glad to be home

 

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We made it home last night. But my suitcase didn’t. Supposedly they will deliver it when it arrives. Eileen thinks that will be afternoon at the soonest.

My trip to California left me feeling sad. Sad to be parted from those I love. Sad that they are going through so much. Eileen and i were sitting in a restaurant at the Ontario Airport and this sadness weirdly and suddenly lifted. I had been resisting rehearsing thoughts that reinforced it, but this cessation felt physical.

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I read in Siegel’s Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human and Dyson’s Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon for White America. These two books help pass the plane rides.

Siegel continues to intrigue me. His book is a window into current brain and cognition science which asks very important questions about the mind. It helps me to think of the mind as existing between us as well as inside us. Our experiences of each other re-hard wire our individual brains.

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This is interesting to factor in when I consider my relationships with others over the years.  I am sometimes mystified about the changes in people I have know a long time. Where are the people they used to be? I can think of several persons in my life whose present personality has morphed entirely from when I knew them when we were younger.

When I knew these people, the synergy of our relationships could be understood as the mind between.  I have had old acquaintance give me the impression that by emphasizing the arts and beauty I am stuck somewhere in the immature past. Of course it doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems something is missing in my old acquaintance. Another old acquaintance seems to have plunged deeply into her own pathology abandoning the things that she and I both cared about when we were younger: poetry, ideas, beauty. Could the previous experience be evidence of some sort of interpersonal connection that is gone now and no longer affects her?

Siegel also emphasizes the notion of “integration.” This helps me as well since I strive to get more of this in my own life.

Dyson’s book is a sermon to white people. It is very charming that he sometimes uses a language that is reminiscent of St. Paul. Speaking of “White fragilitu” as a “will to innocence that serves to bury the violence it sits on top of” and after listing off a litany of realities of racial violence in our time, he writes: “Beloved, to be white is to know that you have at your hand, or by extension, through institutionalized means, the power to take black life with impunity. It’s the power of life and death that gives whiteness its force, its imperative. White life is worth more than black life.

Dyson also relates many stories of his own and others’ confrontation with racial hatred. The book is keeping my attention and I am learning to think deeper about some things in our country like the continuing insidious acts of hate against African Americans.

Bob Woodward’s New Book Will Detail ‘Harrowing Life’ Inside Trump White House – The New York Times

Woodward’s books are often a bit gossipy and dumbed down, but I might read this one

Chinese Parents Protest Bad Vaccines for Hundreds of Thousands – The New York Times

And in the US we have the dang Vaxxers who don’t believe in science.

After the Play, a Supreme Encore From Ruth Bader Ginsburg – The New York Times

RBG is a breath of sanity in a time of insane government in the USA.

Minneapolis Police Officers Won’t Be Charged in Fatal Shooting – The New York Times

This reminds me of a discussion I had with the reactionary pastor of First Pres Detroit when I worked there. He was talking about the killings at Kent State U years ago (even then) of protesting students. He said they were irresponsible. I said that one would hope that the government would be the voice of sanity in that kind of situation not reactivity. Unfortunately, it wasn’t true at Kent State, nor when I talked to the pastor in the 80s, nor is it true now.

U.K. Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt Calls His Chinese Wife Japanese in Beijing –

I don’t know if you saw this in headline somewhere. I did and was glad to read a report about it since it is such a weird thing. It turns out that the Chinese government official he was meeting with had been speaking Japanese and that when Hunt screwed it up in the same breath he said it was a mistake and a bad one. No story.

Opinion | Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction – The New York Times

Interesting back story to some USA madness including understanding Trump’s dog whistles to extremists and Bannon’s connection to this stupid hateful literature.

60 Books Bill Gates Recommends. How Many Have You Read? – Blinkist Magazine

Bookmarked to look at later. I love book lists.

1 thought on “glad to be home

  1. I’ve ordered Bob Woodward’s book. I figured that, with Amazon’s pre-order price guarantee, there’s no reason to wait to order it. I’ll get the lowest price they have had for it leading up to the afternoon of the day on which it’s published.

    I made a note in my calendar a few days before it’s to be published to check and see what I’m likely going to have to pay for it and then decide whether or not I want to pay that much…

    Looking forward to seeing you…

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