This week as I recovered from cataract surgery, a memory from my childhood finally surfaced. In the late 1950’s in my hometown, I had met an artist who could barely see to paint anymore because of her vision loss due to cataracts. Doctors hadn’t yet invented the modern replacement lenses and use of small incisions for implantation. Complications back then were common, rather than rare. I can still remember my dad’s response to my desire for contact lens, “What? Put a foreign object in your eye? You’re asking for an infection!” Perhaps this was why I worried myself to exhaustion while waiting for my first surgery.
Unknown Artist: Inlay in the Form of an Eye, Glass and gypsum, Egypt
As it turns out, I can now see my television set without my glasses and I read my iPad with my untreated eye. I’ve always had my glasses within arm’s reach of my bed or my chair for over sixty years. It feels strange not to put them on first thing in the morning.
If there were things I could not see before, I could always feel them if I were still enough to notice their subtle movements. Most of the time I, as many others do, stress over what “might happen,” instead of being present to the moment in which the important stuff is actually happening.
Luke Howard: Graph of wind, rain, and temperatures from 1815-1832
After I worried myself into an exhausted heap on my couch, I woke up in a different mood. I realized I’d been going “from house to house” to borrow a cup of trouble for a cake I didn’t need to bake or eat. It was going to be a decadent cake with multiple layers and a. rich icing. If it were autumn, I’d probably get first prize in the cake competition at the state fair.
Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes, 1963
But no one needs a Trouble Cake. I saw all my ingredients were as nothing, for I had a great doctor, people who would care for me, and this was a new age in medicine. Moreover, the Spirit of God would sustain me in my recovery and remind me my wellbeing depends on following my doctor’s instructions. As we read in John 3:5-8 NRSV—
Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Sometimes we need to feel the wind and not try to know from whence it comes or why it goes, but merely thank it for arriving to be with us in this present moment.
Utagawa Hiroshige: Yokkaichi: Mie River, 1833-34
Who Has Seen the Wind? by Christina Rossetti
Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.
Sometimes we need a fresh wind blowing through our hearts and minds to get a new outlook on life. We can’t be wedded to the past like the old farmer who said of the new fangled plow he saw at the farm supply store, “My daddy plowed with a two pronged plow, so a two pronged plow is good enough for me.” He never bought the new and improved three pronged plow.
Bernard Evans: Cannock Chase – ‘When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, and they did make no noise’, circa 1885
Much like the church that can’t recognize the fresh movement of the Spirit moving through the world today, if we can’t feel that wind, maybe cataract surgery would help us see the movement in the leaves.
Joy and Peace,
Cornelia
NOTE: The Greek word for Spirit and wind are the same: πνεῦμά. Strong’s Greek Concordance 4151 pneúma – properly, spirit (Spirit), wind, or breath. The most frequent meaning (translation) of 4151 (pneúma) in the NT is “spirit” (“Spirit”). Only the context determines which sense(s) is meant. When used with Holy, the word is Holy Spirit, not holy breath!
Utagawa Hiroshige: Yokkaichi: Mie River (Yokkaichi, Miegawa), from the series “Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (Tokaido gojusan tsugi no uchi),” also known as the Hoeido Tokaido, wood block print, 1833-34, Art Institute of Chicago.
Luke Howard: Graph detailing prevailing wind directions, rain depth, and mean temperature over a period of eighteen years, 1815-1832, in London. The Royal Society.
Bernard Evans: Cannock Chase – ‘When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, and they did make no noise’, circa 1885, watercolor. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sidney, Australia.
Unknown Artist: Inlay in the Form of an Eye, Glass and gypsum, Egypt, (9/16 × 1 13/16 × 3/8 in.), 1540–1070 BCE, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
Wayne Thiebaud, Cakes, 1963, National Gallery of Art, Washington D. C.
This rabbit was shivering during the last week of February.
March is here and the wild hares of the rabbit clan have come to visit. I’m shivering on a cold, dreary, and rainy day, but I’m about to have a cup of steaming hot tea and put dinner on the stove. While I waited for the water to boil, I visited the open AI project out of curiosity. My old daddy used to say, “curiosity killed the cat,” but I think he was trying to keep me safe by not poking my nose into some dangerous places. Without curiosity, we never learn anything new or stretch our horizons. We’d live a sad, constricted life if we always stayed inside the lines and never pushed the boundaries.
The chat bot took my name and combined it with that of Cornelia Adele Strong Fassett, who painted the Florida Case Before the Electoral Commission, to describe the importance of “Cornelia DeLee, artist.” Also according to the chatbot, I am long dead, so I must be communicating from “yonder.” Fassett’s painting was about the contested presidential election of 1876.
The Florida Case before the Electoral Commission Oil on canvas, by Cornelia Adele Fassett This painting now hangs on the third floor of the Capitol.
In January, 1877, when the Electoral College met, 20 votes were contested, but neither side would concede the election. Congress passed a law empowering the Electoral Commission at the end of January. Ten days of deliberations passed before the 20 votes passed to the Republican candidate, an act which the Democrats protested until they received assurances federal soldiers would leave the Southern states. With Reconstruction at an end, Congress declared Rutherford B. Hayes the new President of the United States on March 2, only two days before his term began.
The Civil War and the Reconstruction years have marked our nation with an ongoing trauma, which has passed from generation to generation. At some point in time, we’ll have to heal, for continually pouring salt into that old wound will keep it festering and it won’t ever heal. Then we’ll pass it down to another generation once more. However, if scripture has any truth to teach us, humankind continues to reenact the sins of our ancestors, even when we know their stories and have the God given gifts of redemption from these shackles of death and shame. But now this rabbit is preaching, and some would say, “meddling once again.”
Update: Heather Cox Richardson, a noted writer of American history, reminds us once again how Southerners rewrite our history to make us more heroic and powerful. The Federal Army didn’t leave the south right away, but stayed in some states for awhile. See the note below.
I’ll change the subject. I’m not much on poetry, but I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to write a “Poem in Praise of March.” After all, World Poetry Day is March 21, so I thought I’d give the ChatAI a run for its money (it’s free right now, while in training stage). The Artificial Intelligence project was delighted to instantly produce the following example:
March, the month of windswept skies, A time when winter softly dies. The earth awakens from her sleep, As days grow long and nights grow deep.
The snows of winter start to thaw, And nature’s beauty starts to draw A tapestry of green and gold, As springtime’s treasures now unfold.
The birds return with joyful sound, Their melodies now all around. The trees bud out, the flowers bloom, And life returns to end the gloom.
March, the month of change and hope, A time to cast off winter’s scope. The promise of new life and growth, As nature’s beauty takes its oath.
So let us praise this month of light, For all the wonders it brings to sight. And may we cherish every day, As we welcome spring in every way.
I was so amazed the Artificial Intelligence ChatBot could spit this out so quickly, I typed in, “Thank you.”
AI Enhanced Image by Jos Avery: Erik’s Escape
It immediately answered, “You’re welcome! I’m glad you enjoyed the poem. If you have any other questions or requests, feel free to ask!” I quickly closed the application before it became sentient and asked for my hand in marriage or social security number and tried to enroll me in a monthly cryptocurrency investment program. Yikes!
Speaking of poetry, even the folks at Bloomberg News are writing haikus about global food shortages:
Onion shortage looms. Prices rise, nutrition wanes, Governments take aim.
When I was a child, my brothers and I amused ourselves by lining up dominoes in artful patterns all morning long. After lunch and before our required afternoon nap, we’d touch the first domino in line, and have a wicked joy of watching our entire morning’s work fall one after another. A food shortage (or a toilet paper shortage) happens much the same way in our global economy. Onion prices are still soaring across the globe and fuelling inflation, so countries like Morocco, Turkey and Kazakhstan have taken action and secured supplies.
Close to 40kg of smuggled produce was discovered in the luggage of Philippine Airlines crew members on Friday. (photo credit: PHILIPPINE CUSTOMS OFFICE VIA WALLA NEWS)
Because onion prices are going up due to scarce supply, the price of other fruits and vegetables (such as carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, and apples) also are rising and hampering their availability across the globe, according to the United Nations and the World Bank. In fact, prices have increased so much that onions briefly cost more than meat in the Philippines, and some flight attendants were caught smuggling them out of the Middle East.
This didn’t end well for either the attendants or the produce, since the food was sent out for destruction (it’s illegal to import food, except through proper customs) and the personnel got reprimands and retraining. Word to the wise: hoarding onions isn’t a good idea, since whole, raw onions will last two to three months when stored in a cool, dry place (between 45 and 55 degrees F). Places that provide these conditions may include your cellar, pantry, unheated basement, or garage. Usually, at room temperature, onions last only 2 to 3 weeks. Over the long term, the frugal shopper will buy some scarce items at a higher prices and other items at lower cost when the product is in season and at a surplus. The average price over a year will even out.
Former President Carter signing First Women’s History Week Proclamation
March is Women’s History Month. In February 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first Presidential Proclamation declaring the Week of March 8th, 1980 as National Women’s History Week. In 1987, Congress passed Public Law 100-9, designating March as “Women’s History Month.” Every president since then has recognized the gifts, graces, and achievements of America’s women by presidential proclamation. Other important women’s days in March we recognize are International Women’s Day (March 8), Harriet Tubman Day and National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (March 10).
