This photo was taken last fall in the Rarău Mountains in eastern Romania. Florin Floriol was our tour guide on a trip to Romania’s Bukovina Region.
“Let’s engage in the spirit of the forest,” Florin said to Rebecca just before I took this picture.
As my index finger tapped my phone’s photo button, I recall thinking how humbling it is to imagine the natural world has something to teach us. That it has a spirit.
Photo by Florin Floriol
I read somewhere that prayer ought to be for our sake and not for Gods’. Bowing, kneeling, or prostrating are physical manifestations of reverence for something transcendent.
Listening to a tree is a prayer. It’s also a powerful exercise in something else many of us have lost, a sense of awe.
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An overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful.
Dictionary.com
Awe described my feeling on Monday, when I came upon this sight.
Photo by author
On Sunday, a storm with 65 mph winds pummeled northeast Iowa. No human lives lost but cars overturned and hundreds of trees downed, including this tree at one of the entrances to the Trout Run Trail, three blocks from our home.
You can see my bike just to the right of the woman in yellow.
As I entered the trail, I thought what on earth am I looking at? I dismounted and gawked. Is a chimera just over the embankment dam? And then another damn:
I’d never seen such a big tree torn from its centuries-old home.
I marveled at the size of its roots.
Was this tree planted by the Ho-Chunks who had a village on this land in 1840? Or by the Day family, European-Americans who settled Decorah in 1849, 100 years before I was born.
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You were one of the longest-living beings on earth
A few days ago I walked into my community’s kettlebell workout facility.
Resting on the desk was a new sign commanding me to
START YOUR DAY WITH YES
Really?
Confronted with something or someone new, my initial response for 72 years has been NO.
Sometimes nay becomes kay, but nada is my starting point.
The late public intellectual William F. Buckley described a conservative as
Someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop…
I’m a political liberal, with a conservative personality
To scoot or not to scoot?
That start your day with yes exhortation has been gnawing at me so I’ve been on the prowl for personal examples. Like yours, my days are filled with big and small opportunities to lead with NO or YES.
For example, a few weeks ago e-scooters appeared on the streets, sidewalks, and bike and hiking trails of our 8000 person community.
My first response was faultfinding, particularly when I saw a few discarded on the Trout Run Trail, an 11 mile blacktopped path around Decorah, Iowa.
Critical is a sometimes pretentious way of saying no. That was also my initial posture to e-bikes that appeared about three years ago. Is an electronically-assisted pedal bike really a bike? Won’t it clog-up our non-motorized byways? What will it do to the moral fabric of our community?
I didn’t know I could stand on that soap box while peddling.
A couple of years ago my friend Steve, who shares my 72 years, told me he purchased an e-bike to enjoy the trail regardless of heat or wind. Now he bikes more and only uses the pedal assist up switchbacks.
Travis, owner of a local bike shop, reported e-bikes are half his sales.
Lately, when an e-biker passes me on an incline I think someday I’ll repeat the favor and pass with a wave some whippersnapper.
And I’ve been rethinking my default NO to scooters.
It’s amazing the different modes of moving on our 11 mile avenue: biking, hiking, skating, skiing, strolling, running, and, not least, pulling babies in a bike trailer.
Just off the trail, nature viewing, trout fishing, and, of course, amour.
With all these ing’s going on, why not scooting?
Yes does not mean…
Starting the day with YES does not mean we say yes to everything or everybody.
It’s sensible for me to say NO to the headstand station during our kettlebell workout.
The same, silently, to the owner of the pick-up truck with the Confederate Flag painted on the tailgate I saw yesterday parked downtown.
Saying YES does not mean no judgment about what life presents. Apparently Decorah’s City Council is re-thinking its commitment to the Bird e-scooter program. An Informed YES or NO is a good thing.
As an orientation, Yes is an open door to the world. No is a closed door, with double locks. It can be opened, to an e-thing, but only grudgingly and after too much else is missed.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl has a quote that relates to the theme of this essay. The context was the life-orientation of the despairing person Frankl encountered in Auschwitz and Dachau.
We had to teach the despairing men that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life–daily and hourly.
Starting my day with YES helps me be open to the questions life will pose.
Whether they become haters or not depends upon their parents.
And it’s not easy to teach people to hate.
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Children notice difference
My mother too often told this story.
