The New Year…
Now in embryonic form on New Year’s Eve… the revelrie amidst destruction, the drunken hopes in a dying world, the hoopla scares me… it is premature… what will the New Year bring?
Hope it brings peace… but it is not looking good for that right now. We need Spirit. We need Faith. We need Hope. We need Justice. We need Truth. But most of all, we need, LOVE!
💖💖💖”Just as your consciousness pervades your whole body, the consciousness of Christ is equally present throughout the cosmos– in every tree and plant, in every bird and animal, in all human beings.”💖💖💖💖💖💖💖 Paramahansa Yogananda
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I remember…
Christmases of very long ago, when my parents were just barely out of childhood themselves and we went to my Sicilian grandparents’ house in Larchmont. And there was good cheer, Grandma shouting, “Whoopee, Whoopee!” after a few sips of wine before she disappeared into the kitchen to bring out a sumptuous, Italian meal with foods I no longer eat– bracciole and the ever familiar spaghetti with meatballs. My Grandmother’s meatballs tasted like no others and as many times as my mother asked for the recipe, each time the recipe changed. We children had teeny glasses of wine mixed with water. And after the meal, while the womenfolk were cleaning up in the kitchen, the men sat in the living room on the sofa, hands folded over their stomachs, dozing. Then out came the mandolin when Grandpa woke up and there were festive Italian songs to dance to.
Now Christmases are very quiet. My life with my husband is very contemplative. No more hoopla. No more meatballs or bracciole. No more wine. No more visting with the few relatives still with us. Old friends are mostly gone. A very few of the most precious ones are left, one or two new friends and a couple of lovely neighbors are in our hearts. But I am deeply grateful for the best friend of my life, my husband. Retirement has knit us closer than ever. We do not want hoopla and festivities. Just some music, our little, trusty tree and heart ornaments I bought with my school bestie (long gone) over 50 years ago. Now my husband is the light of my life. He brings the spirit of Christmas to my heart every day. We are grateful to wake up to each other every morning and pain over the thought of the inevitable loss of the other. Life is poignant, precious. Christmas always brought tears. Fears. Underneath all the celebration, even as a child I always felt the vibration of life… and the mystery and nearness of death. Now only more so. Hoopla only goes so far. SPIRIT is underneath all.
A happy Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Diwali to you all and to all a good life!
Sentient Trees in Almost-Winter
“The Feather Trees”
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“The Heart of Darkness“
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“The Cold and Lonely Tree“
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The Edge of Winter
It is an overcast day. Brightly colored birds stand out like jewels in the greyness. The winter birds– jays and cardinals, juncos, black-capped chickadees, white-breasted nuthatches and downy woodpeckers flock to the bird feeder and it has to be filled up almost every day. The red berries on the bushes are nearly all gone and the feeder is becoming a matter of survival. On our walks we see empty nests held in the bare arms of winter trees. An empty robin’s nest is filled with snow– the hatchlings and the mother long gone to fairer climes. The trees are stripped down to their souls. With ice storms they become tinkling chandeliers. In the rain the few remaining dead leaves drip icy tear drops.
Occasionally a dove visits the feeder. The chipmunk, who gathered scattered seeds under the feeder all fall, is not to be seen. He must be in torpor in his den. According to Bernd Heinrich in: The Winter World: the Ingenuity of Animal Survival, the eastern chipmunk builds a twelve foot storage system with a nest chamber some three feet down and a tunnel system which includes a food storage chamber. Heinrich says chipmunks go in and out of torpor. He reasons that they would not gather food if they were to be in torpor all winter long. We will probably not see our chipmunk for the rest of the winter for, in his stuporous state, he would be easy prey. However he can be roused to eat and venture outdoors if need be, especially in March when there still may be snow on the ground but mating season begins.
The grey squirrels are busy clearing snow from branches as they run along tree limbs. On the ground they dig through the snow for the walnuts we watched them bury in the ground with their noses this fall. They do not need to hibernate for they have food stores which they built up in the autumn and leafy, well-insulated nests. The red squirrels survive winter by putting on a thick, insulating fur.