The Jewish celebration of Purim begins on March 6 at sundown and ends on the 7th at sundown. The festival recalls Queen Esther’s faithfulness to God and God’s saving providence for God’s marginalized people. We should always remember God’s grace is wider than ours, even if the faithful seemed to be “assimilating to the current culture.”
Sleep/wake/cycle
Daylight Savings Time begins March 12, with all of us rabbits settling our clocks forward one hour before we go to bed the night before. If you have difficulty remembering which direction, there’s a motto for this event: “Spring forward, and Fall back.” No one falls forward and springs back—silly rabbits maybe, but not the smart rabbits, who have the good sense to “Spring forward, and Fall back.”
National Pi Day March 14— Not all pies are square
The Ides of March 15 were bad luck for Julius Caesar, but originally the Ides of March once signified the new year, which meant celebrations and rejoicing. Two years before his death at an assassin’s hand, Caesar himself had changed the Roman calendar so the Romans celebrated the new year in January. Some people really don’t like change at all. Plus they don’t like military dictatorships.
People celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on March 17 all over the world, whether they’re Irish or not. While the San Antonio River runs green downtown, Hot Springs National Park will have its First Ever 20th Annual World’s Shortest St. Patrick’s Day Parade on the 98 foot long Bridge Street, which is the world’s shortest street in everyday operational use.
Map of Hot Springs St. Patrick’s Day Festivities
Spring Equinox on March 20 can’t come soon enough for this rabbit. Just knowing the light will become stronger with each passing day is a medicine for my spirits. So what if the pollen follows soon after? Eventually, that too will be history and we bunnies will find something else to fuss about. After all, nothing is certain except for change. None of us can stop the circuit of the stars in the heavens above or cease the changing seasons.
The Three Graces of Spring
We can adjust to these great cycles of change, just as we can grow in love for one another and learn to forgive both ourselves (for our falling short of perfection) and others for harming ourselves. If we rabbits wait till the last moment for our death bed reconciliations, we may not have the time or opportunity to make amends with the ones from whom we’ve estranged ourselves.
If you think you’ll be foolish doing this, I suggest you desensitize yourself and celebrate International Talk Like William Shatner Day on March 22. I asked ChatGPT for a haiku in the voice of William Shatner. On the third try, I got something I thought resembled his breathless cadence and broken phrase delivery. I could almost hear him emphatically delivering the words GO and MUST!
Breathless stars above, Silent darkness, vast and deep, Boldly go, we must.
Ramadan starts during the evening of March 23 and lasts until sundown on Thursday, April 20. Muslims commemorate the gift of the Koran to Muhammad by fasting if physically able, declaring their faith, prayers, charity, and pilgrimage..
BRITON RIVIÈRE, UNA AND LION, NINETEENTH CENTURY
Remember, if March comes in as a lamb, it will go out as a lion, or so the ancient weather proverb goes. The saying may have its origin in the stars, for at this time of year, Leo is the rising sign; by April, it’s Aries. (“Kid” or “ram” doesn’t have quite the same ring as “lamb,” though.) Also, this is the season Jesus arrives as the sacrificial lamb, but will return as the Lion of Judah. Both mean, weather-wise, a false spring.
The Beast with Two Horns like a Lamb by Albrecht Dürer We don’t want March to enter or exit in this Apocalyptic vision.
To sum up, as I finish up this note on the last day of February, the high today will be near 80F and I’ll most likely turn my air conditioner back on before March comes to visit. Looking ahead to March, the Weather Channel outlook has only three days in the 70’s for my location, so Mr. Air Conditioner won’t get much of a work out. I only see one night in the 30’s, so even Mr. Heater will get light workouts in March. As one wag put it on their restaurant sign:
That was February; I don’t think think we’ll see 80’s in March
Until next month, I hope you have onions and potatoes in abundance, and you enjoy green eggs and ham, or green beer, or green tea.
Joy, Peace, and welcome to Springtime,
Cornelia
NOTE from Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, March 2, 2023—this corrects my research.
What did not happen in 1877, either before or after the inauguration, was the removal of troops from the South.
That legend came from a rewriting of the history of Reconstruction in 1890 by fourteen southern congressmen. In their book Why the Solid South? Or Reconstruction and Its Results, they argued that Black voting after the Civil War had allowed Black people to “dominate” white southerners and virtually bankrupt the region and that virtuous white southerners had pushed them from the ballot box and “redeemed” the South. Contemporaries had identified the end of Reconstruction as 1870, with the readmission of Georgia to the United States. But Why the Solid South identified the end of Reconstruction as the end of Republican rule in each state.
In 1906, former steel baron James Ford Rhodes gave a date to that process. In his famous seven-volume history of the United States, he said that in April 1877, Hayes had ended Reconstruction by returning all the southern states to “home rule.” In his era, that was a political term referring to the return of power in the southern states to Democrats, but over time that phrase got tangled up with what did happen in April 1877.
During the chaos after the election, President U.S. Grant had ordered troops to protect the Republican governors in the Louisiana and South Carolina statehouses. When he took office, Hayes told Republican governors in South Carolina and Louisiana that he could no longer let federal troops protect their possession of their statehouses when their Democratic rivals had won the popular vote.
Under orders from Hayes, the troops guarding those statehouses marched away from their posts around the statehouses and back to their home stations in April 1877. They did not leave the states, although a number of troops would be deployed from southern bases later that year both to fight wars against Indigenous Americans in the West and to put down the 1877 Great Railroad Strike. That mobilization cut even further the few troops in the region: in 1876, the Department of the South had only about 1,586 men including officers. Nonetheless, southerners fought bitter congressional battles to get the few remaining troops out of the South in 1878–1879, and they lost.
The troops did not leave the U.S. South in 1877 as part of a deal to end Reconstruction.
It matters that we misremember that history. Generations of Americans have accepted the racist southern lawmakers’ version of our past by honoring the date they claimed to have “redeemed” the South. The reality of Reconstruction was not one in which Black voters bankrupted the region by taking tax dollars from white taxpayers to fund roads and schools and white voters stepped in to save things; it was the story of an attempt to establish racial equality and the undermining of that attempt with the establishment of a one-party state that benefited a few white men at the expense of everyone else.
Clarence C. Clendenen, “President Hayes’ ‘Withdrawal’ of the Troops: An Enduring Myth,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 70 (October 1969): 240-250.
Gnomologia: adagies and proverbs; wise sentences and witty sayings, ancient and modern, foreign and British : Fuller, Thomas, 1654-1734, comp : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/gnomologiaadagi00conggoog
Aristotle said in his Poetics, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance, and this, and not the external manner and detail, is true reality.”
He spoke mainly about poetry, which was the highest art of his age, but his words also apply to the fine arts. Today, many people are still mesmerized by artists who practice various styles of realism, but they overlook the artists who show us the realities of emotion and inner vision.
The good news about art.
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,” said the spiritual writer, Thomas Merton. Some people use art as a cathartic exercise, and pour out their inner emotions on the canvas or their chosen media. Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and Van Gogh’s late works are good examples of emotional expression. We all know folks who have a project going in their garage. They go work on “that worthless piece of junk” to focus their attention and energy on fixing something on which they can make a difference, instead of getting tied up in knots about things they can’t change and must accept. Gardening and knitting are also good hobbies for focusing this energy.
We know our nervous system grows to the modes in which it has been exercised. This is what we call building a habit over time. Just as a child doesn’t walk straight out of the womb, they have preparatory skills that must be acquired by stages as they grow. Exercising their muscles by rolling over also helps to strengthen their necks to hold their heads up. Crawling leads to pulling up, and that leads to letting go to learn balance.
Each time a child repeats these movements, he or she will simplify the movements required to achieve the needed result, make them more accurate, and diminish fatigue. In this, they’re building habits that bring them closer to walking. Rushing them to achieve “early” walking actually puts them behind cognitively.
Not only are there twenty five body parts in a baby’s body that are used in the crawl movement, but crawling also strengthens the hip sockets, so the baby will have a strong platform on which to stand. Crawling helps the corpus callosum, which is a band of nerve fibers between the hemispheres of the brain. Criss-cross crawling on the knees and hands stimulates the corpus callosum to develop in a balanced way, facilitating the hemispheres of the brain to communicate. These cross lateral movements work both sides of the body evenly and involve coordinated movements of the eyes, ears, hands, feet, and core muscles. This helps support cognitive function, problem solving, and ease of learning. Exploring the floor in a baby proofed home allows your baby to achieve his or her optimal potential.
Gail’s Painting
“Practice makes perfect” is only as true as the practice is directed in a true direction. This is where a teacher, a parent, a coach, or a spiritual guide comes into play. Only one who’s been led well can lead others with grace. We don’t tear down the learner, but ask questions, give guidance, help them see alternative paths, and allow them a safe place to explore their choices.
Art class isn’t brain surgery. No one will die if the painting isn’t successful, and no one’s salvation is at risk if the painting doesn’t come out the way we hoped it might. Art class is a safe place to take risks, unlike jumping from a tall tower without a parachute. Learning to accept failure on our canvases and coming back next time to try again is a mark of resilience and courage. Every time we fail closer to our target, we realize we’re gaining on it! We never say I CAN’T in art class.
