We have experienced a sort of intermission in our torrid summer, though temperatures are by no means cold or even cool. Instead it has been more cloudy, so the sun cannot beat down and lift temperatures above ninety (32 Celsius). Instead daily high temperatures have often been down around seventy-five (24 Celsius). However, even as temperatures dropped fifteen degrees, the dew-points often remained high. Rather than hot and humid it has been warm, wet, but not downright dank. In fact it seemed weird. At this latitude fog is not suppose to be warm.

In a sense (to me at least) it felt right that the weather seems odd. This summer’s weather has been like the start of one of Shakespeare’s plays, where an ominous mood is set by the night-watch talking about a multitude of strange omens, such as a blood red moon, that they have witnessed, and, sniffing the midnight airs, they display the human habit of making forecasts, just as weathermen do now. Weather is like the mood music of a movie. We live in odd times befitting odd weather.

Some suggest that the weather does not control our moods, but rather that we control the weather. This possibility has always seemed like a recipe for disaster (to me), because people can’t agree about much of anything, and if we tried to control the weather it would be a fiasco. The Baptist Church would be praying for a sunny day for their picnic, as the Methodist Church prayed for rain on their garden, and the clash between the conflicting prayers would brew up a tornado.

Which reminds me; there was a “tornado watch” around a week ago that came to nothing; (I think I mentioned in a past post that the big storms only developed hundreds of miles away, and we didn’t even get a sprinkle of rain). However the “tornado watch” did make parents worry, and their anxiety trickled down to the small children at my Childcare, who stood still (for once), and furrowed their brows like pundits, and spoke of a “tornado watch” without a clue what a tornado was. What does a four-year-old know about tornadoes? Especially when they live far from where tornadoes are normally seen? But they did know they should be worried. I had to seek a remedy for their fretfulness.

I asked them, “A tomato watch? Are you sure? Or was it a potato watch?” They looked at each other, unsure.

I continued, “Those potatoes really hurt when they bonk you on the head, KAPOW! But tomatoes aren’t so bad. They just go SQUISH and dribble red goo all down your hair past your ears and onto your shoulders.” I pantomimed a tomato doing this, and the children dissolved with laughter.

I had achieved my goal. They were not worried any more.

However, as a further aside, I will mention two things. First, the success of my jokes feeds no great desire within me to seek the cheers of adult crowds on adult stages. (Maybe a slight desire, but not a great one.) The roaring of fickle fans (who could turn on you tomorrow) could never match the simple and sweet adulation I receive from merry four-year-olds.

Second, I will mention that, even as I reduce certain subjects to absurdity, and refuse to take myself too seriously, certain priests and politicians are deadly earnest about the subject of controlling the weather. Besides Global Warming true-believers, this also includes some clerics in Iran who wield great political power. They are quite certain not only the weather, but even earthquakes, are a response to how we behave. They have publicly stated, when calamities have befallen other lands, that the calamity is due to other land’s sins.

I sure hope they are wrong. Such clerics only postulate their theory when bad weather and terrible earthquakes hit other lands, but such a theory is not a one-way-street, and would also apply to Iran. And, if their theory is correct, the poor people of Iran (in my view) will soon suffer a force eight earthquake, for those clerics have not sung songs of joy, but have been makers of much misery. Perhaps the only reason Iran has been spared an earthquake (according to their cleric’s theory), is because Iranians have already suffered so much, under the leadership of idiotic Imams who feel they can use a holier-than-thou hypocrisy to shed much blood.

Consider, for example, the stupidity and slaughter of the Iran-Iraq war. First the Iranian clerics basically destroyed one of the five strongest armies in the world by executing most of Iran’s officers, and also many skilled soldiers who had been “trained in America”, and then, having decimated their own army, they picked a fight with the “Sunni” Saddam Hussein, attempting to get “Shia” Muslims in Iraq to join their revolution, whereupon Saddam, seeing the weakness of Iran’s army, sought to invade and make “Arab” parts of Iran different from the “Persian” parts, by absorbing them into his nation. Both sides miscalculated how weak the other side was, and the resultant gory stalemate cost both sides roughly a half million lives apiece. Hussein’s use of poison gas was horrific, but Iran’s contribution to insanity were its “human wave” attacks, which they resorted to because they lacked the skill of their purged generals, and which utilized young teens and even boys to clear Iraq’s minefields.

The journalist Robin Wright was in Iran at that time, and wrote:

During the Fateh offensive in February 1987, I toured the southwest front on the Iranian side and saw scores of boys, aged anywhere from nine to sixteen, who said with staggering and seemingly genuine enthusiasm that they had volunteered to become martyrs. Regular army troops, [and] the paramilitary Revolutionary Guards, and mullahs all lauded these youths, known as baseeji [Basij], for having played the most dangerous role in breaking through Iraqi lines. They had led the way, running over fields of mines to clear the ground for the Iranian ground assault. Wearing white headbands to signify the embracing of death, and shouting “Shaheed shaheed” (Martyr, martyr) they literally blew their way into heaven. Their numbers were never disclosed. But a walk through the residential suburbs of Iranian cities provided a clue. Window after window, block after block, displayed black-bordered photographs of teenage or preteen youths.

