Today I’m with the words of Robert Hubbell on how we deal with our shock, anger, disappointment, and fear.

Robert Hubbell: Worst of all, the early effort to slice and dice the electorate into parcels of blame is the most harmful exercise Democrats can engage in at this moment. We can deconstruct the 2024 election at our leisure. Today, we face the imminent threat of a fascistic regime intent on deporting ten million immigrants, repealing Obamacare, outlawing contraception and abortion, appointing white nationalists to the cabinet, placing an anti-vaxxer in charge of the health of women and children, putting climate-change denialists in charge of environmental agencies, and packing the military and national security community with Putin-friendly isolationists.

I balance and breathe in words of Thich Nhat Hanh from “The Wounded Swan”:

Love and understanding can ease the suffering of all beings. The truth is the truth, whether or not it is accepted by the majority. Therefore, I tell you children, it takes great courage to stand up for and protect what is right.

What is seeing? What do we see? Where do we focus ?

With my post-surgery enhancement of seeing, my brain is busy integrating this new world. All senses are affected. I smell and hear better, touch more deeply into enchantment, discernment, layers. I’m tasting my world. I feel part of this world as though I, too, am being tasted, smelled, touched, heard, seen.

I close my eyes to refresh and honor healing as I need to remember not to lift anything over 20 pounds, and not to bend below the waist, and not to let water near my eyes. Presence is requested and required.

Years ago I took a workshop with Anne C. Klein.  Now I read her words from “Revisiting Ritual”.   

Our mind wanders incessantly, but our body and senses are always in the present. To investigate our embodied experience is to investigate the living present.

I’m with what it is to investigate the living present, and in that to juice the sacred within, to feel the touch of lungs on heart swinging through like monkeys in trees, branching and expanding the roles we share.

The octopus has three hearts and nine brains, a central brain and one in each of its eight arms.  We have ten fingers.  What might we stretch and embrace to reach even beyond what we see?

On Juneteeth, we remember that 157 years ago, white Americans enslaved African Americans because of the color of their skin. We remember and change.

T.H. White set his book The Once and Future King, a book about King Arthur, in a different time period than what we historically and mythically know.  He used Le Morte d’Arthur, as a source, though he re-interprets it from the perspective of a world recovering from World War II. What advice might he give?

In the book, this is the advice Merlyn gives Arthur.

“The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your house trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then – to learn.  Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”