Crawl before you Walk or Run
The sad reality is we can teach and expand the horizons of young people up til the age of 25 or 30. After that, they seem to lose energy and desire to learn more or to change. They “habitually” repeat their previous acts, for good or for ill. We’ve all heard the old saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Those of us who are no longer young have sometimes been accused of being set in our ways. Some of us are afraid we won’t excel at a new challenge, for we’ve always been held to a high standard of achievement. Since none of us will be the next Georgia O’Keefe or Leonardo da Vinci, we can set that worry aside. They both had more years to practice than we have left in front of us. Instead, we should give our remaining time our most focused attention, so we can get the most from our experience.
My high school chemistry book had the same information in it which my daddy’s college chemistry book covered. He was amazed I was learning “advanced” ideas at my young age. In 1982 R. Buckminister Fuller introduced the idea of the “knowledge doubling curve.” Up until 1900, knowledge doubled every century. By 1945, knowledge doubled every 25 years and by 1982, it doubled every year. Some say it’s now doubling twice a day! The newest computer we buy off the shelf today is already obsolete.
We can’t train our students for the jobs of today because these jobs likely won’t exist tomorrow. We need to train people to be lifetime learners instead. Luckily, we don’t have to know all things, but we do need the skills to find the knowledge and sort through the best sources for the best possible information.
1930-2006
Today, knowledge we acquire in high school, college, graduate school, and our last job may already be obsolete. (I’m one who still grieves the loss of Pluto as a planet; it exists but is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt). This is especially true in fast moving fields like technology. As futurist Alvin Toffler wrote, “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
This means all of us will need to become lifelong learners or we’ll risk losing touch with an ever evolving world. Maybe we think our brains can’t handle something new, for we’ve heard about the effect of aging. Cognitive process studies with older brains show learning, memory, and problem-solving in humans are often less efficient in these areas.
However, it has recently been established that dogs show many of the same kind of age related changes that humans do. A study in Vienna showed that older dogs learned new tasks just as well as younger dogs, although they took longer to do so and required more repetitive corrections. This aptitude is also known as “resilience training.”
I think it’s also important to know why we want to keep our brains agile as we move into our later years. John Wesley was fond of repeating William Law’s summary from the Practical Treatise on Christian Perfection,
“Do all the good you can, to all you can, by any means you can, as long as you can.”
Because Wesley was better known than William Law, this quote is now attributed to Wesley alone. We Methodists have made it our own, however, and have carried its banner around the globe in our world wide mission efforts made possible by our Connectional ministries. Wesley thought enough of Law’s writing to reprint 19 editions of his work.
My late mother, at the age of eighty, learned how to use a laptop computer. She was motivated because she wanted to see emailed photos of her grandchildren, but then she realized she also could find recipes. When a child in her hometown needed a Mercy Flight, she used her new skills to get him transportation to an out of state hospital for treatment. I occasionally had to reteach her on how to double click quickly on her icons, rather than slowly, but she finally caught on.
iPad drawing of pear and apple
If we want to keep our brains agile throughout our middle, silver, and golden years, we always need to try new things. Doing art challenges makes our brain build new neural pathways. Every time we look at a still life or a landscape, we have to make multiple decisions: what shapes do I see—circles, squares, triangles, or rectangles; how do these shapes relate to one another on the plane of our canvas; what is most important; what colors will I use; what emotions do I want to express; and where will I begin?
Eventually, we will find our “style.” We don’t find a style by copying another’s work, but we create enough works until our hand becomes one with our spirit. Since God has placed a special spark of God’s own creative Spirit within each of us, eventually we’ll experience the joy of being one with God when we are in our painting moments. As Paul said to the Romans (8:16):
“The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
Last Friday we had a simple still life as our inspiration. Half our class was out sick with spring pollen troubles, but it was good to see those who could come after a two week hiatus. After a brief show and tell to get us inspired by other artists’ takes on the subject for the day, we got started. I reminded everyone not to make the fruit too tiny, so it wouldn’t get lost on the canvas. I believe everyone succeeded with this goal!
Mike’s painting
Mike painted his whole canvas with one brush. This gave the fruit a certain texture with contrasting colors, and the background, which was in a close value, didn’t show much brush strokes or texture. I like the perspective he chose, which brings the viewer in close to these fruit.
Gail tried a larger canvas with bolder colors than she normally uses. It was more dramatic and stronger in contrast than usual, while she kept her smooth strokes of paint as usual. She also took a view from above.
Cornelia’s Fruits
I stuck to a traditional rendering of the still life, since I do many abstract paintings in my own studio. I’d call these two Day and Night, for the Apple is quite awake and the Pear seems to need a little nap. It’s a study in contrasts: red and green, blue violet and yellow orange—a color wheel study masquerading as a still life.
Next week we’re in the season of Lent. As Christ turns his face towards Jerusalem, we’ll begin a study on the icons. This will be accessible and interesting. You’ll end up with your own icon for your personal worship center also.
Morse Peckham, author of Man’s Rage for Chaos, believed “Order is humanity’s freedom; but the rage for order creates its own limits on that freedom.” Art, he maintained, enabled the artist to fight that rage, which destroys what it would create. Only the rage for chaos can balance the rage for order.
Stellar Bones: Aries zodiac sign. Horoscope. Illustration for souvenirs and social networks.
As one who was born under the Aries sun, with an Aries moon, and a Virgo rising sign, I fully understand this rage for chaos and order within my own body. I somehow always have fifty-eleven projects and and even more ideas I’d like to accomplish, but I too have the same limits as all other people: we all have only 24 hours on any given day. Some of these moments must be given to the life giving nurture of the body, which carries our great mind and imagination and the hands which do our good works. Some days the balance scales of Virgo call my chaos into order, while on others my Aries excitement causes the balance to quaver. This tension shows up in my work.
Venus and Saturn at Early Sunset: follow the line of the building
I mention my astrological signs, for once in ages past, people believed the stars ruled their lives. The heroes ascended into the stars—Sagittarius, the archer, while other constellations were named for animals or the humans who were turned into animals, such as bears and swans. Some got their names for resembling objects—the dippers, while others were named for legendary persons—Cassiopeia’s chair and Orion’s Belt come to mind. In the time of dark skies, our ancestors could pick out these sky patterns with ease. Light pollution in our cities makes these shapes harder to discern every year. Our national parks may be the only places our city dwelling future generations will be able to see the night sky in all its glory.
The Ancient Greeks believed the gods ruled their fates. The writer Pausanius listed the many shrines to the deities in Athens, including “in the Athenian market-place among the objects not generally known is an altar to Mercy, of all divinities the most useful in the life of mortals and in the vicissitudes of fortune, but honored by the Athenians alone among the Greeks. And they are conspicuous not only for their humanity but also for their devotion to religion. They have an altar to Shamefastness, one to Rumour and one to Effort. It is quite obvious that those who excel in piety are correspondingly rewarded by good fortune.”
Altar to an Unknown God, Athens, Greece
The apostle Paul even noted the Athenians had a temple to an “unknown god,” just in case they didn’t cover their bases with offerings to all the other deities (Acts 17:23). Yet, you already know him, he said, for
“The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” — Acts 17:24-25
Our creation story in Genesis 1:1-2 begins with familiar words:
“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”
Milton addressed the same Spirit of God, which was at creation, in his epic poem, Paradise Lost:
“And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer Before all Temples th’ upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for Thou know’st; Thou from the first Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread. and with mighty wings outspread. Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss And mad’st it pregnant.”
William Blake: Temptation of Adam and Eve, Pittsburgh Univ.
God is always creating order out of nothingness, but human beings have a tendency to create disorder wherever they go. We aren’t God, or even “as gods,” as the first humans hoped to be in the garden when they ate that fateful fruit. Even knowing “good from evil” doesn’t seem to keep us from our propensity to engage in chaos. I don’t live in a messy home, but because I put away some of my projects when I lose interest, I can forget where I “hid them.” I know what they look like, I can find others like them, but I might need several days to find the intended object of my desire. I’ll put all of these in ONE PLACE when I’m done with them. This will guarantee I’ll lose them all at once the next time I go looking for them!
Frank Hinder: Bomber Crash, 1941
In art class, we began our projects by thinking about the contrast of order and chaos. The emotional experience of the disruption chaos brings to our sense of order can change our perception of our position in the world. When Frank Hinder was serving in World War II, his bomber was shot down. As part of his therapy, he painted his memory of that occasion. That chaos in his life got channeled into a painting, for art allows us a safe haven in which we can experience cognitive dissonance.
Most of us wouldn’t willingly chose to experience such an event first hand, but we can imagine it in art, poetry, music, or fiction. This is why we exercise our creative freedom. Dealing with raw emotions in paint or other media is better than stuffing them inside, from where they can fester and harm us, or worse, break out and inflict terrible wounds upon others. We seek to center our emotions and focus our energies in a more balanced, positive manner, much like the renaissance genius, Leonardo da Vinci.
Leonardo: Virtuvian Man
Lauralei is finishing up a drawing and is going to work the famous Leonardo Virtuvian Man into it somehow. I can hardly wait to see this. Virtuvian Man is a classic Renaissance image of order: Leonardo saw the great picture chart of the human body he had produced through his anatomical drawings and his Vitruvian Man drawing as a cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm). He believed the workings of the human body were an analogy for the workings of the universe. That’s seeing order in the many details.
