Family, friends, nature, books, writing, a good pen and journal, freedom of thought, culture, and peaceful co-relations - these are the things that occupy my mind, my heart, my time...
I ride the celestial star ways, shaped and awakened atop Earth’s long arc across the heavens. Lit by fire. Oh, the wonder! Oh, the human frailty.
The Earth, al0ng her celestial path, pulled by centripetal forces out among its neighbors. Then, on the far reaches of her path, turns toward home, ablaze and wanting. Solstice. A human marking of the turning.
We ride upon her shoulders, a veil of living matter beneath the unknowable sky.
In our fragile coats of protoplasm, our beating hearts fill and flow, fill and flow, attuned to Earth. Flung on the arc of heaven, we offer our faith.
She died last Spring. Had probably been dying for some time. Her mantle of green needles slowly turned to orange, then brown.
The landscape company – a hack and mow down outfit – has left her there for some reason. Slowly a blanket of pale blue lichens is engulfing her skin and bones. The tree’s brain of underground mycelia may yet be conscious.
I do not know, but I feel her presence. Her gray limbs fill my living room windows. We’ve been together for 3.5 years. I am grateful to her enduring presence. Oh, dear Virginia Pine!
How lovely you remain in your shroud of blue lichens like flowers on a gravestone. I will sorely miss you when at last you depart. Even when they come to remove your dead limbs and trunk, you will continue to bring me refreshment and grace.
Goodbye is a long process when I do not wish to let you go.
“The revolutionary ideas of 1776 and the national framework established in 1787 laid the foundation for America’s story—chapters that continue to shape our nation today. This toolkit gives you everything you need to explore the founding documents and the enduring vision they set in motion.” ~ The National Constitution Center
At the National Constitution Center located in Philadelphia you will find an entire curriculum for 2026 that you can use to explore the history of and the ongoing shaping of our self-government. We the people at every decade have been the force and the protector or our self governing experiment.
Several years ago, I discovered the National Constitution Center and have been an active participant in their programs through the podcasts, the archival papers, and the lively discussions free of politics. Conservative and liberal voices and scholars debate our history, the meaning of our founders’ documents, the functioning of our three branches of government: the checks and balances.
Reader and friends, this is a place of refuge for all the fraught and worried public no matter your political persuasion. Here, we carry on the processes and scholarship that not only defines American but also charges all of us to read and study and debate our current governance.
I’m looking forward to dipping into this curriculum. and I plan a year of focus and study about the American path and promise.
I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but the wise men ever rule under this roof.” ~ John Adams, First Occupant of the White House
“Renewable energy investment has overtaken fossil fuels, and green technologies are advancing at record speed. More governments are rethinking their energy systems to improve affordability, accessibility and sustainability.”
See Solar Schools: What’s Possible on this blog. The Tidewater area of Hampton Roads in Virginia is seizing the soon to end tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act. It makes good sense for schools to gain the benefits of cleaner energy and reduced costs.
“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” – Benjamin Franklin
Ezra Klein interviewed two of America’s most knowledgeable climate planners. I watched the interview and felt it is so important I am posting it below.
What did we accomplish under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) during the Biden administration, and what lies ahead with a climate change-denying and wholly unqualified administration?
Jesse Jenkins a leading climate modeler who was a lead for developing the Inflation Reduction Act, and Jane Flegal, past Executive Director of Blue Horizons Foundation who was on the Biden climate change policy team.
The legacy of the Peacemaker [the man credited with bringing the Iroquois Nations together under a Pax Iroquois] is best illustrated in his concept of The Good Mind. The Peacemaker believed that a healthy mind naturally seeks peace and that a nation of individuals using reason and harboring good will in their hearts can not only establish peace in the worst circumstances but maintain it forever.
At the time the Peacemaker was born, the region was beset by wars among the five tribes (Onandaga, Mohawk, Huron, Seneca, and Cayuga). In some areas the hatred ran so deep that individual warriors practiced cannibalism on their enemies. These dark times were at least 1,000 years before the Europeans arrived in what is now New York State.
There are noteworthy circumstances surrounding the Peacemaker. First, his grandmother had a dream that a great man would be born who would save the tribes from utter destruction. He was recognized as a youth for his exceptional qualities of mind as someone who would become a leader. But he had a problem—a speech impediment (stuttering)—which later required the assistance of the great Iroquois orator, Hiawatha, to help him accomplish his mission to bring the tribes of his nation together under the Great Tree of Peace—the democracy of constitutional laws and principles that exist to this day.
When I began studying with my teachers in Yuma, Arizona (see previous blog post, The First American Democracy) I was completely unaware of this body of law, the Iroquois legacy of which some passed into the U.S. Constitution, nor was I aware that the Iroquois Confederacy had maintained peaceful coexistence for 750 years before the founding of the fledgling American democracy.
The most important lesson of my four years of study was the reading of Basic Call to Consciousness, written as an address to Western civilization in the 1970’s when the Iroquois were still under threat and domination by the powers that be: the Canadian government and New York State legislature. Basic Call is still relevant in its astute analysis of the values that drive Western societies and how they lead to the destruction of the very basis of life.
