REFLECTIONS ON LIFE – JUNE 2019

ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED

REFLECTIONS ON HOME IN COLUMBIA

Bullfrogs have reached their melodious (at least to my ears) peak.  There must be at least a hundred of them in our two ponds.  I find their deep resonating mating calls so peaceful in the night. Not all of our neighbors agree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtAdhpTKmgg

Wrens and sparrows built three nests on our home early in the spring – one above the light fixture affixed to the outside wall of the deck outside our bedroom, and two on the walls of our kitchen and dining room.  These latter two utilized forsythia branches to lend more support.  Then about a month ago we were mesmerized by the hatching and subsequent food deliveries by the parents.  Now these little birds flit around on their own among the three bird feeders on our decks and kitchen window.  What a joy to simply sit and watch them.

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As usual I attended the Juneteenth commemoration among the African American community in Columbia.  This year it was held in Town Center.  I was surprised to learn that the main speaker, the head of Howard Community College’s Library is from Ghana.  He was a wealth of information about the slave trade,  We had learned much about this when we visited Ghana ourselves right after our marriage 25 years ago.  We stayed with our dear friends Harriett and Jim Lancaster.  Harriet had served as the first director of the Howard County Department of Citizen Services in Howard County back in the 70’s.  Jim devoted a full week of his life driving us around the country, including the gate through which Ghanaians passed to board the slave ships. 

I am deeply gratified to see that our community college has chosen someone schooled in the deep history of the slave trade. We spoke, and formed an intention to get together sometime soon.  I can learn so much from him.

REFLECTIONS ON ZACH

Next month Lloyd and I will head to the beach house on the coast in North Carolina with our kids and grandkids.  This will be our third year in the “new” house, the prior one having grown too small after almost 20 years.  Zach has never been with us in this house, but I can walk a very short distance down the ocean beach to where he played in the sand and surf.  He and his sister, Julia were the only grandkids when we first began this summertime tradition.  I can remember my daily morning walks with Zach along the ocean  (his idea). We spoke of such varied topics as the beauty of the sport of boxing (hitherto incomprehensible to me), the pull of the water returning to the sea, star formations we had observed from the deck the night before.  One memory stands out above all others - Zach’s demonstrating the style of Mohammed Ali by leaning up strong against a rope line out through the small waves.  Then those words that, although I came to love them, startled me upon first hearing:  “Grandma, that’s what I did with cancer.  I leaned back and leaned back and leaned back.” Rope-a dope!

Countless times since Zach died more than five years ago, when I am struggling with sadness about so much injustice, cruelty and hatred in our world, I remember Zach and emotionally “lean back and lean back and lean back.”  Then I become aware of all the love, beauty, and courage in our world.  It never fails me.

Thank you, Zach.

REFLECTIONS ON BALTIMORE, MY HOME TOWN

The Baltimore Sun                                                                   June 9, 2019

“John Waters deals with a life less shocking”     by Charles Arrowsmith

As a teenager growing up in Baltimore I first developed my love of good films.  What a perfect environment to nourish that love.  Barry Levinson lived to the north and John Waters to the east – one born a year before me in 1942 and the other two years after.  As a young adult I heard much more of Waters than Levinson who’s well deserved fame came several years later.

Waters, the king of nonconformists, says about the acceptance and popularity of his new book “Mr. Know- It – All, The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder” - “Suddenly the worst thing that can happen to a creative person has happened to me.  I am accepted.”

Last year Lloyd and went to the Baltimore Museum of Art, right across Wyman Park from where I went to high school, to see the extensive exhibit relating to John Waters exhibit.  No doubt he was “way out there” at times. When all is considered there is not doubt of his great creativity.

REFLECTIONS ON PUBLIC POLICY

“Take the silencer off gun control                                    Editorial

This is a national emergency and must be confronted as one”

The Washington Post                                                         June 2, 2019

When I first began serving as Howard County Executive in 1986, Vinny DiMarco, leader of Marylanders Against Handguns solicited me to be the first County Executive in Maryland to take a stand against the gun lobby by publicly supporting a bill to ban handguns in Maryland.  I agreed.

Now, many years later the damage by guns is beyond our worst imagination.

Lloyd’s daughter and her husband worked in the city office building in Virginia Beach where the mass shooting took place.  They were not in the office that day.

U.S.A.  (I deliberated placing the following in Baltimore, My Hometown)

The New Yorker                                                         June 10 and 17, 2019

“Conduction ” by Ta-Nehisi-Coates

I have written of Ta-Nehisi in prior “Reflections on Life.”  Since then the subject of “reparations” for black slavery in our nation has come closer and closer to the forefront.  It is not uncommon to read about it in our foremost publications.  It is currently the subject of congressional hearings in our nation’s capital.