Mike has been called away from class the past two weeks to take care of courthouse business. He has a 9/11 work in mind, if the judge ever lets him go. He has many images in his mind, so simplifying the many into a few might help him get his ideas out of his head and onto the canvas. He’s got business to attend to, however, so all things will come about in God’s good time.
Gail’s Painting of Creation
Gail chose the first day of creation as her inspiration. The tiny words are photocopies from a child’s Bible, which are plucked from the first chapter of Genesis. They read more as white directional or linear strokes than actual words, but I have a major cataract in my right eye, and my judgment on readability is suspect at the moment. Others may be able to see the words better than I. She used a sponge on this canvas, a new technique for her. She also wants to use gold leaf flakes to finish it out, so she may yet have another step to it.
First Work: Overhead View of Ancient Jerusalem
This small square painting began from an image of an old Jerusalem map with the surrounding walls of the city. This site was destroyed numerous times over the centuries, notably in 587 BCE by the Babylonians, in 70 CE by the Romans, while the walls were destroyed by the Muslim Calif in 1250 CE, but Suliman the Magnificent rebuilt them in 1538-1541 CE. In addition to the sacks of war, earthwakes and other disasters have rendered the era of Christ to the deep basements, which are only accessed today by descending narrow, spiral staircases. The era of the prophets of the Babylonian Exile are deeper yet. The famous Western Wall of the Herodian Temple, rebuilt after Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians, is only the upper third of the structure.
The people of Israel believed God’s favor rested upon them because of their proximity to God’s Temple. The prophets were quick to remind them, “They were to be holy, as God is holy,” for the Temple wasn’t a magic token like a rabbit’s foot. The book of Joel probably was written in the post exile period, around 350 BCE, but could be as early as 650 BCE, due to its description of an eclipse. The prophet reminds the people:
“So you shall know that I, the LORD your God, dwell in Zion, my holy mountain. And Jerusalem shall be holy, and strangers shall never again pass through it.” (Joel 3:17)
When the king and his court, the learned priests, all the educated tradespeople, and anyone who had any skill or knowledge was taken into slavery far distant from the sacred land where they worshipped their tribal god, the people had to wonder if God was still their god in this foreign land. Would God hear their prayers? If they could no longer offer sacrifices or make the required pilgrimages to God’s altar, were they faithful to their god anymore? In their grief, they wrote Psalms 137:4-5:
“How could we sing the LORD’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!”
During the Exile, the Hebrew people developed the synagogue as the focus of their worship of God and the study of scripture, as well as a place of prayer and fellowship, and the site of life’s transitional rituals. In 538 BCE, Babylon fell and the Jewish exiles eturned to their homeland to rebuild the walls and the temple. For the people, the earlier promise of God from the prophet was finally being fulfilled:
“Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.” —Joel 3:13
Back home, both the synagogue and the Temple prospered, but when the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, all of the pious acts transferred to the synagogues and the homes of the faithful. Never again were sacrifices made for Passover, but the thought of the Holy City remained. The closer one came to the Mount where the Temple once stood, because the area was more holy, so the person coming near had to be more ritually pure. They may have chanted from Psalms 125:1 in unison as they made their ascent:
“Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion, which cannot be moved, but abides forever.”
God’s Love Flows Beyond The City Walls
Today, Mount Zion is holy to the Muslim faith, for there Mohammad is said to have received the words of the Quran and also to have been lifted into heaven from here. This is also the traditional site of the Binding of Issac (Genesis 22), and it’s holy also to Christians because this is the temple where the boy Jesus was found in “his father’s house” (Luke 2:41).
The three great monotheistic faiths have fought for generations within their families of origin over who has rights to be included in the family, beginning with Abraham and Sarah’s attempt to fulfill God’s promise of an heir by using the slave woman Hagar. When God showed up to announce the birth of Isaac, it was unbelievable. When Sarah had her promised child, Hagar and Ishmael were sent out to die in the desert. God saved them, however, but the two blood relatives haven’t gotten along since.
Christians accept the promised messiah, but those years of crusading and crushing the “Muslim infidels” have left a bad taste in their mouths for us, and for some of us too. We all keep fighting, even though we’re all branches off the same tree. We all claim the same holy sites and we’ll fight over them “till the last dog dies.”
As Jesus reminded the Samaritan Woman in John 4:21 & 23:
“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.”
Remember the lesson of the exile: God is everywhere and not fixed to one altar or site. The same God who led us through the wilderness also leads us through the ups and downs of our daily lives, wherever we find ourselves. No disruption or chaos can move the steadfast God of love and mercy from our side.
Joy and peace,
CORNELIA
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Astronomical Myths, by John F. Blake, 1877.
Rabbit! Rabbit! Welcome to 2023! This old bunny may not see the clock strike midnight, but I’m recovering from a bad cold. Rest is more important than ringing in the New Year. Every year has its own character.
Live with Optimism, even when the nights are long.
Zeitgeist is a word that comes straight from German — zeit means “time” and geist means spirit, so the “spirit of the time” is what’s going on culturally, religiously, or intellectually during a certain period. When it comes to the turn of the New Year, we bunnies wonder if our new broom will sweep clean or if the old broom will leave the same mess as always in our cozy rabbit dens.
Always use a New Broom on the New Year for Good Luck.
Are we filled with hope or with foreboding? Do these dark days and deep nights of winter fill us with a gloomy spirit? Or do the imperceptibly lengthening minutes of daytime give hope to the shadows the cold of winter has left in the depths of our souls? Or have the coastal grandmother bunnies among us learned to ignore all this stum and drang by blending their afternoon tea time into early evening wine tasting?
Everything a culture considers taboo, evil, or immoral typically ends up being proscribed or “consigned to the outer darkness.” From there it ends up inside us in what Carl Jung called “the Shadow,” or our inner “Satan,” as it were. Repressed and inhibited, it festers and rages in the darkness of our “unconscious.” Even in extreme cases, it takes on a quasi-autonomous existence of its own, occasionally intruding as the famous “voices in the head” or even as a multiple personality.
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde is a famous light and dark shadow character from fiction, but too often in real life we rabbits point out our own dark shadows in the lives of those we so easily demonize. As my wise old granddaddy rabbit would reprimand me, “When you point out the faults of others, you have three fingers pointing back at you.”
Luke 6:41 “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?”
I always find life more refreshing on the first day of the year, perhaps because I don’t over indulge in strong drink as I once did in my wayward bunny youth. We bunnies all have a wayward youth, for how else would we know what the immature among us are getting into? My old daddy rabbit believed, “Experience was the greatest teacher of all time, as well as its most costly tutor.” Indeed, we remember the costliest lessons best of all. The young ones today say, “Go big or go home.” My grannie would say, “If you’re in for a penny, you might as well be in for a pound.” After all, everyone who participated, either in a small or large way, would be held accountable.
Janus: Bloodstone intaglio of Roman god of transition, passages, and new beginnings.
As I look back on old 2022, grizzled and worn out by conflicts both at home and abroad, I can understand why the ancients thought of Janus, for whom January’s named, as a two faced god. One face, which looked backwards, was lined, bearded, and craggy featured, while the forward looking face of the new year was youthful, smooth, and clean shaven. Every new year is fresh and clean as a beardless youth’s face, as well as untroubled by any recollection of pains or past memories. Most of us bunnies also have short memories, for we tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Rabbits have short term memories of around 4 minutes, but can remember bad experiences for longer periods, just as humans can.
Unknown Roman Artisan: Soldier’s Brooch in the Form of a Rabbit, 100–300 CE, Copper alloy with champlevé enamel, found in Britain, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
In Ancient Rome, as the poets Ovid and Horace recount, Janus was the god of war and peace. They differ as to whether the Temple of Janus was a prison for peace or war, but they both agree the prison was meant to maintain PAX ROMANA, or the great Roman Peace. If peace were impounded, peace would be guaranteed to the nation. If war were imprisoned, it wouldn’t rampage about to destroy the countryside. Just as Janus had two faces, Roman religion was open to multiple interpretations and meanings. Perhaps today, they’d be known as “freethinkers,” as opposed to “literalists” or “strict constructionists” in their interpretation of their ancient stories.
Seeing the Night Skies through Bunny Eyes
Maybe in 2023 we bunnies might want to look at different ways of thinking, instead of one fixed way. There’s a difference between a straight and narrow path and a rut. On the path we can still see other twists and turns, which might change the outcome of our experience and existence. In a rut we’re stuck for life, with no where out, until it becomes our grave. If the world is changing more quickly than is comfortable for us, I give the example of my old granddaddy again. He pushed a button to turn on one of the first electric lights in his home town and lived to see men walk on the moon. Be resilient, be adaptable, and embrace change. After all, we’re always changing, so the option of never changing is death.
Ancient Greek Black Figure Vase, Wasps Attacking Men Robbing Zeus’ Bee Hives for Honey, c. 540 BCE, British Museum, London.
Romans would celebrate January 1 by giving offerings to Janus in the hope of gaining good fortune for the new year. They believed their acts set the stage for the coming year, so it was a common practice to make a positive start to the year. Not only did they exchange well wishes and sweet gifts of figs and honey with one another, but according to the poet Ovid, most Romans also chose to work for at least part of New Year’s Day because they saw idleness as a bad omen for the rest of the year. If 1st century Romans were to drop into some of our 21st century celebrations by means of Dr. Who’s traveling blue Police Box, they would wonder how the barbarians, who sacked Rome in 455 CE, had managed to take over our modern New Year.
