Happy April First, no Foolin'!

 

Wishes for a good month ahead!

Each morning, find a way to start your day right as it sets the tone for your day.

-----------------

This is as close to a joke as I feel like today.

War means children are dying. Even soldiers had mothers who weep.

Image courtesy of Agencia El Vigía

-----------------

Still Trillium flowers bloom

Photos by Jason Rinehart, Bret Love & Mary Gabbett

----------------------

Peace through the world

The Butterfly Effect, by Anastasiya Markovich, 2008, from Tom's blog

---------------------

My next door neighbor enjoying her app's panorama function on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

-----------------------

Had coffee with two friends the other afternoon. The little seats and tables are snug next to other people, and a man with his laptop sat pretty close next to us. It wasn't until I said I said I was thinking of donating to Cooper for Senator that he said nice and loud that he had already. We all laughed, especially as I'd been sharing lots of personal information with my friends, and now we knew he'd heard it all! He was diplomatic and said he'd not paid much attention till then.

In case you don't know, getting former NC Governor Roy Cooper elected to the Senate will hopefully help tilt Congress to the blue side. It's a pretty long shot in our red state...but these days we all are betting on lots of long shots.

Including the guy at the next table.

---------------

It has always seemed to me that the test of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised. -Chinua Achebe, writer and professor (1930-2013)

Coach House Daffodils

 

The building was damaged by flooding 17 months ago, so is now for sale. But the daffodils don't know about it!

The former Coach House Restaurant was not as upscale as some steak and seafood places, but was family owned and operated. Southern hospitality was part of its charm. I spent many meals enjoying hardy food and companionable conversations.

Sharing with Wordless Wednesday

----------------------

The U.S. military announced on Sunday that three service members were killed in action and five are seriously wounded after a joint strike on Iran as part of Operation Epic Fury. (By Tuesday we know 8 have died.)

KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

By ETHEL SPOWERS – SWINGS

From Heather Cox Richardson March 2, 2026 (please read her information about the newest war.)

And her newsletter March 3 gives this info...

"Central Command has reported six American service members killed and eighteen wounded in the operation.

According to U.S. Central Command, which manages U.S. military operations in the Middle East, there are about 50,000 military personnel involved in Operation Epic Fury, 200 fighter jets, two aircraft carriers and bombers, and they are moving more support to the region. Yesterday Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to rule out sending ground troops to Iran."

She goes on to give the cost estimates for this current situation.

--------------------

Who do you serve? To whose life can I most effectively contribute? What practice –- meditation, or relaxation practice, or prayer, or time in nature -- whatever brings you peace -– do you follow to build your internal power? Do you allocate enough time or emphasis to that practice? There is a time to give and a time to restore. Restorative time is the basis of all worthwhile creative work, and all work that seeks to contribute to the lives of others. And it gives us patience with our own foibles, and those of others. 

Rod MacIver in Heron Dance

Flat Creek lunch

 

We dined "al fresco" at the original Ole's Guacamole on Sunday. Flat Creek is behaving itself gurgling by.

The little bridge survived the flood 17 months ago... so residents of the motel can easily arrive at the restaurant. (Or full patrons might retire for a siesta at the motel!) When I moved here 19 years ago the restaurant was a southern specialty place, with their hot dogs well known.

And look what I saw across the creek, but a bed of daffodils!

The remains from cleanup continue to float down stream...many trees were down from the winds, and landslides, as well as floods of Hurricane Helene.

Sharing with Tom's Tuesday Treasures

----------------

WE'RE AT WAR WITH IRAN

-MARIANNE WILLIAMSON

It could be a quick devastating war, or it could be a prolonged devastating war with consequences none of us can even imagine.

As you’re probably aware, the United States and Israel have begun a war with Iran. Full scale. No holding back. Very much for real.

Forget the Constitutional demand that the President go through Congress before declaring war, by the way. There’s no more even pretending now. The Constitution is little more to them than an administrative hindrance. Congressional debate is like a joke to those guys.

And now we are where we are. We are at war with Iran. It could be a quick devastating war, or it could be a prolonged devastating war with consequences none of us can even imagine.

