In the middle of the night, I heard a kitten meowing. It woke me. It was coming from my bed. Elsa was making that noise. Elsa is very taken with cats. When she sees another dog, she pulls, but I can control her; when she sees a cat, forget it. She doesn’t want to hurt the cat; she wants to sniff it. There is a cat in our neighborhood who lives with five dogs peacefully. Needless to say, this cat isn’t frightened of dogs. She sits still while Elsa circles her.
After hearing her meowing sounds last night, I found myself wondering if it is possible for an animal to feel they were born into the wrong species. Does Elsa feel she should have born a cat? Is this the next horizon for humans? Can we be transitioned into another species?
For me, born in 1940, the sexual transitioning, which is accepted by many as normal today, still takes some adjusting. This is not to say that I don’t recognize that people have this experience, and I believe they are happier when they are transitioned. I also see no harm to other humans in this transitioning. The only people at risk are those who do the transitioning. Parents have to make adjustments to their expectations of their children. This can be hard but not harmful. As for many of those parents, sexual transitioning is just not a given in my mindset.
As I think of it, we have been loosening the nature of the expectations that parents can have of their children for quite some time. There was a time when parents could determine the employment of their children, their mates, and where they lived. Then when those children had children of their own, they assumed that power over their children. Whenever a child, or anything for that matter, deviates from our expectations, we have a difficult adjustment to make. For me, that’s what the teaching of Buddha is about, learning how to adjust when things happen that you don’t want and when something you do want doesn’t happen.
That’s not to say the expectations aren’t crucial in maintaining societal structure. Expectations, like assumptions, are necessary for day-to-day living. The challenge is having the right grip on our expectations, not too tight and not too loose, and adjusting when things don’t go as we planned.
I had more weird dreams about bathrooms last night. This time I was looking for a shower. I couldn’t find a suitable one. I had problems with shower construction, appropriate privacy, and soap. I never did get to take that shower. I have been showering less in real-time. I take one in response to my body, saying, “ I can’t stand another minute of this.” Listening to NPR commentators lets me know I’m not alone. Maybe there is a natural rhythm for cleaning ourselves that’s been lost.
I know Americans are the most obsessed with being clean and eliminating all odors, suggesting that we are human after all. I understand this resulted from an ad campaign launched in the 1950s by the bathroom fixture companies convincing us all that cleanliness was one step above Godliness. Americans have the most elaborate bathroom arrangements. These are no longer just practical; they’re works of art. It used to be that realtors didn’t list the bathrooms when advertising a house; there was only one. Now, you can expect to find at least two bathrooms in a two-bedroom house.
I went a slightly different route on my morning walk today. I managed to do over 5,000 steps before I got to my driveway. I spoke to Dorothy while walking. She told me that Jean R. had called her to ask for her son’s telephone number. Jean and her husband, John, have agreed to let Dorothy’s son David do their food shopping for them. Yay. This is so much better than John getting up a 5:30 am., suiting up, and getting online at the grocery store with the other seniors to do the shopping. Both Jean and John are up there in age and have health issues. I think we are all giving a sigh of relief.
B. texted me to say that he was heading into town. Did I need anything? Pumpkin seeds from the health food store. I put them in my salad every night. They are a source of protein. B. called me from the store to tell me that they were out. No surprise. The air-dried, unseasoned ones disappear almost as quickly as they come in.
When I was in elementary school, I bought two boxes of unshelled salted pumpkin seeds every day after lunch and ate them on my walk back to school. When I say salted, I mean coated with salt. Each box cost two cents. No one could get away with selling anything that salted today.
After I fed Elsa and washed my dishes, I meditated. Boy, what a difference this makes in my attitude and my ability to function. I did more work on writing my book on my method of teaching reading and several household chores. I think I am going to become a domestic diva. I was always good at massive cleanups for arriving guests, but I have never been good at those small daily acts of straightening and cleaning. While Mike was good at straightening, cleaning wasn’t a priority for him either. I am not a germaphobe. I believe a degree of exposure to dirt is good for you. Whatever ailments Mike and I suffered over the years, none of them were a result of filth. We were never that dirty.
Now, however, I’m getting into small daily acts of cleaning and straightening. I don’t know if Mike would have cared about the cleaning, but he would have been over the moon about the straightening. I do things like push the dog food containers sitting on the counter flush against the splashboard or push them all together, so they’re not randomly spread out.
I’m also discovering that I don’t mind cooking. Of course, what I’m doing doesn’t qualify as cooking in the sense that Mike did it. But I’m providing healthy food for myself with little waste. I’m even enjoying planning ahead, so I have some variety from day to day. If it weren’t for all the chocolate I’m scarfing down at night, I would be losing some weight.
I get the greatest satisfaction from working on the book. If I have done some of that for the day, I can consider it a day well spent. Nothing else does that for me, not even the updates, the housecleaning, the gardening, or the ongoing, although much slowed down, sorting of items to get rid of, a lessening of the load.
I turned the radio on around 2:00 pm. On the NPR news station, they play Hawaiian music for two hours every Sunday afternoon. What is striking about Hawaiian music is it is mostly love songs about the land. They are not love songs reminiscing for what Hawaii was before it was manipulated into becoming a state. No, these are love songs about physical places for their beauty. I don’t know if there is another culture that embraces the land this much. Maybe some of the Native Indian cultures do, but I am not familiar with their music. I’m living in the middle of a culture that adores the land.