When Paul was three [I’m 72], I took him shopping to Walgreen’s Drug Store. We were in the check-out line and Paul turns and sees a Black man for the first time. Paul starts crying and pointing and would not strop until we left the store.
My partner Rebecca’s mom told a similar story about her three-year-old son Mike [Mike died last year at 72]. They were at the State Fair in Illinois and Mike saw a Black man and said over and over “he’s black, he’s black.”
Two years ago Rebecca and I spent three months in Houston, Texas babysitting Irene, one of Rebecca’s five grandchildren.
Photo by Rebecca Wiese
One day during the summer of 2020 Rebecca showed Irene a You Tube clip of a friend’s four-year old Chinese granddaughter singing a song. After the brief clip, Irene said “I don’t like her.”
According to Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, humans are programmed to start grouping people–making distinctions based upon physical characteristics–by the age of two.
Little Paul, Mike and Irene did what all humans start out doing. They notice human differences and respond.
I was scared, Mike bewildered, Irene displeased. Yet I did not become a hater. Nor did Mike. Irene, well, let’s just say the chance of Irene becoming someone who hates Chinese people is slim to none.
I first heard the soundtrack to the musical South Pacific in 1958, when I was eight. It was the first record played on the stereo that two men hauled into our living room earlier that day.
For some reason, You’ve got to be carefully taught was my favorite song.
I did not see the film South Pacific until 1980. That’s when I saw the anguish of American Lieutenant Cable and Tonkinese girlfriend Liat. Cable and Liat decide not to marry because love was not enough.
Too many of Cable’s contemporaries had been taught to hate:
People who’s eyes are oddly made and people who’s skin is a different shade
It’s not easy to teach people to hate
There is a hate-formula and the song lays it out.
You’ve got to be taught; to hate and fear
You’ve got to be taught; from year to year
It’s got to be drummed; in your dear little ear…
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late; before you are six or seven or eight
To hate all the people your relatives’ hate…
When I was growing up in America in the 1950s & 60s, I don’t remember my parents saying much about race. My mom did not describe the Walgreen’s incident until I was 30.
The only race comment I heard from my father was that the singer Nat King Cole was a “good negro.” Yes, cringe-worthy to today’s ears, but enlightened contrasted to the racial language I occasionally heard from my dad’s father and brother at Sunday dinners on their farm.
My parents taught their sons to respect everyone.
Rebecca’s mother and father spent one year in the 1940s in Georgia before moving back to Illinois to raise their six children. According to Rebecca, her mom told her kids that Blacks in Georgia had to use different drinking fountains and how wrong that was. Throughout the 1960s, Evelyn Franklin would refer to that Georgia experience when talking with her kids about the moral rightness of the Civil Rights Movement.
Irene is now seven years old and has moved from a scooter to a bicycle. She still lives in Houston with her mom Suzanne and dad Jonathan. Houston is one of America’s most diverse cities and Irene’s daycare, school and neighborhood reflect this diversity.
The evening following four-year-old Irene’s “I don’t like her” comment we all played the I Never Forget a Face memory game. All three adults took every opportunity to talk about how different human faces are and how this difference is good.
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Most people do not become haters because their parents and increasingly the culture that surrounds them send messages into their “little ears” that serve as antidotes to turning the differences children note into fear and then to hatred.
I see differences everywhere in America. And like you I see it up close, 24 hours a day, in my community and on my devices.
There is more of it than at any time in my 72 years. It is both at the root of America’s contentious politics and bigger than politics.
The human animal has been interacting with groups outside her tribe for only 130,000 years. Our brains are trying to keep up with the reality of living with those who look, worship and speak differently.
Hate still sells and not only in America. I will not live to see its sell-by date.
By the way, it took Loudon Wainwright III 15 minutes in 1972 to write Dead Skunk after he ran over one on a highway. He finished the song before it stopped stinkin.
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When I saw the live skunk, I wanted to rush outside and take a picture. But I didn’t. You wouldn’t have either, for an obvious reason.
Later in the day I talked with my neighbor Craig. He had spotted our Mephitidae invader while up peeing the night before.
Everybody needs a neighbor like Craig.
He called the police who arrived 5 minutes later, a quiet night, human-crime-wise. The cop patrolled the neighborhood inside the safety of her squad car, to no avail.
I asked Craig what the police do when they locate a skunk. You know the answer. The execution is done humanely.
OK, that’s what I wanted. The skunk dead.
