Life – Page 14 – Hobbits In Rivendell

“Where Do We Go From Here?” – by Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967

November 10, 2016

1:12 pm

Leave a comment on “Where Do We Go From Here?” – by Martin Luther King, Jr., 1967

I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again with tear-drenched eyes have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our chartered course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.

Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?

We have come over the way
That with tears hath been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered,

Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of now way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right:

“Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is for hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address
By Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., 16 August 1967

And, after Tuesday…

by TadMack

November 7, 2016

10:34 am

Leave a comment on And, after Tuesday…

California

Tony Hoagland

HARD RAIN

After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
then I understood: there’s nothing
we can’t pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can’t keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,

About all those people you killed–
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time –

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
that the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood –
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth
whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking thorough the Springdale Mall

“After Tuesday,” the pastor said this weekend, “God will still be God.”

And, after Tuesday, we will still be us, and America will still be America, for good or for ill.

And, after Tuesday, the planet will still spin. Life will go on.

Traveling abroad even briefly in the past two years, the conversation most people outside the US have wanted to have with us was our opinion about the election. And we quickly got tired of talking about it. Especially after going through the mail-in ballot so early in the process, we both have sort of pulled back from reading about politics, engaging about it on social media, etc., etc.. There just comes a limit, which we reached roughly about ~~six~~ twelve months ago. It is all too easy for us as Westerners – and, perhaps as human beings – to retreat into endless self-preoccupation which limits our point of view. There’s a lot more happening in the world than the bloviating nonsense currently occupying the national stage.

This poem resonates because so many of us have felt that if we disengage and claim that, “it’s not my issue,” that going along to get along is good enough; that leaving well-enough alone is fine. But, we are all connected in so many ways; every act is connected, and we are not only involved, we are complicit. This is not to say that every act of living is guilty, but that we all ultimately hold some responsibility for each other. Giving a hand-up and paying the gift of what we have forward to our communities means getting involved on behalf of others. Speaking on behalf of those who aren’t heard is our privilege. If nothing else can be learned from this national conversation it is that listening to those who are not usually heard is just so much more important than speaking.

Whatever way the world shifts, at least this election season has taught us that.

After Tuesday, here’s hoping that perspective remains, and that all sides in this contretemps can agree to disagree, and to compete again without so much rancor, perhaps. If nothing else, may we remember that we are not opponents ordinarily, but community, with many of the same goals and beliefs, and the same hopes for our future.

On Iceland; Links

by David T. Macknet

October 7, 2016

2:00 pm

Life With a Single Bag

by David T. Macknet

September 15, 2016

3:38 am

3 Comments on Life With a Single Bag

Traveling

Years ago, T blogged about her inability to leave our first flat in Scotland without a purse packed with what she considered necessities. Everything, down to food and bandages, was carefully packed away, to prevent what she saw as unnecessary limitations to our comfort and happiness everywhere. It took her a long time to trust our lives without a car, without knowing where all the stores were – it took her a long time to imagine that we didn’t need for her to carry everything for her comfort and safety on her back like a turtle. Thinking back on it, it was like she had lived through some kind of natural disaster — but the only disaster, really, was leaving the idea of “home.”

So, what does it mean that we are here in Iceland for a week with only one suitcase between the two of us? Other than that we forgot our toothbrushes, of course? It’s funny to think back to those anxious times, and compare them to how life finds us today — not any less mistrustful of the universe at large, at least in T’s case, but with a surprisingly clear idea of where home is — with each other. Though we’re less comfortable this trip abroad, we’re a little bit less concerned, if that makes any sense.

As the Viking ship indicates, we’re in Iceland at the moment, in pursuit of a work connection D had – one, an interview, the other, a beginning business meeting. One of the connections is very obviously not going to work out, so we’re waiting – still – and attempting to take this in the nature of a vacation — a little holiday from late summer into the land of winter (forty degree temps, of course, it what passes for late summer around here). We’re taking time to sit around on a blustery morning with coffee, doing pretty much nothing but stretching out on an unfamiliar couch with a book. Tomorrow we will bestir ourselves into the countryside with cameras and guide books, in search of waterfalls and “geysirs.” (Tomorrow, the wind may have dropped from 30 mph gusts!) But, for today, we are sitting, and looking thoughtfully at what has changed.

We first came to Iceland from our lives in Glasgow, and found this country, probably as many British people do, a reasonable exchange. Certainly there was more sunshine, more extremes in weather, more light. The Icelandic people we met remembered us, were happy to chat over coffee shop counters, telling us where to go, what to see. Comparing then to now – our last trip here in 2012 – it seems a vastly different place. Tourism caught fire here in 2014, and has increased about fifty percent each year since. It’s visible in many ways – the hordes of people wandering the streets, unmoored, snapping photographs of everything, even at six in the morning. (Courtesy of flights which arrive at 4 a.m. and nothing open until 9!) The begrimed buildings, sporting, instead of the quirky artistic graffiti murals, random tagging, and the weary people, serving too many guests to chat. We visited our favorite shops and then went away, a little troubled. Nowhere stays the same, of course, but the Iceland we enjoyed seems to be no longer enjoying itself.

We are not the same, either, of course. We’re older and trying harder to be more realistic about what we can and cannot truly do in the long term. While T can write anywhere, we’re trying to think where is easiest and best, in terms of productivity. While D can work anywhere, the business contacts he has here are best looked at long-distance. Using our most firmly critical and realistic gazes, we don’t see how living here would work out for the best. We’re having to be harder on our dreams and whimsies – obviously because that’s part of being boring old adults, but another reason is that at the end of our lives we don’t want to be left with just whimsy and wishful thinking. We left for Scotland on a whim, but we’re not going to leave the US again with quite so little preparation! We’re hopeful that doesn’t mean not leaving at all, but we’ll have to see how it goes. In the meantime, the kettle is calling on this dark and blustery day, and it’s time for another cuppa and maybe a movie, and then we’ll wrap up and head out into the lashing rain to see what society can be found. People visit California for the sun – we’re visiting Iceland and turning our faces up to the rain. It’s a strange puzzle of a world, isn’t it?

