I Have to Face It

 “Life is what happens while you are making other plans.” –John Lennon, “Beautiful Boy”

 

And look at what a sweet potato contributed to our plant basket. It’s growing no matter what.

 

 I have something new to think about regarding the Star Wars Trilogy.

 Star Wars writer George Lucas made “The Force” a household phrase.

 And it has presented the idea that some people are born with more of it than others.

 And it can be inherited.

 Well, well, well, that leaves some of us poor peons out, doesn’t it?

 

In speaking with a teenager, I noticed that they believed in a “Dark Side,” as if darkness were a tangible entity.

 

Darkness is the absence of light.

When you enter a dark room, you turn on the light switch.

 When you turn it off, it is dark.

 There is no dark switch.

The sun emits light. It is a source of light. It creates light within itself through a series of atomic reactions that generate heat and, consequently, light. Most of what we call stars are suns. The planets are reflective bodies. (How can that be? A barren piece of dirt lights up? It beats me.) And we’ve seen pictures of the Earth glowing as seen from outer space.

 Move away from the sun, and it gets colder and dimmer until it is cold and dark.

 Hold up a mirror and you can reflect light. Light reflects on water and metal objects. If a cloud obscures the sun, it appears to darken it, but it doesn’t put out the light; the light is shining behind it.

 After we discovered we could move electrons along a wire (electricity), we could attach a light bulb to the end of it and have light. (Thomas Edison discovered 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb, until he finally hit on the idea—a wire whose electrons were dancing, excited, moving, would glow. It was hot. Heat puts out light.  (It was more complicated than that. He had to encase it in a glassed-in vacuum.)

I had to go into the house and ask my husband about electricity, and when we tried to reverse engineer it, we ended up with FIRE.

 Fire gave humans a way to light up the world. Energy. Heat. Light. That glowing ember would warm us, cook our food, and light the cave.

 Learn how to make fire, or a way to carry it away from a forest fire.

Find substances that would burn and can be contained. Ah ha, a torch. A Candle.

Remember, there is no dark switch.

 It is only the absence of light.

 

We use the metaphor of light and dark to represent good and evil.

 

The Force are words taken from The Source, which is in all of us.

 1.     Yesterday, a precious friend lost her life to Pancreatic cancer. She was a “Soul sister.” I miss her already.

      2. Today, I ventured into Internet territory, and bumped into another lost hero—Jane Goodall passed away today, October 1, 2025. I have followed that lady’s career ever since she was a young woman who had the dedication and fortitude necessary for the anthropologist David Leaky to take a chance on a young secretary and send her into the jungle to study chimpanzees. She changed how we define human beings, who were once described, among other things, as tool users. Well, Ms. Goodall discovered that so are chimpanzees. 

 

    Through her field observations and books, Jane Goodall became a legend.

 

 

3.  “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life of the electric vehicle tax credit.”Gone now:  Up to $4,000 off electric and hybrid vehicles.

 I wanted a little electric car my husband and I could bop around town in, but opted to have the pickup repaired instead. Now I have lost the chance for that reduction in the sale price.

 However, this past year, our daughter and I bought a hybrid after our car croaked.  

 “Former President Joe Biden, in 2022, as part of the Inflation Reduction Act, for the duration of its three-year life, the electric vehicle tax credit eased the financial burden for manufacturers and consumers as Americans embarked on the transition from fossil fuel-dependent cars to the more climate-friendly electric option.”— Ece Yildirim, Published September 30, 2025.

 

There is light shining behind the darkest cloud.

"Twould Be More Fun..."

“Twould Be More Fun…to Go by Air…but We Couldn’t Put …These Signs up There--Burma Shave.”

 

Remember those? 

 

As you drove along the highway, usually on long strips of isolated roads laden with sagebrush, you would come upon a little sign…then another...and another followed by “Burma Shave.”

 

We kids loved to see them—we would read one aloud, wait for the next one--maybe an eighth of a mile down the road—read it and the next until the punch line, and laugh as the last sign, “Burma Shave,” rolled by.

 

The above sign quote was from Charles Kuralt’s book, A Life on the Road. It took me back to Sunday mornings when I sat mesmerized in front of the Television, watching Kuwalt sitting in a chair, no props, simply a chair, where he spun out tales of small-town America.

 

For twenty years, Kuwalt roamed the back-roads of America and gave America back to Americans on the CBS Sunday morning TV show On the Road with Charles Kuwalt. 

 

How I envied his job.

 

And then we moved to San Diego, where John Sinor wrote folksy essays, similar to Kuwalts for the San Diego Union-Tribune. I envied his job too. His tagline was “Every day problems of everyday people,” 

 

“A tough-looking but harmless lizard adds to our annual dessert hike. For a moment, I thought I was looking into a mirror.”—John Sinor.

