Tuesday, June 24, 2025

WE THE PEOPLE

Lady Liberty

All night I watch the rain,

 I Wake and still it's falling.

Too wet for me but not the cardinals,

A pair of lovers search the ground beneath the feeder.

There must be something left.


All day we see our love unspool,

for country, future, freedom.

We fear but do not tremble.

Do not appease, Remember that, 

Appeasement feeds the PIG. 

 

There's so much danger in our land and all from one benighted man

power without stature, words without soul. 

Others, vacant from unknown causes,

Shorn of  bravery, confidence and heart,

They lie and preen and call it truth--

If truth be subterfuge with hollows where its eyes should be.

 

There are enough of us. you know

Who clearly see and won't appease.  

remember how it feeds the PIG? 

We are the lovers who search the ground for country, future, freedom

Who search the sky, the by-roads, towns and squares  

Who protest peacefully

 

More of us than anyone has counted yet, five million? Ten? One-hundred? 

So don't succumb, there's more than something left. 

It's all there, our country, future, freedom,

In our hands, no one else's. 

WE THE PEOPLE 

God bless the fight  

 

 

 

 

 

 



Friday, June 20, 2025

THE ART OF BEING HAPPY ON THE SUMMER SOLSTICE


“The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.” ~ Rev Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887)

 

North Carolina shore  

    The longest day is a lovely time to think about finding happiness in common things.  I say that after a morning where I got to walk on the beach, not an ordinary day for me by any means.  Many in the world live on or closer to water than I.   Having begun the day like that--the beach wider than usual, the breeze sultry of course in mid-June, but not over-heated--I may be more prone to recognize happiness than I would be on other days.
    Everything seems easier when our mood is one of appreciation.  It's interesting that Beecher talks about "extracting" happiness from common things.  Extracting is active, it's a bit of work, isn't it.  But that's OK. These days we don't expect to be wooed.  We're willing to say, isn't it nice that I woke up by my husband today to the hum of the ceiling fan?  Isn't it nice that I packed the Grape Nuts and milk for breakfast?  Can you believe there's a line of pelicans out the window, and that the walk to the water is not far at all?  
    And that even though we live in the southern United States, we will still have a long day with the sun rising at 5:50 am and not setting here in Atlantic Beach until 8:23 pm. So that we can sit on the windy deck after a supper of local fish I bought at the market today and some luscious heirloom tomatoes that are almost bronze in color. All these pleasures are common to someone, if not always me.  But summer tomatoes?  Who doesn't have memories of those dripping down our chins? My dad grew tomatoes in a small garden behind our first house in north St. Louis.  Strawberries too.  My mother tried her hand at peonies.  They definitely extracted happiness from common things.  Friends over for cards.  A beer.  
    My grandparents too.  They fished in the rivers of the Missouri Ozarks and fried up the catch.  They stayed in $5/night cabins and swatted the mosquitoes.  We kids stayed with them and fended for ourselves in dangerous currents during fishing season.  
    Well, it looks like we can extract happiness from memories too.  What are you thinking about today?  Do you live where the light lasts far longer than a mere 8:23 pm? Are there sheep grazing in the twilight where you live, or cattle lowing?  Or is there nightlife, songs and dancing? One year 9 years ago we were in Fairbanks, Alaska for the longest day and went to a midnight baseball game, sans lights.  That was fun! 
     I'm almost sorry that days get shorter from now on.  We want long summers don't we?  We want moments of happiness to bank for times of sorrow or worry.  And we're willing to work for this, to cook for friends, to put on clean sheets for guests, to clean up before and after.  That's the Art of Being Happy.  
Nina Naomi

Sunday, June 15, 2025

JOY IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD


    I know, summer is different for everyone, some people traveling, but these few weeks we're doing nothing but opening the doors and windows to this fragrant midsummer in North Carolina.  I'm feeling 100% blessed.  The solstice is almost here, June 20, the longest day will be upon us and I'm trying to think what to do special.  Before retirement I never had time to care, but now . . . .  I love both winter and summer, every day and every time of year.  It is an exuberant feeling.