But then I thought, should we be putting skunks to death?
Momentarily, and snowflake that I am, my dander was up and my halo straightened.
And then I recalled the slaughter on Water Street that had taken place earlier that day.
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Photo by author
These are Japanese Beetles on the leaf of one of our Birch trees. When I discovered their invasion of our nine little trees, and with the help of a garden shop expert, I devised a two-pronged strategy to beat back the enemy.
I mixed a solution in a gallon of water and poured it on each of the tree bases. Over time it will be absorbed by the trees’ roots to dissuade future invaders. Think moat around a castle.
I then sprayed a pesticide on the leaves of each tree. Think machine gun.
I slaughtered hundreds of beetles on Water Street.
And not only that. Two weeks ago I vacuumed an equal number of Carpenter ant carcasses after strafing their redoubts.
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As I was writing this essay, a thought, unbidden and unwanted, was delivered into my consciousness. I will share it with you.
The only good skunk is a bad skunk.
Yes, it made me uncomfortable too. Where did that phrasing come from?
I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are.
Ugh. Even writing these words spoken by someone else 136 years ago, to illustrate a point, creeps me out. If I was still in a college classroom, I might not put Roosevelt’s quote on a slide or the whiteboard.
Why not? Because the idea behind the words contradicts the way we are suppose to feel, do genuinely feel, about American Indians or any other group of humans in our society, in 2022.
And then I had another thought I will leave with you. I will ponder it as well.
Will most people in 2162 condemn my wish for a dead skunk or my slaughter of beetles and ants just as today I condemn Theodore Roosevelt’s attitude toward American Indians?
My anxiety had morphed from a prison guard into a companion
Image from Wikipedia Commons
Have you ever resisted a thought, feeling or urge?
It’s a fool’s game we cannot win.
Two weeks ago I was sitting in the backseat of a Piper Archer single engine airplane as our pilot Aviv taxied to the runway at the Beverly, Massachusetts Regional Airport.
Aviv is my partner Rebecca’s son-in-law and an excellent pilot. The day was perfect for an afternoon round trip to the Sanford Seacoast Airport in Maine along the Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine coasts.
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Beverly to Sanford
Belted in, I
Thought: This plane will crash and I see body parts and scattered wreckage.
Felt: Tense & nauseous from tightened stomach muscles.
Had the urge: to Unbuckle my seat belt, grip the door handle, and get out.
Thought, feeling, urge: bang, bang, bang. Maybe my stomach tightened and then I thought and saw a crash image. Or the urge to escape preceded both. No matter.
All three descended instantaneously and unbidden, the moment before we ascended.
As Aviv guided us to 2000 feet, I grabbed with my left hand the pocket of the pilot’s seat. When the plane tilted left, I leaned right.
Photo by Aviv Hod
As the plane leveled, Aviv took this picture. I won’t tell you what I thought as our pilot was snapping, yakking and flapping. I put on my Eddie Haskell smile.
My left hand grasped the slivered pocket as if it was Linus’ security blanket.
I saw none of the coast from Beverly to Sanford. I did not join Rebecca and Aviv’s chit chat.
I was consumed and controlled by anxiety. The image by Bhargov Buragohaim that begins this essay represented my experience on that Saturday’s first leg.
But I was not helpless. About 15 years ago I was diagnosed with OCD, an anxiety disorder. I will write about my OCD in a future blog. For now, I want to share insights from my journey of recovery that might help you, whether you suffer from anxiety or are occasionally anxious.
After Aviv’s gentle touch down in Sanford, we had 30 minutes to enjoy and appreciate the earth. The picture below, with another security blanket in my left hand, was taken after I had reminded myself that I control my reaction to anxiety.
Photo by Aviv Hod
I wanted to enjoy the return view from 3000 feet. Yes, that right, our compassionate pilot told us another 1000 feet would smooth out the ride. Yikes, but…Higher-up means a better view, right.
And I wanted to be a better companion to Rebecca and Aviv.
Sanford to Beverly
Here is what Recovered-Paul said to Anxious-Paul, as we hung around the Southern Maine Aviation Airport.
You grew up thinking you could control what you thought and felt. This was a cognitive mistake. 1000s of thoughts move through us everyday. Feelings come and go, often without rhyme or reason. Remember: Our thoughts and feelings are outside our conscious control.