Thousands of mothers and fathers are grasping their children now, trying to reassure them. Soldiers are dying who have no idea why we’re doing this. People who don’t have a political bone in their body are rushing into bomb shelters, praying for safety. Among the leaders involved, there are no good guys in any of this - only various gradations of the spiritually blind.

The coming days will see many tears. On the other side of this - and that’s a huge theoretical - we must be willing to do things differently. And truly mean it. None of our hearts will be untouched by what is unfolding now. The drama of these days will either purify the human race, or it will end it.

In the words of John F. Kennedy, Jr., “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” We must learn to wage peace as effectively as we now wage war.

I saw, when I was running for President, how the pseudo-sophisticates in American politics and media treated the very idea of a Department of Peace. They treat such an idea with condescension and smirks, as though the merchants of war are the only grown-ups in the room. I saw widespread ignorance of the fact that peacebuilding is even a thing, much less with statistically proven results at preventing and reducing conflict. In truth, if we’d had a Department of Peace playing peace games over the last few years rather than just a Department of Defense playing war games, we would have a different world today.

Share

I’m thinking this morning about a quote from President Franklin Roosevelt called I Hate War, inscribed on the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington DC:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded. I have seen men coughing out their gassed lungs. I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed. I have seen 200 limping, exhausted men come out of line—the survivors of a regiment of 1,000 that went forward 48 hours before. I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.”

From the United States supporting Israels’ continued war on Gaza, to war between Russia and Ukraine, to the madness in the Sudan - and now this: an actual war with Iran - humanity is testing the fate of the human race. We cannot continue this way. In the words of A Course in Miracles, there is a “limit beyond which we cannot miscreate.”

All of hits is happening, of course, at the same time that Trump seems to be revving up to rig the 2026 midterm elections. I will have much to say about that, of course. It’s genuinely overwhelming. But as tempting as it might be to put our heads in the sand, friends do not let friends sit this out. These indeed are extraordinary times. Let’s thank God that we are extraordinary people. We do not serve Him, or each other, by pretending we are anything less. May our prayers, our thoughts and our behavior now reflect the inner greatness that is God’s gift to us all. The times are dark, but we are filled with Light.

Source: FB Sat. Feb. 28, 2026

---------------------

“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”

John Steinbeck

Marie Bashkirtseff - The Umbrella, 1883.

So angry

 

A heavy box was delivered.

Inside was another box which opened to show a nicely packed journal, vial of pills, various instructions and warnings.

 

It even included a lame little plastic pill counter to hang around the bottle…it fell apart when I tried to remove it from its packing housing.

So the new drug I'm about to try comes like this.

Why does it make me angry? Haven’t even started taking it yet.

I'm pissed at this expensive marketing presentation! The cost is exorbitant!  And thus the pharmaceutical industry has spent all this money to encourage me while taking the drug.

Remember the “methinks he doth protest too much” phrase?

Why?

There are phone calls every other day from representatives and pharmacists to give support and answer questions. I let them go to voice mail.

I haven’t started the drug because I’m currently on antibiotics. 

Will I?

Probably, since I'm paying for it.

And on top of all the junk they pushed into my home (it won’t fit in the recycle bins) I'm almost crying to have been sent a journal.

I can no longer write comfortably thanks to my essential tremors.

They didn’t know it, but when my Dr called to make sure I got the antibiotics I let him know that this disability looms large in my life these days.

Yet another invisible condition!

————————-

People rarely win wars; governments rarely lose them. -

Arundhati Roy, author (b. 24 Nov 1961)

------------------------------

More to be angry about!

"The UN Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state in Article 2(4), which reads, “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” Launching attacks, like the U.S. strike on Iran, is generally illegal. There are exceptions for self-defense against an armed attack (Article 51) or an attack authorized by the Security Council, but neither of those is in play here.

Treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate, like the UN Charter, have the status of federal laws under Article VI, Section 3 of the Constitution, which reads, “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” (emphasis added). Upholding them is part of a president’s duties and the oath of office he takes under the “take care” clause of the Constitution.