The back yard is a maze of tunnels. We think they are deer mouse tunnels as many have tunneled their way into our house. But they must get by the feral cat who sometimes waits out a snow storm under our deck. In the woods, the occasional deer waits out the same storm under a squat fir tree. The tracks in the snow tell the story of how they weathered a Nor’Easter.
Beneath the tracks in the snow, in the frozen leaf litter, the insect world is dormant. Some hibernate. Others fill their bodies with antifreeze, glycerol, to stay alive. Heinrich talks about woolly bears hibernating but they are also capable of freezing solid and surviving, coming to life again as they thaw in the spring. The pupae, however, don’t survive being frozen.
In Winter: an Ecological Handbook, authors, James C. Halfpenny, Elizabeth Besiot and Roy Douglas Ozonne, tell us that the reptiles and amphibians pick out a “microclimate for hibernation that does not freeze” for their winter, such as the “bottoms of ponds, streams, or deep in the ground.”
Our stream flows out back in the marsh under ice and snow and one can see the elongated bubbles of running water. In the pond next door the turtles lay beneath the ice in their hibernacula. At the end of the book, The Year of the Turtle, David M. Carroll, the naturalist, author and artist, has his watercolor of a spotted turtle hibernating. This picture is hypnotic and in its spell, I think of all the animals hibernating beneath our feet in lugubrious gloom. It reminds me of the penguins in the film, The March of the Penguins, in the dead of an Antarctic winter, huddled together for warmth in the harsh, strong winds and snow, taking turns being on the outside of the huddle. Winter can be magnificent in its transformations yet tragic in its harshness: hibernating animals who freeze to death and deer starving to death in the snow among the victims of its violence.
Carroll’s drawing shows the turtle all alone, withdrawn into its shell under less than two feet of water lodged firmly in the mud under ice under snow in a sunny winter’s day, a far better clime than the penguin’s– and yet it evokes a certain sadness for this little creature all alone beneath the snow, in a torpid state. The turtle is missing out on a sunny day, sleeping a deep sleep in a “half year of stillness.”
Carroll’s writing is sheer poetry as he describes the turtle’s hibernation: “Mounting layers of snow silently cover the ice. Night after night in the harshest depth of winter, as Orion and the Pleiades burn distant and brilliant in the black sky and strong winds howl off the mountain to the northwest, the turtles rest beneath the ice. With the life in them nearly suspended, reduced to its most tenuous hold, all but extinct in the vast, inhospitable regime that reaches above them to the limits of the universe, they lie within their shells, waiting for the earth to make its required turnings and return them to the sun that will awaken them to another season.”
I think of the turtles below, along with all the other beautiful creatures. I wish them a kind sleep from which they will safely stir with the life force surging through their veins as the sun brings them to the fullness of life again. The death of some, and the half life of so many, proffers the poignancy of winter.
Thanksgiving From Within
If you look between the buildings you can see the sky and the trees I watch as the seasons change. There are bare branches in between the buildings there now.
But this afternoon my husband called me in to the other room see the leaves still on the tree outside the den window.
The leaves were ecstatically yellow today as I drank in their beauty from my window seat on a stationery bike.
The yellow leaves filled the room with a wondrous yellow light. Migraines and severe arthritis keep me in. But MUCH can be seen from the inside.
Time flew by as fast as the low lying clouds. I felt a form of ecstasy with Spirit and the world outside. A peace that nature gives and one that has been rare for me in these days of deep strife in the world.
The clouds zipping by and the fresh air from the window and the bright yellow brought me great joy that others racing by in their busy lives below do not see. I am blessed though mostly homebound… blessed with a loving husband and breathtaking beauty in the great beyond. I have much to be grateful for and I wish you all many such blessings and the urge to give thanks.
Mostly I give thanks for a sensitive and sensible husband who has stuck by me through thick and thin and my many moods and suicidal depressions– as a person with a major mental illness. Bipolar Disorder. It has not been easy for him. And he has helped many others in his career as a psychiatric social worker. I was able to help him understand some of his clients, yes, but he gave them the greatest gift of all by sharing with them his sense of humor and treating them as normal human beings.
