Posts Tagged ‘sending love’
Love Letters
While walking back up the driveway from the road, rolling the empty recycling bin through the cold air under a bright sunny sky, I paused to confirm that Asher would come with me after finishing his task in the tall brush of our north loop. We had just accomplished an almost perfect interaction at the road with the mail van showing up just as we got there.
I got Asher to sit and stay while I stepped up to grab our mail as the postman rolled by, but then I spotted that the dog had released himself from his ‘stay’ and was planning to prance around the back of the van. A simple command interrupted his misbehavior, and he enthusiastically corrected course to join me for the trek back to the house.
It’s not obvious to me why that pause I made at the peak of the rise in the driveway triggered a thought that my daily blog posts are love letters I write for you. Maybe it was the mail in my hand, which consisted of three holiday cards, one of which was an ad from a steakhouse, disguised as a friendly card in an envelope.
Traditionally, at this time of year, people reach out to their friends, families, neighbors & associates with heartfelt greetings of warmth and appreciation via cards through the mail. I used to design a custom Christmas card every year after we got married and started trying to fulfill the “adulting” role.
After email started to replace snail mail for communication, and workplaces initiated campaigns to become “paperless” in their daily operations, I developed a complex about using so much paper to print and mail cards. Being naturally frugal, I was also unhappy with the cost of the number of stamps needed to reach our ever-expanding variety of people in our thoughts.
Now I use Relative Something to send Thanksgiving and Christmas greetings to those of you who might see them here. No trees are harmed for paper, and no additional postage expense.
But every day, I write something that reflects my experience in the world. It is what I would tell you if we were sitting together without the usual distractions of work, or surrounding people, or things cooking on the stove. It is a way to make a connection despite being great distances apart.
This may have been the intent of other social media platforms, but I long ago chose to avoid those. I am satisfied to have this space, devoid of advertising, bots, and algorithms, as my media method for sending love to those of you with an interest in checking in on what I will come up with next.
Thank you for allowing me to visit you through this blog. I get to see all the countries where readers are located, and I am well aware of the reach this WordPress blogging offers. It may be mostly a one-sided pen pal connection, but it is a thrill to be able to beam love to you all in the simple form of my narrative of *this* John W. Hays’ take on things and experiences.
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Protest Day
Just show up. If you do nothing else today, especially if you are one of the millions of Americans who neglected to vote in the last Presidential election and have noticed the current administration is operating more unlawfully than any previous one in the history of our country, join with your neighbors to voice your displeasure.
I OBJECT!
I object to EVERYTHING the Republican politicians and every last one of those who support them are allowing to happen to our country. Cyndie and I will be attending a gathering in Hayward, Wisconsin, today to stand up and be counted among the citizens who are upset about the simultaneous violation of people’s rights and the unabashed profiteering via all manner of grifts and bribery. The constant barrage of “Look what my right hand is doing while I use my left hand to enrich myself at all of your expenses” is heartbreaking and crazy-making.
Here we are in our favorite getaway spot, where it is about as peaceful as possible, living a life of luxury while our fellow citizens in states across the country are under constant threat of being kidnapped in broad daylight by masked thugs masquerading as legitimately trained, law-abiding officers. Hah! As if.
It is unknown how many of the local rural residents of this community will take offense at a democratic demonstration against the racist, homophobic, and transphobic biases that the current despicable President is flaunting, but we are hoping for minimal conflict at the Hayward gathering.
We don’t prefer to leave the precious sanctity of the lakeshore to stand along a highway on a beautiful fall day, but it will only be for a couple of hours at noon, and it’s for an unprecedented cause. Today’s protests are an attempt to turn the tide and light a fire under anyone and everyone who occupies positions of power to hold this administration accountable.
We will need to leave Asher on his own at the log house overlooking the lake, where he can bark at anything that catches his attention while we are away. It will give us an extra incentive not to hang around too long at the protest, even if we find it a treasure to mingle with people who openly agree with our disapproval over what is happening to our country.
