A Practice of Gratitude

For the month of November, this cornucopia has been the seasonal banner at our front step. Soon it will be time to put up something suitable for Christmas, but the image of natural abundance in the picture reminds me that I need to make a list of some of the things I am most thankful for.

Back in 1999, I read a small book titled Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach. The premise was simple...too simplistic, some would say. The idea is to become aware of one's blessings, to cherish the present moment and see what one has to be grateful for. Cultivating this practice of gratitude has become my most reliable spiritual discipline, since I tend to falter when it comes to some of the others. And even though the Simple Abundance idea has gone on to become a huge industry, that basic practice of gratitude...finding five things a day that I am thankful for, each day, without duplicating yesterday's list...has sustained me when I have felt overwhelmed by work or commitments, saddened by events beyond my control, discouraged by my own weakness, or just plain tired. If I were to compile a condensed Simple Abundance list for 2006, it might include the following:

• Retirement, and the joy of sleeping in--sometimes.
• Water exercise
• Reading club
• Blogging
  
• Seeing Carnall Hall restored and thriving (see account on Home Stories)
• Walking on the beach in Ft. Myers, Fla.
• Doug's PhD hooding ceremony.
• All of Doug's family and Matt's family and many friends at our house for his graduation picnic in May
• Being able to walk right after arthroscopic knee surgery
• The hum of neighborhood generators through the night during our 5-day storm blackout.
• The kindness of neighbors.
• Hummingbirds at the feeder
• Quilt stamps to put on letters
• Online banking to save postage
  
• Sloppy Poodle kisses from a pup named Sam
• The best neighbor in the world, Barb, to share a driveway with, and her 15-year-old terrier, Barnabas.
  
• All of the Linville sibs and many of their families at the reunion in June
• The World's Largest Ball of Twine is really that.
  
• Highways
• Non-stop flights
  
• high Speed Internet Access, and the means to pay for it.
• The Cardinals win the World Series
• My student newspaper staff takes 2nd in the nation
• A 13-year-old Van keeps truckin'
• Sunlight
• Rain
• Our outdoor and indoor garden
• Christmas Cacti blooming two months early
• 250 Trick or Treaters on Halloween
  
• Passing the Peace on Sundays at Compton Heights
• Norm
• Life, here and now, every day.
  

Armistice, Veterans, Peace

November 11, 1918-- Armistice Day. The truce that ended World War I, or as it was known in that long-ago time, the War to End All Wars. Down through the years, the date has become a federal holiday, and now is known as Veterans Day, to honor all those who have served in all of the armed services in any of America's Wars since WWI. The photo is of Kansas City's striking Peace Memorial, recently renovated and re-opened to the public. It has a new museum underneath. Originally known as "the War Memorial," it was built to commemorate WWI. At some point, Kansas Citians renamed it to honor the 20th Century's quest for peace instead.

At at time when our nation is caught between a rock and a hard place in Iraq, it might be a good time to pause and think about the sacrifices of those WWI doughboys who went to Europe and endured unimaginable wounds, mustard gas, and worse. Every time America has to go to war, personally I would hope that the exercise would leave the world a better place, in addition to securing greater security for our nation and a better climate for peace. They say that only 12 to 15 veterans of WWI are still alive, and most of them are over 100 years old. Veterans of WWII are dwindling, too. My dad, whose draft notice appeared in the mailbox the same morning I was born in 1943, has been dead for 17 years now. When I sorted through his keepsakes I found his Army field manual and several medals for expert marksmanship. An old knee injury from high school football kept him out of the Infantry, and a field surgeon sent him home to my mother and me just before his outfit left to attack Rommel in North Africa. Because he didn't see combat, he wasn't a veteran, but he was proud of his service. If he were alive today, he would be watching the televised news reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and probably would say something to the equivalent of "what are they thinking?" in regard to the political leadership, and he would be supporting the troops in their impossible mission. I can do no less than that.