It amazes me that I have been watching this Iranian insanity for 46 years now. As I sit in the oppressive humidity of this summer of our discontent, I remember Carter was president and I was a young man in my twenties. The Vietnam War was at long last over and I felt we were embarking on the Age of Aquarius, shining with Truth, Love and Understanding, when I first heard Iranians chant like robots, “Death to America.” It astonished me. Death to me? What did I ever do to you? Now they are still chanting like robots, “Death to America”, and I still am astonished. What did I ever do to you?

When I look backwards in time, it seems like I’ve actually been friendly towards Iranians. My dad, as a surgeon at a prestigious Boston hospital, taught young visiting surgeons from foreign lands, including Iran, and I briefly befriended some of their sons, and later my father traveled to Iran to teach the surgeons there. One day the young surgeons decided to play a joke on him.

My father was famous for one particular operation where he was part of a wonderful team which reattached an arm to a boy who lost his arm playing on the train tracks. Knowing this, the young Iranian surgeons came rushing up to my father and asked him if he’d help them with a “reattachment.” He said he’d do his best, was ushered into the next room, where he was confronted by a “patient” who had recently had his head chopped off by the Shah.

Ha ha ha. Brutal lands have brutal humor.

In California in 1985 I met a group of Iranian student-protesters who had helped depose the Shah only to face the insanity of the Imams. Many of their fellow protesters had been hung, some for the crime of handing out pamphlets. They were now refugees, still protesting, but far from home, and they all looked aged beyond their years. They were trying to make sense of it all, but it is hard to make sense of what is senseless, or to be wise about ignorance.

My own opinion at that time was that the Imams were trying to reform society with a club. I firmly believed (and still believe) that you cannot legislate spirituality. You must use persuasion, even if no one seems to listen.

The odd thing was that I had become a little bit like an Imam in my own life, at that point. I had gone from believing drugs should be legalized to feeling they were very bad, and had moved from feeling promiscuity made me like James Bond to feeling it made me a fool. But it never occurred to me that I should behead people who had not yet seen what I saw. I must persuade. If I was going to be brutal with anyone, it should be myself. Charity begins at home, and so does reform. Before I preached that my enemies must stop hating me I must set the example and love my enemies.

The Imams in power in Iran seemingly never saw what I saw, and instead they have made misery after misery after misery for nearly half a century. Where is the earthquake that they should have earned, by now?

Actually what recently killed the president of Iran was “fog.” According to official news, that was what caused his helicopter to hit the mountain. Therefore, (to return to what I was talking about,) if you subscribe to the idea humans can influence the weather and earthquakes, and that bad weather and horrific earthquakes are the result of human misbehavior, then you must admit there was some sort of misbehavior on the part of the Iranian president which caused the fog that abruptly ended his life.

So then, what might have the president of Iran have been doing to deserve the rebuke of death? Here is my theory, which I have dreamed up while sweltering.

When Mohammad graced the earth there were two powers much stronger than the Arabs involved in an extended conflict. They were the Christian Byzantines and the Zoroastrian Persians. They fought each other for decades until they were exhausted and weak, which allowed the Arabs to march right in and take over.

While I am ignorant about the levels of corruption among Zoroastrians in Persia, back then, it is fairly clear the Byzantines were not practicing Christianity as Jesus intended. In fact the word “Byzantine” can be synonymous with corruption, deviousness, and surreptitious behavior. Such a rotten and perverted form of Christianity didn’t stand a chance before a far clearer vision of Truth, but this is not to say Mohammad disrespected Jesus.

In like manner, Mohammad did not disrespect Moses. Apparently he even stated that any Arab who did not follow the Torah was not a true believer.

In fact, though Islam overthrew the corrupted with ease, they retained some level of respect for Christians and Jews (and perhaps Zoroastrians) who were not corrupted.

This was especially true of one Jewish tribe who fought alongside the Arabs, back in those early days of Arab expansion. This tribe was eventually awarded lands to settle in, and those lands became a place where Arabs and Jews lived together in friendship, century after century. It was called Azerbaijan. And, 1300 years later, when Azerbaijan declared its independence from the Soviet Union, Israel immediately recognized them, and developed a friendship which armed Azerbaijan in its unfortunate fight with Armenia, as Azerbaijan supplied Israel with more than half of it’s oil.

Of course the leadership of Iran could not approve of such a friendship between Arabs and Jews continuing. Some want Jews erased from the face of the earth altogether, (though I don’t think Mohammad ever commanded that). And therefore the president of Iran traveled to Azerbaijan to encourage the destruction of friendship.

Apparently, whether you want to control the weather or control the world, destroying friendships is not pleasing to the Creator, because the president of Iran never made it home from Azerbaijan to Tehran. A fog bank arose, and smote him.