Of course, we all know that under the Constitution, Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war. We also know that for the past few decades, the executive branch has been assuming more of that power, adopting a “beg for forgiveness,” rather than an “ask for permission” stance. But no one has been as brazen about it as Donald Trump, who has bombed 7 different countries in just over a year in office and is at in a second time in Iran, after claiming, in June 2025, that he had “obliterated” their nuclear program. It’s not a good thing when the man with the nuclear codes is punch-drunk on the amount of power at his disposal, and it behooves us all to keep a close watch."

SOURCE: Civil Discourse by Joyce Vance

“The use of force by the United States and Israel against Iran, and the subsequent retaliation by Iran across the region, undermine international peace and security.”

UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemns military escalation in the Middle East.

-----------------------

The ego is simply a way for us to understand and attend to ourselves, at the same time as we understand and attend to the world around us.

 

I'm brave plus some food

 Rabbit rabbit.

by Amuelle

by Annie Peeker

And I must tell you about how brave I am!

Somehow even with this old two story apartment building having newer windows and plastic cladding, there are some critters that sneak in the cracks. One is the stink bug. They are geometric shaped flat critters, who really do stink if you smash them, which I learned the hard way of course. So I usually grab a tissue and pick them up and throw them outside. This time of year they may be flushed, because why make them suffer in the freezing weather.

One’s exo-skeleton was stuck hanging above the shower, somehow attached to the rough ceiling for months, because I couldn’t reach it. Apparently it died of natural causes.

But this last week, lying in bed, suddenly I saw one slowly walking toward me, on the bed sheet about 6 inches from my body…the sheet I was lying on, not the covers. It looked quite determined to climb onto me. I did the brave thing and flicked it off the bed. I didn’t feel I could get my body up out of the prone position, find a tissue, etc. and actually it was fight or flight response …so then for 2 days I wondered where it had gone. Yes they fly, and hide very well. Clothing is all over the bedroom, as well as storage shelving.

So finally two days later, early in the morning on Friday it was crawling up the wall in the bathroom. It was the biggest one I’d ever seen. I said a few words to get my “fighting attitude up” and grabbed the tissue and gave a well timed flush. Whew. The conquering heroine I am!

My shrimp hibachi style, white rice with soy sauce, and carrots. A nice sauce for dipping. I also had already eaten the egg roll, and had to ask for sweet and sour sauce to go with it.

A renovated Mexican restaurant is now the Japanese- style “Kyoto,” still owned by the family who owns Ole' Guacamoles. Here Teresa and I tried to include some of the little plastic Bonsai trees on each window-sill in the background.

My take away? The shrimp was overcooked - really dry…grilled popcorn shrimp needs just a minute on a grill. Or it had been left from the day before? But I liked the veggies, since every other Asian place is high on veggies that I avoid, namely peppers and onions. The side of carrots was wonderful, sweet contrast to the salty hibachi flavor.

The same dish may have chicken or steak or even salmon as the protein. I may try one of those. The egg roll left me cold. And our obviously Latina waitress couldn’t understand enough English to answer most of my questions. She made efforts with a translator on her phone however. 

So would I give her a good tip? You bet cha! I remember trying to be a bi-lingual Pan-American flight attendant and how difficult it was to understand rapid Spanish compared to my classroom Spanish conversations!

 But it also didn’t help me find out how the Kyoto cooks made their spring rolls. My Latina waitress could only say they were microwaved.

---------------

BIG NEWS in my life.

The Lakeview Center for Active Aging is opening again in a week, on March 9. No more carrying lunches home in a Styrofoam box! And exercise classes will be held there too! Eating around a table of 8 seniors each day for lunch! Whoopee!

So the inspections following the downstairs structural work have met standards. But I think there is still more renovation to be done, since we won't have the space downstairs for classes yet.

——————    

I am so sad about the girls killed in their school in Iran by the United States and Israel.

That is all.

Venezuelan war

 Here I am looking at blogs, a few emails, and just dealing with learning this that and another...when someone in an email says we're at war with Venezuela. 

NPR has  an article published at around 6 am.

I have another aural migraine now...stress anyone?

Here's what Jay Kuo said "Waking up to News of War."

We’re all waking up to the same sobering, disturbing yet somehow unsurprising news out of Venezuela. I posted some of the below on social media but wanted to share and expand on it briefly here, too.

