Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Candlelight

These days I’m with the magic of candlelight even as I read the news.

I was on a Zoom Call on Monday and AI gave a beautiful summary of the experience and journey.

We can thank Chat GPT for this as posted by Heather Cox Richardson.

When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbersasked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.

May that change as people wake and vote for democracy, support, unity, and humanity.

A burning candle shows the many ways to give and offer Light!

Posted on by Cathy Edgett

Receiving

Today is a beautiful autumn day.  I think of pumpkins ripening in the fields, gathering sunlight, nourishing seeds even as there is that huge open space inside.

I’m with these words of Joseph Campbell:

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.

What resilience and trust that requires, and yet there is an energy to it too.  What comes now as the light changes inside and out.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote: Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall.

And in these staggeringly complex times, Jimmy Carter guides us with his words: 

“A strong nation, like a strong person, can afford to be gentle, firm, thoughtful, and restrained. It can afford to extend a helping hand to others. It is a weak nation, like a weak person, that must behave with bluster and boasting and rashness and other signs of insecurity.”

And with that, a return to Hafiz:

I wish I could show you,

When you are lonely or in darkness,

The Astonishing Light

Of your own Being!