1.
A strange week it’s been as I’ve once again been isolating due to COVID rebound, making it three weeks, with a short grace period in between, dealing with isolation, schedule and work adjustments, cancelling all kinds of things. Can’t complain, really. My symptoms have been mild; I have food, a roof, a bed—creature comforts and the good fortune and happenstance to live in the place and time that I do.
Not so for the people living in any of the regions where there are more than 110 armed conflicts happening across the globe, some making daily news rounds, many not. As I sit here pecking at my computer, I am angry and disappointed that our country keeps feeding the war machine far and wide. I’m not ‘for’ any regime or country; my only thoughts are ‘for’ the innocent civilian lives that are caught in the storm of the madmen calling the shots.
2.
And speaking of madmen calling the shots, the House just elected a speaker who is spearheading efforts to restrict abortion pills nationwide, has worked to shut down abortion clinics in his home state of Louisiana, opposes gender-affirming care for children, is anti-LGBTQ rights, anti-union, and anti-immigration, wants to restrict the discussion of CRT, is a longtime proponent of prayer in public schools, a critic of efforts to fight climate change, and has been an election-denying, staunch supporter of the orangeman. Mike Johnson. “I am a Christian, a husband, a father, a life-long conservative, constitutional law attorney and a small business owner in that order,” Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson told the Louisiana Baptist Message, “and I think that order is important.” Gawd help us all.
3.
And a brief discussion by Heather Cox Richardson of the recent slaughter in Maine and how it relates to Biden’s worldview of reversing the neoliberal economic policies promoted by Republicans is a must read. This administration has resurrected the idea that the government can promote economic growth by regulating businesses, protecting workers, and investing in ordinary Americans resulting in yesterday’s data from the Commerce Department showing that the U.S. economy grew at an astonishing rate of 4.9% in the third quarter. In contrast, the modern-day Republican Party grew out of a rejection of that idea. In the 1950s and 1960s, a faction insisted that such government action was a form of socialism that stopped the economy from responding efficiently to market forces. Individual entrepreneurs should invest their money without government interference, they argued, and their investments would dramatically expand the economy. Putting money at the “supply side” rather than the “demand side” would allow everyone to prosper together, they promised: a rising tide would lift all boats. They vowed to cut taxes and regulations and to restore American individualism.
And in a similar light, Robert Reich lays out the argument that a civil society doesn’t allow the strong to brutalize the weak. It doesn’t incite the weak to terrorize the strong. It doesn’t tolerate violence against innocent people, nor does it tolerate retributive violence. Without norms and laws preventing the stronger from attacking or exploiting the weaker, none of us is safe. Oppressors can ever be secure from the oppressed. Even the most powerful live in fear of being attacked or deposed. Terrorism always lurks in the shadow of brutality. Our job — the responsibility of all who seek a just society and a decent world — is to move as far as possible away from hateful violence, toward social justice. Both of these above Substack newsletters are fairly short and well worth a read—a couple of times.
4.
Two years ago, October 22, 2021, I wrote about Little Amal, the 3.5 metre-tall living artwork of a young Syrian refugee child walking across Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium and the UK to focus attention on the urgent needs of young refugees. She represents the millions of children forced to leave their homes in desperate situations.
Between September 7 and November 5, 2023, she will journey 6,000 miles across the United States in one of the largest free public festivals ever created. And this Saturday, October 28, you can experience a day of events with Little Amal here in Tucson. Click the link to check the schedule starting with a 6am walk at Tumamoc Hill.
5.
Pulitzer Prize winning Poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019) was known for her words inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. But the following essay is more about humans, and the task of being an artist.
Mary Oliver: The Artist’s Task
It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone. Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart — to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And what does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist, that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is two weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.
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The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self — and does — is a darker and more curious matter.
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Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
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Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask of the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?
Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do — fly an airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.
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In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.
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No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.
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Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.
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The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work — who is thus responsible to the work… Serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another.
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It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.
There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
And now…
I'm a little behind reading you blog, Productive One! I really enjoyed the Mary Olive piece, thanks for sending it my way, Friend.
so that's what's happening inside the mind of an overachiever. Scary. I'm pulling the covers up, rolling over, and going back to sleep. Good seeing you and the team last night. Keep on overachieving my friend. kw