Getting back to our paradise on the lake will be a soothing chance to unwind from the intense focus on the awful things we are objecting to and reinvigorate our goal to send LOVE out into the world as a healing balm.
I hope many of you will join in making your voices heard and your wishes known on this national day of protest!
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Sheltered Lives
Every so often, I notice that I don’t have to fret over the likelihood of masked armed government gangs in unmarked cars showing up to roughly wrestle me to the ground and cuff my hands behind my back to haul me away to some unidentified detention facility.
Having chosen to consciously avoid all forms of news media since the last US Presidential election, my world has shrunk significantly. Morsels of world events come to my attention through friends and family or through my participation in an international online community, as well as occasional discussions in sub-Reddits that the app algorithm steers my way. Other than that, my days are filled with life on our 20-acre sanctuary or the lake place up in Hayward.
In some ways, it feels like I have stepped into a fog. I am aware there are things happening around me. I just can’t see them right now. My life experience has brought me an awareness of the threads of connection between people, as well as animals, in a transcendental realm that cuts through distances and fog.
When we are thinking about each other, we are connecting. Our love and hopes, and empathy reach each other just as easily as radio frequencies that are beamed to distant antennas. When you read tales of my adventures, you become participants along with me.
You feel the drama of an injured horse or a runaway dog, and you are aware when green growth is overtaking the land or weather events are ruling the day.
Upon reflection, we are not as sheltered as a first impression might hint.
Yesterday morning, while Cyndie and I were tending to the horses, we started rehashing the crazy incident of Light’s mysterious head wound. I was pleased at the veterinarian’s impression that there was nothing that looked unsafe for the horses in our facility. One thing they surmised as a remote possibility was that Light could have reared up in line with the metal fascia edge of the overhang.
As Cyndie and I talked about it, I glanced up at the metal edge from a different angle compared to the day of the incident and immediately noticed a distinct bowing in one spot. I can’t definitively say it wasn’t like that before, but it sure could be another piece of evidence about what happened.
I’m happy to report that all four horses seem to be doing well since the doctor visit. No noticeable lingering negative effects from the shots or the dental work, and Light appears to be recovering well from her wound.
Maddy, from This Old Horse, successfully got fly shields on the front legs of all the horses and brought a new fly mask for Mix. She looks good in Superman colors. I’m a little surprised the leg sleeves have stayed on for several days so far. When we’ve tried them in the past, in less than 24 hours, they have found ways to get out of them.
I like to think the horses are soaking up all the good vibes you readers have been sending them over their years with us.
Keep up the good work.
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Enormous Void
Since I no longer work for a living, yesterday’s New Year’s Day holiday was no different than a typical Wednesday for me. Hoping to pay some respect to the festive occasion, I rustled up a college football game on television to entertain me in fine holiday fashion. That is when I unexpectedly witnessed a brief statement of news from a sports announcer.
Their “BREAKING NEWS” moment revealed to me there had been a terrorist attack in New Orleans, and it was causing a 24-hour delay in the playoff game scheduled to happen in the stadium there. Not the most joyful start for a new year.
The (peaceful) void in our home due to Asher’s week with a trainer has been filled after Cyndie and I picked him up on Tuesday. The rabbits and lackadaisical pigeons better take note that the sheriff’s back in town. I’m sure we will have plenty of opportunities to practice the “Leave IT!” command in the days ahead.
There was also a void in the latest jigsaw puzzle I assembled that had me overthinking many of my decisions about which piece went where.
After the initial build, there comes some sectional rearranging, which then permits the opening of a second bag of pieces to complete a surprise middle. Good fun in a hand-me-over gift from my sister, Judy. My hat’s off to the artist who created the multitude of entertaining details and strategically repeated portions that allow the image to be manipulated like the last page of a MAD magazine.
Ultimately, however, the most enormous void I am experiencing is the result of a member of my virtual community, Brainstorms MetaNetwork, having ended his life between Christmas and New Year’s. That was such shockingly unexpected information to read on a typical pass through new posts Tuesday morning.