On our first date, almost 40 years ago, a walk in the park, his sense of humor was what I first noticed about him. He scored the first home run. And then moments later, another, with his compassion. And that was the start of the love story of my life.
Today I send my deepest blessings to him, and, too, I want to wish each of you many blessings of love and nature on this fine, yellow day of Thanksgiving week!
A Few of the Last Leaves Upstate
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FALL IN NEW YORK CITY… Dedicated to the two most compassionate bloggers I know of… Gigi in Chicago at/ https://gigisrantsandraves.wordpress.com/ and Tiramit in Thailand at /https://dhammafootsteps.com/ for their total kindness and because they wanted to see Fall in New York City
Central Park
Central Park
Sakura Park in Morningside Heights, Harlem
Sakura Park
Sakura Park
Riverside Park in Morningside Heights in Harlem
Our block in Morningside Heights, Harlem
Columbia University in Morningside Heights, Harlem
“Cool Change”… Fall Upstate in Millbrook, New York
This was one of my brother’s (R.I.P.) favorite songs… “Cool Change” by Little River Band.
Autumnal Septuagenarian Love
Waking to your touch
electricity in
your massive
healing hands
without a glint
of sexuality…
Waking to your smile
whispers sweetly
to my soul…
like the first time
so long ago
on our first walk
together
when your arm
brushed against mine
and shook our worlds
out of their solitary
orbits and
sent us to the moon!
Your grey fluffy hair
sparkling silver threads
entices every time
I sniff your fragrance
and inhale the heavens
the warmth
of your cheeks
in our fleeting
embrace
I would it
would last forever
like our love!
The smile lines etched
around your sky blues
alter the pulse
the course of my blood
and with each glance
reach for the stars
twinkling inside my head!
The wrinkles in your cheeks
and your furrowed brow
pluck at the strings
inside my bosom
for I know the hard times
and worries that
engraved them on your face!
As day turns to night…
On the doorway
to Orpheus
in pillowed embrace
your big hand
holds mine
and makes me
feel safe and loved
and little
as you drift off
leaving me wishing
for morning
to awaken once
more to you
fears tears
so long to wait
till morning!
We are old
How did this happen?
and we are in love
more than ever
youthful passion gone
replaced by years of fidelity
affection, quarrels, laughing,
teasing, crying
always sharing, caring
yet attraction still stirs
and the years of together
have sewn our souls to one!
Loss is inevitable
and unacceptable
In equal measure
The God I used to find
in nature
I now find in you
And the ecstasis
of gazing at the sky
now rests with the mystery
of you!!
A happiest of birthdays to the love of our many lifetimes together! Hope to continue our journey together to enlightenment!
May the rest of your seventies be healthy and happy and filled with love!
💖Your wife
Blessed by Spirits
I have had three visits from the spirit world. Some might say they are “vague imaginings” born of grief and loss. But I know vague imaginings and these were different. In each case I had a soul connection with the spirit in question while they were living so it is not so strange that I would connect with them in death.
The first one happened when I was on my first trip to Europe at age 22. I was off to visit the tiny peasant town where my Grandfather was born. It was a tiny mountain town in the province of Enna, reachable by train and then a long bus ride up the mountain. The name, Valguernera Caropepe. I was in the train station in Sicily and an old Sicilian man looking very much my Grandfather’s type— short, grey-haired with a warm smile— saw me and started singing the words to Stormy Weather. I turned to look at him stunned. When I was a little girl I spent lots of time with my grandparents in Larchmont. Grandpa and I were inseparable. We danced and sang to music on the Victrola or his mandolin by day, had our evening cocktail together in the late afternoon (a Shirley Temple for me, Whiskey Sour for Grandpa and I got his cherry). And, at nights in summer, we went for walks catching fireflies, or sat together in the bedroom, each at our own window, in the silence of our thoughts, watching the neighbors in the courtyard below. Even as a little girl, I could feel that there was something special about the quiet we shared and that we were always connected. Physically, emotionally, and I like to think, spiritually. I took his death very hard. About Stormy Weather— whenever I walked into the living room where Grandpa was inevitably to be found smoking a pipe or reading, he would sing: “Here Comes Stormy Weather.” I looked into the smiling eyes of this man in the Sicilian train station as he sang the lyrics of the song Grandpa used to greet me with and I saw Grandpa for a few seconds. And then I had to leave to catch the train to his town.
