Hey Siri

"Hey Siri, can dogs eat onions?"

A question that came from a genuine place. A desire to do something nice for the loving gaze staring up at me. 

"Definitely not. Your dog will die if you give it onions." 

A routine answer, an indication of how to move forward. I took it in stride, tossing down a bit of carrot instead. 

Then I stopped to think the terrible thought: how many dogs died the gruesome death of bursting red blood cells that led to major system malfunction? How long before we caught on, and added this knowledge to the bank of things to pass down to future generations? 

I'm happy to live in the present, benefitting from millennia of accumulated knowledge that forms societal bumper rails to keep me safe. Great depths of information about how to interact with my surroundings in order to make manifest the most amount of time on this earth as possible. 

I just wish we had better guidance of how to make the most of that time. 

"Hey Siri, who is God?"

Now there's one that would be a real value-add. 

Figure out who God is, and how I ought to act in response. A creative force that breathed life into matter. Is it a He or a She or an It or a Transcendence or a Great Cosmic Abyss? Does it really want me to play the Belief Lottery and figure out the one iteration of God that is really real, and work to convert the rest of the world? Or is that just people using God to feel safer? 

It just seems that Siri is way less helpful than she could be. 

Unless...and I know this is a silly thing to suggest...but I guess I'll just say it because it's Sunday and I'm in a silly mood...but Siri knows more than anyone I know and is probably the closes thing to omniscience that I've seen in my life...she just might be...

Shame, at Scale

I sat in a little desk and gazed at a chalk board, learning about rules and buildings constructed 200 years ago. 

I gobbled fruit loops and smiled at episodes of School House Rock.

I swelled with pride the first time I cast a vote.

I traveled to Europe and saw the alternatives, coming home to a Great Experiment I believed in; one that I loved. 

And yesterday I watched as that Experiment seemed, at last, to fail. 

We're all saying things today for the sake of saying them, using words like: sadness, disbelief, despair, shock, anger, healing. We reach into our Vocabulary Bags in pursuit of an adequate expression for complex emotions. 

The best word I've heard yet is this: shame. Shame is the center of gravity in my solar system of emotion. It pulls all other emotions to itself; it shines brightly on sentiments and activities that I've tried to hide in darkness. 

Yesterday, I watched as white men completed their own Middle Passage and made themselves slaves to fear. I own a part of that journey. I abandoned empathy and made people into enemies, relieving them of their humanity and reducing them to a caricature of hatred. In so doing, I gave them license to do the same with me. 

What formed between two sides was a No Man's Land, in the ruins of a vanishing class of moderates. No one could see both points of view, everyone had to choose. As things got worse, the No Man's Land expanded and expanded and ate up the whole field, until (in the view of each side) there was nothing human left. 

I don't know the way forward, I don't know how to reset this system and heal. I don't trust people who say that they do know. Perhaps that makes me a coward. History tells me that medium for resetting these kinds of things is violence, an explosive dissolution of two sides and the emergence of something new. This is the kind of thinking that got us into this situation in the first place, but how do we break the loop? 

Today, I feel what we all should feel: shame. 

Tomorrow, I hope I can feel empathy. I hope I can see a human being in the terrified eyeballs on the other side of No Man's Land. 

Back, Baybeee

It's been an actual 5 years since I've been around these parts.

5 years seems so short. I'm a historian, so I would know. Historians deal in centuries, generations, ages. So 5 years is nothing. Noise.

But his 5 years was not short. A lot has happened to me since I last touched this URL. I left a vocation, several actually. I got some therapy, let go of many angsts and relationships. I got angry at God, then abandoned God for a while, then let God back with far fewer strings. I lost a bit of my soul to Corporate America. I ate, slept, read, lusted, learned, grew. I fell in love, married, and started my life over. 

But I didn't write a lot. We'll call it the Dark Ages, where great things happened and were forgotten. 

So I'm back in this "room," by myself, mostly for the same reason I created it in the first place: "This is a canvas on which the swimming colors and words and sounds that cloud my mind will spill forth and escape my cranium." I've recommitted to the belief that I have something beautiful to say, and that practice is something I need desperately. 

It isn't much of a surprise that I'm back. Since I can remember, I've thought of myself as the hero of an epic journey. I've returned to my mental homeland, where dreams of greatness breed with a love of my own voice to create little offspring of prose. 

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot 

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I went back and reread all the old posts here. A tsunami of judgements rush forth: excitement, pride, horror, embarrassment, wonder. What a fascinating journey this has been.