I never met him in real life, but we’ve been hanging out in the same discussion spaces online for more than a couple of decades. It definitely strikes a nerve knowing he dealt with depression and some stressful life situations. He has left a lot of folks with challenges of grief, and it has currently tarnished the start of the new year for us.
I keep seeing that hole in the puzzle I built and thinking that is what our virtual community looks like this week.
I’m sure the families and friends of victims of the incident in New Orleans early yesterday morning are feeling even larger holes in their lives today.
It feels like there isn’t enough love to fill the void, but what better response could I give?
Join me, because we can conjure love from out of nowhere by simply thinking it into existence and then feeling it in our hearts. On top of that, when we are focused on love, and manifesting it into being, there is a simultaneous absence of hate occurring. Less hate, more love. Send it! Feed the world what it truly needs.
There is a tremendous void deserving of our attention, and it is within the reach of all of our hearts.
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Year End
’Twas the last day of the year, and all through our house, we did a quick review through my blog to see what had mattered. It occurred to me that I am more inclined to reminisce about long-past events than the prior year. I spent time in the morning looking through newspaper articles from the 1870s. The minutiae of Pierce County, WI, in 1874 strikes my fancy more than the collection of my daily reports on the ranch.
Looking through the “Previous Somethings,” we were reminded of trips we made to the lake to supervise the replacement of a rotting log truss on the main house and to do a little DIY masonry on the satellite building we call Cabin 3. The fall I experienced at the end of February didn’t require any “remembering” because it led to a chronic shoulder problem that I am painfully reminded of every single day.
We coped with water on the basement floor at the beginning of the year and the broken power line to the barn. We dragged out a DIY landscape project to our entryways over several months. After a soaking wet first half of the year, we experienced a long drought that revealed the water fountain in the paddock had sprung a leak.
In February, we hosted Hays relations up at the lake place in Hayward with a photography contest as one of the features. I rode my bike in the 50th version of the Tour of Minnesota. At this point, I’m undecided about whether I will do the 51st in 2025 or not.
In a year when Cyndie went surgery-free, we each took a turn at having our first case of COVID-19 illness and separate bouts of pneumonia. For the most part, we are otherwise healthy, although both of us have been noticing aging is increasingly sapping our youthful vigor.
The most notable adventure was our trip to Iceland with friends, Barb & Mike Wilkus in September. That island country is a marvel of fascinating natural beauty.
Despite that wonderful event highlighting 2024 for us, I’m afraid the heartache of the results of the U.S. Presidential election in November and my resulting coping reaction of avoiding news ever since has become the predominant pall shadowing my perception of the year. I can pretend all I want that I didn’t notice, but that doesn’t change the fact that it happened, and we will all face the consequences in one way or another.
Considering all the terrible things that have happened in the world since those quirky stories of interest in the 1870s, it is noteworthy that good people still endured, coped, and found ways to survive and sometimes thrive time and again. We can do this.
Thus, my review of 2024 is complete, and I am ready to return my attention to whatever today brings, especially taking note of the many blessings bestowed upon us.
Sending love to all you readers who have successfully found your way to the last day of this calendar year. Let’s spread the love far and wide throughout the next 365 and beyond!
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Tit Tat
Being inclined toward contrarianism, I frequently find myself wishing for some version of equivalent retaliation against news making headlines. I’m rarely successful in coming up with anything that fits just right but that doesn’t stop my urge to imagine a good counterpunch.
What would the opposite of Russian-driven falsehoods about American politicians look like? What could Americans make up about Russian leaders that would have any equivalence? I’ve seen a lot of parodies of a bare-chested Putin in various situations, but they never feel as if they are the least bit influential.
How about a flip of stories about “millions” of criminal immigrants flowing unchecked across our borders? I’d like to see a flood of online shares about news of an equal number of unsavory Americans invading Iceland and demanding more gas and convenience stores be built along the ring road.
Here’s one that proves how futile this whole contrarian mindset is for me: campaign lawn signs. I practice the complete opposite. I don’t post any signs on our property. Ha! I sure showed them!