Some days I need to be in two places at once.
We toga wearing bunnies, who are long of tooth, know from experience the barbarians are always at the gate of our safe little gardens. Sometimes they’re even inside the gardens of delight, as Peter Rabbit and his Cottontail friends perpetually discover when Mr. McGregror chases them with a rake. If we cast a look back on 2022 with our rheumy eyes, we saw Russia attack Ukraine, an outrageous act which sent millions of people to emigrate from their the destroyed cities and ravaged countryside, with the hope of finding safe haven in another European country.
Mr. McGregor thinks Peter is a Barbarian, who has slipped through his impenetrable garden gate.
Across the pond, on our southern border, thousands of migrants have fled disaster and violence in their homelands, but even though the US economy is hurting for workers in our entry level jobs, they have difficulty getting in. Are these people actually “barbarians at the gate?” Or have we projected our Shadow Fears upon them because they are foreigners? We did this with the Japanese, who m we placed into Internment Camps in World War II, much to our disgrace. This bunny asks us to search our hearts in 2023 to see if our three fingers are pointing back at our own selves.
Think about how Woodstock symbolized the 1960s: Woodstock was part of the Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Whatever seems particular to or symbolic of a certain time is likely part of its Zeitgeist. I came home from college one Christmas wearing a necklace of tiny black and white seed beads, only to be greeted by my old fashioned daddy, “Are you a hippy now?” For him, any one thing represented the whole, for he grew up with the ancient bunny wisdom, “One bad apple spoils the bushel.” We were only reconciled when he realized I hadn’t lost my fondness for his beloved Cowboys football team.
If we can find one common interest in this strange and fraught world with those with whom we would be at war, then we might be able to come to peace with them. If we insist on all or nothing, no bunny will get anything. We all want to have endless days of peace and joy, but the life of a bunny also has days of struggle and sorrow.
Earth as seen from Space
Carl Jung, the great psychologist once said, “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.”
We also have this promise from 1 Corinthians 10:13—
“No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”
Many of my southern bunny kinfolks will eat a variety of this New Year’s Day meal: black eyed peas, ham, greens, and cornbread. We think every pea consumed equals another day of good luck. Of course, we’re not the only superstitious clan.
Our cousins in Japan, celebrating Ōmisoka, or New Year’s Eve, gather together to eat long noodles to cross over from one year to the next. At midnight, many visit shrines or temples for Hatsumōde. Shinto shrines prepare amazake, a sweet low alcohol drink, to pass out to crowds and most Buddhist temples have large cast bells that are struck once for each of the 108 earthly desires believed to cause human suffering.
Year of the Rabbit
I found some interesting New Year’s good luck traditions, which are practiced around the world. In Greece, folks hang onions outside on their front doors to ward off evil. On New Year’s Eve, Colombian households have a tradition, called agüero, of placing three potatoes under each family member’s bed—one peeled, one not, and the last one only partially. At midnight each person, with eyes closed, grabs for one. Depending on the potato they select, they can either expect a year of good fortune, financial struggle, or a mix of both.
Ruined House (suspected fruitcake damage)
In Ireland, people bang Christmas bread against the walls of their house for good luck. If any of you bunnies have a Christmas fruitcake still lying around, please choose another loaf to prevent damage to your walls. Good contractors are backed up and hard to find, especially around the holidays.
The Danes chunk plates at their friends’ doorsteps for good luck on New Year’s Eve. Perhaps all that darkness from the winter solstice makes my northern relatives harebrained, but we love them just the same. I suppose every bunny has some weird relatives.
New Year’s Eve Weather Predictions
Old bunny weather lore says, “The first 12 days of January foretell the weather for each month of the year.” Another way to forecast the weather for the coming year depends on the wind. The old bunnies are at odds as to when this poem should be recited, with some advocating for sunset on New Year’s Eve and others at the break of dawn on New Year’s Day. This bunny notes the poem mentions New Year’s Eve, and since none of our ancient bunnies had time traveling abilities, I’d think we are safe to practice this on the Eve at sunset, then go out to do our responsible reveling.
If New Year’s Eve the wind blows south It betokens warmth and growth. If west, much milk and fish in the sea. If north, cold and storms there will be. If east, the trees will bear much fruit. If north east, then flee it, man and brute. Then throw your new year wishes to the wind!
GOOD HEALTH AND JOY FOR EVERY BUNNY
My New Year’s wish for 2023 is for each and every one of my bunny friends to have a better year than last year. And especially to know deep in your hearts, each of you are God’s own beloved children. Remember this good word from Romans 8:28—
“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.”
Joy, peace, and love each and every day in 2023,
CORNELIA
Multiple Interpretation of the Opening and Closing of the Temple of Janus: A Misunderstanding of Ovid “Fasti” by S.J. Green, 1.281 on JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/4433099
This shortest day of the year is the Winter Solstice, which is on Wednesday, December 21, at 4:48 P.M. EST, in the Northern Hemisphere. Some think of this as the Longest Night, but I’m a person of the light, not the darkness. I always prefer to look to the light, no matter how dim or feeble it may seem.
Be the Light
Yet darkness is a necessary experience in our lives. We do not yet live in the land of the “unclouded sky” or the heavenly realm:
“And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb.” —Revelation 21:23
Kindness is a warm fire
In the darkness, growth often happens: germination and rooting are two types of unseen activity that help produce the plant we see above ground. Without adequate light, the visible plant won’t thrive. So both darkness and light are at work to produce fruit in our lives.
“We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” —Romans 8:28
Rejoice! The days will get brighter soon!
The Winter Solstice in Hot Springs is at 3:48 pm CST on Wednesday, December 21, 2022. In terms of daylight, this day is 4 hours, 37 minutes shorter than the June solstice. In most locations north of the equator, the shortest day of the year is around this date. The good news about the Winter Solstice is the days will begin to lengthen, although imperceptibly at first: one minute, four minutes, seven minutes, ten minutes, thirteen minutes, sixteen minutes, and so on.
In Scandinavia, the Norse celebrated Yule from December 21, the winter solstice, through January. In recognition of the sun’s return, fathers and sons would bring home large logs, which they would set on fire. The people would feast until the log burned out, which could take as many as 12 days. Today we recognize the source of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song in this festival. The Norse believed that each spark from the fire represented a new pig or calf that would be born during the coming year. Prosperity for all in the New Year!
In this present darkness, a small light still shines brightly
In this time of stress and strain, grief and gripes, let’s look to the in-breaking light, and the renewal of life and love. Here’s a “Winter Solstice Chant” by Annie Finch, for your pleasure:
Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing, now you are uncurled and cover our eyes with the edge of winter sky leaning over us in icy stars Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing, come with your seasons, your fullness, your end.
Rice Krispy Stonehenge
Of course, if you can’t get your travel plans together at the last minute to visit Stonehenge, England for the winter solstice celebration, you can always make Rice Krispies Bars in the shape of the ancient monument. The recipe link is at the bottom of the page. Hint: don’t turn the heat up high or your treats will be hard. Due to high carbohydrate count, one “pillar” of Stonehenge Krispies is actually two servings.
While some are counting the days until Christmas, some of us are are counting the remaining days left in the old year of 2022. Somehow I always get a cleaning burst of energy around the end of the year. Maybe I hear my mother’s voice urging me, “Let’s get the house straightened up, so Santa will find it neat and clean. There’s no way the jolly old man can find the tree when the house is in this much mess!”
My mother’s idea of a mess was a line not perpendicular to its base, or a fragment of paper left on the table. She mostly cleaned to the grooves while my grandmother was alive, for she slacked off after Nannie passed on. The Christmas tree was ensconced in the NONO ROOM, also known as the living room. It acquired the NONO nickname because our parents never let us into it, for we weren’t allowed to touch anything inside it. We lived in the den, like the pack of wild animals we were. We weren’t raised by wolves, but our parents were never able to wring the wolf out of their brood.
I confess I still organize my large spices by size on one shelf and the smaller ones alphabetically on another shelf. I can’t understand anyone who sets their spices on the shelf willy nilly, so they have to search for them every time. Then again, I sort my paints by color and temperature. Organization is one thing I did learn from my folks, even if I didn’t inherit an obsession for daily cleaning.
However, with less than two weeks before Santa comes to visit and Christmas Eve services will bring the birth of Christ to mind once more., my inner mother began to notice strange flecks of dust on the high cabinet doors, as well as dust bunnies rolling out from behind the sofa. Some people have visits from the Ghosts of Christmas Past. My mother comes to visit me. At least I can still climb ladders.
While I’m cleaning up the house, I should catch up on some art works our Oakland UMC art class has been doing. I took off for a month to visit California, came down with a couch bug that made me so congested I couldn’t think, paint, or do doodly. For some reason, Mike moved faster than I could get my camera out, so I don’t have all his photos. Also, sometimes he was tied up in court doing good for others. I promise to do better in the New Year.
Delaunay: View of Paris, Eiffel Tower
The following three paintings began with the idea of circles and lines. As usual, I showed a few different examples from well known artists whose work hangs in museums. This quality inspiration helps students come up with better ideas.
