May the ocean of my life flow into the sea of love that is the Lord ...

Consolidated all Long Beach material on new site

I found that I could improve the quality of my videos by setting up a new site with wide parameters. The videos are running larger and their full width is not compromised.

Also, I have added some still photos that I shot on Cape Disappointment at Long Beach June 16. The west side woodlands of Washington State are magnificent, as you will note from the photos.

The URL for the new site titled, "Sights, sounds of Long Beach, Washington" is:

http://longbeachsightssounds.blogspot.com/

Sorry it took me so long to get all of my Long Beach trip material up.

D. Grant Haynes

Dandelion patrols out en masse

Two dandelion escapees with seed and a third that has already released seed (horror of horrors), ensuring continued disgusting dandelion presence for another spring! (Photo by D. Grant Haynes)

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Well, my neighbors, as well as management of the apartment building where I reside, are into their "kill every stinking dandelion in Washington State" mode at this time, as every spring.

The grounds where I live have already been "treated" and thousands of dandelions are wilting and dying at this time.

And my neighbors each patrol their lawns in the afternoon, trigger finger cocked on a herbicide gun, ready to zap any dandelion that dares to rear its illegitimate, unwelcome, disgraceful head on their manicured lawn.

Why do people hate dandelions so much?

Dandelions offer cheerful yellow flowers early in the spring when lesser herbs linger in the cold ground.

And dandelions grace the landscape with their fluffy, sun catching, graceful seed heads when the bloom has performed its essential role.

And besides, dandelion greens are thought to be a delicacy by some. Did you ever hear of zoysiagrass greens?

I like dandelions and I enjoy their presence in my world.

I believe men in this farming region of North America, especially, despise any plant that they can't control completely and bend to their wills--most especially a plant that, in addition to being ornery, doesn't represent a cash crop for them.

I see more herbicides applied here than anywhere I have ever lived. A few people back home used to pull up or hoe out what they considered to be weeds. But not the wheat farmers of Washington State and their kin. They do not bend their waists to eliminate any weed. They spray it with a herbicide, the residual effect of which will last for years.

And who should wonder that the ground water here is dangerously polluted with agricultural chemicals or that old folks are dropping as flies now that crop spraying is going at full tilt again?

Dandelions refuse to be tamed and domesticated. Dandelions refuse to give up. Dandelions do not ask anything of men--no fertilizer, no watering, no cultivation. And they grow in a wide variety of terrains, soils, biomes, and climates. A friend in Moscow, Russia, sent photos of downtown Moscow recently and darned if there weren't dandelions growing in cracks in the sidewalk there even!

So, here's to dandelions! May they long prosper and continue to confound controlling men who believe themselves to be masters of all there is on the face of the Earth.

There'll always be one more wild dandelion to challenge them!

D. Grant Haynes

Any man's death diminishes all men

Why did Obama's chest beating gestures about "gittin'" Osama bin Laden leave me cold?

Why did the hair on the back of my neck not rise, and why did I not stand and sing the Star Spangled Banner after Obama's statement May 1?

Because, in my opinion, destruction of a human life is always an undesirable solution.

I cannot gloat over Osama bin Laden's death, as do millions of Americans at this time. While I seek to avoid judging them and their motives, I am, quite obviously, in a differing place, spiritually and philosophically, than are they.

English metaphysical poet John Doone wrote, "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

I agree with Doone.

D. Grant Haynes

The darkling beetle saga--Part 2

D. Grant Haynes with darkling beetle

In early January when all was frozen outside and the days were frightfully short, I shared with you, my readers and browsers, the story of a darkling beetle (Eleodes spp.) that had emerged from somewhere and entered my warm apartment. The little fellow had paced back and forth for three days and nights when I became aware he would dehydrate and die soon if I did not take some action.

As related previously, I set up a small terrarium on my kitchen floor and sought to make the darkling beetle happy. I knew nothing about the care and feeding of the tiny creature. He, obviously, knew nothing about the large entity that was offering him aid and comfort, rather than squashing or spraying him.

We learned much about one another over the next weeks and months.

Now, more than three months after offering safe haven to one beetle that would have frozen in January's cold, I have six darkling beetles. No, there has been no multiplication of the species here. Rather, other darkling beetle wayfarers have emerged from the woodwork of the apartment from time to time. I have introduced each to the original boarder and they seem to have all gotten along well.

One of the beetles was found outside my door early on a particularly cold March morning. He appeared to be close to expiration. I assume the cold, or possibly some residual pesticide from management's determined spraying of each threshold last summer, had affected him. He could move nothing but his antennae when placed with the others. I expected to find him dead by the next day, but to my surprise, he gradually recovered!

