Mystery and Illumination and the Women of the United States

 

Has anyone ever seen something like this before?  While walking in Big Rock Garden, I stopped to look at what has appeared to be a dead Japanese maple tree among many thriving Japanese maples.  I keep hoping that it is not dead.  Hoping once again to see signs of life in the tiny tree, I was startled to see a strange motionless insect at the top of it.  It was under an inch in length. 

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Beyond all reason is the mystery of love.

Thaddeus Golas

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Continuing my walk through Big Rock Garden

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If the Women of the United States rather than the Supreme Court were to be the ones to make such a decision through a vote, the majority of women would not vote to overturn Roe vs Wade.   Four male judges and one woman judge are not the appropriate ones to put major governmental restrictions on abortion and yet they have that power.  

My gut feeling is that those Supreme Court judges don't have the power to keep women from having safe affordable abortions.  If Roe vs Wade is overturned, courageous women and men will take great personal risks to make sure that safe abortions continue to be available to all women who choose to have them, whether those women can afford them or not.  

I am remembering my freshman year in college in 1967, when birth control pills were available if a woman told a doctor she was engaged to be married.  At that time, abortions were illegal in the United States.  A woman in my circle of friends became pregnant at the same time she lost her virginity and went to Mexico for a safe but expensive abortion.  We weren't all that far from Mexico but few women could afford that option.

After nearly 50 years of women having safe and affordable abortions, I foresee women continuing to choose to have the safe and affordable abortions that will continue to be available, no matter what the Supreme Court decides.  You may say I'm a dreamer and that's okay.  I'm sickened by this turn of events, among many events that I never thought would come to pass, but I am not without hope for the women and men in generations to come throughout the world.

Sky and flowers / Resisting the plague of the absurd

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Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people are resisting the plague of the absurd.  

The power of love in action

Jacob Lawrence.



From whiskey river:

"We have not overcome our condition, and yet we know it better. We know that we live in contradiction, but we also know that we must refuse this contradiction and do what is needed to reduce it. Our task as humans is to find the few principles that will calm the infinite anguish of free souls. We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But superhuman is the term for tasks we take a long time to accomplish, that's all.

Let us know our aims then, holding fast to the mind, even if force puts on a thoughtful or a comfortable face in order to seduce us. The first thing is not to despair. Let us not listen too much to those who proclaim that the world is at an end. Civilizations do not die so easily, and even if our world were to collapse, it would not have been the first. It is indeed true that we live in tragic times. But too many people confuse tragedy with despair. "Tragedy," D. H. Lawrence said, "ought to be a great kick at misery." This is a healthy and immediately applicable thought. There are many things today deserving such a kick." (Albert Camus)