Gail’s Circles
Gail combined her lines with her change of colors. Those boundary lines set up a line which carried through the subtle colors of the background. Limiting her color scheme helps to define these lines. She likes to plan her ideas out in her head first, imagine how they will look, and then paint.
Mike’s circles and lines in the image below reflect his more exuberant personality. Using both the compass and the ruler, he came up with a variety of circles and lines. Mike paints as the spirit moves him. Whatever feels good, that’s where he goes next. He’ll adjust as he goes.
Mike’s Circles
Either of these methods are fine. If one doesn’t get you down the road to the place you want to go, then maybe it’s time try a different route. I never force anyone down a particular fork in the road. I let them explore in one direction until they learn all they can or hit a dead end. Then they can follow the “road not taken.” Everyone gets to try both roads eventually, and learn the ancient wisdom, “All roads lead to Rome.”
This Road May Lead To Rome Eventually
In the art world, “Rome is the fullest experience of both order and emotion.” Some of us prefer one over the other, just as I prefer order in my spice rack, but I’m willing to throw the spices into the soup by sight and not by measuring spoons. We can get too organized or too exuberant, as the Greeks were fond of saying, “The middle path is safest and best.”
Klee: In the Beginning
During this time, the Russian attack on the largest nuclear power plant in Europe was ongoing. Not only was the electricity at the plant cut, an act which blacked out Ukraine and much of Eastern Europe, but it also threatened the stability of the nuclear reactors there. The Ukrainian engineers at the plant were prisoners of foreign soldiers, who knew nothing about the dangers of their stronghold. The world held its breath as fighting broke out around this sensitive target.
Cornelia’s Ukrainian Power-plant Under Attack
Thanks to satellite imagery, today we can see via the internet, what we waited to see in newsreels at the theater, the last time we fought on European soil. We had to wait until the evening news to see film from Vietnam. Now cable news breaks every half hour with the same old news and we might get an update if we’re lucky. Not all can afford to send reporters to distant lands anymore.
By the grace of God, that power plant still stands. However, Europe and Ukraine will have a cold and costly winter. We should not complain if our prices rise, for it’s a small price to pay for democracy and freedom. There are still nations who would oppress smaller countries, just as the Roman Empire did back in the time of Christ’s birth. As we remember in Matthew’s story of The Visit of the Wise Men (2:1-2):
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.”
This information led Herod to kill all the innocents, the children under two years old in and around the town of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16-18). Brutality and mass executions aren’t a recent invention of despots desperate to retain power at any cost. The ethical term is utilitarianism, where one uses others as means to gain their own ends. The test question for this type of ethics is “Does the end justify the means?” At what point can you excuse bad or corrupt behavior to get good results?” A moral person answers, “I prefer good means for good ends and will use those unless I’m in a life or death situation.”
I returned, no worse for wear, from my vacation and texted the group to bring a vacation landscape photo to work from. Of course, Gail brought her latest vacation dream destination and Mike brought several island maps to combine into one image. It was the same island where he and his wife had vacationed, but one had tourist attractions, another was history, and the other natural beauty. He has a flair for combining things. Unfortunately, his busy life gets in the way of keeping all his art supplies in one place, so between his work chaos and organizing chaos, plus my slow phone draw, I failed to get his interesting map. It was a good idea.
Gail’s Mars Elevation
The new Mars rover has been sending back some awesome images. The folks at NASA must be over the moon, without a rocket. Gail worked on this elevation image for two weeks, with colors representing different heights in the landscape. It’s a good copy of the image. In the new year we need to go back to three dimensional work again, but we have had fun with color mixing and texture.
Cornelia’s Western Landscape
While out west, I visited as many national parks as I could manage. I did see many volcanoes and convened in a cave, plus I visited Roswell, NM, but wasn’t abducted by aliens. I was impressed with Arches National Park, and hiked about it most of a day. It’s a stark place, with strong rock formations jutting into a brilliant blue sky. The bright sunshine makes strong patterns of light and dark across the landscape. Most of what grows out in the desert is short grasses or a scrub brush, but on occasion, I would find a gnarled tree in dark shade.
Gail’s Christmas Tree
At Mike’s request, we made Christmas cards, but he had to work that day. Probably helping someone with legal matters, because that’s his calling. Gail and I had fun working on the cut paper cards. I was thankful she brought me a coffee. Whatever bug I had took a while to clear my system. Caffeine helped. She rearranged these triangles several different ways on a horizontal plane and never felt satisfied with the way they looked. Because she was wise enough not to glue them down first, she could see her ideas weren’t hitting her happy place.
Then she turned everything straight up, and organized the design on a perpendicular. Now her tree has its happy red birds, a sequin star, and little trees in the background.
Cornelia’s Card
I brought one of my many boxes of colored paper from my scrapbook stash. I know the Christmas colors are red and green, but I made an Advent Tree. This is why it’s violet and pink and blue. Anyway, we don’t have to follow the rules for Christmas trees. If we want a pale purple tree, we can have one. It’s our tree. Santa will still put a present under it, and the color of our tree doesn’t impair our salvation. A nativity set looks just fine under any color tree.
I know we have at least one more class in December on the 16th. Depending on if my plumber is coming over on the 23rd, we might not meet that day. He said he’s behind, so I don’t know. I’ll be on vacation on the 30th, so we’ll see each other in the New Year of 2023!
I always say, “if I ever get totally organized, the world is coming to an end.” Maybe it’s the providence of God that I always bite off more than I can chew, because I’m never totally organized! But I am going on to organization.
Today marks one week since our most recent election. Many races have been decided, while some are due for an automatic recount due to the close vote. At least one senate race will have a runoff between the top two candidates (Georgia), as some races haven’t been decided at all, since the vote counters took Veteran’s Day and Sunday off. Then we have all the legal, but late arriving mail-in ballots from the military and overseas residents. These too need counting. We’ll know the final, final results sometime after December 6th, when Georgia results are in.
Grand Canyon
Pundits on the left and right can give you commentary ad nauseam for the duration with breaking news alerts or standing up for what’s right(wing). They’ll talk demographics, policies, and statistics, but you won’t get that commentary here. I’m more interested in the deep derivations of the arcana of the day. Arcana is that mysterious or specialized knowledge, language, or information accessible or possessed only by the initiate —usually used in plural. The singular arcanus, is from the Latin, arca, chest. It was first used in the 15th century.
El Capitan, Yosemite National Park
Of course, the conspiracy mongers among us are busy weaving tales of hanky panky. As an aside, my spell check wants to make this phrase “hanky pancakes.” I’ll check in with Cornie’s Kitchen to see if there’s any special ingredient for making hanky panky pancakes. Hanky pank once referred to any of the various carnival games in which contestants might win small prizes for the exercise of simple skills (such as dart throwing). State Fair enthusiasts who succumbed to the barkers of carnival games might, if they were lucky, grab a few of these prizes, but as in casino betting, the wise player remembers the house usually wins. It’s an old word, dating from the 1840’s, maybe related to Hokey Pokey. Both these words referred to trouble making bordering on the illegal, if not out right against the law.
This is why your parents warned you not to run away and join a traveling circus or side show, as “There’s hanky panky going on there, child, and you’ll come to no good!” Not that I ever tied a peanut butter sandwich up in a bandana and walked away from home, or at least I got as far as that sandwich took me, which was to the end of the city block. Hot summer days can change a child’s mind about running away from home.
Big Oak Road, Yosemite National Park
Those trading in false tales were known as mongers, from which we get the word “costermongers,” or apple sellers. In the 1510s, “itinerant apple-seller” was formed from coster (a type of apple ) + monger (“to traffic in, deal in,” often implying a petty or disagreeable traffic, by 1897). The sense extended from “apple-seller” to “hawker of fruits and vegetables,” to any salesman who plied his wares from a street-cart. Contemptuous use is as old as Shakespeare: “Virtue is of so little regard in these coster-monger times, that true valour is turn’d bear-herd” (2 Henry IV), but the reason for it is unclear.
Arches National Park
But I come not to bury America, but to praise her, especially the American democratic project, which so far has earned the distinction of having the world’s longest surviving written charter of government. It was written in 1787, ratified in 1788, and has been in operation since 1789. We’ve celebrated 233 years of our unique brand of representational democracy. We aren’t ruled by mobs/anarchy, nor by a wealthy few/oligarchy, or even by one/autocracy, but by all who vote/democracy. As Whitman writes, we must be careful to distinguish between the “chosen” and the “act of choosing.” It’s not the winning candidate which represents the “heart”of our democratic achievement, but rather the “quadriennial choosing” itself.
Arches National Park
If you follow my musings, you’ve probably guessed Whitman is a favorite poet, and the varied landscape is a renewing and inspiring source of reconnecting with a creator God. I recently took a vacation to California and photographed some of our great national parks in the month I took off to see America. On my journey, I met generous, kind, and decent people everywhere I went. May God bless America and use her bounty and her people to bring peace and prosperity to the nations of the world. I hope my images do justice to Whitman’s words.
