Beautiful Devastation

Here is what I've learned:

all beauty comes from a place of pain,
a place of discomfort
or doubt,
fear
or sadness.

Trace that dance,
that lilting piece of music
that painting
that poem
back far enough,
and you'll find the
troubled spark.

Beauty comes from the cloudy gray
shadows of our lives
for it is against that dim beginning
that our brightest selves shine.

Our soul-locked beauty needs the gentle devastation
of doubt and sadness and grief-
the realization that we are no more
and no less
than flawed flesh and bone.



4.29.2017

Dark, Light, Dark

Life is light and dark
and everything in between.

There are no sides,
no absolute good or absolute evil.

Our superficial intolerance and hatred are
as damaging and unnecessary
as the invisible borders we have long drawn
between each other.

I've come to believe
that if  humans are meant to survive
we will
but not through might.

We will survive through
intelligence
and empathy,
generosity
and humility
compromise
and discussion
using the best of ourselves.

And if humans are not meant to survive?

I, for one, won't be all that  surprised.

The darkness has always been there,
inside us
around us
behind us
and we chose to embrace it
instead of each other.




4/27/2017

Just Another American Day

This was just another American day.

Another American day
under sunny Southern California skies
when a shooter made his way onto
an elementary school campus
with the Second Amendment  in his pocket.

Another American day
blown in with the Chicago breeze
when an Asian doctor
was dragged from self-proclaimed
"friendly skies"
for daring to keep the seat
for which he had paid.

Another American day spent
teasing apart how we can fire missiles
in defense of people
to whom we deny sanctuary.

Another American day
where intolerance, racism, bigotry and assault
are polished rings adorning the  pale fingers
of the powerful, the famous and mistakenly respected.

Just another American day.

How much will this American day
subtract from our future?

What price will we all pay
for our American days?

4/10/2017

Forgotten Immigrant Roots: A Letter

Dear President Trump

Don’t forget that through your veins

5

runs immigrant blood as well.

What would your immigrant mother

Mary Anne MacLeod-

born in Scotland-

think of you today?

Would she praise your treatment of immigrants

when she was once  poor and  in their same desperate shoes?

Would she praise your budgetary decimation

of the arts, of food programs for the young, elderly and poor

when she used her eventual status and money to support

organizations for disabled adults and cerebral palsy? 

We will never know. 

2,6

Perhaps it does not matter to you what 

your mother

would’ve thought or said 

because it is abundantly clear that 

you modeled yourself after your 

paternal grandfather (and German immigrant)

Friedrich Trump (born Drumpf). 

His  tenacity to succeed

often overrode the softer, perhaps you would say weaker human qualities

of  compassion, ethics, legality and morality.

This same tenacity and impatience for anything that stood in his way

was inherited by your father, Frederick Christ Trump.

And so it goes, 

from your paternal grandfather

to your father

to you.

I wonder Mr. President,

what is it in your immigrant past

that has twisted you so thoroughly

to despise and legislate against people

who, after all,

want to immigrate here for so many of the same  reasons

that compelled your mother to leave her home. 

You may say that your family is none of our business.

And to a certain point you are correct.

Everyone deserves a certain privacy after all.

However,

in seeking and winning the Presidency of the United States

you are now the face of this nation,

and whether or not you want to acknowledge it,

you are

a public servant.

And so we are watching. 

We must watch and we must ask

and we must investigate.

Your smokescreens of 

tweets,

your carnival of foolish and dangerous advisors, 

and your shameful unprofessionalism when meeting with world leaders

have clouded the reason and thinking of some—

your supporters, confused and desperate for change and help

you are incapable of delivering--

but there are many more of us who see you quite clearly.

You choose to wear the cloak of the buffoon

in order to covertly erode our nation from within.

After all, any playground bully knows

it is always easier to rule over the frightened, fragmented  and desperate

than the confident and united.

But many of us see the destructive path

down which you are leading our country. 

Our country.

So we’ll remind you that it wasn’t so long ago

that your own family members

were once the “other",

the outsiders wanting, needing to get in.

And that your right to call this country YOURS,

your right to become President of the United States,

rests squarely on the backs of your own

immigrant

family 

roots.

Sources

1. https://www.scottishroots.com/people/donald.php

2. http://www.dw.com/en/what-donald-trump-learned-from-his-german-grandpa-friedrich-drumpf/a-18701551

3. http://www.snopes.com/donald-trumps-mother-illegal-immigrant/

4. http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trumps-immigrant-mother

5. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3602299/An-uncomfortable-truth-REAL-story-Trump-s-mother-climbed-penniless-Scottish-immigrant-wife-businessman-revealed.html

6. http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/22/politics/trump-grandfather-germany-friedrich/

Complexities

I'm trying to see complexly.

Not simply.
Not in stark black and white
that limits my comprehension
and robs me of nuance and shades and  subtleties
of being alive.

Complexity is challenging
when nearly all humans are subconsciously/consciously
trained
to live in a
black and white world.

Black and white.

Us vs them.
Him vs her.
Rich vs poor.
Native born vs immigrant.
Our skin color vs their skin color.
My beliefs vs your beliefs.
Good vs evil.

Everything that is me
vs
everything that is you.

Our symmetrical bodies
and bi-hemispheric brains
demand to see things
in pairs of opposites.

Our great challenge is not to abandon
our terrible visceral connection
to living, breathing, thinking, loving, understanding
in cemented pairs of this or that.

Our great challenge is to embrace what we are,
and to rise above it.

Within every thing, every situation that seems determined to divide us
is common ground.

That common ground IS the complexity.
That common ground IS the nuance, shade and subtlety.

