“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 will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

First post of 2016.

I tried for one last week, but all I could do was rant. I will grant you, there is a lot to rant about. But . . .

So then this morning, I drew the Ant card from the Animal Wise Tarot deck. And the Scarlet Macaw. And the Porcupine.

It’s all about balancing work and play and finding the spiritual in the mundane.

Setting the new course.

I emerged from last year. That’s how I can best describe last year’s journey around the sun. A journey from which I had to emerge. Mortality shadowed me. Not mortality as in my death, but in how mortality shapeshifts life.

As I said, I felt like that candle in the wind.

And then the winds stopped as I sailed into the doldrums.

I don’t much like the notion of god as a stern taskmaster, looking down on us, wondering why we can’t be better, forgiving us for not being better. I personally believe that god is in awe of humans. Amazed that we can live and love with mortality perching on our shoulder.

I remember reading that Inuits don’t have a word for art. Their art is functional, tools fashioned for the mundane but imbued with spirit. A recognition that the ordinary tasks required for living a life are part and parcel of an extraordinary creation.

I read this last week in an article by Nancy Langstonian titled “In Oregon, Myth Mixes With Anger” in the New York Times:

“In the first decades of the 20th century, the conservationist William Finley paddled a little boat through the marshes of the basin and came upon a colony of egrets slaughtered by plume hunters, the young left to starve. Out of hundreds of thousands of egrets that had once nested in Malheur Lake, only 121 were left.

My first response was to rant. To scream at the television. To swear on Facebook. To join those who are sending dildos to the people who are occupying the Malheur Refuge Center.

I wanted to do something extraordinary to make it go away. But I wasn’t sure what “it” was that I wanted to go away. Stupidity? Ignorance? Arrogance? But, other than keeping my head from exploding with outrage, I could not see how screaming at the television, swearing on Facebook, or sending dildos to the occupiers made it go away for me.

Side note: just as pure theater, I think sending the “Occupiers” dildos was brilliant and encourage its continuance. Even if it can’t help, it can’t hurt.

That article in the NY Times was just one of the many outrageous pieces of information floating around in the media. And with journalism taking a back seat to corporate media, the information just hangs out there as if all sides are equal. As if anger that we have to share the world with others is equal to anger over lives lost

So, setting this new course, having decided to sail into this new year, is going to be tricky

I’m going to start by saying right out loud (please read this aloud) that claiming god as yours and yours alone is not a spiritual act. That is finding the mundane in the spiritual and calling it religion.

Okay, got that off my chest.

I’ll also say out loud (please read aloud) that “telling it like it is” is not truth telling. It is vomiting out vitriol, which I guess gets it out of one’s system, but exhorting crowds to believe that god supports their prejudices and that they can kill (figurative or literally) anyone who matches their prejudice or gets in the way of their god-given right to have a world that supports that right, is blasphemous. And nasty. And mean. And cruel. And stupid. And cynical. And will lead us into a very dark world.

One where only 121 egrets survive.

I often start these posts not really knowing where I will end up. I think I just got what this has to do with setting a new course, finding the spiritual in the mundane, the spirit in the mundane in the coming year.

It’s remembering those slaughtered egrets and giving voice to the ravaged landscape. Wherever that may take me.

In case the copyright doesn’t show, all photos are copyrighted by Sue Padgett, a friend for close to 50 years and photographer extraordinaire.