Headed to Albuquerque
Election Day, November, 1884 By Walt Whitman
If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show, ‘Twould not be you, Niagara—nor you, ye limitless prairies—nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado, Nor you, Yosemite—nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing, Nor Oregon’s white cones—nor Huron’s belt of mighty lakes—nor Mississippi’s stream: —This seething hemisphere’s humanity, as now, I’d name—the still small voice vibrating—America’s choosing day, (The heart of it not in the chosen—the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,) The stretch of North and South arous’d—sea-board and inland—Texas to Maine—the Prairie States—Vermont, Virginia, California, The final ballot-shower from East to West—the paradox and conflict, The countless snow-flakes falling—(a swordless conflict, Yet more than all Rome’s wars of old, or modern Napoleon’s:) the peaceful choice of all, Or good or ill humanity—welcoming the darker odds, the dross: —Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify—. while the heart pants, life glows: These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, Swell’d Washington’s, Jefferson’s, Lincoln’s sails.
On September 5, we celebrate Labor Day, and our kids are already back in school. We’re once again slowing down in school zones in the morning and afternoon, and setting an extra plate at the kitchen table for our absent college freshman. We might even see the first fall colors when the Fall Equinox comes around at the end of the month.
Edwardian Summer Gown, 1905
September is when we set aside our summer white clothes and shoes to change our closet over for darker colors and longer lengths. My dear mother had a rule of never wearing white past Labor Day. This quaint fashion principle dates from before Memorial Day, which was instituted in 1868 after the Civil War. This rule helped to separate the old money families, who summered in the country and at the seashore, from those who stayed to struggle on in the grimy cities, which were polluted by coal fired engines. These urban families usually wore dark clothes year round, as the rich did when they returned to their city residence.
Air conditioning has changed this now, but wearing starched, white cotton still reminds people you either have money to send your clothes to the cleaners or hire laborers to do it for you. Or, you might just work extra hard to look like one of the first two. This bunny has reached the age of dripping dry all those cotton clothes. I actually do more ironing when I do a craft project, such as quilting, since those seams need to be pressed open to make a good square. As this bunny has aged, I’ve changed my mind about what I think is important enough to worry about.
Rabbit Ironing
September is also a time to reassess the three core myths which animate much of American life. These myths are we can give 100% to our work, 100% to our family, and 100% to our personal health. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to do this type of higher math without going bananas or feeling significant amounts of guilt that I’m not doing enough in one of those areas. Eventually I learned I was only Wonder Woman in my fantasies, but not in real life. I also realized other people who managed better than I hired help for the housework to free themselves up for family time.
My Wonder Woman Fantasy
Somewhere along the line we’ve bought into the myth of the “ideal worker,” who “has no competing obligations that might get in the way of total devotion to the workplace.” The second myth is the “perfect parent,” who “always puts family first.” The last myth is the “ultimate body,” which is cultivated through diligent dieting and exercise, and doesn’t deteriorate with age.
The authors of Dreams of the Overworked, note in the digital age, when people can post curated images of their best lives, “Achieving even one of these myths would be impossible, but achieving all three is ludicrous.” If your daily stress has increased and you feel like everything you do isn’t enough, I suggest deep breathing with your eyes closed (unless you’re driving a vehicle!). Once you get some extra oxygen to your brain, you’re in a position to calmly reconsider your situation. Not all situations are hair on fire, unless you’re a two year old with separation anxiety. Most of us beyond this age have experience and memories which can guide our future behaviors. An ancient proverb is “Experience is the mother of wisdom,” or as my folks used to say, “The school of hard knocks is the most expensive degree you’ll ever pay for.” Live and learn. With age comes wisdom.
Now that you’re calmer, you can decide, “Do I have options? Do I have a support system with people who can help me discern my way? Can I lay down my false self image of competence so I can ask for help? Can I triage my priorities to say NO to the less important ones, even if it means not pleasing everyone in my social circle?”
Google it, Ask friends for recommendations, and Breathe!
Speaking of options, women are primarily responsible for housework and childcare, not only in America, but also across the pond. About 91% of women with children spend at least an hour per day on housework, compared with 30 % of men with children. The latest available data shows that employed women spend about 2.3 hours daily on housework; for employed men, this figure is 1.6 hours. Gender gaps in housework participation are the largest among couples with children, at 62 p.p., demonstrating an enduring imbalance in unpaid care responsibilities within families. This leads to women taking lower and slower career paths.
Animated Map of 2022 Fall Color Change
September 22 is the Fall Equinox. We’re already seeing signs of seasonal leaf color changes, due to heat stress and drought. Some call this “False Fall,” but I call it a sign of hope. Trees will drop their leaves in order to survive in extreme conditions. Although some claim plants are sentient, they don’t have a brain or consciousness that we can recognize. They do interact and react to their environments. Their first priority is survival. Photosynthesis and the subsequent leaf abscission after changing color is part of this process. I always look for the change of light which precedes this event. One morning last week, I noted the color of the morning light had turned cooler, and wasn’t the warm yellow of summer. I also had a spark of energy I hadn’t had before. I look forward to more daylight.
This bunny is very fond of September, since I’ve always been eager to start fresh and new. I always got new pencils and a new manilla paper writing pad when I started elementary school. Later on, as I progressed up in grades, ink pens with cartridges were a special treat. Even to this day, I keep my journals with hand written ink in good paper books. I love the feel of these materials in my hands. I probably would have stayed in school my whole life if possible. The day our brains quit learning something new is the day our minds begin to die.
School Bunnies and Friends
That leads me to remind my bunny friends that Alzheimer’s disease is the 7th leading cause of death in the USA and it’s the most common cause of dementia in persons over 65. While most of you may not be baby boomers, you young bunnies have grandparents or parents of that age. Today, about 6.5 million Americans have Alzheimer’s disease, but that number is expected to almost double to 12.7 million by 2050. Perhaps beginning September with World Alzheimer’s Day is a good reminder for all of us to be proactive about our health choices, so we can live independently as long as possible into our senior years.
Talk Like a Pirate
I also like Positive Thinking Day, since reframing negative thoughts into positive ones changes our attitude, our behaviors, and then we get better outcomes as a result. If you don’t feel like being Batman on the 17th, you can ARRRGUH yourself about, MATEY, as you Talk Like a Pirate on the 19th. Bonus points if you wear an eye patch, earring, and tricorne hat or bandana on your head.
The Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah begins at sunset on the 25th. It’s one of the four “new year” celebrations in their religious calendar. This one recalls God’s creation of humanity, as well as the legal new year. On this one night in September, when the faithful eat apples dipped in honey or other sweet sauces, they remember how God originally created humans in a sinless state and wish each other a good year to come.
Magic Bacon Carpet Ride
Did I forget International Bacon Day? How can any rabbit forget bacon? Someone will cut my carrot rations for the future, I fear. But if I remember to keep the coffee pot full, I’ll probably get out of the rabbit hoosegow before National Coffee Day on the 29th.
Some interesting holidays we can celebrate this month are: Better Breakfast Month (I suggest bacon, eggs, and pancakes on the weekend and old fashioned oatmeal during the week). There’s also Hispanic Heritage Month and National Sewing Month. Finally, every year on September 30th is National Love People Day. The purpose of the day is to show love to everyone—no exceptions. National Love People Day offers us the opportunity to show unconditional love, which many have never experienced. When we genuinely love our neighbors and express it with kind words and thoughtful deeds, we make our world a better place. This the true meaning of “love your neighbor as yourself.”
Maybe one meaning of loving your neighbor is offering a meal to them. Food insecurity is increasing once again, this time due to increased rents and costs of transportation. Consider a weekly meal service from your church building or organization’s meeting place. It doesn’t need to be fancy, but calories and nutrition would help hungry people have the strength to move on from their current situations. Joining with other groups to cover all the days of the week would be a bonus to your community, not only for the hungry, but also for the smaller groups who could team up to share in the blessing of loving their neighbors.
Until the spice is on the pumpkin, I wish all my bunny friends
Welcome to June! I’ve found my sunshades and my flip flops, so this rabbit is ready for a summer vacation. Old school teachers never die, they just take the summer off. And teachers, as well as students, will need a summer off, along with some intensive counseling, to get them ready to return in a healthy frame of mind next fall.
Summer Solstice Mandala
In my early years in ministry, I served in a certain county where many people were caught up in despair. I often complained to my district superintendent of my desire to pour mood elevators into the public water supply.
“You do know drugging the water supply isn’t exactly an acceptable activity for a Methodist minister?”
“Oh, yeah, but it sure would make my job easier.”
Rabbits Love One Another
Remember, June 3 is Love Conquerors All Day. I need to remind myself of this on occasion when I want to take the easy road. As Jesus reminds us in Matthew 7:13—
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it.”
Taking the easy way out isn’t always the best choice, but it’s the one we rabbits most often choose. We rabbits don’t like to rock the boat, and we like to make all the other rabbits happy if at all possible. The only problem is if we please A, B gets upset. If we please B, A gets upset. We don’t even try to please C, since C is so cranky, even the good Lord Jesus couldn’t fry an egg to please them. We set our hearts and minds on pleasing God, as best we can, and hope to hear the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your master.”
Make Mine Chocolate Ice Cream Day
Chocolate ice cream brings me joy any day of the year, but June 7 is a day dedicated to this frozen delight. Don’t worry about frying eggs, but keep it frozen. I like mine plain, but fresh strawberries or peaches are a nice addition, plus some chopped nuts. Always go for complex, unless you just can’t wait. Then grab a spoon and eat it straight from the pint. (Mark it with your name, since you ate from it.)