I came to appreciate these harmless little vegetarian creatures more when I observed the healthy ones come and sit quietly by their ailing brother day after day. I cannot know what was communicated nor what healing touch or energy they conveyed, but it apparently worked.

I realized darkling beetles are capable of the rudiments of compassion and other soul qualities men in their arrogance may think are reserved for themselves.

I had read that darkling beetles eat decaying plant material. Not knowing what else to do, I introduced them to mulch from under conifers in my yard and changed the mulch every week or so. They survived on whatever they found in it for over two months. But recently, on impulse, I placed a small bit or raw broccoli (a leaf) in their enclosure. I learned that they love broccoli! Within minutes, they were lined up as tiny pigs at a trough, each munching on the broccoli. They receive a ration of several bits of broccoli daily now.

How long must this continue? When will I put them outside and, in doing so, turn them back to God, Love, the Universal Spirit, from which we all emanate and in whose merciful arms we all ultimately reside? Soon, I hope. I would have expected them to have been liberated long before the third week of April. But the winter has been a severe one in Eastern Washington and the nights are still dropping below freezing quite often.

I am anxious to release these harmless creatures so they can do "beetle" things during the brief summer they are allocated as a life form indigenous to Washington State. I hope to do so by May 1.

My visitants have taught me much and I am grateful to have known them.

D. Grant Haynes
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Update:

I released my seven little darkling beetle charges today, May 19. I had never intended to keep them so long, but cold nights persisted well into the present month. And they had appeared to be comfortable and at peace in my care.

Still and all, they deserved to be free to do beetle stuff during the brief Pacific Northwest summer about to begin in earnest.

I released the beetles far from human habitation with its pesticides, herbicides and lawn mowers.

I made a brief video of their departure--something I may seek to incorporate into a comprehensive statement about my philosophical underpinnings and my long-held belief in the sanctity of all life forms.

D. Grant Haynes

Francesca should have opened that door!

(What follows is a movie review I wrote on Amazon.com in 2002 concerning the film adaptation of Robert James Waller's book, "The Bridges of Madison County". My review was named one of the top seven for the movie out of hundreds some years later. -- DGH)

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I viewed Hollywood's adaptation of Robert James Waller's "The Bridges of Madison County" last evening. I had seen the film initially some years ago and regarded it as much ado about nothing for the most part at that time.

But I was struck in this new viewing more than before by the universality of Francesca Johnson's dilemma. Perhaps maturation and recent life experiences have generated a heightened understanding and awareness on my part.

Robert Kinkaid possessed a few of the qualities that have both inspired and dogged me during my middle years.

He was a rootless writer and photographer, as well as a keen and cynical observer of the human condition. Kinkaid had been far and done much. He had seen and experienced multiple facets of life and love and possessed limitless anecdotal knowledge of the world. He offered much to Francesca in terms of sensitivity, understanding, appreciation of beauty and companionship that she would never find on an Iowa farm.

But Kinkaid lacked Middle America's major indicators of success and worthiness--roots sunk deeply in one geographic location, a home and real estate, and most importantly, a traditional Cleaver family mind set.

Francesca reluctantly opted for the Cleaver family syndrome, choosing security and safety over fascination, inspiration and love. She lived out her years with a boring Iowa pig farmer, remaining a lonely and empty woman with nothing but tattered memories of her brief encounter with Kinkaid.

Had I been writing the screenplay, I would have had her fling open that truck door and dash through the rain storm to head west with Robert Kinkaid.

For better or worse, that's the impulsive sort of decision that has governed my life more often than not.

But such actions and those who take them do not comfort the psyche of Middle America's puritanical heartland.

Though they know better from their own experiences and those of others, the majority of Americans--middle class protestant ones especially--prefer to keep their heads safely in the sand about life and the human condition, pretending still in a little house on the prairie dream world that probably never was--one that most certainly doesn't exist now.

All is well in this delusional world of make believe--one that's filled with Little League games, soccer moms, church suppers and PTO meetings. Marriage and family are still the rocks of civilization and the ostriches are "saved" and bound for Heaven. Their president, George W. Bush, is a worthy man with a commission from their God to root out homosexuality, abortion and Islam.

In my opinion, such as they dwell in the outer limits of utter darkness, living and dying without a clue about the past, the present, or the future. They're not living--they're merely existing in a state of perpetual denial, awaiting the flat line and the rude awakening that will likely follow.

Thoreau wrote, "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is termed resignation is confirmed desperation."

Francesca Johnson completed her life journey in this condition of quiet desperation. I think that's a damned shame. I wanted more for her. I wanted her to go with Robert Kinkaid and seek a few years of happiness and joy while they each had the time and opportunity.

