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| Texas Springs Campground, Death Valley National Park, Steve Brown 2022 |
There is more beauty in truth, even if it is a dreadful beauty. The storytellers at the city gate twist life so that it looks sweet to the lazy and the stupid and the weak, and this only strengthens their infirmities and teaches nothing, cures nothing, nor does it let the heart soar.
--John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 1952
I cannot find peace if I cannot see what is causing peace not to be present.
--Kaden, a former student of mine, 2023
An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion.
--John Steinbeck, East of Eden, 1952
July 8, 2024
Heat hangs heavy even in the darkness. It's 5:08. I woke up and the edges of my ears were hot. Perhaps they burned over the holiday weekend. Today, we will reach 95, by Friday 101. That's here, along the mountains. Out in the valley, it will be over 107.
Things aren't what they used to be. It amazes me people can pretend them to be. Over the Fourth, to keep the peace, when politics came up, my one son said, "Let's not get political." To which my father in-law responded, "I get so sick of hearing that climate-change hogwash."
I also wanted peace, so I sucked in what immediately came to mind: "It's not politics; it's science." Silence is a heat. Grasshoppers move by the millions through the stubby, dry grasses.
In the spring when some friends announced they wanted to come see Marci and me, I told them to come early--June, if possible--before the West filled with smoke as it now does annually. Before 2007 that was seldom the case. My friends took my advice, but June wasn't early enough. The fire season begins earlier almost every year--even the good ones when mountain snows are plentiful.
How do you not notice that? How does one deny the smoke filling your lungs and blotching your skies with thick gray smut? Yet many do. They believe a man who never tells the truth--things that are very simple to fact-check--and ignore smoke-dense skies as real as the concrete or asphalt beneath their feet. They froth and foam over the numbers of desperate immigrants seeking salvation at the border and ignore the hell sweltering up in their own backyard.
Things ain't what they used to be. And there seems to be no way to change anything. The grasshoppers move in. The supreme court sinks its jaws deep into the constitution. That madman will get his tyrant's seat. The fires will rise, as will the seas. The tornadoes will twist, the winds will blow. Seldom will we see again a crystal-clear day.
Yet, joy is a must. As Germany demonstrated, you can keep a nation amped up on hate for a very long time.
Yet, even in the midst of the artificially fed hysteria and combustive flames of nationalism, humans still need happiness. Kindness, goodness, and peace are as essential to humanity as food and water. A moving mob always eats itself up as the jaws of the bulging-eyed eventually devour each other in fear and desire for more power. Yet, in the midst of the plague, for anyone else to remain sane, there must be joy. Laughter, even if it's expelled in whispers in hidden rooms and attics, must still rise from the human hearts during times of tyranny or all is lost. Joy is a necessity not a luxury.
Thus, there is a time to focus on the tangerine sunlight rising above that ridge even when you know that beautiful orange marmalade color is caused by a fire burning fifty miles away. Because we need beauty always, even under the shadow of an incinerator smokestack or on edge of Armagedón. Therefore, it is important to understand how to feel joy unconnected to circumstances.
For me, it all comes down to now. A moment observed well, no matter how awful, is a true and tangible thing. At least for some, honest observation brings a sort of joy regardless of the nature of the data observed. A problem accurately named is a problem that can be solved.
A sunrise is a sunrise. These things exist even in the Armageddons that swirl around us, and they cannot be taken away once we learn to enter a moment well. I see, therefore I am. Happiness doesn't come from existing; it comes from observing existence well. It is the dying man who knows his cancer well who feels joy beyond his circumstance. No alcoholic is ever healed without naming their disease and the devastation that has resulted from it. Once we sit comfortably in reality, no matter what it is, we can be okay. We are meant to watch sunrises no matter what the day brings--and to see them clearly for what they are, even when that glorious red morning is clearly a warning of the storms that are coming.
Escape is not joy. Sitting in your current reality, whatever it is, is the first step in finding it. Silence is not peace. Naming what is causing peace not to be present is the first step in finding it.
We are a nation in denial of the human-caused climatic tempest currently swirling all around us. We are a nation so hungry to escape accountability for our own history of slavery, segregation, and political and economic injustices, we will gladly worship and serve someone blindly as long as he will blame all of our problems on others--easy targets like refugees and the homeless. A bully is always a coward compensating insignificance by targeting those not in a position to fight back.
We are a nation ripe for a tyrant to give us permission to scapegoat our fears onto the most vulnerable.
This is not a pleasant time. But there is more joy in naming the cancers than in pretending they don't exist. A truth is a good thing even when it is an unpleasant thing. Naming things accurately has power. God named the light light. And he named the darkness darkness. And he separated them.
Satan calls one the other, or says they are one in the same, trying to mingle them until they are sooty gray.
Climate change is not political. It's reality. It can be and is documented in real numbers.
Trump is not Christian. His rhetoric and actions are the absolute antithesis of everything Christ stands for as depicted in the New Testament. Therefore, Trump is an antiChrist by definition. That could change, of course. People change. But if that happens, it will be observable in both his rhetoric and actions.
You must know a thing by what it is, not by what you want it to be.
Give me some truth.
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