Often we cut the Gordian Knot and go for the shortcut to our complex problems. Sometimes this is a good solution, for the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. My daughter used to call my vacation navigation shortcuts “the long cuts,” since I’m directionally challenged. Most of the time, that straight line went through swamp land and alligators. I can hear her voice now, “NOOOOO!!!” I’m known for taking the scenic route, so I often see America’s less known sights, which are off the beaten path.
In the gospel of Luke (14:34), Jesus quotes a proverbial saying:
“Salt is good; but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?”
Another translation of the latter portion of this verse is “how can it be used for seasoning?”
When I think of loss, I think of a life snuffed out. Some people are burned out, so we can say they’ve lost their seasoning ability. There’s no vim or vigor in them. Other lives are cut short and aren’t able to fulfill their purpose to season the great soup of our community. Our past month was marked by 47 mass shooting incidents in May alone. A mass shooting incident is defined as one in which at least four people are injured or killed, not including the shooter. Suicides aren’t included.
Suicides are also a public health problem. They are the “deaths of despair” that leave ripples of grief and hopelessness in the survivors. They’re the ultimate shortcut solution to a problem, the placing of a period where life has placed a comma or a semicolon. My daughter once attempted suicide by downing half a bottle of aspirin. I noticed the open bottle and pills scattered across the floor. She said the “dog ate it.”
“That’s too bad, I’m going to miss that dog. She won’t be long for this world. We’ll need to make burial plans for her.”
“Well, actually, I’m the one who ate the aspirin.”
“Then we’re going to the hospital. You aren’t going to like getting your stomach pumped, but it’s better than being dead. You want to have a chance to grow up and have a good life. A dog we can replace. You—not so much.”
It was a rough time in her life, and mine too. But God was with us. And we had support from counselors, friends, family, and our church family. My work family and my clients supported me too. I must be the most extroverted rabbit in the patch, because I asked everyone for help. It turned out my problem was shared by everyone else. I discovered I wasn’t alone, but was the most ordinary of rabbits around.
This is a humbling experience, especially when you’re a first child and the only girl. I admit to being spoiled, but don’t let my brother rabbits hear me say this. I’ll deny it to my last breath: I’m like every other rabbit I know. I want to think I’m someone special, even when I’m just as fluffy as every other bunny out there on Gods green earth.
June 21—Summer Solstice
Unfortunately, half the suicides today are committed with a gun, not aspirins. When looking at overall gun deaths, roughly two-thirds are attributed to suicides—a proportion that is consistent across most states. Gun suicides are on the rise and data also indicates men, white Americans, older people, and individuals living in rural areas present higher rates of gun suicides. Another group presenting a unique risk for suicide is current and former members of the armed forces, especially those with PTSD.
Compared with the general population, current and former military members have significantly higher rates of gun ownership. According to a 2015 study, nearly 50% of U.S. veterans own a gun. In contrast, studies suggest that only about 22% of the general U.S. population owns firearms. Similarly, the age groups of 50 to 64 years old and 65 and older have the highest rates of gun ownership, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center study. This can further explain the high rates of suicide among older veterans.
According to data from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), in 2019, close to 4,332 veterans died by gun suicide in the United States, representing close to 18 percent of the total number of gun suicides reported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during that year. Perhaps more alarming is the fact this figure shows a veteran is killed by gun suicide every two hours. In 2019, active duty military members committed suicide by gun 64% of the 498 total (318), almost one gun suicide per day.
Why isn’t anyone speaking about this? For all the lip service our politicians give to the flag and to the armed service members, they seem to forget them once they’re no longer useful to fight their wars or march in their parades. Perhaps because Congress won’t devote any money to study the effects of gun violence on the citizens of our Beautiful America, so we have to fund private studies here and there to piece together a patchwork of facts of this scourge on the peace of our people.
My young neighbor, only 8 years old, was in a panic as he knocked on my door the other day. His parents hadn’t come straight up the elevator, as they’d said they would. He was crying to beat the band and was sure something bad had happened to them. I invited him inside and left the door open so we could see them come past. He was so worked up, he couldn’t sit down. I suggested a call to his daddy, but they came walking past just at that moment.
June 19—Father’s Day
We don’t realize what terror these school shootings put our children through. There’s no safe place for them any more, no matter how “hardened” we make the buildings. Some person always breaks the shell at the most inopportune moment.
Some rabbits will have empty seats at their family reunion tables because someone decided to act impulsively. Father’s Day (June 19) won’t be a celebration without the son or daughter to give Dad the tie, the golf balls, or breakfast in bed.
I think back to my own childhood. We worried in the 1950’s more about the urban legends of Halloween candy poisoning, when we were more likely to get killed crossing Highway 1, a four lane highway running through our town. My mother rabbit would wait for me to ride the trolley home from school. She would wait until the near lane of traffic cleared before she walked out to the center median and time this so the far lane’s cars would finish passing so she could walk across the newly empty lanes to meet me on the other side. We held hands and crossed in the same manner on the way back to our home.
This was our routine from the start of school until sometime in the autumn. Mother was delayed one day, so I sat down to wait for her and opened my book to read. I was wearing a brown jacket against the early cool spell, and my dirty blonde hair blended in with the pile of dry leaves on the ground. Intent on my book, I failed to see her come outside. She overlooked me and went inside thinking I’d missed my ride.
A bit later, I decided if she wasn’t coming for me, I’d come to her. Gathering up my possessions, I stood on the curbside. I watched the comings and goings of the quickly moving traffic. Once I saw the break in the pattern, I walked out into the clearing, waited at the median, and crossed behind the trailing traffic of the second lane. When I walked inside, my mother had a conniption fit. After this, I began riding my bicycle to school, and my brother got to come with me.
Brain Functions
Not everyone is mature enough to cross a four lane busy highway by themselves when they’re in the fourth grade, which is the same age as the children who lost their lives at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. . Some people still need to be supervised at work even in their 20’s. The brain keeps maturing past age 21, as the frontal lobes, which are home to key components of the neural circuitry underlying “executive functions” (such as planning, working memory, and impulse control) are among the last areas of the brain to mature; they may not be fully developed until halfway through the third decade of life. Although neuroscience has been called upon to determine adulthood, there is little empirical evidence to support age 18, the current legal age of majority, as an accurate marker of adult capacities.
Since May 24, the date of this tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, the gunviolencearchive.org has recorded 16 mass shootings in six days, with 79 killed or wounded. Some of these are high school graduation parties where uninvited guests arrived and gunfire broke out, others are the result of young people wandering about in the late hours and getting into trouble with guns. During my time of ministry, youth, alcohol, and firearms were usually a recipe for trouble. Maybe parental rabbits’ brains are still developing too, if they aren’t able to put their rabbit foot down and tell the junior rabbits to leave their weapons at home. Visiting Jack Rabbit in jail for accidental death or intentional use of a firearm will throw a curve into your best laid plans for your progeny.
Rabbits in Cars Going for a Joyride
Instead, cities may have to reinstitute curfews after dark to curtail the opportunities for gun violence. Or they could raise the age to buy a weapon and require a longer waiting time and a more thorough background check. I wouldn’t be opposed to a training class and a test to see if the owner knows how to use the weapon safely. After all, we do this for the 2 ton weapon of mass destruction known as the family automobile. So what if the founding fathers never had autos; they also never had automatic pistols or large magazine weapons, modeled on the ones used in combat.
Did I mention June is National Safety Month? Its emphasis is workplace safety, but as a former teacher, this old rabbit reminds you, between 2009 and 2020, teachers’ workplaces are in schools, which is where 30% of mass shootings occurred in public places (schools, malls, or bars), while 61% of mass shootings occurred entirely in the home and another 9% occurred partially in a home and partially in a public location. The common factor in these is the gun and the presence of domestic violence. In at least 53 percent of mass shootings between 2009 and 2020, the perpetrator shot a current or former intimate partner or family member during the rampage.
Richard Small seen posing with his rifle before turning it over to police. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
I know y’all usually expect a bright and cheery note from me at the beginning of the month, but my heart is broken. Thoughts and prayers are nice, but they don’t stop the carnage. We need to make some changes. At least one man has turned in his assault weapon to his local police station, so it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. He couldn’t bear the thought of it being used to perpetrate a similar crime if he were to sell it. If we parents don’t say no to our children, if we keep voting for politicians who are doing nothing, then we get to keep the distinction of having the highest rate of violent gun deaths for any of the developed countries.
That’s not the American Exceptionalism I believe in. We can do better. These are crimes against the common good and against the innocent. The shooter shares the primary blame, but everyone who does nothing to change our society for the better also shares the blame and shame for the next group of victims. At the rate we’re going, we’re having about one mass shooting per day. Eventually this scourge will come to YourTown, USA, and your small town police force will be just as flabbergasted as poor Uvalde’s. How could this happen in our little corner of the world?
I cry along with Jeremiah ( 8:21-22):
For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?
Time Magazine Cover from 2019 with all the Mass Shooting Locations Named
Sometimes we go along with the attributes of cultural Christianity, rather than practicing the Christianity of Jesus Christ. Romans 12:2 reminds us
“Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
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