Listen to the wind chimes play their melodic non-melody —
Melody in time with the breeze,
A constant reminder of unseen powers at play —
We see and hear the impact of those powers
But we never see the wind itself.
The wind chimes’ music soothes even when the wind is blowing at destructive levels, when the power blinks off and on or lightning and thunder accompanies the music. Why, I wonder?
Are the chimes a motherly assurance that everything is going to be all right? Or a wise example of how even this potentially destructive force of nature can be harnessed in the service of creating beauty? There’s a metaphor in there somewhere — this force capable of toppling trees or creating symphonies.
The wind has no choice, it is what is it, but we choose daily between beauty and destruction.
May we each harness our powerful energy in the name of beauty, with a goal of a better world, not a barren and bitter world.
We toiled for years under the illusion that the leaders of the U.S. government were good humans who wanted to preserve ideals of truth, justice, and liberty. Was it ever so? It certainly is not now.
The presidential candidates over the past 32 years have all either been very wealthy to begin with or slick con men who used the tools of politics and government to make themselves wealthy — and once wealth insulates you from the concerns of everyday humans, it’s easy to tax them into slavery and bully them into any sort of ghastly behavior, from waging war against strangers to submitting to bizarre medical experiments.
The U.S. government is a pathetic shadow parroting Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence but refusing to live by even a shred of its meaning. In the absence of decency, the least we can do is refuse to participate in the charade. At a minimum I won’t vote for these people.
So much of this mess is out of the everyday human’s control that it seems hopeless to preserve truth, justice or liberty, but even the bloated and corrupt leviathan cannot be everywhere. What we CAN do is use what resources are left to us to be kind in the face of bullies, to live our lives as if we are free — that is to say, to be a living example of what a true and decent human looks like, living in peace and loving our neighbors.
I hesitate to mention the name of Jesus because that name has been misused and misrepresented by petty tyrants and narrow-minded bigots down through the ages, but Jesus and his apostles are the best example I have for what I mean. These were people who lived by the essential laws of love God and love your neighbors. These were people who believed that “the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23)
Could we really build a peaceful world on that gentle but firm foundation? Why not? The bullies would howl and belittle the followers of such a path, and probably even maim and kill as many as they felt they could get away with — but they have a basic flaw, and that is their way of thinking is wrong, detrimental to humanity, and, well, simply indecent.
The bloated leviathan someday will collapse upon itself, and what is left could be as brutal and lawless as the leviathan itself — or it could be grounded in the fruit of the spirit, if we start building that gentle but firm foundation, today.
Next — now for my next trick — what comes next? Here we stand at the nexus of next, the watershed moment as it were. The next thing can be this, or perhaps that, or perhaps both, or perhaps neither.
Whose choice is it? Mine, yours, or someone else’s entirely?
I don’t know.
That’s the scary and the exhilarating thing about it all: We don’t know. We may have preferences or predictions, but what comes next is out of our control.
You might say only God knows. But who knows what God knows? If we have free will, He might have a good idea, but if we have free will, wouldn’t we surprise God from time to time by choosing a different path than the one we seem destined to take?
It could be that the only ways to see what comes next are to watch, or to act and see what happens.