What if there were a Reconciliation Commission for Iraq? The mission there today has become stabilizing the nation so that the Iraqi government can function without being overwhelmed by various factions, including insurgents and warring religious and ethnic sects. The situation might be better handled if the troops could be augmented by a proactive effort to begin to heal the wounds in that country, an effort led by the Iraqis themselves. After apartheid was ended in South Africa, a Reconciliation Commission investigated the various imprisonments and wrongs that took place and helped people find solutions that didn't involve civil warfare. Would something similar work for Iraq? Is anyone willing to try some genuine peace-keeping in addition to maintaining a security force? On this Veterans Day, former Armistice Day of the war to end all wars, it's worth a thought.

Election Day Thoughts

Yesterday I tried to write an Election Day post, but the upload feature wasn't working. Probably all those bloggers out there hogging the bandwidth! This photo is of a St. Louis landmark, the Old Courthouse. It was a working federal courthouse throughout the 19th Century and into the 20th. The slave Dred Scott lost an appeal for his freedom before the United States Circuit Court meeting in this building in 1854. A 25-year-old Hungarian immigrant named Joseph Pulitzer bought a newspaper in a bankruptcy sale on the steps of this courthouse in 1878, and merged it with another one he owned to found the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Now we all know that the Dred Scott decision was ultimately superseded by President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and the ratification in 1865 of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. And earlier this year, the Pulitzer family sold the Post-Dispatch to another publishing group. My point: even the great moments of history don't last forever.

I like the clean, classic lines of The Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis because it reminds me of the somewhat classical ideals on which our country was founded: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, a rule of law, an abhorrence of dictatorship or monarchy, equal justice for all. And regularly we hold elections to choose our representatives to carry out these ideals. Since my first election in 1964 (which is the only time I ever voted absentee) I have missed only one opportunity to vote wherever I have lived. Often I find myself on the losing side (I start out in blue states and they turn red, seemingly overnight, after I move there) but I have never subscribed to the cynical theory that my vote doesn't count. You couldn't keep me home on election day with a flotilla of tanks in the street.

Last night I stayed up to watch the election returns. It was a late night; the victor in Missouri's contested Senate race spoke after 1 a.m., followed by a concession speech from the incumbent. The margin of victory was finally about 3 percent, although at the time Claire McCaskill was declared the winner, only about 25,000 votes separated her from Jim Talent. This is one of those extremely rare years that "my" candidate actually won, but I have to confess I have been following the excitement of the political process since I was about 9 years old.

During the hot summer of 1952 in Oklahoma, I remember the political conventions being broadcast, seemingly gavel-to-gavel, on radio (we didn't have television until I was 14.) I would be sent to bed at the usual time but my parents kept the radio on, and I kept sitting bolt upright in my bed, with the door ajar so I could listen to the speeches and above all, the roll call votes. There was something thrilling about hearing "and the Great State of Illinois....casts its ...votes for...Governor Adlai Stevenson!" Or the chants of "I Like Ike" coming from the Republicans as they nominated the general who promised to "go to Korea" and end that conflict. My childhood diary entries reveal that summer I became hooked on politics and that interest probably foreshadowed my interest in journalism. Many of my acquaintances are suspicious of those network news pundits who sit at what nowadays resembles an aircraft carrier control desk and gleefully track the Red and Blue states. Last night their excitement was probably interpreted as a liberal bias. Some of them are liberal, to be sure. But most of the excitement is from an adrenaline rush of reporting on something that is ever-changing, quick moving, novel and historic all at once.

There is nothing else on earth like an American election, even with all the flaws in our political system that surface from time to time. Yesterday morning I spent an hour in a line to use one of the three brand spanking new working computerized voting machines crammed into our tiny precinct headquarters. It was not yet noon and I was voter number 349 in a village of 1500 souls, not all of them of voting age. Turnout in our county was close to 70 percent. People cared about the propositions on the ballot, especially those to protect stem cell research and to raise the minimum wage. They also cared about their local legislators and the Senate contest.. One woman using a walker was attended by her son, a 50-ish fellow in a gray sweatshirt who talked with us in line. I'm pretty sure he didn't vote the way I did, but I liked being there in line with him, anyway. And he had brought his mother to vote. Another man came in a wheelchair. Young people came on their lunch hours from work. Black and white, old and young, Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and Independents. Americans. As deTocqueville noted: here, the people rule. I can't wait for 2008.