Doesn’t work.
The best I can come up with is countering hateful news and actions with pure love.
In a way, it doesn’t work either. Not without extra effort. Loving people can be a lot like not putting out lawn signs. Who really notices? How does it make an influential point like a good meme image with a catchy turn of phrase might?
I need to put in mental energy to overcome my desire for instant gratification of exposing objectionable acts or intentions and redirect that urge to induce a loving smile and beams of hopeful goodness upon deserved targets.
Because the world deserves better.
Plus, after I send out that love, I can still imagine miscreants slipping on a banana peel in front of people they were trying to impress. Lovingly, I mean.
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Declaring Idiot
“Idiot,” he spat out as if cursing. We were biking on a trail as a group and the approaching rider objected to how long it took one of our riders to yield space for him to pass.
An exclamation such as that reveals a lot more about the person expressing it than it does about the person who offended them. If “Idiot” is the first thought on his mind, I suspect his heart is not overflowing with love for others on a regular basis.
Now, it is certainly possible that he was just having a bad day and I was judging him harshly with my interpretation, but the principle stuck with me enough that I am still remembering it weeks later. Plus, our group ended up using the term “idiot” in a playful way the rest of the week as a default response to a wide variety of situations, fittingly or sarcastically absurd.
If one of my friends accidentally bumped me when slipping past my back? “Idiot,” was the response, quickly followed with a silly smile. I think I was attracted to the way such a response would stand out as being so ridiculous when applied to every situation. Maybe it’s not the best (first) thing to say to someone you don’t know who has just offended you.
I suppose saying “I wish you would move over sooner” takes too long to say when you are traveling in opposite directions.
Yesterday, the weather up at the lake was an idiot. Chilly, wet, windy, and gray all day long. We got a photo from home that showed Asher fawning for the camera.
He may have been showing how he felt about the weather since the report from Beldenville sounded very similar to what we were experiencing in Hayward.
Send folks you meet a little extra love today. Maybe if enough of us practice behaving in this way more regularly, we can counterbalance those who allow their frustrations to tarnish the surroundings when things aren’t going their way.
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Collective Action
What can I do about the ills of the world? My fallback attempt to make things better tends to rely on the age-old art of wishing. I wish wars would cease. I wish that criminals would never get away with it. I wish people wouldn’t fall for the rantings of lying politicians. I wish the world could figure out a way to adjust societies to function consistently year-round without moving clocks twice a year.
One belief I hold that is well within my abilities to practice and encourage others to take up is to practice LOVE with as much or more gusto as they do all the world religions. Drop all the centuries of concocted dogma and simply produce and share LOVE.
There is one dilemma where my solution of sending love as a fix may only be as effective as merely wishing for improvement: the over-cooking of our planet Earth.
My news feed recently led me to an opinion piece by climate scientist Bill McGuire offering, “If you knew what I know, you’d be terrified too.” It is posted on CNN.com and listed as a 4-minute read. I hope you will take the time.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/07/opinions/climate-scientist-scare-doom-anxiety-mcguire/index.html
The terrifying realities of the ongoing climate change underway are enough to scare people into doing nothing since it appears all is lost. Scientists who rant about the issue can get labeled as “doomers.”
I approve of Bill McGuire’s point that people can handle being scared and still rally to take action.
The bottom line is that many things in life are scary or worrying, from going to the dentist to noticing a potential sign of cancer, but ignoring them almost invariably results in something far worse happening down the line.
The key is finding a way to have hope. One of the ways to cultivate hope is by collective action.
There is a wikiHow that explains ways to become an Activist.
It will take more than simply wishing to solve all the ills of this world. Let’s all seek out a way to contribute positive energy toward groups of like-minded people, driving change that will lead to better outcomes for ourselves and those around us.
We all do better when we all do better. Paul Wellstone.
