Negotiating dystopia with love

I so want to start the week with encouraging words, but as I sat in my quiet living room searching for those words, my mind was distracted by the weekend news of riots in France by “demonstrators” who seem to share ideology in common with the organizations that back the mostly peaceful gatherings that were occurring on this side of the Atlantic. It feels inevitable to me that we are creeping back towards the sort of dystopia that hung over the US of A from 2021 to 2024.

Lest you jump to conclusions, let me hasten to add that I am no big fan of the incumbent administration these days, either. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

But I find myself contemplating how I might cope with what seems to be an inevitable descent into even more unpleasant times, given my preference for liberty and peace.

“Love God and love your neighbor” is the law I live. How do I interact with those who mean to tear down the country and rebuild it in their image? “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And what about those who invade and attempt to close churches and synagogues, or censor dissent, as they have done before? “Love your enemies.”

This is why the most important commandment is “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” — because there are some people who are hard to love without divine intervention, people who are filled with hate and have no objection to violence. We cannot defeat them by hating them and countering their violence with violence, however; we must meet them with peace and with love. Doing so is the equivalent of heaping burning coals on their heads, and they quite possibly will lash out with intensified violence, like a child in mid-tantrum. We restrain the child to prevent further damage, but we act in love.

That’s easy for me to say; I am miles from the epicenter. Lord grant me the strength and the patience to meet the haters with love, should I ever encounter them.

The AWLR books

I was so absorbed in this week’s unplanned trilogy (“To be heard,” “To hear,” and “Peace over a coffee cup”) that I forgot I have designated Thursday for promoting my modest selection of books. My hope is to convince you to purchase one or more of my little offerings for the book lover in your family at Christmastime. They make quite nice gifts if I say so myself.

I have published five books in the last three years. I was talking with my daughter-in-law, Wife of Son of Red, this week, and we agreed we tend to measure time as Before We Lost Red and After We Lost Red. These are the five books I’ve published since Carol Jean passed, and while I can’t put my finger on the difference, I am more inclined to emphasize/promote/recommend these five works first among my 17 literary efforts, although I certainly am proud to point you towards all of them.

I’m listing the ISBNs with each because I am a horrendous marketer, and so it’s unlikely you’ll find these tomes at your local bookstore — but I’m confident they will gladly order them for you.

Ebenezer: A sequel of sorts to “A Christmas Carol” (979-8-9863331-6-8) (or hardcover 979-8-9863331-5-1) is a novelette about an encounter between a morose young man and Mr. Scrooge, envisioning how that fine gentleman may have spent his time after pledging to hold Christmas in his heart always.

Dejah & Summer in the Time of Magic (979-8-9863331-8-2) tells the story of when my two golden retrievers began to talk shortly before Halloween and how we fought off an attack by the Evil One, with the help of a motley crew of magical beings.

The Man Who Crossed Whimsy Avenue (978-0-9910107-0-7) is a collection of 96 very short stories (“flash fiction”) in various genres.

And then there are the last two collections of posts from this blog.

A Declaration of Peace (979-8-9863331-9-9) collects my thoughts in the wake of Red’s passing, generally focused on the value of human life after the worst loss of my experience. Originally published as War IS the Crime, I repackaged it to better emphasize the underlying theme, which is, of course, “Love God and love your neighbor.”

See the World! (978-0-9910107-1-4) contains 70 reflections about staying aware in the moment as we walk through this most amazing life, and about what we see when we look up from our screens and embrace the world around us.

I still aim to release my next collection, titled What I Came to Say, in time for Christmas 2026, in case your book lover wants to find the very latest Bluhm tome under the tree. Of course, they can always find the very latest right here, and for free, but we all know there’s something extra special about holding the words in your hands.

Peace over a cup of coffee

Please allow me to introduce myself. On second thought, I’m not especially important. In a world of 8 billion people, I’m just one of them. And yet — and yet — I serve a God who cares about every sparrow and every flower in every field, so perhaps just maybe he cares about me, too, and you, and so I should care about myself and about you and about those 8 billion other humans. We are all irreplaceable, beings who will pass this way only the once with our unique set of circumstances and experiences and what is it that makes us.

As long as I have paused to contemplate what to write next, let me get my first cup of coffee.

Coffee is among so many miracles of human experience. How did someone years ago decide to try grinding the beans and boiling the results to produce a comforting drink with the power to wake the senses? Look at a coffee plant; how do you make that leap? And what insight prompted humans to generate electricity or forge metal or assemble days into seconds, minutes and hours? How do you go from living in caves to building caves, or from scrawling words on paper to sending your words to every corner of the earth?

Every mind is a miracle, our every act an accumulation of all that has gone before and an expression of hopes and dreams. And when one of us has lost hopes and dreams and even prayers — when, for example, he/she begins to believe they are only one of 8 billion people and that thought drifts into melancholy — we must lift them and remind them that each life is worthy of notice by the God of our universe — or if, which is also true, none of us is worthy, then we must share our gratitude for that God’s eternal love, and in God’s footsteps we should love one another, even those who did not get the memo and have sworn to be our enemies.

If I love my neighbors, no one is my enemy, and if you see yourself as my enemy, then you are gravely mistaken, but it will not change the fact that you are my neighbor and I love you.

This is not an easy attitude to maintain, and when I struggle at it, I am grateful to the God of the universe for setting the example.

And here my pride starts to creep in — “These are good words,” I say to myself. “I must share them with the world.” Who am I to think any of my little thoughts are big enough to share? But even someone who is no more important than anyone else may say something that others may want to contemplate and share. One of those no-more-important-than-anyone-else people once upon a time suggested boiling coffee beans to make a beverage.

And so I write these thoughts down in a book meant for myself, but also meant to launch what thoughts may benefit others. This is my message to myself, and I share it on paper (and later in bytes) in small part with the hope and perhaps even the belief that others might see dare-I-say wisdom in them.

I begin to lose the point when I begin to focus on who I am or try to assign any value to my words, although I must admit the source of my message did say “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and so if I am to love my neighbor I must also find love in my heart for myself. And so I write these words and say, “Here are my thoughts; what are your thoughts? Yours are as important as mine, and as we listen to one another and find common ground, we move forward in peace.”

And there, at last, perhaps, is a description of the process that led to discovering how to make a pleasant beverage from a coffee plant.