In Basic Call to Consciousness Americans have a useful guidebook on how to strengthen our own democracy by broadening our bill of rights to include the natural world and all the life in it as sacred because, everything emanates from our common Creator. Practically, the document gave the early constitutional authors further reason to formulate a bicameral congress and institute a process of checks and balances. For example, the Peacemaker charged the women of the tribe to act as arbiters of peace by choosing the male leaders and representatives and removing them should their thoughts and actions stray from the sacred purpose of the Great Law.
I remember being shocked to find this gem of a small book in whose pages lay all the wisdom needed to solve entrenched political, economic, and relational problems here and abroad. But I realized the document was politically dangerous in the U.S. precisely because it would prevent greed and avarice from being the dominant drivers in our social and cultural enterprises. In fact, when my teachers suggested I read it, the book was out of print and hard to find. But I eventually did find a used copy at the Bohdi Tree bookstore in Los Angeles. It was considered an occult book and probably still is by a society that relegates any true challenge to its economic values as dangerous and suspect.
Today you can find Basic Call to Consciousness on Bookshop.com to support independent book stores. I consider that progress!
For nearly 15 years I have shared my blog with so many of you around the planet and at home on Turtle Island, in part known as the USA. For most of my life, my true self questioned the nonsensible ways in which we live above the land rather than as part of the land. I have written books about my experiences in a capitalist society which subjugates our living relatives (trees, birds, insects, oceans and Mother Earth herself.) Indigenous knowledge has called me home for decades of my life since I was a child. Now, I leave you with this exceptional wisdom keeper, Robin Wall Kimmerer, who better than anyone I know, speaks the truth and points the way to living in new (ancient) ways that would help us find The Way out of madness by combining the indigenous way of knowing with the capitalist way of knowing. The present moment of madness in the U.S.A. is answered, and a path forward that is sustaining, and what we yearn for. All is contained in this keynote address presented recently at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, Arizona. I leave you with Dr. Kimmerer’s wisdom, and I thank everyone for reading my blog over the years.
And here is another important voice from Indigenous America whom I greatly respect and is a worthy follow up to what Dr. Kimmerer is describing as a way forward. It is not lost on me that it is the women leaders whose voices are coming forward in response to the perils we now face.
“Though I’d never forgotten Alan, I hadn’t uttered his name aloud in the many years since he’d died, back in that decade when it seemed that the greatest menaces on earth were war, the atomic bomb, and polio.” ― Philip Roth, Nemesis
The dangerous vaccine policies of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., heralds the grave risk of the Trump Administration’s reckless retreat from science to embrace unscientific beliefs which currently threaten children’s lives.
Our Children at Risk
Polio was eliminated from the United States by 1997. I remember when polio terrified every parent and my sister Beverly and me were 5 and 7 – the most at risk for the polio virus. Vaccines and immunological science and medical practice were in the infant stages of learning how to prevent many viral vectors emerging as public health crises in the early 1950s.
I was born in 1945 in July, one month before the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki which finally ended WWII.
My father had joined the U.S. Army Air Corps after Japan attacked America at Pearl Harbor. Three months after I was born, my father returned from the war theater, joined the new U.S. Air Force, and began my life’s experience in a military family, moving about every two years around the U.S. and Hawai’i.
To understand how Americans lived during that time, imagine very little access to health care, no vaccines against many childhood diseases (measles, mumps, diphtheria, whooping cough) — many diseases few American children have contracted for at least the last 75 years of modern medicine.
Mothers, the primary healthcare providers, may have 2-6 children all sick with the same infectious disease and no one cure except aspirin, Pepto-Bismol, moist wash clothes and orange juice. Woman labored day and night to keep their children alive. High fevers from rubella, for example, often conferred blindness and/or hearing loss in children.
My parents were so fearful of their daughters contracting polio, they petitioned the Air Force when we were living in Texas for a transfer to Los Angeles where the infectious rate was lower. They were transferred thus saving Beverly and I from infection until the Salk vaccine was offered to children in the 1952 trial with a killed virus vaccine that resulted in immunity to the live virus.
In the bizarre and surprising way that fate confers destiny, I studied Special Education in graduate school on a full scholarship from the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) at the University of Tennessee. There I studied deaf education to join the workforce as an educator for deaf and hard of hearing students affected by rubella in the 60s.
Likewise, when I later joined the Arizona State University’s Disability for Students Resource Center, one of my colleagues who had contracted polio as a child in the 1950s epidemic shared his journey with me as he began to experience a return of symptoms as an adult. He lost the use of his legs and began to experience difficulty breathing, both of which affected his ability to thrive.
Young Families: Pay Attention to Facts
I tell this story for young American parents who are doubtful about vaccines for infants and young children. Embracing the belief held by the current Sec. of Health and Human Services that vaccine schedules for children – recommended by the American Academy for Pediatrics – have caused the rise in number of autistic children is dangerous. That has been proven wrong. Protect your children with proven vaccines that prevent these dangerous diseases. I lived it. I know.
We the People are coming together as the Trump regime presses down on the People. Free Speech, the first right of the Bill of Rights, is under threat. A free press is under threat. These are the essence of democracies.
We are urged to get out with our friends and family and “do stuff” to demonstrate our power as a freedom loving People.
**Start at 1 min. 30 seconds due to a sound problem/
Now’s the moment.. We are much more powerful than the weak and sick people who are trying to threaten us and put us down. We ARE coming together to decry the ridiculous ploys of this MAGA movement which seeks to divide us but has only united us.
Susan Feathers 