“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” ~ Robert Frost.

I can’t say that I have ever been very good at debating on the fly.  Some people are quick, able to respond to taunts and jabs with a rapid response, cutting and accurate.  Me, my best responses come to me later, when I am mulling over the conversation.  I was a member of our debating team in high school, but of course for those competitions the topics are chosen prior, with time to look up, discuss, with solid research to back up our points.  Mind you, we did all that without the benefit of google, or any of the AI programs that leap in to help us nowadays.

I have always been reluctant to challenge over-confident people, even when the subject is one with which I am very familiar, questioning myself over what I thought I knew for sure when faced with someone else’s brash assertions.  I am not sure why that is, whether it is my nature or being nurtured as the youngest in a large family, where everyone seemed to know more than me.  It is a huge disadvantage to have lived less years on the planet, let’s not even talk about believing in ‘Father Christmas’ as he was known in my household.  As a child, when your naïve pronouncements are greeted with laughter you either grow up to be a comedian, or learn to hold your thoughts. Being transplanted to Jamaica meant that I had even more to risk, and so I became an observer, watching and listening, trying to avoid drawing the laughter of my peers.

I don’t know if it was that we were brought up not to fight, certainly no physical fights were allowed at home, and verbal arguments between siblings would not be allowed to go on indefinitely (and never on Sundays!), but I was totally unprepared one day when my friend’s sister’s friend (in other words, not my friend!) slapped me! I don’t even recall what I had said to provoke that response, but in shock I didn’t even hit back! For those reading this who may know my background, it may interest you to know that the perpetrator was one of the other (few) white girls in the school, so it was a white-on-white slap! I wonder where she is now!

I remembered the shock of that slap this week when I read a vicious response from a stranger to a harmless comment I posted online.  As a proudly ‘woke’ white woman in the US, I follow numerous groups that continue to promote the history of this country, even when it is painful.  There is a professor, author, historian in Miami, Dr. Marvin Dunn, who fights racism with his ‘Teach the Truth’ tours and other acts of political activism.  He owns a piece of land in Rosewood (now unoccupied), the site of the 1923 massacre.  Recently he and a group of college students planted azaleas on the property, in memory of the bushes that had grown there long ago.  My comment ‘Honoring the ancestors’ provoked a profane laden, hateful response from a random stranger.  To which I replied: ‘Love you too!’.  Which of course led to an even more vicious retort. 

I had been torn between ignoring and responding.  One of the challenges, in these polarized times, is to try to think of those who (I want to write ‘seem to have lost their minds’) have a different opinion from me with compassion.  If we fight hate with hate, what will we accomplish?  I recently watched a video of a white woman speaking very directly to those who wish to live in a far less diverse USA.  She did not hold back, pointing out the hypocrisy of wanting to go back to a ‘white’ America while dining at a Mexican restaurant.  But which member of her target audience will she convince of the error of their ways or the incorrectness of their assumptions?  Do we ever win an argument by using slurs and insults?

When we are learning to meditate, we have to learn to slow down our breathing, but even more significantly, to slow down our thoughts.  I once attended a talk about mind-body medicine, where the speaker told us that in order to be more effective at meditating, we should imagine taking an elevator from our head down to our heart.  Some do see the heart as being the true center of our brain.  Perhaps this is why we learn things ‘by heart’; we are encouraged to ‘listen to your heart’. For most of us, our mind is a very busy place, and it gets even busier when it tries to tune out external stimuli.  We can very easily go down pathways of future ‘what ifs’; we revisit past conflicts and try to rewrite them; we imagine all manner of evil befalling our nearest and dearest.  By descending in that elevator, perhaps we can go to a quieter corner, a pump that beats with regularity, reminding you that it can be the regulator of your emotions.

One of the joys of retirement is visiting my virtual library.  I have become an avid reader once more.  I was thinking about those books that leave you with questions, the kind that don’t have a conveniently happy ending, with all the loose ends tied up.  And I realized that instead of being annoyed, you have the ability to create your own ending!  Instead of wishing the author had told you what happened, you can edit it for yourself.  Which, to a certain extent, you can do for your own life.  You can reinvent yourself, change your direction, take a new path, at any stage in your life.  If you find you have become a prisoner of your unhealthy thoughts, lying awake allowing your thoughts to control your body, try thinking from the heart! Slow it down!

This Friday morning, as I try to grapple with the current political climate, I have to come to terms with the reality that there is only so much I can control, whether it is the actions and thoughts of others, or the divisive rhetoric of our leaders.  I can, however, work on controlling my response to these provocations.  I can direct my actions to the positive work being done on behalf of the dispossessed and the voiceless.  I can continue to contact my political representatives; donate to just causes; show my support of truth, equal rights and justice.  And when things get too crazy, I can take the elevator down to my heart, and send out vibes of pure love into the world, in the hopes they will land on fertile soil.

Have a wonderful weekend, Family!  And before I forget, let me give a shout out to the universe for bringing my parents together, for without them there would be no me! Happy 81^st Anniversary!

One Love!

Namaste.