Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

In my gratitude journal it asked me to write about a pet I loved.  That was easy, as there were many and I loved them all, even the ones no one else in the family cared for.  I loved our nasty cat, seeing that she had been dominated by our slightly older male cat, and really never got her fair share of attention, even having to eat second as long as he was alive.  She had a habit of biting people's legs, but she never bit me.  She badly scratched the ear of one of our pups, but really, she knew what was coming and she was absolutely correct.  We had a dog no one in the family paid attention to but me, and it made me sad.  When we tried to move him two states to here he went crazy, but he'd been out in the country with a big yard and now he had a tiny space on the deck and I was taking care of my dying father and my husband and kids were overwhelmed.  We took him to a shelter to be adopted, but he was old, and he had tried to bite the mailperson.  I still have pangs of criminal guilt at giving him up, but I couldn't be in two places at once.  I mourn both of them, perhaps more than the popular pets we've had, because they did not get the life they deserved, and it wasn't their fault.  They needed much more time and attention that our family gave.  Then there is the lab we adopted from a shelter but he bit the neighbor and had to be given away to a goat farmer who wanted a biting dog.  And the dog I ran over in our driveway, and the cat my friend lost when we moved.  Oh, dear.  I loved them, but no one misses them but me.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Today I had fun shopping with a friend.  She needs regular clothes.  As a doctor, she had to be polished and professional, but now she wants jeans and tees in her retirement.  I showed her some places my younger son took me to, and she got two pair of jeans and a raincoat.  I mean, it WILL rain, eventually.  She also ordered new glasses.  We had a long cappuchino and the sun was out and I felt much happier than yesterday, when the fog made everything gloomy and chilly.  I even had the heater on in my studio.  AND I was sipping hot cocoa.  I am determined to wear sandals and no socks as long as possible without catching pneumonia.  I missed summer at the cabin due to smoke and fires, so I just have to pretend it's summer here.  And today, with sunshine and our grandson coming over later, I can easily keep up the delusion.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I'm reading a spy novel of Daniel Silva's - The Other Woman.  It was slow to build, but in the meantime I was struck by how much I used to think these kind of books were fiction, and how it has only recently dawned on me how very much they reflect the real world.  Because this book brings in real names of real exposed spies, it has hit me harder.  This is really what our governments do.  I'm pretty horrified.  And in light of new information about Russia it seems as if we are in a terrible cold war that I naively assumed was over.  So world operates in an ugly manner, with the intent to sabotage each other.  Great!  I feel like a kindergardener who has just discovered there is no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Yesterday we could see the smoke from the fires.  Today it's supposed to be clearer.  My friend's daughter was trying to find someplace smoke-free to have a small vacation.  We finally thought of San Luis Obispo.  So much of the state is smoky and hazardous.  And today in the paper I read that after the fire's out, carbon is still being emitted, so much so that our attempts at regulations and hybrids are going to be wiped out.  I also read that the fires since 1900 are 90% man made.  It is we who are burning up our planet.  I've been worried also about the trees:  the Mariposa Grove, the Merced Grove, the world's oldest Juniper near our cabin.  These are the animals' habitats, and the terror and devastation must have claimed so many animals.  We are all interconnected, but so few humans understand that connection or even get to feel it.  Forests and the seas are suffering.  Listen.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I'm reading Roxanne Gay's "Not that Bad", a book she edited with stories from, as she puts it, "the rape culture".  Each story is powerful and different from the ones before, and they range from the physical to the mental.  These stories wake you up, and remind you of experiences you blamed yourself for or that seemed inconsequential at the time.  Honor is due:  women are on a battlefield most of the time, we just take it for granted.  Gay doesn't want us to be so cavalier about the "little things".  She wants us to sit up and notice how it's the little things that wear us down.  That and fear.  When we don't speak up we have good reason.  It's because we've seen what happens to women who do, and we don't want to be heroes, we want to be alive.  But if we don't pay attention to the little things, how will we protect our daughters and granddaughters?  How will they know it's not right for anyone to touch them, to catcall, to tease in mean ways.  How will they know to speak up in class and not let the boys hog the teacher and the conversation and the atmosphere?  And then how in the  blazes is anything ever going to change?

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I've gotta say, this new Oscar category for "Popular" film strikes me as racist.  Why?  Because the Academy is afraid of Black Panther, Sorry to Bother You, Blindspotting and BlackkKlansman.  They KNOW Get Out was the best film last year:  fresh, creative, about important issues, funny, scary, etc.  They dodged a bullet by giving Jordan Peele best Screenplay, but now that 12 Years a Slave has won, and this year, all these amazing films by Black filmmakers, they know they've got nothing up their sleeve to compare.  Spike Lee is long overdue.  It's his time.  But they're fighting it, fighting for sequels and cartoons and formulas that have bored us here, and only make money overseas.  They are afraid the British actors who reside in Hollywood might not stack up against these Black actors blowing our minds.  I hope I'm wrong, but it bears watching.  We have to bear witness.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I just saw a movie with right speech and wrong speech.  "Black Klanskkman", Spike Lee's new film, "tells it like it is", and he's not afraid to confront the history of racism in America and show us who we are as a nation.  The movie is funny, human, horrifying and grieving.  It's bookcased by Gone With the Wind and Birth of a Nation and, at the end, footage of Charlottesville.  We might have grown beyond race baiting and fear, but we have not.  It's powerful and wrenching.
Wow!  What a year!  Get Out, Black Panther, then Sorry to Bother You, then Blindspotting and now this.  Black filmmakers have come into their own.  And each film is fresh and unique and breathes new life into movies.  And the young filmmaker Jordan Peele of Get Out is the producer of Black Klanskkman, by the venerable Lee.  Lots of right speech, heartfelt speech, speech that we should listen to and learn from.