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Missing Phase
So, yesterday I wrote about the stability I have enjoyed throughout my life. That would include infrastructure, which isn’t exactly what I was referring to in my rambling sermon. When it snows, our roads get plowed. When I turn on the faucet, water comes out. When I toggle a switch, the lights come on. Except when they don’t.
My current perception of stability was rocked on Tuesday when I flipped the two switches for lights in the barn and only one set came on. I’ve seen incidences where a circuit breaker fails. That would be easy for me to fix.
It’s not the circuit breaker. It is something I cannot fix. One of the phases of 120V AC coming into the master circuit breaker in the electrical box in the barn is no longer live. Zero voltage.
Since the source of this power is after or beyond our electric co-op’s meter, they do not provide service. That falls on their members to contact an electrician for help. The person I spoke with at the co-op was as helpful as possible in providing information to aid me in deciding what to do next.
The most unsettling thing I learned was that burrowing critters do indeed contribute to underground electrical line failures. He said that when cable insulation gets chewed to expose conductors, the wires can begin to corrode and eventually even turn to dust.
As a result of that, he told me the co-op now runs wires through piping between transformers and homes when doing new installations. Doing so has significantly reduced these kinds of problems.
Lovely.
What are our chances of finding an electrician who happens to have time to just show up when we call?
Well, pretty good, actually. The first company I contacted said “Joe” would call me back as soon as he had a moment. Based on previous experience, I fought my fears that I wouldn’t hear from him for days, if at all.
Cyndie encouraged me to send him love in advance. I sent the whole company love.
An hour or two later, I got the call and he immediately asked if it was a dairy barn and whether it was urgent, or not. When I admitted it wasn’t urgent but we did have horses and the power keeps their water from freezing, he said they would come out first thing in the morning.
We couldn’t be more pleased about that.
Does it work if we send the underground electric cable love?
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Admittedly Isolated
I’m home alone with the animals again this weekend and contemplating the incredible peacefulness and beauty that I enjoy the luxury of experiencing here every day. This morning the horses radiated peacefulness under a foggy wet blanket of sound-dampening air. It was Delilah who disrupted things every so often with her random barks of alarm over imagined threats that really don’t deserve to be barked at from my perspective.
As I methodically made my way around the paddocks to scoop up recent manure piles, my mind meandered through so many trials and tribulations that we aren’t facing.
Our country has not been invaded and bombed by a bordering nation that was pretending to be doing our people a favor. Our region has yet to be torched by wildfires or swamped by unprecedented flash flooding. Extremist politicians haven’t maliciously trafficked hapless immigrants to our doorstep. We are not experiencing a shortage of food or potable water. We are not struggling with the debilitations of long-COVID infection.
The much more benign burdens directly impacting me this day include two issues that aren’t happening as swiftly as I wish. I’m wondering if the technician who will splice our fiber optic cable at the base of the utility pole across the street from our driveway works on Saturdays. Nobody showed up by the end of the day yesterday even though the cable to our house was buried last Tuesday.
I’m also anxious to receive a promised bid from our favorite excavating business regarding the landscaping of the slopes on either side of our new driveway. We’ve decided the job is too big to accomplish on our own and will require a truckload of dirt they can provide. It’s been a week since he was here to discuss the issues.
It’s pretty easy for me to preach about having a positive attitude about how great it is to be alive when I reside in a sanctuary of natural beauty and affluent comforts. I am sensitive about boasting too assertively from our admittedly isolated circumstances in the world, but my perspective is coming from having successfully treated a depression that shadowed much of my earlier life.
Our daughter is enduring the stress of knowing a vulnerable adult who walked out of her music school before his father did and has now been missing for days. Our hearts ache for those who are suffering.
I walk through our woods to a soundtrack of calling birds and water droplets coming down from wet tree leaves, the autumn aromas of fallen leaves just beginning to become noticeable. The horses huff a big sigh as I show up to clean the area beneath the overhang and serve up their pans of feed.
What can I do but send the love I experience out into the universe to flow toward all who face difficulties that I struggle to fathom, recognizing the privilege of my isolation.
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Relative Something 