Earlier this month Lloyd and I drove with his sister, Jenet, to spend a few days in my daughter Chris’ condo on the beachfront in Ocean City.  Jenet rode home to Pennsylvania with her son who was staying nearby and Lloyd and I drove separately. While passing through the eastern shore town of Denton, I instinctively asked Lloyd to pull off the road and drive toward the Pocomoke River.  When we reached it, we saw a couple men fishing from the bank.  Under a nearby bridge decorated with magnificent depictions of slavery stood a young black man about 6’6” in height.  He was talking on his mobile phone.  I didn’t want to disturb him, but I did want to get closer to examine some art on the bridge’s concrete abutment.  As I got closer he looked up, and I said “Hello, I’m getting closer for a clearer look at these beautiful murals.  He put his phone in his pocket, and commenced a great conversation about the river and life in the little towns nearby.  I told him about the stories my mom told me about spending her summers on a tobacco farm owned by her father’s brother in nearby Calvert County.  After ten minutes or so, Lloyd, who had been checking out the fishing spots, joined us and we talked longer - beautiful exchange with this young man.  Although we each spoke of our own personal connections to the history of the area, the subject of reparations never arose.  Yet I knew, virtually without a doubt, that his family had cause for them.

I wonder whether Ta-Nehisi Coates ever visited Denton or the town of Prince Frederick in Calvert County where, as a boy my grandfather worked the family tobacco farm.

My experience in reading “Conduction” was as if I were there walking with the main character “to cross through Virginia by the North West Virginia Railroad and then, once in Maryland, link up with the Baltimore & Ohio and proceed east and north into the free lands of Pennsylvania, and on to Philadelphia.  There was a shorter route, due north, but there had been some recent troubles with Ryland along the rail there, and it was felt that the audacity of this approach, right through the slave port of Baltimore, would not be expected….”

“The slave port of Baltimore.” Those words on the page of “The New Yorker” burned my eyes and brought tears to them. Baltimore, my hometown, with all its painful past and present.  And yet it did give us Ta-Nehisi, who grew up there.  And even now it has the potential, through so many kids growing up there now, to bring more love and truth to the world.

The Baltimore Sun                                                       June 20, 2019

“Coates makes a case                                                   by Errin Haines Whack

Baltimore native testifies before Congress in support of reparations”

It is clear that Ta-Nehisi is extending his role as historian beyond that of an author.  We can only benefit from that.

REFLECTIONS ON OUR PLANET BEYOND THE UNITED STATES

A Great Read

On the recommendation of a friend, Lloyd recently purchased and read “Sapiens” (as in homo sapiens), a New York Times bestseller a few years ago.

Its author, Yuval Harari lectures in Israel. The book includes the Timeline of History below:

Years ago            Event

13.5 billion                The Big Bang

4.5 billion                  Formation of planet Earth

3.8 billion                  Emergence of organisms

6 million                    Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees

2.5 million                 Evolution of genus homo in Africa

2 million                    Humans spread to Eurasia

0.5 million                 Homo Neanderthals evolve in Europe

2000,000                   Homo Sapiens evolve in East Africa

45,000                                    Sapiens settle Australia

30,000                                    Extinction of Neanderthals

16,000                                    Sapiens settle America

Next time you have to wait an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year for some anticipated occurrence in your life, take a look at this chart and recall the virtue of patience.  

Morocco

Last month I wrote of the beauty of Morocco – its people, its souks (markets) in Marrakech, Fes, Casablanca, Tangier, its mosques, its sometimes seemingly endless desert lands, its magnificent Atlas Mountains.  I returned home with a mystical and romantic sense of the land.  Then the news of the two Scandinavian women being brutally murdered in their tent in the middle of one of the nights of their long and meticulously planned climb in those mountains whose winding roads we traversed with eight other travelers from various nations in our National Geographic touring van.  Evil and nature’s beauty intermingled.

Nepal

“The Washington Post”                                                  JUNE 2, 2019

“Mount Everest is packed.  Whose fault is that?

We hype adventure – to deadly effect says Michael Kodas”

Very poor judgment aside, where is the respect for the natural beauty of nature being viewed from afar? I cannot help but wonder whether some of these “adventurers” even see the beauty.  The international border between Nepal and China runs bisects the summit. The monks of Nepal could teach these climbers.

REFLECTIONS ON OUR UNIVERSE

Lloyd and I marked the summer solstice at 11:54 a.m. on our back deck facing south and overlooking the larger of the two ponds beside our home.  We stood in awareness that the sun had reached its highest position on this day with the longest period of daylight. I love the synchronicity of the longest day of the year, when the Northern hemisphere tilts toward the sun at its greatest angle. The direct opposite occurs on my birth date, December 21 --winter solstice -- when this part of the globe has its maximum tilt away from the sun.  Sometimes when I am in somewhat of a state of confusion and my purpose in life is not clear to me, I summon up the image of this astronomical contrast.  I remain in silence and stillness for a bit.  Then it becomes clear to me.  I am here to spread love.  Actually, I believe we are all here for that purpose.  We simply forget it.

A friend sent me the following Van Gogh inspiration earlier this month.  I have watched and listened literally hundreds of times, transported each time back to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, and then up into the starry night.

I hope it will bring you the same peace it has brought to me.

Starry Night

Peace on earth.

Across the Universe

“Pools of sorrow, waves of joy

Are drifting through my open mind

Possessing and caressing me

Across the Universe

~Lennon and McCartney

Be well and love life.

~ Liz

PS - My monthly Reflections episodes, the Dragon radio show I record at HCC, can be found at http://dragondigitalradio.podbean.com/category/reflections-on-life/.