For much of your adult life, you let thoughts and feelings bully you. Remember in 2009 when you walked along the cliff in Northern Ireland and had the thought “I could jump off.” You stayed away from cliffs the remainder of that trip. Not easy as you were the leader of the group. And you ruminated about what that thought might mean, even though you had no genuine suicidal symptoms. Remember: Our thoughts and feelings are unruly and we should not take them literally.
On the flight over, you did three things that anxiety loves because it craves attention. You gripped the seat pocket, looked down at the floor, and neglected Aviv and Rebecca. These were compulsions you engaged to lessen anxiety. Your security blankets. They worked but with a cost. You missed the visual and social experiences. Remember: If in control, anxiety chips away at your life.
Compulsions never work in the long run. They keep you attached to anxiety and detached from the world. One of your OCD symptoms was checking whether the stove top burners were turned off. Today, you check once, maybe twice instead of 30 times. You retrained your brain by refusing to give in to the compulsion to check.
The exposure and acceptance of the anxiety that came from not checking was not easy but ultimately successful. Paul, on the second leg, don’t hold the seat pocket, look out the windows, and chat with Rebecca and Aviv. Accept the anxiety. Remember: You’ve learned to train your brain to ignore the noise of your thoughts, feelings and urges.
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I like Recovered-Paul more than Anxious-Paul. He’s more alive. And less afraid. No, that’s not right. Recovered-Paul is still anxious and afraid. Including ascending to 3000 feet. And that steep left turn to line-up the Piper with the Beverly runway.
The radio squawked about another plane ahead. Aviv looked, Rebecca scanned, and Paul spotted.
My anxiety had morphed from a prison guard into a companion.
I’m attending my undergraduate college and know I have two courses to complete.
Do you have a dream like this? You must finish something or can’t find something.
I’ve had this dream 100s of times. Last night, something was different.
I received a grade plus sheets of paper, different sizes, clipped together, with comments, and a number. I could not read the comments but the grade was clear and stark.
79/100. In America, that is a C+. A passing but average grade. Maybe below average today.
But there was no number for the one class I had to complete. Inside my dream, I hoped but knew the number wouldn’t be there.
I’ve stopped grading students but can’t stop grading myself. And I’m not alone.
Mickey Mantle* dreamt he couldn’t find Yankee Stadium. 536 home runs were not good enough.
Image from Wikipedia Commons
Even The Mick didn’t couldn’t stop judging himself. Maybe The Babe didn’t either.
At 72, a public convenience is now a private necessity. Even when a water closet wasn’t needed every hour, I recall being fascinated by the markings outside and the wall hangings inside.
For example, when I was 24, and after a few beers, I followed the bar restroom arrows to a dark corridor, with two doors. One had a picture of a gun; the other a holster. I stood between the two doors, puzzled. A guy brushed by me and with no hesitation pushed through, well, you guess which door.
A couple of days ago Rebecca and I were driving country roads in southern Iowa and northern Missouri. The day before she had ridden her bike on these roads and had stopped in Rick’s Country Shoppe to use the bathroom. With no money, Rebecca thanked the counter person and said she’d return another day to buy something.
That’s one reason we were at Rick’s. After filling our gas tank, I used the bathroom and took some pictures of the wall hangings. Yesterday I read Robin Christine Honigsberg’s fine essay on the memorable art around us. And I thought, bathroom pictures can also be memorable.
The other reason we returned to Ricks is the sign pictured below. Rebecca told me it lessened her guilt about not being able to buy something.
Photo by author
How often I have slinked out of places with a Benjo, without buying something. Or, on a few occasions, had someone hurtle “toilets only for customers.”
The sign’s owner offered more than a guilt-free privy. She gently reminded us of a currency always available.
Rick’s Country Store now joins the gun and holster bar in my loo memories.
Kindness is found in the strangest places. And is always contagious.
“We need to be touched by something better within us”
Photo from the universe.com
“My favorite movie is South Pacific,” said Deb, among the reddest of the reds. “That’s my favorite movie too” chimed this bluest of the blues’ whose heart began to melt, just a bit.
From istockphoto.com
A problem and a solution
I belong to a small group of reds (Republicans) and blues (Democrats) who have been meeting once a month on Zoom for a year. We call ourselves Braver Summit, an 18 person off-shoot of Braver Angels. Braver Angels, with a membership of 10,000, was created in 2016 in response to America’s descent into poisoned politics.
