Art

Most people aren't very interested in art because most art isn't very interested in people.

The lens

A photographer has an array of lenses through which to see the world: microscopic, macroscopic, panoramic, soft focus and more. The world looks different through each lens, each lens attempting to capture a piece of reality, each contributing to a search for the whole.

The same is true for each of us. We can choose to see the world through a rosy lens, a dark lens, a hopeful lens, a scientific lens, a feeling lens or a lens of absurdity or more.

One of my favorites is the lens of absurdity, where humanity seems to be at its wacky best.

Jihad

The brutal and inhuman jihad which ISIS is waging against those they consider infidels has caused widespread fear among us. The media help whip this fear into a frenzy. We don't fear being killed in a car accident or in a mall by an angry gunman or in a school by someone who is  mentally ill or in a murder suicide in our own family. Yet any of these latter incidents is more likely to kill us.

There's no glamour for the media in death tolls that slowly accumulate from automobiles, alcohol, suicides, murder-suicides, person-on-person murders, gang violence. These number in the tens of thousands each year.

The religious hatred in radical Islam is only different in degree from the racial hatred of the Aryan Nation or the Ku  Klux Klan or the hatred that is at the root of gang violence or the hatred that drives those who are intolerant of the beliefs or sexual orientation or religion of others. In fact, in some cases these groups dream of restoring turf and dominance as ISIS does by resurrecting a failed past.

Fear can bring a healthy caution. But fear should not be a knee-jerk reaction lacking any measured reason.

Nursing home

Yesterday I spent an entire day with  my 91-year-old dad at the nursing home where he now resides. I had been in nursing homes before, but never for this long. To realize the complexity of all these laundry persons, kitchen persons, therapists, administrators, nurses, aides and maintenance workers doing their jobs simultaneously for all of the residents so rooms are cleaned, resident needs are met, showers are given, meals are served relatively warm, individual personalities are dealt with, corridors are kept unclogged and all the other things I didn't observe.

It was a real help to me to now  know exactly what a day is like for my dad, from wake up to bed time. If we live long enough, we are all likely headed there in one capacity or another. I don't think it's morbid to start to think about his. I suspect that who we are now is who we will be then. Grumpy, still grumpy. Pleasant, still pleasant. Feeling entitled, still feeling entitled. What expectations we have of family now will be the same as we will have then.

I want to prepare myself now. Will I be the lady who hums in her wheelchair all day? The man with the blank face? The resident who greets everyone with her eyes? The one who perseveres?

I don't know. But I do know I was happy I spent this whole day with my dad.

Serendipity

Everybody needs a little serendipity in their lives. So try this.

Take a walk that's aimless.

Have a view of the world that's frameless.

Have a thought that's shameless.

Let the things be nameless.

Hold experiences blameless.

Some new memoirs

Forever Young: How To Never Grow Up, by Justin Bieber, 10 pp., big print

Silicon Valley: My Badass Beauty, by Kim Kardashian, 132 pp. with an appendix of documentation of cosmetic surgeries

An Intimate History of My Penis: And By the Way it is VERY Big, by Donald Trump, 853 pp.

Congressmen of Courage, by John Boehner, 2pp.

Balls and Bullets: The NRA Makes Me Feel Like a Real Man, by Wayne LaPierre, 218 pp.

Stoning, Smiting and Other Ancient Nomadic Rituals: How the Bible Guides My Life, by Ted Cruz,
1072 pp.

2016

As contemporary Westerners, we typically see time as a linear construct. It follows the track from past to present to future. We push back to the beginning of time's line, the Big Bang, and speculate ahead to the future, whose seeds we have already sowed.

Indigenous cultures see time as a cycle and mark it with seasonal reckonings, eternally present ancestors and rituals of renewal and regeneration.

In fact, we actually live a combination of both of these concepts of time. We name it in linear increments and celebrate it with cyclic regularity. For example, imagine yourself as a dot on the rim of the wheel of time's train. As you travel inexorably forward you repeat loop after loop after loop.

This path of time is filled with ups and downs in a geometry of rhythmic beauty.

Best wishes for a 2016 in which these ups and downs are lived with beauty, ever arching forward.
And be sure to enjoy the ride.