    Our neighbors have a farm and this weekend we had all homegrown veggies and fruits on their cabin porch sitting in rockers.  They promised us figs later in the season. Sometimes it's good to let the world pass us by long enough to savor all that is on our doorstep. 

    We've had so many nature adventures this week.  First the Canada geese. Handsome heads balanced on tall necks in our high-grass meadow, they have been blocking our path daily, using the cartilage along their beaks and even on their tongues to forage for seeds.  And they don't do it quietly.   My husband caught a pair waddling nonchalantly down our driveway after keeping watch from our roof all morning.

 

Next a lovely box turtle, all gold and brown, treading water in our small pool, neck outstretched, looking for help.  We gently grasped her with her legs waving and took her carefully into the leaves. away from the tree roots that seem to tip her over as she struggles to climb over them.

tadpole haven

    Then, the most surprising of all, a knot of tadpoles (I had to look that up--knot) dashing about our small pool after several nights of a deafening chorus of tree frogs and bullfrogs.  Apparently we had let the chlorine run low and the frogs had left their eggs and with their strong legs, escaped the pool.  That was a job liberating all those tadpoles.  

    And of course, the dried flower arrangement I put by the back entry is now home to a mossy nest of the tiniest eggs we have seen ever, and the tiniest mom keeping them warm.  Doesn't that happen to you too, in your hanging plants and wreaths? We put up a sign to reroute friends and neighbors to the garage entry.   

Then yesterday our local No Kings Day march was a great success.  So heartening.  If the opposite of fear is hope, many of us felt less fear and more hope for our country yesterday, with over 5 million people participating in peaceful protest around the country and world.  If you want to see the pictures, just search on Substack or The Dworkin Report or the Guardian online.

    At the same time, our brave military was doing its best to celebrate their history of 250 years in Washington DC.  All-in-all it felt like a day and week of buoyancy.  I hope your week was good.  We all know not to take those weeks for granted. 

Posted in peace and love from Nina Naomi

    




Friday, June 6, 2025

"TEAR DOWN THE WALLS OF INDIFFERENCE AND HATRED," POPE LEO XIV

 

Iona, Scotland

I've been thinking.  Christianity is a cross-shaped faith.  The vertical beam could be our relationship with our God.  We mortals made of dust reach to the heavens.    The first and great commandment is, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind," Matthew 22:37.  Christians strive to love the Lord with heart, soul and mind so that He shall abide in us and we in Him, John 15:4. That striving to reach God is bound to the horizontal beam, which could be the side-to-side relationship with our neighbors, whom we are to love as we love ourselves. 

Cruelty toward a neighbor is no more Christian than hating Christ would be.  Cruelty and hate are not Christian virtues.  They are not virtues at all.  A vertical relationship with God (Jesus loves me, I love the Lord), creates horizontal obligations (I will befriend the poor, the widow and orphan, the fellow Christian, the Jew, the Palestinian neighbor, whether next door or across the sea). 

I wrote before about an evangelical turn against empathy ("A Word About The Stranger," April 17, 2025 post).  Empathy is a virtue.  It allows any of us to place ourselves in another's shoes and see what we would want or need if we were in their place. What does a trans or gay person need to be safe in this world?  How does it feel to be bullied for one's gender or religion or status?  How does it feel to be without status, or to be hungry or homeless?   

There are Christians (which we might put in quotes) who have chosen power over principle.  I think we have to admit that these are mostly MAGA Republican "Christians."  Those who approve the the cutting of AIDS and vaccine research, the firing of 6,000 veterans who are Federal employees, the waste of $92 million on a military parade that is without history in our country, the end of Supplemental Nutrition for our poorer school children, and so on.  

Many speak out against this, but no one, I think, with more authority than Pope Leo XIV who in Sunday's Mass in St. Peter's Square asked that the Holy Spirit   

“break down barriers and tear down the walls of indifference and hatred. . . ."

 "Where there is love, there is no room for prejudice, for ‘security’ zones separating us from our neighbors, for the exclusionary mindset that, tragically, we now see emerging also in political nationalisms,”

 the first American Pontiff said.  He did not name a specific country or leader, but it's hard to deny that the shoe fits us.