The second time I had a brush with the spirit world was when my father died. Dad had been sick for three years battling colon cancer. The end was near and I visited the hospital often but had just taken a new job so was not at the hospital every day as, had I been stronger emotionally, I would have liked to have been. Again Dad and I were very close. Not like Grandpa. But in temperament and looks. My father married a Sicilian and I was the only one of the three children who looked like him with blond hair and light skin. And I was shy and quiet and liked writing and music like Dad did and didn’t like the screaming and yelling that was much a part of our family life. Dad didn’t either. Dad and I were sympatico— even to the point that my mother was sometimes jealous, though she had no cause to be. A few days before Dad died he went into something like a coma. His eyes were closed and he was mostly unresponsive. My Mom in an effort to get a response, teased him (Dad was the tease in the family) one warm November day, one last time, and told him it was snowing outside. (It wasn’t.) Dad’s eyes fluttered and he opened them and looked out the window and presumably saw it was not snowing. A few days later Dad died. I was at work in the ladies room at the time. I remember the exact moment. I knew Dad had died. I went back into the office. Moments later came the phone call. I had the moment down right to the minute. I called my fiancé to go to the hospital and see Dad before they took his body away. And then I stood on the street corner waiting for him, frantic with grief and stunned despite all the time we had to “prepare” for Dad’s death. Suddenly I felt a zephyr pass through me on the corner. Dad’s spirit. No mistaking it. No, for sure it was Dad. And then it began to snow. The snow only lasted a few minutes. A sign. Dad, a teaser, gave his last tease, for the benefit of my Mom. I told later told her there were a few moments of snow.
I didn’t get a message when my Mother died. We had quarreled the last night she was alive. My husband and I had done some fancy footwork to grant her last wish— we had gotten her home so she could die in her own house. We had been her main caretakers and it had taken a terrible toll on us. And though I didn’t get a message from Mom when she died, I’ve got her inside of me. Today even clearer than when she was alive, I hear her telling me how to handle the problems of life. (I still don’t always listen.) And, we inherited my Mom’s ten-year old dog— a miniature poodle, named Ko-ko. Ko-ko came to live with my husband and me and we loved her to pieces in our childless marriage. We never expected her to survive losing Mom (especially after losing Dad a few years before) and losing her home, but she adjusted. When she lost an eye to my aunt’s cat we again never expected her to pull through, but she survived. She drank up love like a parched plant and we were only too happy to give it to her. And then she developed Cushing’s disease and a cataract in her good eye, arthritis and a bad heart— but she kept on going with the spirit of a puppy. I almost believed she would live forever— even when she was diagnosed with cancer. But she didn’t. And in October, her 17 and ½ years came to a close. She had an appetite up until the last— eating dinner the night she died. Ironically it was a stroke or something she ate that impaired her breathing. It was too late to go to our vet. We decided to take her in first thing in the morning to be put down by the vet she knew and loved. I stayed up through the night with her trying to help her make the transition but she clung to life. And in the morning we brought her in to be put to sleep. Our tears were joined by a tear streaming down Dr. Howell’s face. I think he had begun to believe in her immortality, too. He gave her the shot. She reared up a moment and then was gone. We had made plans to meet my aunt and uncle that day. We could not break the date— it was too late to even call. They were coming to New York from Connecticut. I just couldn’t go. My husband, God bless him forever, went to meet them with out me. I went home to rest a bit, collect myself and then meet them later. I was at home on the bed doing Reiki, an ancient Tibetan form of energy healing, on myself. My eyes were closed but I was wide awake. And I “felt” Ko-ko. She was running in a white field filled with white flowers and then going towards a tunnel. I was with her at her eye level close to the ground and all around was pure white and she was very happy and excited. Running to be reunited with my parents. And I felt profoundly blessed by her presence as I did in life, for she had a beautiful soul. Instead of visiting us in spirit, my mother left us an angel.
