Ageless in Spirit: Discussions and interests for our times

 June 25, 2021 This rusted object came alive for us! (Windward Oahu Waimanalo Ditch Trail) I'm reading another series of books by Octavia Butler the Patternist series. If you can accept her premises that there exists humans with special abilities similar to the Marvel characters such as Inhumans or Avengers then your reading about good and evil without nuance so at times I feel I'm in an alien world of dystopian cruelty and chaos.  I juxtapose this with my reactions to some of the current news that describes how were finding out about the capital riots and insurrection attempts, the great lie of Trump which is endorsed by so many people thinking he had the election stolen from him,  The new laws being passed in some of the states to disenfranchise large segments of their population and attempts to stifle free speech by targeting critical race theory as a subversive act which can result in your being fired or even have charges brought against you in Texas and Florida. The ...

 June 13, 2021 Friday 6/11 Rebecca and I had a pleasant luncheon with friends at the Honolulu Museum of Art. Afterwards Rebecca led me into the rooms of here  https://honolulumuseum.org/collection_exhibits/  . Lee Bontecue has a wall art three dimensional piece which drew me in to her world, her minds view, and her humanity.   What do you experience?  To put into words a description of our encounter with this art object is very difficult. The artist has created a world for us with her essences used so I'm captured and feel frightened and curious so all of a sudden there's an entity behind with eyes, a mouth, zipper mouth. A borg creature? the biography of the artist is very interesting and her artistic journey from pieces like this to others created on canvas with an acetylene torch is worth exploring. Artists bring us into experiences and worlds that have meaning but to translate into words is very difficult. There is meaning here and pieces like this can ...

 June 8, 2021 Humans are gullible. We can be fooled and amazed by subterfuge. The science of magic and illusions is alive and well. A sucker is born every day. The world is full of trickery and danger lurks with some bait to bring you in.  What am I writing about? I've written in the past about how we can be fooled by our biological makeup to see things that are not there, to not see things that are there, to remember things that we never experienced and forget things that we know very well. Do you need examples? Weapons of mass destruction, a gorilla costumed person walks in front of us while viewing a basketball game but we do not see him, Trump won the election, and testify to our relatives innocence when abused and raped repeatedly by him.  O.K. you may believe not you misled these ways. Ever buy a free range chicken for your dinner? There is no standard for free range, the vendor is the one making this up and trying to convince you that somehow the chicken is pecking...

June 4, 2021 What is a good definition of a friend? I was reading this morning an article about the use of a virtual reality tool to assist people with PTSD and various anxiety disorders enter into a more "real" virtual reality to desensitize and then also uncover repressed memories of traumatic events in their past. I sent this article on to my granddaughter since she has special training and interests in acting. I was reminded of a course I put together with a friend that I met in Jerusalem in 1979 teaching psychiatric residents to use role playing and acting to interact more effectively with some of their patients. My friend a professor of acting at an east coast university and I enjoyed having our class take on the roles of people with fears, anxiety, traumatic and uncomfortable past experiences revisited in their mind and behaviors well past the events. I can not recall my friends name now since we've lost touch over the years. But I now am aware that he was my frie...