 

As it turned out, although we didn’t know it, we bought a house right next to his. We were on the edge of a canyon, so nobody was on the other side of our property. However, I never took the chance to become acquainted with him--too bad. 

 

I remember his story about the little white deer who roamed Presidio Park in San Diego. No one knew what happened to her mate, but she, a lone deer, would, on misty mornings, give happen-chance viewers a belief in magic. I never saw her and didn’t know she existed until I read Sinor’s column where City officials worrying about her safety as she would sometimes be seen on the road, decided to move her to safer territory. Someone shot her with a tranquilizer gun and used too much tranquilizer.

 

Bambi all over again.

 

And now I think about those signs, the physical ones alongside the road that made us laugh, the inspiring writers who made us want to create something of value, and last night another sign came up-- about the spiritual nature of we, the people.

 

I got a glimpse into how the universe works. 

 

Our lives are made of bits and pieces, signs, showing us the way. 

 

Look what we have been through, little biological bodies carrying a soul we didn’t know we had for a long while. We had an inkling but couldn’t quite get it. We went into psychology, physiology, and anatomy to get a picture of what we were about. All the while trying to eke out a living while also trying to make sense of this complex condition called life. We muddled through—the good, bad, and ugly--but if bad was all we were, we probably wouldn’t be here today.

 

Remember what Steven Pressfield said about cleaning the way so the Muse doesn’t soil her gown on the way in?

 

She doesn’t always come, but she sometimes does, and often after years of labor. (It takes enormous sweeping to clean our emotional/spiritual house or years of wandering in the wilderness before bumping into the giant Sequoia.)

 

Many a creative has felt the Muse’s effects, a formula that presented itself whole and complete, an answer to an equation that made itself known, a writer who read over his material and said, “Who wrote that?” 

 

These sorts of events often happen after you have swept your house. 

 

Burma Shave went out of business in 1963. Change happens. They sold to Remington.

 

Change happens with the signs too.

 

Last night I watched Nanci L Danison speak of her death experience and felt that lady was spot on.

 

She added more signs into the link of signs—how we are biological animals of the earth with an eternal Soul, how we’re had God all wrong by believing in a Patriarchal being who lives outside us and is kind and compassionate on the one hand, and doles out punishment on the other—demanding sacrifice, admiration, and who sends people out to kill and do atrocious things. And would send his creations to eternal punishment, for heaven’s sake. 

 

We are afraid to stand up to that whatever, for fear of death and eternal damnation. 

 

On the other hand, some say, “God is Love,”

 

Love, smove, you say, it doesn’t feel like it.”

 

“I’m both enamored with and terrified by Jesus’ audacious ethic,” writes Barney Wiget, vagabond preacher. “His Sermon contains some of the most fetching words ever spoken and, at the same time, the most unachievable to live under human steam. Love your enemies, do something good for the person cursing you, and do it without telling anyone you did it seems pretty out of reach to me!” 

 

The biologist in me liked that Nanci Danison said, “We are all animals.”

 

The spiritual person in me liked that she said we are souls, a part of the God being, 

a part of The Source. She sees the two, the biological entity and the soul, as separate.

 

I have hesitated to go to this place, for I know everyone has their belief system, and we want to respect that. So? What am I afraid of? Just say it. The last sign might say, “The Source in Within You.”

 

I have come through Catholicism, Protestantism, Atheism, Unitarianism, Science of the Mindism, and the Law of Attractionism, to a new understanding. Most all isms carry a sign, a piece of the lineup that tells the joke, but crash into the others before completing the run. 

 

Nothing has changed my mind from ancient beliefs that God is too big for us to understand. For example, I’ve read that some Native Africans say God does not live in a Church, but in the forest and the fields and on the mountain when the rains come.” 

 

My model is that God is like the ocean, and we are the drops in it. We are all a part of the whole.

 

But that model is my need to have a visual picture, something to explain the unexplainable. Scientists are now studying consciousness, which is probably another aspect of Source by a different name. We are getting pieces and signs and slowly piecing them together. 

 

Another explanation is that God exploded himself into all souls. With our human bodies, we are the little antennas, like neurons from God, feeding back to The Source. In this manner, Spirit knows what it feels like to be flesh and boney creatures, to love and be loved, to bring forth offspring, to find our spark of creativity, and to look in awe at His paradise. 

 

Maybe when it said in the Bible to worship God, it meant more like “Look out in wonder, and appreciate it.”

 

If we thought we were all in this together, we would act differently. The biological entity looks out for itself, for its nature is to survive. The spiritual entity has another agenda.

 

“I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.”
— John Steinbeck, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1962