Some things to keep in mind as we process news of the war in Venezuela:

1) This act of war is unauthorized, unjustified and unconstitutional, no matter what the near term “success” the White House claims in toppling a foreign government or capturing its president.

2) Regime change is always unpredictable and could lead to greater instability.

3) With such acts, we lose all moral authority to condemn other nations that similarly attack their neighbors or carry out illegal renditions of foreign leaders.

4) Trump wants Venezuela’s oil reserves for his friends and a war to distract the public. This was never about interdicting drugs.

5) We still don’t know how many people the U.S. may have killed or injured so far, and we must demand all hostilities cease immediately to prevent further loss of life.

6) Two things can be true. It’s possible both to despise Maduro for what he has done to Venezuela AND to oppose this war as an illegal invasion of another country to seize control of its oil reserves.

7) Expect the GOP in Congress to lay down again and surrender their constitutional authority. Some already have fallen in line.

8) It is unclear what the plan is should Maduro’s people not give up. Their government is illegitimate, so a lot will depend on what the opposition and the Venezuelan people do from here.

This is not how any of us wanted to begin the new year. Now that the U.S. has committed unauthorized acts of war, we can only hope that they are short-lived and that chaos and further violence does not ensue.

Stay tuned, more to follow.

Jay

Thanks Starhawk

Constellation of Pain by Starhawk

A Response to a Time of Murders 

Dec 16, 2025

reposted for my blog Dec 17 in the evening - I finally read this, and it helps consolidate some of my feelings of rage, sorrow, and confusion about the many events of people hurting people.

Sunday night was the first night of Hanukkah. it was also a night that capped a weekend of horrors: the shooting a of a Hanukkah party on the beach in Australia, another mass shooting at Brown University, and the more personal horror of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife.

And in the same week, as people in Gaza shivered in cold tents, Israel assassinated more Palestinians, and at least fourteen children in Gaza died of cold.

These events circulate around each other like random stars that seem as though they should be linkedIn some kind of discernible, awful pattern. Stars sprinkle the night skies, and depending on what lines we draw between them, we make different constellations. But what do we make out of all of this, at a time when in our various ways we yearn to celebrate the rebirth of light out of darkness?

It’s only human to want to draw lines of simple cause and effect. We yearn for clear meanings and moral lessons. And the lines we most love to draw are those that encircle one group or another, that we can then label ‘all good’ or ‘all evil’.

But people are complex and so are groups of people. A Muslim father and son shot into the crowd at the Hanukkah party on Bondi Beach. A Syrian Muslim immigrant risked his life and single-handedly disarmed one of the gunmen, taking two bullets in the process. Many Jews do support the assaults in Gaza, and this terrible attack will inflame their fear and sense of victimhood. Yet many, many Jews, including me, have spoken up, organized and stood up against the genocidal policies of the Israeli government.

Many years ago, when I had just returned from doing solidarity work in Gaza, I was trying to explain to a friend, and to her ultra-orthodox rabbi and his wife what I had seen and experienced there: the targeting of civilians by snipers, the bulldozing of homes, the daily restrictions and humiliations inflicted on the population, and at the same time, the warmth and welcome I had received from the people there. At the end, the rabbi’s wife looked at me in great confusion. “I don’t understand,” she said. “We’re good! So if we’re doing it, it must be good!”

But we are not all good or all evil. We carry within us the capacity for both.

And we do the worst evils when we forget that, when we label another group as evil or subhuman, when we taint all the members of one group with the actions of a few, and when we refuse to take responsibility for the actions we support or the ways we benefit from harm done to others.

Anti-Semitism is real and deadly as we have just seen. And the genocide in Gaza is real and continues to be deadly. Conflating opposition to that genocide with anti-Semitism simply opens the door to all Jews being blamed for every death in Gaza at a time when the Jewish community is deeply split and no longer unified in support of Israel’s every policy. And failure to condemn the murders on Bondi beach reinforces the callousness and cruelty that are fueling discrimination against Jews and Muslims both, against all targeted groups that someone has drawn a circle around and labeled ‘fair game’, and reinforces the lethal cultural idea, one that infects our politics and our uniquely personal moments of breakdown, that the gun or the knife or the act of violence is the ultimate way to relieve our deepest pain.