As I wrote this, the station played a love song to a woman. However, there was mention of the ocean and the seashore, and a particular town. The land is everything here.
It is said that the land chooses who gets to live in Hawaii. The longer I live here, the stronger the physical pull of the land is, and the more struck I am by the beauty of this place. When Mike and I first moved here, the landscape was a blur of alien vegetation and rock formations. I tried to explain to someone that I wasn’t struck by the beauty of the Big Island. The scenery is not as dramatic as it is on the other islands. We may have the highest mountains, but they don’t look big. They just look like big hills, sloping gently to the ocean. There are skyscrapers as tall as some of the mountains on Oahu; those mountains jut dramatically up to the sky at the edge of the valley in which Honolulu sits. They look impressive, but they are mere molehills compared to what we have here on the Big Island.
Where Honolulu has lush growth, we have vast expanses of barren rock that look like Macadam at first glance. But when you become familiar with it, the lava rock presents a surface with endless variations. The view of the ocean never gets tired – now. The sunsets. Oh, boy. The sunsets. Sometimes, Mike and I would actually applaud a sunset. I used to think the wonder of sunset was watching the sun sink below the horizon. Now, it is how the light of the setting sun colors the sky. Familiarity does not breed contempt; it breeds deep appreciation.
My eyes seem to be getting worse by the day. They only bother me when I’m reading or writing, activities I do a lot these days. It’s a combination of things: the macular pucker, the age-related drooping eyelids, and some allergy that makes my eyes red and itchy and leaves a film—yuck to the whole thing. I have also noticed that print is cleared at night. There is a single light coming over my shoulder at night, illuminating the book I’m reading. I suspect I’m having problems with glare during the day. I don’t know if anything can be done about that. I‘ve already had cataract surgery.
A family member is also complaining about her eyesight. She has always loved to read. She has opted for audiobooks as a substitute for reading. Jean probably has the worst eyes in the family. I never hear her complain. She soldiers ahead, reading when she can and writing endless letters to help people in prisons.
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Musings:
I finally looked into a book Judy lent me called “The Face of God.” As far as I’ve read, it looks to quantum physics to illuminate the mysteries of life, mainly how consciousness works and impacts things outside of itself. The author concludes that this mysterious something is God, a conscious force that impacts the world. The keyword is consciousness, suggesting that whatever our world is about, it was planned by something we understand as a mind. Some believe this provides proof -positive, empirical proof of the existence of God. God, as a conscious presence outside, beyond human existence, is, from my point of view, a hypothesis. The empirical world still has nothing to say about the existence of conscious design. Just because it looks that way to us doesn’t make it so.
My position is that of the agnostic. “I don’t know.” I am certainly not an atheist. That would require knowing. I can live with this uncertainty. This doesn’t mean I don’t also believe. It just means that I don’t need empirical knowledge to make that possible, and I don’t need certainty.
I wasn’t raised to believe in anything metaphysical, quite to the contrary. My parents, my father mainly, saw nationalism and religious affiliation and belief in God as a source of contention, which leads to war.
He was born and raised in Germany and only left in 1935. That he believed group affiliations were a source of evil is understandable, given what he experienced. It took me a long time to let go of his fears and accept my human need for community and for belief. While he’s right, affll1iation can lead to evil, it can also bring out the best in humanity. Affiliation itself is not the problem.
Some say that if you don’t think your belief is true, you don’t really believe; you’re only acting as if. The book I just finished on the subject of Jung’s religious beliefs mirrors my own position. He has said he knows God. But he equates the depth of the human mind, which may or may not be connected to God, with God. That’s what he calls God. He is pretty explicit about this in one of his letters. He is also explicit about his belief that any effort to define the nature of God beyond our own experience is pure hubris. The finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite. All we can do is use our experience in the world to create an image of God. This does not mean God does not exist. It only means that our picture of Him, It, is incomplete at best.
For me, I experience some depth of mind that is beyond my comprehension. As Schroeder wrote, we know how sound is received by the brain, but we do not know how those electrical and chemical impulses are translated into our conscious awareness of sound. Our minds may operate as a radio transmitter, which receives signals from outside ourselves, or all thought is generated from inside our skulls.
I have experience as a psychic. Most people I work with say I do a pretty good job discerning their thoughts. I don’t know where I get this information from. I only know that I always monitor the information I get to determine if it could be harmful. If so, I censor it. I have no idea where this information comes from. Am I receiving information from the other person’s mind? Are images coming up for them because of the topic under discussion that they can’t discern, but I can? I assume I can provide information that the other person isn’t even aware they are thinking at that moment because they do not have as good a relationship with their nonconscious mind as I do.
While I clearly believe in interpsychic events, I don’t know that I ‘know’ that I have a relationship with a being beyond the person I am working with at that moment. Does that mean I don’t believe? Of course not. I just don’t know. I often pray openly for advice on how to help a person. I am also clear if that information comes through my left-brain using background logic and linear thinking versus my right brain thinking. They feel different. There are surprises if it comes through my right. I suddenly know things or offer suggestions I don’t understand myself but wind-up having meaning for the person I’m working with. I have a deep relationship with the unknown. I just don’t know what the source of that unknown is. I just know that I have to treat that unknown with a deep respect for its power to do harm as well as good. My only prayer is, “Let me do no harm.” Failure to do good I can cope with, doing harm not so much.
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