I am convinced that if we can only find that common ground--
that shared foundation of need and feeling and simply being alive--
then
only then
will we metamorphose
from being merely human
to being a part of humanity.

CHM

Not About Trump

I guess I'm one of those snowflakes you are hearing so much about.

You know, one of those bleeding-heart, earth-loving, eco-minded, diversity-embracing, open-minded, critical-thinker liberal snowflakes.

And I'm trying hard not to melt in the blazing fires of hate, fear and intolerance that are sweeping through my country.

But who am I kidding?  These fires have always burned--here and everywhere.  Sometimes the fires are banked down, ignorable.  Sometimes kindling is thrown on them and they sweep back up, towering and frightening.

But they've always burned.

And as I considered this human ebb and flow of hatred, fear and intolerance, I realized something.

My fear, anguish and anger are not about President Trump.

President Trump is a convenient stand-in.  A scapegoat even.

He only seems to be the catalyst for what is happening now in the United States because he had the bluster and money to construct the facade.  He spent his life constructing a larger-than-life costume inside which he hid.  And hides.

Who is he really?  What is he really?

He's small.  Truth be told, on the grand cosmic scale we're all very, very small.

He's got determination without consideration.

He's got decisiveness without insight.

He is a man lacking nuance and critical thought.

He's a self-created caricature of success that has become so monolithic that  millions of Americans can no longer see that he's a caricature at all.  Pixar and Dreamworks combined couldn't have created a more believable animation.

And  he is in way over his head.  I believe there was a point during the presidential campaign when he realized this.  When he realized that maybe he couldn't do and  didn't want this job of President.

That maybe, just maybe, he had made a mistake and is only now appreciating the price.


But as he has always done, he thundered  his way through, hiding any doubts he had behind outrageous accusations and impossible declarations of promises he could never keep.

His business model turned political.

And now?

Now this small man is standing on a tower made of other small people--his advisors, his cabinet, his children, his wife, his supporters.

Like Dr. Seuss' Yertle lording over all he sees atop a swaying pile of his turtle minions, President Trump is a man who has fooled himself into believing that he is the one who will decide if and when he falls.

He doesn't realize that it is not up to him at all.

And I pity him.

And in my pity for President Donald Trump, I have found the real source of my fear, anguish and anger:

my fellow Americans.

It is a strange, heartbreaking and nuanced realization to make.  But it is a realization with which I must grapple.

My fellow Americans--people who could easily be friends, family, colleagues, mentors, that Starbucks barista, this nurse taking my pulse--these people are the ones who decided that Donald Trump was the leader we needed.

My fellow Americans are the turtles at the very  bottom of the tower atop which sways and boasts this President Trump.   They rely upon their hard shells of desperate belief to protect their tender hearts and minds from being crushed.

And as small as Donald Trump is--just a human, just a man who was able to convince himself that he was more than the sum of his parts--could it be that we are all just as small?

That those Americans who supported him are also small and deserving of consideration and sympathy?

And if I feel consideration and  sympathy for the vast number of fellow Americans who support President Trump, what do I then do with my own fear, anguish and anger? How do I look towards an immediate and long-term future--for myself, those I love, my country--in which all I see is a cold and foggy gray unknown?

I fall back on  what I believe in.

I fall back on myself.

On being a snowflake.

Of course, my one snowflake might  easily melt in this fire.

But enough snowflakes together might turn into a storm.

“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn't something that has nothing to do with you, This storm is you. Something inside you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn't get in, and walk through it, step by step. There's no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up the sky like pulverized bones.” 

― Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore

Eulogy

Eulogy for our Country

I am writing this while I still can,

and sharing it while I am still able,

before my keyboard is frozen

my internet banned

and my voice silenced.

This is my eulogy for our country.

Now with each flourish

of that golden presidential pen

our rights

our hopes

our choices

our hard won lessons

our questioning, questing minds

constrict

a little further. 

This is my eulogy for our country.

We have elected a man

who has confused business acumen

with leadership.

We have elected a man who will sell our souls

for the right price

to the highest and best bidder.

I do not blame those who believed his sparkle and show.

They did not vote for him to spite those of us

who could see the foreshadowing of today

all too well. 

They voted for him out of

fear,

ignorance,

closed-eye denial

anger.

They are our neighbors wearing thousands of different faces.

I pity the moment when each of them realizes, finally realizes

the price we will all pay

for their simple ballot mark.

This is my eulogy for our country.

I was born at the end of 1966

to a country still reeling from  the empty space

where John F. Kennedy

once stood

and learned to walk and talk

as our country bled through the losses

of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X and  Robert Kennedy. 

I grew up in a country that flailed and twisted

through the horrific uncertainty of the Vietnam War.

I grew up in a time where the fire of protests nudged up against

the mindless goo of variety shows 

and the dizzy, swaying idealism of Woodstock. 

I watched with increasing awareness

as each president we elected 

struggled through their personal flaws

and political ambitions.

Some succeeded.

Some failed.

Some hovered between the two.

In all of my 50 years of life 

though I have at times doubted our country,

questioned our leaders,

cheered each president’s better choices

worried about each presidential mistake—

in all of my 50 years of life

I never caught this glimpse of the end--

the end of this grand experiment

that drew together our diverse hopes and lives

into a messy, flexing, imperfect miracle.

But now I see the possible end of those

formerly self-evident truths

that united these states.

I watch each flourish of that golden presidential pen

and feel a clenching terror

at each facet of our lives that he signs away.

Make no mistake-

we will live on

but I can't help but fear what we will become.

And so

I am writing this while I still can,

and sharing it while I am still able,

before my keyboard is frozen

my internet banned

and my voice silenced.

This is my eulogy for our country. 

1/24/2017