D. Grant Haynes

The Sheeple

The people have spoken, goddamn them. -- Mo Udall

Chapter 2

This brief section in which I decry the apparent collective stupidity of the American electorate in giving George W. Bush fresh mandates to continue his madness at home and in the Middle East in 2002 and again in 2004 is the one segment above all others that my fainter-hearted friends have advised me against including in this volume. “You will only alienate readers and cause them to close your book by publishing such ire and rancor”, I have been advised. Perhaps so in some cases, though I hope not. But I do not seek to win a popularity contest anyway.

No record of the Bush administration-induced anguish that has dominated my thinking and emotions for the last six years would be complete without an honest expression of what I felt at moments of greatest despair and disgust during these terrible years. I am not dishonest enough to omit these statements. Or, alternatively, I am foolhearty enough to include them.

Americans could have rebuffed Bush in the 2002 mid-term elections, but they didn’t. This was inexplicable and unforgivable, I thought. My statements at the time reflected those sentiments.

And after the presidential election of 2004 when blindered Americans had voted Bush into office still again, thereby expanding his mandate to drag our nation ever deeper into the worst domestic and international malaise since the Great Depression, at least, I was, frankly, livid.

At that point Bush had established an indisputable track record of lies and double dealing about Iraq.

At that point he had expanded his unrelenting plutocratic attack on the middle class of America with more tax breaks for the wealthy, diminution of welfare funding, and relaxation of environmental laws to favor his fat cat contributors from the energy and other sectors.

Nothing had gone well since his appointment as president in December 2000, but here we were four years later facing four more years of the hell he had already put us through.

This, because Americans had not displayed enough collective intelligence to kick the bums out in the 2004 election. Rather, too many Americans were still crouching in dark corners expecting the Bush administration to protect them from “terrists” from without when, in truth, Bush and his cabal were the worst terrorist in America and in the world at the time. Or so I felt and wrote.

The tide is finally turning in the spring of 2007. Bush has few friends on either side of the congressional aisle and the most lethargic American couch potatoes are willing, finally, to listen to criticism of their president.

The corporate media whores are even finding a voice and daring to speak out after years of cutting Bush slack and presenting White House press releases as the gospel.

But it’s too little and it’s too late. The darkness from which our nation and the world must recover in the post-Bush years will linger for decades. It did not have to be so.

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Excesses of blind patriotism annoying, dangerous

November 17, 2001

Dear Post-911 Flag-Waving Fellow Americans:

After reading your newspapers--after listening to your corporate media's propagandistic version of the so-called "War Against Terrorism" now under way in Afghanistan--after seeing your flag-decked SUVs with the Pisces emblems on the one side and National Rifle Association stickers on the other--after enduring this national adrenalin rush daily for the past two months--I have concluded that you are, by and large, a shallow, callous, insular, naively manipulable and infinitely self-righteous lot.

You are dangerously intoxicated at this time with a virulent strain of myopic ethnocentrism approaching Third Reich fanaticism--one that is most unattractive to the quiet minority here who can't in good conscience join your sloganeered, bumper-stickered, anthem-singing, flag-flapping, Arab-hating hysteria.

You are riding the crest of a wave of blind arrogance, egocentric hedonism and aggressive nationalism that cannot last--one that will inevitably lead to a cataclysmic fall in time.

I do not know how these things will evolve. I am no prophet or seer. But of this I am reasonably certain. You will be--you must be--humbled. Karmic laws are inexorable, inescapable and universal. America is ripe for a humbling as the 21st Century begins.

I do not wish this to be the case. I live here, as have my forebears for at least six generations. I have children and grandchildren who will suffer when the collapse occurs. But I see this national adjustment as inevitable.

You as a people are not better than--you do not deserve more of everything than--any other group on the planet.

You do not possess an inherent right to abuse--to show utter disregard for--other human cultures and groups, as well as every other species with which you share this tiny blue orb.

You do not possess an inherent right to destroy the very Earth that has nurtured you with your outsized contribution to global pollution--one that will bring catastrophic climate changes and sea level alterations within the present century.

You are not so very special and unique as you may imagine, flag-waving Americans. Deity has not singled you out for preferential treatment and predestined dominance. You are merely the current bully on the block--an ephemeral thing at best. Bullies come and go.

In the longer view of history, you will go the way of other civilizations that became overly extended, overly aggressive, overly confident, overly materialistic, and overtly abusive toward all that did not embrace unflinchingly their narrowly defined interests and values.

I have thought often during recent days of Thomas Jefferson's remark regarding the institution of slavery--a gathering storm in his time.

He said, "... I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

Indeed, I tremble today for my country because I know my fellows are on a course that cannot end well.