The title of this blog is Lauren’s reason for joining the Braver groups. Lauren is blue-leaning and in an email conversation she said:
As a blue-leaning person in a red-leaning family, I often have found myself having challenging, reactive, and unproductive conversations. As someone with a psychology and counseling background, I honestly felt ashamed. I was desperate to find a better way.
Red-leaning Peter, co-founder of Summit along with me, writes:
This is personal for me. I have two sons. My conservative political leanings offend their liberal leanings and so our relationships have been deeply compromised by political difference.
I met Peter at the first Braver Angel’s workshop I attended. This blog’s subtitle is the heart of Braver’s philosophy built upon Abraham Lincoln’s plea to America’s southern states at the end of his first Inaugural Address in 1861:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chores of the union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln, from the Avalon Project, Yale Law School
I joined Braver Angels and helped found Braver Summit because I did not like who I had become when faced with someone on the other side. Red friends had become enemies. That’s not good for me or my country. Echoing Lauren, I thought “there’s got to be a better way.”
Braver seemed a path to a better America and a better me.
What Braver Summit does
We begin each Braver Summit meeting with an ice-breaker, something simple, and unrelated to politics. At our April meeting, when red-Deb said South Pacific, blue-Paul forgot Zoom queue etiquette and hollered me too. More important, he saw something he and Deb had in common. Yeah, a small thing, but a reminder that politics is only one part of who each of us is.
After the ice breaker, we build each of our monthly meetings around exercises that focus on listening and finding common ground. For example, we asked group members to come to the April meeting prepared to describe three things they feared about the other side. Each side convened to come up with their top three fears, while the other side was muted and listening.
Then the reds (blues) were tasked to develop responses to the blue-fears (red-fears) while the blues (reds) observed. Our group of 18 then came together to talk about what each of us had learned. On that April evening, I learned my red friends fear an authoritarian left. They learned we blues fear an authoritarian right.
Over the past year, Braver Summit has had sessions on abortion, race, war and January 6th. In June and July, we will tackle gun violence.
A year of living dangerously
It’s not easy to listen to the other side. That’s the Braver part of Braver Angels. My stomach still tightens before every meeting. What’s the angel side? I asked a few members to describe why they want to stay in our group.
My relationship with my sons remains strained. I now have a new perspective on it all, though. I have taken to reading both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal daily, to keep a broader view of issues and ideas.
Peter, red-leaning
I am amazed at the places in my life where the concepts of Braver Angels unexpectedly appear. I attended a virtual Yom Kippur service at Central Synagogue in Fall 2021. During the sermon the Rabbi shared about two people who ‘were willing to sit in the discomfort of dissent and even doubt…because they knew their debates were in the service of something bigger than themselves and only by listening to opposing views could they arrive at a conclusion that transcends either of their original positions.’ (Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, September 15, 2021)
Lauren, blue-leaning
I learned that, after getting to know the people, it is easier to appreciate where they come from. Seems pretty trite. Now a goal might be to listen better to complete strangers.
Mike, red-leaning
Me? Now, when Deb’s face appears, I see a kindred spirit who happens to be on the other team. But the game needs both of our teams.
Last week Rebecca and I started off for Trout Run, an 11 mile bike trail around our home in northeast Iowa. I said let’s do clockwise” and Rebecca nodded.
Entrance to Trout Run Trail
When we got to the entrance, she went left and I went right.
Later, and being curious, we talked about why we went opposite ways. I went right because I observed an imaginary clock in front of me and so headed toward 1:00. Right, from my point of view, was clockwise.
Rebecca went left because she saw herself in the center of the clock looking outward. Left, from her point of view, was right and clockwise.
We see the world, not as it is, but as we are – or as we are conditioned to see it.
Steven Covey in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
The next time you disagree with someone ask two questions: What do I see? What does she see?
I wish bad things would stop happening to innocents.
I wish Yahweh and Jesus and Mohammed and Devi and Buddha and Kant and…would convene and write across the earth’s sky in every language what is truly right and what is truly wrong so we would at least know the Blasphemers.
I wish no one’s heart was stone.
I wish no one’s mind was wracked.
I wish those who have been hurt would stop taking their hurt into the world.
I wish all leaders were good people.
I wish all caregivers cared.
I wish the content of one’s character mattered more than anything else.
I wish for strength for those who need it today and tomorrow.