I have longed for further contact with these three souls and with my Mom but the longing goes unfulfilled like so many desires in life. I am indeed lucky to have had these three visits. They are high up on the list of treasures in my life, whispering of a life beyond this one. Treasures too ephemeral for touch, treasures locked away in the depths of my soul.
Beginnings & Endings
No one in my family liked summer. Probably because we lived in New York City and summer is not fun there. Moving upstate changed all that– up to a point. Although I must admit a weakness for those beautiful June days when the temperature reaches perfection, the sky is blue with fluffy clouds, and a soporific breeze wafts through the trees. And true, one has much more time with the four or five extra hours of sunlight. Still in all, when the first hints of fall come I am bordering on ecstatic.
First there is the change in light. The sun, still hot in mid-September, does not pack the punch it did in July, when one could be outdoors for an hour and come in with a change in skin color. Temperatures cool. The grass does not grow as fast. The “blood” of the trees starts to flow back into the trunk causing leaves to change color. Walnuts, acorns and apples fall. The bats leave the attic for warmer climes, giving us yet another chance to plug up holes inside to keep them outside next summer. Summer houses are closed down. The butterflies, that were so rampant outdoors in August are now inside the stomach of many a child with the start of school. Even adults are not immune. Many grown people feel the flutter of back-to-school anxiety come fall. After all September means “back to school” for many, many years. Time to “honker down” again and mean business. Fall offers a new beginning and there is a tinge of excitement added to the anxiety in facing some thing new.
And most of all, fall is a time of riotous color, when a walk in the woods finds one reveling like a drunk, besotted by the yellow, orange, crimson, russet world which our eyes imbibe like a hefty cocktail. It is a time when Italian comes to the lips in a loud “Que bella!!” The green of summer is bucolic and raises the spirit, but the many colors of fall intoxicate. People start talking of peak color, and leafing becomes the pastime of many. It is the time to plant bulbs and endlessly rake blowing leaves.
But fall is a time of melancholia, too. Flowers die. Reptiles go into hibernation. Insects die or overwinter. Songbirds migrate. Trees eventually loose their leaves. Anxiety over new beginnings can be uncomfortable. And the end of the lazy days of summer brings with it shorter days, longer nights, and possible depression for many people. Moments of sobriety seep into intoxication with the new world of color as we may remember loved ones who can no longer share the beauty. Who can no longer enjoy those cool crisp days in September, so coveted in August, when coolness brushes the cheeks.
For autumn is a celebration of endings, too, perhaps best described by the French poet, Guillaume Appollinaire, in his poem Autumn:
“A bowlegged peasant and his ox receding
through the mist slowly through the mist of autumn…
Oh the autumn the autumn has been the death of summer
In the mist there are two gray shapes receding.”
When the Walnut Leaves Begin to Fall
It is the school-imposed end of summer, Labor Day weekend has come and gone and I am looking forward to Fall. It is not good to be this way. Ideally one should be living in the present… for that is all we have. I have yet to overcome this and many other bad ways of thinking. A breeze shimmers through what I call (in my ignorance of the real name) the penny tree for when the wind blows the leaves look like so many pennies shimmering down from Heaven. The sun is so hot it tingles on the skin– yet it is not the strong sun of July that burns quickly. The angle of the sun in its diurnal slant is different. Summer is definitely slipping away.
The bees, wasps and yellow jackets are having a heyday in the goldenrod, Joe Pye Weed and Purple Loosestrife. The marsh is thick with flying insects going this way and that. My eyes capture swallowtails. Happily the monarchs are still here. A turkey vulture circles overhead. Some carrion must be nearby. Earlier we saw two golden hawks fly sunlit into the back field. A wisp of a cloud floats by in an otherwise perfectly blue sky. This summer has flown by in the blink of an eye like a fritillary flits by the flowers in the marsh.
The smell of fresh cut lawn is intoxicating to my raw senses. Soon the grass will cease to grow and the lush green will look washed out. All of its inhabitants in the metropolis beneath our feet will dig deep underground or turn off their bodily systems to overwinter– an amazing concept to a mammal. Some fill their bodies with a type of antifreeze. Nature never ceases to astound. This summer I have made my peace with the insects. Terrified of them as a child I have come to love and respect them, indeed hold them in awe for the feats they accomplish. Our accomplishments pale as humans, supposedly so superior.