In our church on Sundays we say the creed. "We believe in one holy catholic (small c) and apostolic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the Life of the world to come."  The leader of the Catholic (large C) church, has told the world in this statement that there is no room for prejudice or political nationalism.  In our country today this is called Christian nationalism or perhaps, again, white supremacy. 

If we are being tested by the times we live in, we might say that many are failing.  But many are not.  Many are doing much to protect the weak, the sick, the old, veterans, children, refugees, the air we breathe, the principles we live by, our democracy. Opportunities abound.  Common Cause, Indivisible, MoveOn, The No Kings Team, the Contrarian, Lawyers Defending American Democracy, the Dworkin Report (a favorite), the Watchdog Coalition, Civil Discourse, all found on-line supporting community activism.  Plus opportunities for churches, non-profits, individual actions, community protests, voting, prayer, financial contributions and contacting Congress. What have I missed? One such opportunity is this Saturday, 1800 peaceful protests and counting across America on our first ever NO KINGS DAY.     

Christianity is a cross-shaped faith.  As a gift to us, there are calls to action everywhere and much for which to be thankful.  Let us rejoice and be glad.   

                                        Nina Naomi     


 





Thursday, June 5, 2025

WISHES AND DREAMS ARE NOT WASTED

Wishes and dreams don't have to come true to have value. I'm taking this thought from the nature writer Sydney Michalski on Substack.  Maybe you know her.  Wishes and dreams are hopes and hope is good on its own.  It is never wasted.  As Emily Dickinson says, 



Our hopes may be dashed, this is not unusual.  But then the hope changes and continues to live.  Hope sustains us, whether the hopes are large or small.  Today I hoped my dermatology biopsy would turn out negative, and it did.  A hope fulfilled.  My husband's turned out to be a basal cell carcinoma and so we hoped they would get clean margins and they did.  Another hope fulfilled.  Last summer a spot turned out to be melanoma, so I hoped it was early stage and it was.  It needed no treatment beyond removal.  One hope disappointed but the second one fulfilled.  Were any of these hopes wasted?  Not at all.  

There is always something to hope for.  We each ultimately hope for a long life and a peaceful death.  But in the interim we might hope to get into college and then to graduate, to find a partner or be happy single, to find a job or be brave enough to leave one, to have enough to survive or enough to share.  Each hope today is for something tomorrow.  

A dream or wish looks to the future.  I hope I get to go the Florence again.  I want to see the ancient chapel where Dante met Beatrice, the Duomo, Michelangelo's David. This may or may not happen.  But the wish itself is lovely.  It sets to mind these beautiful places, my memories of them and the feelings that seeing them again would bring to my heart.  My breath enlarges, a bit of the awe returns.  Every time this wish surfaces something good happens to me.   The wish itself brings joy. 

A daydream is a happy thought.  Living in the woods, winning the chili cook-off, taking a dream vacation, remodeling the kitchen, being debt free, learning an instrument. . . .  These are all worth thinking about, each a dream that might become a plan.  

Michalski writes, "To look ahead to what is possible in the future, and fashion a thoughtful vessel to contain its potential, and offer it into the sweeping current of the present, could never be a waste of time." In nature that vessel might be an acorn, or a seedling from the Rose O' Sharon that jumped the fence and might bloom this year, or another forsythia plant emerging through the pine straw as a shoot from the root of my giant spreading shrub.  

In our lives that vessel is our heart.  As vulnerable as we are, as fragile as our hope may be, we set it afloat before our eyes and rest upon it.  And if it becomes a plan, we work to make it happen.  But in the meantime, if it brings some relief, or respite, or even joy, let's continue to wish and dream and thank that faithful thing with feathers that perches in our souls.  