I believe we are capable of better. I believe our hearts are large enough to hold the pain for the children of Gaza and of Bondi, without constantly needing to compare the two or rate one against the other. We can hold the pain of the families of the students at Brown, and the many, many families who have lost children to violence, and the very personal pain of the Reiner family, and the vast, unfathomable pain of the hundreds of thousands who fell victim to the murderous DOGE cuts to food and medical aid in Africa and beyond, of the immigrants and trans folks and all those who’ve had targets painted on their backs. And we can turn that pain into action, to build a better world.

And if all that seems too much, if your heart is breaking under the weight, look up into the night sky. Find three stars in alignment: name them Empathy, Compassion, Courage. Draw a line between them, make it a laser beam to cut through false boundaries and carve a new circle, one big enough to include us all.

------------------

And to echo my earlier post on joy:

"Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift" ~Robin Wall Kimmerer

It's hodge podge day!

 First, here's a photo of the gazebo work being done at Lake Tomahawk. Thanks to Elizabeth Swan photographer.

----------------------

Maybe by Bansky

And another artist at work... "Critical Race Theory"  by Jonathan Harris.

And yet another artist, Norman Rockwell.

If you've noticed a lot of confrontational pieces here, it's because that's the life we're all living today. I like how Rockwell says so much about the loss felt by these women.

"To stand with Palestine is to be human," she explained. Needless to say, it also means to be criminalized. Greta Thunberg among a group arrested today in Copenhagen. As always she is on the right side of history

San Marco, Venice by Giuseppe Marastoni

This is my Facebook Cover Photo.

I ache so bad, the pain of compassion for the innocents in Gaza, it's just a tiny drop of the incredible suffering they're enduring. Definitely Hamas must pay for it's atrocities. But Israel needs to give the normal people some consideration also. I'm a pacifist. I hate all war, but this powerful heavy handed attack against sneaky terrorists is the worst. 

What kind of future do any of them think they will have?

-----------------------

OK, here's something that is beautiful (in my opinion) and uplifting.

Slow motion  bee hive...very short, you might want to mute the music.

Sharing with Eileen's Saturday Criters

Today's quote:

Life cannot be classified in terms of a simple neurological ladder, with human beings at the top; it is more accurate to talk of different forms of intelligence, each with its strengths and weaknesses. This point was well demonstrated in the minutes before last December's tsunami, when tourists grabbed their digital cameras and ran after the ebbing surf, and all the 'dumb' animals made for the hills.

 -B.R. Myers, author (b. 21 Aug 1963)

Yes. I said.

 Billy looked at the clock on the gas stove. 

He had an hour to kill before the saucer came. 

He went into the living room, swinging the bottle like a dinner bell, 

turned on the television. He came slightly unstuck in time, 

saw the late movie backwards, then forwards again. 

It was a movie about American bombers in the Second World War

 and the gallant men who flew them. 

Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this:

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses, 

took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, 

a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, 

sucked bullets and shell fragments 

from some of the planes and crewmen.

The bombers opened their bomb-bay doors, 

exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, 

gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, 

and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes.

The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own,

 which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck

 more fragments from the crewmen and planes.

When the bombers got back to their base,

 the steel cylinders were taken from the racks

 and shipped back to the United States of America, 

where factories were operating night and day, 

dismantling the cylinders, 

separating the dangerous contents into minerals.

Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work.

The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas.

 It was their business to put them into the ground, 

to hide them cleverly,

 so they would never hurt anybody ever again.

The American fliers turned in their uniforms, 

became high school kids. And Hitler turned into a baby, 

Billy Pilgrim supposed. 

That wasn't in the movie. Billy was extrapolating. 

Everybody turned into a baby, and all humanity, 

without exception, conspired biologically 

to produce two perfect people named Adam and Eve,

 he supposed.

~ Kurt Vonnegut

from Slaughterhouse Five

with thanks to love is a place

As posted here in The Beauty we Love.

PhotoofdevastatedDresden - Jason Dawsey