No longer do I see turtles sunning on rocks or snakes coming out to bask in the heat of the road. Some species of birds have left already– unbeknownst to me. I just know that some I used to see are gone and the bird song of the spring mating season is a fleeting memory. One lone humming bird flies around the marsh intermittently, causing frantic excitement upon spotting him.
It is the time to dead head the flowers of summer. It is the time of Black-Eyed Susans and Peonies and Sebum. And soon it will be the time of the Mums.
With each gust of wind yellow finger-like walnut leaves shower down on our heads– like large yellow snowflakes– a foretaste of snowfalls to come. The sun’s shadows grow long as twilight is near. Soon the white cloud “lions and tigers and bears” will retire into the black cave of night. And the summer will die and in dying, give birth to fall. The comfortable rhythm of the changing season beats in our sometimes unhearing hearts.
A Personal Look at Autism Spectrum Disorder
THANK YOU, Tina Brown, for your guest essay to the New York Times. (See below) My husband, of 35+ years, and I, like your son, are on the Spectrum and have other mental health issues at ages 71 and 74, respectively. We feel the bewilderment and intense-to-the-point-of-unbearable emotion that Gus Walz showed at the DNC while applauding his Dad, often in our own daily struggles with neurotypical friends and neighbors. My husband forwarded your article to me amidst a struggle I was facing at my age with a friendship! Yes, the worst time for those of us on the spectrum is not during our school years! It comes afterwards. My husband and I are among the lucky ones, blessed by God to find each other, and to be given the ability to help and console each other. My husband is a retired Psychiatric Social Worker, who helped many of the disadvantaged mentally-ill in his job, as I helped him help them, and as we help each other daily. Coach Walz, we, and all neurodivergents, need you and President Harris to win for SO many reasons, and, among those, to champion the cause.
Guest Essay to the New York Times by Tina Brown
Ms. Brown is the author, most recently, of “The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil.”
My Son and Gus Walz Deserve a Champion Like Tim Walz
Aug. 23, 2024
The sight at the Democratic convention on Wednesday night of Tim Walz’s 17-year-old son leaping to his feet, with streaming eyes, a hand to his chest with a cry of “That’s my Dad” was heart piercing.
As the mother of Georgie, a 38-year-old on the spectrum who still lives with me, I recognized him immediately as one of “ours,” a sweet, unfiltered, slightly bewildered-looking young man who wasn’t quite sure what was expected of him in this epic moment of political adulation.
Gus Walz has, according to his parents, a nonverbal learning disorder, A.D.H.D. and an anxiety disorder, all of which they regard not as a setback but as his “secret power,” that makes him “brilliant” and “hyperaware.”
I know exactly what they mean. One of the joys of my life in the social churn of New York is living with a son whose inability to read the room makes him incapable of telling anything but the truth. Once, as my husband, Harry Evans, and I left a pretentious social gathering in the Hamptons, Georgie told the host sunnily: “Thank you very much. No one spoke to me really, so it was a very boring evening. The food was OK. I doubt I will come again.”
“I have never been prouder of you in my life!” shouted my husband in the car. How many times have all of us wanted to say that as we gushed about the fabulous time we just hadn’t had? Then there was the moment he went up to Anna Wintour at one of my book parties and asked if she was Camilla Parker Bowles. And the time at the intake meeting for a supported work program, when the therapist asked Georgie, “Has anyone ever molested you?” “Unfortunately not,” he replied. Georgie teaches me every day how much we depend on social lies to make the world go round. His sister — his forever best friend — and I feel so lucky to have him in our lives. So did his dad, who died in 2020.
And yet for people who are different and have no support, the world can be bleak. Their loneliness can be agonizing. Some people assume the school days are the hardest, but it’s the years after that are the social desert. Having a friendly, forgiving workplace to go to is critical. It’s often their only taste of community and what makes them such reliable and rewarding employees. The work from home movement has been a killer for people with special needs, often depriving them of the only social connections they have.