Nina Naomi








Wednesday, May 28, 2025

THREE QUATRAINS AND A COUPLET

 I found some light verse I composed, just little chats with my Journal that I wrote on a day I needed to backtrack to a time when I was worried.  Goodness, I may have written these 4 years ago.  And even then it was a backtrack.  Do you ever do that?  Have a need to re-process something, not a present worry but something that intrudes less over the years, yet still intrudes?  There's a cost to this, it's said.  But writing an emotion gives you some distance from it.  You're not there if you can write about it, I've found.  Anyway . . . 

Me:  I tell you secrets.

Journal:  You can.

Me:  How can I be sure?

Journal:  Heart of my heart, we are one.


Me:  Sometimes I'm embarrassed.

Journal:  Oh no, please.

Me:  Please what?

Journal:  Please know that I welcome every word. 


Me:  You know why I started writing.  I was betrayed. 

Journal:  They betrayed themself too.

Me:  I should have forgotten by now.

Journal:  It doesn't matter if you forget.  It was repented.  You forgave. 


Me:  You can't change the past.

Journal:  No, it changes you.  



 


Friday, May 23, 2025

"WHAT DOES THE LORD REQUIRE OF YOU BUT TO DO JUSTICE?"

 Every morning I begin the day with a look at my phone--the New York Times, the Guardian and Substack.  Some of my Substack favorites are about nature, poems, watercolors, attention to the minute like a salamander or frog that lives happily on someone's front porch or daisies in a meadow (like mine).  

But I also get stuck in the news:  the wanton destruction of Ukraine and Gaza, the cruelty of cutting food for the hungry, medical research for the chronically ill, educational budgets for our school children, Medicaid for the deserving poor . . . the list is long.  When I think it can't get worse, it does.  Like the $4 million jet from Qatar or the attempt to exclude international students from Harvard.  (full disclosure:  My grandson is an international student at St. Andrews, Scotland.)  Or maybe the worst, some movie-inspired parade of military might on Trump's birthday. We've all seen those in old black and white Nazi propaganda clips. 

Many are saying that America isn't immune from cruelty, recalling Indigenous genocide (full disclosure again:  we just visited the Taos Pueblo, what remains of the sovereign nation of the Tiwa of New Mexico); the cruelty of slave holders; the internment of Americans of Japanese descent during the second World War.   Three groups that looked different from the whites with the guns or whips and power.  But it does seem simplistic to conclude that this administration loves cruelty for its own sake, as sadists do.  After all, what our president seems to love more than anything is gold and wealth, for himself and his friends.  Think of the golden escalator at Trump Tower (more disclosure:  we've ridden that thing) leading inexorably to the glorified new Air Force One from Qatar (no doubt embedded with golden listening devices).  

No, as analysts are noting, the demonization of immigrants, gay adults, trans youth, women who need abortions, Medicaid recipients, international students who might support Palestine, protesters, grant recipients, NPR and PBS (I loved Downton Abbey!), scientists, the judiciary, is not for its own sake but rather the playbook for fascism, dictatorship and white supremacy.  We live in a hard time.  

As a Christian, many wonder, what can we expect from our churches? In a different time, Martin Luther King Jr said, "The church must be reminded once again that it is not to be the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state." Surely this is true.  There is no conscience in this administration and its supporters.  No empathy.  No kindness.  To speak up is a duty; to waffle or remain silent, a sin. 

After the new Pope Leo XIV (Chicago native) appeared on the balcony of St. Peter's in Rome, a writer for the New York Times (David French, an evangelical from the rural South) noted:  Trump is no longer the most important American in the world.  We have an American of malice and an American of love and compassion.  French said, "Christianity is an ancient faith, one that has endured through rulers and regimes far more ignorant and brutal than anything we've ever confronted in the United States."

I find hope in this, that our faith will help us endure--not passively but in active protest--and that long after Trump is gone from public life, Pope Leo will be preaching the Gospel that has sustained us for over 2,000 years.  

We have two visions and only one is sustainable.  The Bible says in Micah 6-8, "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your god?" 

There will be protests all over America on June 14, easy to find under No Kings, Mass Protest, June 14, 2025.  I signed up for our local one.  It is something we can do, a showing of conscience.  For what is required of us but to do justice.  

                   In peace, Nina Naomi