James's blog

The last few weeks I've been focusing on the meditation of reflecting on the thought I wake up to. I don't examine it too deeply - I try to avoid the rabbit holes when I can - but I observe it in enough detail to decide whether or not I want it to shape how I feel beyond being grateful I woke up at all. Sometimes it's a thought that I'm glad to carry with me throughout the day and refer back to, sometimes I use it as a way to find the way back to being in the moment when I stray from it as the day passes. This moring was a particularly good awakening.

Apologizing is hard. And I'm not even talking about the "changing the behavior" part of amends, which is one of the most difficult things there is to pull off, mostly because it's so necessary to the process. I'm talking about simply admitting we are wrong and all that we have to set aside to do that. For me personally, the most difficult kind of amends is apologizing to my son when I'm wrong. You'd think it would be easier, based on all we've been through together. Making amends is not brain cancer.

I'm not sure that enough people understand what the Department of the Interior oversees in our government, so I'm going to take it upon myself to explain in the simplest terms possible to illustrate how impactful the appointment of Rep. Deb Haaland to be the Secretary of the Interior is. It didn't exactly come as a shock, but I woke up this morning and the enormity of it is still pounding at me.

I hope you're taking care of yourselves, taking time away from this madness. It can seem overwhelmingly dark and hopeless here, like we're plagued with unforgiveness. We need to forgive ourselves for feeling that, I think, treating our anger/resentment as a child in need of love.

I say this mostly for myself, I hope you understand, though I know if you're reading it you feel at least some of the same things/threats/anger concerns for our future. I'm fully aware that it's the hardest thing for me to do and my rants reflect that.

If "both parties are the same," explain how so many see scandals of the last four years as acceptable and others see the Constitutional crisis.

I’ll never understand how a group of people so willing to close the borders to their country based on their fear of being “invaded” and harmed by "foreigners" would do nothing to prevent a virus from entering as they watched it take over and destroy other countries. They went to the inhumane lengths of separating families, stealing children and caging them as a “deterrent” to those who seek entrance and asylum, but did literally nothing to guard against a virus, an “invisible enemy” as they call it, or even prepare for it as they watched it approach.

My son calls us a lot. When he’s got a few minutes to kill, walking to or from class, on his way to dinner, first thing in the morning, last thing at night. He just calls to say hello and “I love you.” He’s also the only college boy in the history of the world who will hold his dad’s hand walking across campus, too, so…