There’s something of a trend at the moment for certain businesses to say they encourage the hiring of people who are neurodivergent. Sadly, it can be just virtue signaling. Employers like to think that a person who is neurodivergent is some secretly brilliant introvert who writes code in his apartment all day, not the more likely candidate: an awkward kid with a gentle smile who takes time to get the hang of things and talks too much about the same subjects.
One of my son’s quirks is that he likes to wear bandannas and nail polish, and tends to say so in the first five minutes of every job interview. More often than not he’s told that no, that would not be “appropriate.” Appropriate? Being inappropriate is the very definition of Georgie’s condition, and for his family, his most treasured trait.
The most painful thing for a parent is to pick up on the scorn of strangers that her child often doesn’t notice; the whispered insults or titter at the next table. Remember Donald Trump Jr.’s sneer at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference? Referring to Senator John Fetterman’s struggles to recover after his stroke, Mr. Trump said that Pennsylvania had “managed to elect a vegetable.”
“I’d love for John Fetterman to have, like, good gainful employment,” he continued. “Maybe he could be, like, a bag guy at a grocery store.” Is it possible to go any lower than that?
But how could Don Jr. be any different from his father? The elder Donald Trump has never missed the chance to denigrate people with disabilities, and already the MAGA crowd is mocking Gus Walz’s emotional embrace with his dad. “Talk about weird …” the conservative media ghoul Ann Coulter posted (and later deleted).
If the Harris-Walz ticket wins, will parents of people who struggle with being different at last find a powerful advocate in the White House? This voiceless community is in desperate need of a new, mighty champion. Coach Walz, you who have been such an inspiring role model to kids all your life, and were caring enough to offer your own credibility to the role of faculty adviser of a new high school gay-straight alliance. I urge you: please make this your cause.
Face to face
“Be fearless, sincere, and loving and you will be able to look everyone in the face, knowing that you have done your best.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
Divine Intelligence
“God is manifest in everything! Look at the beautiful earth, and how nature keeps it in balance– how there is a plan, an Intelligence behind everything in creation.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
Star Blossoms
“When you find that your soul, your heart, every wisp of inspiration, every speck of the vast blue sky and its shining star blossoms, the mountains, the earth, the whipporwill and the bluebells are all tied together with one cord of rhythm, one cord of joy, one cord of unity, one cord of spirit, then you shall know that all are but waves in His cosmic sea.”
Paramahansa Yogananda in “Metaphysical Meditations,” p. 36
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“Homage to Kandinsky” (esw)
The World Within
“When the body and mind become totally still, one begins to perceive the manifestation of Spirit.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
A Flowering Friendship
“The duty of friends is to continuously help each other to develop themselves. When souls seek progress together in God, then divine friendship flowers.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
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The Smiling Moon
“THE BEAUTY OF NATURE IS LIKE A FOUNTAIN. YOU SEE THE BEAUTY OF THE SPRAY, BUT YOU DO NOT SEE THE WONDERS INSIDE THE DROPLETS… THE MOON SMILES AND THE STARS TWINKLE BECAUSE THOU ART SPARKLING THERE”… “Divine Romance” p.87
Paramahansa Yogananda
Lessons of the Lily
“FEEL THE INFINITE LOVE OF GOD WITHIN YOUR HEART. LET YOUR HEART EMANATE THAT LOVE FOR ALL… THE FORCES OF GOOD ARE HUMBLE AND UNASSUMING.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
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Oceanic Currents
Paramahansa Yogananda
“As soon as you lift your consciousness to the state of divine awareness, you see the oceanic current of God’s light flowing behind all matter.”
Stream in our backyard in Millbrook, New York that eventually flows into the Hudson River which in turn flows into the Atlantic Ocean, thereby hinting at global consciousness.
“Happiness lies in giving yourself time to think and to introspect. Be alone once in awhile, and remain more in silence.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
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Flower Seller for puja (offerings for the gods)
Allepey Town, Kerala, India
Simplicity
“Live more simply, so that you can find time to enjoy the little pleasures of life.”
Paramahansa Yogananda
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Fly in a Lily, Millbrook, New York
MOONSIDE 
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