Category: Michael D
Another Orbit
Four days into another orbit. Reflect on failure, lessons, and look forward. Make resolutions, set goals, and dream wild audacious dreams. Everything is possible. Based on previous orbits there is high confidence in the probable even with the disruptors, disrupting. Transitions. It is one of those years when people I know will have a zero or five birthday. I’ve lived long enough that mentors and friends, artists and inspirers have begun passing from this reality to the next.
Be present. Be proactive. Really live.
I revisit Bob Dylan’s, “Forever Young,” when a new year arrives. And this O’Donohue poem resonates too.
Beannacht / Blessing
by John O’Donohue, Echoes of Memory, 2011
On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.
And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.
When the canvas frays
In the currach of thought
And a stain of ocean
Blackens beneath you,
May there come across the waters
A path of yellow moonlight
To bring you safely home.
May the nourishment of the earth be yours,
May the clarity of light be yours,
May the fluency of the ocean be yours,
May the protection of the ancestors be yours.
And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.
Unlearned Lessons
I’m not a historian. World history and US history was taught in high school and college. There has been other reading since. Increasingly, our context is repeating the early 20th and 19th centuries. As I lay me down to sleep this morning after the 2024 election, I don’t understand my neighbors. If they thought the Nation was on the wrong track. Buckle up. Beyond our political and theological commitments, we apparently don’t share a path to dreams or aspirations for people, for families, this Nation of immigrants, or the ideals enshrined on Lady Liberty or the Bill of Rights. There are many things I’m not and maybe that’s the point. We are living through a time of “you’re not like us” that is turning more systemically parliamentary. In a recent article, a BBC reporter described our Nation as two countries sharing a land mass uncomfortably. If the new President achieves fifty percent of what he wants to do aided by the nationalists and loyalists to him that fancy themselves as anointed by a deity, the profound change will affect two generations. Is our Constitutional Republic in danger? No and yes. It depends on the character of my neighbors and their humility. Reading, Go Set a Watchman a few years ago helped me glean how two terms of a Trump presidency have come to pass.
I wasn’t a fan of either Bush Presidency, but I thought I understood my neighbors. The concerns about Clinton’s moral failures and questionable character was understandable. I could empathize. Integrity mattered. I got it. With the 47th President moral character doesn’t matter anymore. Integrity doesn’t matter anymore. My neighbors can’t argue morality or integrity with me anymore. The 47th President has no moral compass or integrity that doesn’t point to him or benefit him or those that flatter and bow to him. Mr. Potter, the character in It’s a Wonderful Life, won the Presidency of these United States Nov 6, 2024.
Many times my parents just shook their heads at my decisions. I’m sure they still do today. For the second time in my life I understand what they felt and experienced as I grew up and lived into adulthood. They had to let me learn the hard way. I guess that’s what our Nation will have to live through, again, as a former President, who inspired an assault on the Capitol during the ritual accounting to prepare for the transfer of power when he lost an election, will again return to the Presidency and lead this country for the last half of this second decade of the 21st century. Every Nation older than ours has lived through their version of extremism, authoritarianism, and graft politics. They’ve dealt with oligarchs and religious extremists attacking secular and civic institutions to bend them to their will and vision for the Nation. It’s our turn. As a Nation, we haven’t learned history’s lessons. SCOTUS has provided the path backward. The Nation is more entertained and aggrieved than ever before in my lifetime. We are about to get what my neighbors asked for. I weep for them. I weep for all of us and the world as the American experiment turns more toward the Sci-fi western Star Wars with each passing day.
Love your neighbor as yourself. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don’t understand my neighbors. But, I’m listening. I trust that goes both ways.