“Lived reality is always a muddle.”

by TadMack

August 16, 2016

7:36 am

Leave a comment on “Lived reality is always a muddle.”

California, Life, Rant

It is a truth universally acknowledged among T’s family and friends that D. is “the smart one,” in this relationship, and, in the face of a vast body of evidence, T generally concurs… however, as she has just sent him off to work after a failed attempt to start the car without the key, she would like to herewith state the time-worn truth that it’s a good thing that “cute”… can take one a long way in this world. ::cough::

The big buzz in adult literary circles at present, from Oprah on down, is Colson Whitehead’s THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. There’s a brilliant New Yorker essay by Kathryn Schulz this month which talks about the actual historical facts of that portion of abolitionist history, and the well-stitched (quilted, even) lies and mythologies which have generally overtaken its history. Whitehead’s novel is kind of a magical realism; the railroad – complete with cars and track – is real, in his point of view, and the novel – which we’ve not read – apparently takes into account who that would work for, and what it would cost them emotionally and physically as well as probably monetarily. Schultz’s essay has some great points about the history, and how Americans tend to view it – and mythologize it – in the general scope of today’s history and politics. Inasmuch as it caused frothing at the mouth for some to consider that slaves even built the White House, it’s obviously easier to recenter the narrative about slavery to the people who helped and healed, rather than who benefited, and to canonize them. We also like to imagine that “had we been there,” we’d have been working shoulder to shoulder with the abolitionists, ever on the side of right.

It’s such a nice fantasy.

The final statement in Schulz’s essay really stuck home:

“One of the biases of retrospection is to believe that the moral crises of the past were clearer than our own—that, had we been alive at the time, we would have recognized them, known what to do about them, and known when the time had come to do so. That is a fantasy. Iniquity is always coercive and insidious and intimidating, and lived reality is always a muddle, and the kind of clarity that leads to action comes not from without but from within. The great virtue of a figurative railroad is that, when someone needs it—and someone always needs it—we don’t have to build it. We are it, if we choose. ♦

Lived reality is always a muddle.

ALWAYS. A. MUDDLE. Oh, for the moral high ground which many people seem to find, and assume that their lives would have been peerless and blameless back in the day. They would have turned away from anything smacking of sexism or racism. THEY would have never kept slaves. THEY would have taken the kids out of the city for a camping trip to Jericho instead of being in Jerusalem the weekend they decided to crucify Christ. Always with the superiority complex, we humans! If it were all that easy, we’d all be swanning around in perfection, perhaps on golden streets. It’s NEVER that easy – life is also coercive, and insidious, and intimidating, full stop. This reminds me to, for the love of God, to give a bit of grace to others in terms of their follies and mistakes in the here-and-now.

We recommend Schulz’s entire essay, “The Perilous Lure of the Underground Railroad” where she considers Whitehead’s novel and Ben Winter’s alternate history novel, Underground Airlines within the context of history, historians, and how it we consider this piece of our collective past today.

Swallowed With All Hope

by TadMack

August 15, 2016

2:38 pm

1 Comment on Swallowed With All Hope

California, Life

Despite T thinking she was a bit old for it, T’s mother often sang to her a Mr. Rogers song “Let’s Thing Of Something To Do (While We’re Waiting). A jazzy little oddity from the show, Let’s Thing of Something To Do was helpful for preschool teachers dealing with Lifestyles of the Small and Antsy. Sadly, though some of us are *cough* larger now, the antsy-ness has not demonstrably decreased… – if you can’t control any or everything around you, there’s really no point in twitchiness, but astonishingly, it is not a grace that all of us receive, that ability to “possess thy soul in patience.” August is barely halfway in, and already it seems a heinously long month.

So, we wait. This poem is a slightly less catchy (?) version of Mr. Rogers’ song, which we’re holding close in the Hobbiton, in these days of waiting for phone calls, waiting for interviews, waiting for critiques, waiting to finish manuscripts and waiting for this, the summer of our discontent, and this onerous election cycle to be OVER and please God, please, please please can you give us a time machine, and we promise not to skip ahead past February of next year, if we could just miss these next eight to ten weeks???

No? ::sigh:: Okay. Waiting again, then.

Things to Do in the Belly of a Whale

Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

Scottish Independence

by David T. Macknet

June 24, 2016

10:54 am

1 Comment on Scottish Independence

In Retrospect, Rant

To all of our dear friends in Scotland, in the wake of Brexit, you know what happens next:

(That’s a “YES to Scottish Independence” flag, in case you missed it.)

-D & T

Marauding Squirrel

by David T. Macknet

May 8, 2016

11:58 am

Automobile Woes

by David T. Macknet

May 6, 2016

7:56 pm

They’re baaaack….

by TadMack

April 20, 2016

1:44 pm

1 Comment on They’re baaaack….

California, Life

Despite the perception of turkeys as Thanksgiving beasties, they’re really showing off those traditional tail-feathers in mid-to-late Spring. They’re noisy and twitchy and generally a mess, as most grooms are.

Meanwhile, the intermittent rains keep are keeping things gorgeously, almost historically (hysterically?) green — and we find ourselves torn — wanting to go outside and revel in all the color, while knowing full well we’ll end up sneezing and wheezing and regretting the whole thing. Life with seasonal allergies; life in California. Life in the Spring.

Carpe diem.

Glasgow:
NY:
Grinnell:
Roswell:
Berkeley: