in Provence, albeit set instead in Tuscany or Morocco.   

 

My tastes in books are akin to my tastes in music.  I like authors in translation from the French, the Japanese, and from a wide array of other languages.  I like critical darlings favored by the Booker Prize.  But then again, I like total trash like Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden stories. My tastes have followed the trajectory of my life, partly truth and partly fiction.

 

Well the library’s bot, as I was returning an early Dresden book that I had not read before, suggested Piranesi. I didn’t know the book but I did know the author. Susanna Clarke wrote the book and she had previously created one of the greatest fantasy books I think I have ever read, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Given my love of the Jonathon Strange book I decided to give the tome a chance. I downloaded it from the library. 

 

Wow.  Simply Wow.

 

To try and give you a sample of the text of the novel, or a summary of the characters, would ruin the reading experience of anyone actually coming to the book.  Suffice it to say the novel is in the genre of fantasy and for the most part if focused on three characters.  The characters are two men, and the environment they inhabit.  The tale is one of divided desires for awareness and for comfort. Ritual and pattern are preeminent in this tale. 

 

When you begin reading the story you are dropped into a world like none you have known but which you may have imagined when you first heard of lost civilizations, places vanished beneath the dusts of antiquity or the waves of an unforgiving sea. For a substantial part of the book you are an observer in a darkened room where things don’t make sense.  Eventually however someone commences tearing off the papers pasted and taped over the windows.  As light pours in the room you begin to see the reality of the situation bit by bit.  Ah and aha follow.

 

Piranesi is fantasy, but it is a world and perhaps a mindset that you come to understand well by the closing paragraphs of the tale.  Clarke writes in a lyrical style; hers is a stark but gentle style.  Her descriptions leave you with a sense of the feel of Piranesi’s world.  You can see the light of the moon Piranesi watches.  You can smell the waters that surround Piranesi.  When Piranesi’s thoughts get muddled you can empathize.  

 

Once I began this book, I devoured it.  Piranesi is one of those books where the ending, the final paragraphs matter and make the book that much more wonderful.  If you are a fan of Susanna Clarke, or of gentle fantasy, I would urge you to put this on your reading list.  There are wonders awaiting the reader as the dark paper is pulled away and the room where you are standing grows warmly illuminated.