A Letter

 

Dear Friends,

 

I ran into an old friend at the grocery store who told me this story:

First, let me say that we live in a small town about 12 miles from Eugene, and the minute you drive into town, you see an enormous billboard almost wholly covered with a picture of a llama. You also see that the largest RV dealership in the state has spread its wares on both sides of the highway for a couple of blocks.

That billboard tickled me. It was the RV company advertising themselves with a picture of a llama.  At the bottom of the ad, it said: "We accept anything as a down payment."

Then I met Penny.

Penny's husband thought getting alpacas—they weren't really llamas—was a good idea. I don't know, maybe he wanted to sell the wool or something, perhaps those big brown eyes got to him. And alpacas are cute. (Did you know alpacas sing to their babies?) Penny, however, definitely a city girl, not a farm girl, was less than impressed with the accumulation of alpacas in their back yard.  To add insult to injury, her husband hurt his back, and she had to care for the alpacas.

Time went on until they were in the market for an RV. And so they went to the local RV outlet to shop—you know the one in our home town that's spread out on both sides of the freeway.

When penny saw their ad, "We take anything as a down payment," Penny, smart cookie that she is, said, "Boy, do I have a down payment for you," and convinced them to take an alpaca as a down payment. A good advertisement for them, a good deal for her. When they found an outlet for the alpacas, they agreed to accept the others as well. Alpacas gone. Happy Penny.

I never heard how the husband felt about losing his Alpacas.

 

Now I'm into this week. What are you up to?

I'm avoiding my Real Estate studies (175 revised Real Estate Laws wore me out) and have been working on my book. Yep, I'm writing one. It has been an escape for me—isn't that what novels are about? I had been reading Inglath Cooper, and she inspired  me to write my own.

I found her on Kindle. She's an animal advocate, likes to delve into personal relationships, and said, "Who, after all, doesn't like a good love story? And, she nearly always puts a dog in her stories. She seemed like my kind of girl.

I can write a love story, I said, and I will have a dog in it.

And since I felt cooped up at home, I decided to move my protagonist to Florence, Italy. If I couldn't travel, I could at least fantasize about it. Well, I know little about Italy, except you need to fight the nuns at the airport to get a luggage cart. I don't know the language or much about the country, except I know Florence is the seat of the renaissance, and it is filled with art. A friend, my kids, then age 13 and 16, and I made a stop off the train long ago and briefly visited Florence. We visited Florence's Accademia Gallery to see Michelangelo's David, followed by a lunch where the chef surprised my youngest daughter with a heart-shaped pizza. That was it. I didn't know anything else, but I had fun learning and dreaming up a romance for my heroine.

So, that's what I've been doing. I am riveted to my computer. You could hardly pry me away for two days. I hope my readers will feel similarly and can't pry themselves away from my book.

Who wants to read about a 72-year-old woman falling in love?

 I don't know.

 I do.

Now, tell me about your week.

 Love,

Jo

Calling All Renaissance People

Which is it?

 

"Are we hopelessly fragile victims of events beyond our control, or are we powerful creators harboring dormant abilities that we are only beginning to understand?"

 "Both questions have the same answer.

 "Yes."—Greg Braden

 

On the one hand, we are told that we are frail beings who live in a world where things just happen. On the other hand, ancient and cherished spiritual traditions tell us there is a force that lives in every one of us that assists at the darkest moments.

 No wonder we are confused.

 Sometimes we think we make no impact on the world, and what we do doesn't make any difference.

Yet, think of it this way, leading-edge people do make a difference. 

Let's say that one person buying an electric car doesn't change the carbon imprint of the planet much. But carmakers look at what people are buying.

 

One person putting solar panels on their roof only impacts the world a smidgen. Still, solar panel makers listen and change their way of making solar cells and selling them.

 

Hospitals must have listened when women demanded to be awake and aware when they delivered their babies, and they proved that husbands wouldn't faint in the delivery room. While I was hauled off to a delivery room that looked like a surgical theater, my daughter gave birth in a bed with a drop-down foot and was never moved on a gurney when she was doubled over with contractions. 

 

Used to be only hippies were into organic foods—now look at the grocery stores.

 

Used to be, we thought in terms of this table is hard, solid. This glass of water is just that, a physical object. Now we look at things a little differently, like everything is made up of molecules and atoms and magical DNA strands. And that between it all is space.

 

Recently, I picked up Greg Braden's book, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief.

 

 Two assumptions that have been basic to science for the last 300 years have been:

 

1.     The space between "things" is empty. New discoveries now tell us that this is simply not true."

2.     "Our inner experiences of feeling and belief have no effect on the world beyond our bodies. This has been proven absolutely wrong as well."

 

"Paradigm-shattering experiments published in leading-edge, peer-reviewed journals ( ? ) (question mark mine) reveal that we're bathed in a field of intelligent energy that fills what used to be thought of as empty space."

 

The thought is that this field responds to us and thus rearranges itself in the presence of our heart-based feelings and beliefs.

 

"In the instant of our first breath, we are infused with the single greatest force in the universe—the power to translate the possibilities of our minds into the reality of the world"—Greg Braden.

Could this be true?

 I knew that scientists now put forth the idea that space isn't nothing. It has something in it. When I read Braden's statement that that something is where our thoughts, feelings, our very consciousness works, I was astounded.

 I am wondering if this time is a time of renaissance. (Rebirth) Remember how Florence, Italy pulled the world out of the dark ages and into a Humanitarian era?

 A competition to sculpt bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery did it. Lorenzo Ghiberti won the competition and became the arch-enemy of Brunelleschi, the architect of the Duomo, the Dome of Florence's The Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral.

 Brunelleschi won the Duomo competition with an egg trick. He asked the commission if they could make an egg stand on the table. They couldn't. He smashed the egg into two pieces, placed one piece on top of the other, and the egg stood.

 He used that principle to build the dome, a dome on a dome. And the builders began. At that time, there was no technology for constructing such a thing, so it was left unfinished until someone came up with a solution.

 It took 142 years to build.

And Brunelleschi had to endure Ghiberti as his co-superintendent. (With many fights, I might add.)

 

Ghiberti's bronze doors are an exercise in perspective, with items close, middle and far, including vanishing points, all in exquisite Frescoes. 

 I did not know there were three Davids in Florence, Italy. The oldest was sculpted by Donatello in 1400. It is of a prepubescent nude male and cast in bronze. It was a classical nude that a generation before would have thought to be shameful. 

Now it is considered art.

 Florence had moved art out of the churches and into rich people's courtyards.

 A celebration of life occurred. Art for art's sake. 

 What does it take to push people into a new paradigm?

 Could it be that is what's happening now? The trouble is, since we are in the thick of it, we can't see it?

 In 1962, President John F. Kennedy said, "We will send a man to the moon and bring him home safely by the end of the decade."

 "We choose to go to the moon," he said, "not because it's easy, but because it is hard."

Sure, we were in competition with the Russians, but Kennedy also invoked the pioneer spirit of Americans, emphasizing that we choose our destiny rather than have it chosen for us.

 The engineers, scientists, and mathematicians didn't know how to do what Kennedy requested. But they set out to do it.

 And they did.

 So, dear ones, if there is a space within objects that looks empty but is not, let's fill it with good stuff. That we heal this pandemic, that the world's people see that we are stewards of the planet, not takers from it, and that "Swirled Peas" do exist.

 Here’s what Obi thinks of my blog.