Of course the fog of war is also involved, and, because Iran has made it so deadly clear to Israel that it is dedicated to destroying Israel, Israel is very aware it is fighting for its life. Therefore, if you are of a suspicious nature, (as I have become), it seems a striking “coincidence” that, when the leader of Iran attempts to corrupt one of the better friendships Israel has with the Arab world, then, immediately after the leader of Iran has a meeting with the leader of Azerbaijan, his helicopter has a meeting with a mountain.

Besides corrupting Israel’s friendship with Azerbaijan, Iran’s current leaders have sought (and seek) to corrupt Israel’s friendship with the United States, through corrupting our political processes, and (in part) creating the “swamp.” Iran’s Imams have felt no qualms about dirtying our democracy, for it identifies the United States as being “Great Satan,” and to destroy the United States was, and remains, Iran’s goal. However irony stepped in (in my opinion).

In their eagerness to live in End Times and be the heroes in the Battle of Armageddon, it did not occur to these Imams that, in making so much misery, they might be making hell happen, and therefore be playing the role of Satan themselves. (While Armageddon does not appear in the Koran, (that I’ve seen, though I am no scholar), in Islamic oral tradition it is called “Al-Malhamat Al-Kubra”, and the bad-guy [IE Satan] is called “Al-Masih ad-Dajjal”. According to those oral traditions Satan appears from the east of Arabia [IE Iran][IE the Imans of Iran are “Al-Masih ad-Dajjal”). (I rest my case.)

It is not good to think too deeply about such stuff when dew points are above 70. The brain becomes too feverish. One clicks on the news, hears how insane the world has become, and has the strange sense one is in the midst of one of those bad dreams you have when your temperature hits 103.5.

But I am running a Childcare, and it will not do to depress the little children. However, as I am off duty at the moment, I will confess that my Childcare sometimes feels like the last place on earth where life is still like it was 46 years ago: The last place that holds the naive concept that “Love, Peace, and Understanding” is an actual Power.

Yet once upon a time I really did feel my protests had ended the Vietnam War, and that we were about to embark upon a beautiful “Age of Aquarius.”

When I look back on what I was like, all those years ago, I shake my head. In many ways I couldn’t even imagine being bad, back then, and therefore couldn’t imagine others being as bad as they have become. I was a hopeless optimist. What a rude awakening my lifetime has been! Where I once thought I could blithely explain how nice life would be if people were nice, and convert wickedness to niceness, I have since learned some think being nice is for losers. I have learned this over and over and over again. I’ve responded by working late nights developing painstaking counter-arguments, but have only earned blank looks. Some people are deaf and blind to simple niceness, and instead become dedicated to being something which is not nice, called evil.

I think my rude awakening began when I first heard “Death To America” chanted 46 years ago, and it has simply developed, like the spooky music of a classical symphony heading towards a crashing crescendo, but, where a symphony is over and done with in an hour, this has gone on and on and on and on for tedious decades, until now a force eight earthquake seems likely.

To some degree it hurts my feelings that people don’t want to be nice. A child-like part of myself wants to sniffle like the three-year-olds I tend to at to my Childcare, and to protest, “They aren’t being nice!” Surely that is laughable to wicked people. However even the most wicked Imams have some concept of supernatural forces, when they state bad behavior can cause earthquakes. Therefore maybe they should not laugh.

Perhaps the saddest betrayal of nice people occurred when the people of Israel were kind to the Arabs of Gaza. They moved out of that land and gave it to them, and gave them all sorts of assistance, hoping the Arabs might create a beautiful enclave on the coast of the Mediterranean.

After all, look at Monaco. As the smallest nation in the world (excluding Vatican City) at less than a square mile, it is by no means poor. Or look at what Lebanon was once like, before civil war destroyed it. The world could be so nice, if only people were nice. And many Israeli were nice to the people of Gaza, offering them jobs just across the border and dealing with them on a daily basis, hoping niceness might spread like an infectious disease.

It didn’t. Although the Israeli abutting Gaza might have thought their kindness might convince the men of Gaza that Jews were nice, there is not a single tale of the men of Gaza being nice, in return, to Jews, on October 7. Instead there was an expression of hatred beyond the ability of most to imagine; a hatred carefully nourished for 46 years, a hatred honed to a razor’s sharpness, slashing even little children, relishing pain, making pain as painful as possible to parents and children alike, and filming it, and bragging about it. Seldom has hatred, when utterly ungoverned, been so carefully documented, which seems a sort of proof how demented the perpetrators were, and how their leaders had convinced them that being beasts was “good”.

To me this seems a perfect demonstration of how a movement aimed at ending corruption can become more corrupted than the corruption it originally intended to end, when it first began. Surely the Imams of Iran were only aiming to avoid the corrupting influences of “western society” and the oppression of the Shah, when they first started their “revolution”, and never intended to become monsters. Surely they did not start out intending to cozy up with communists who oppress the Moslem in China, or with corrupt swamp-politicians like the Clinton’s, the Biden’s, or He-whose-name-is-mud. But now the Imam’s names are mud, for they are more associated with evil than with the simple, good people they murder. As Moslem in China suffer, the Imam cozy up with the communists. They deserve a force eight earthquake.

At some point one needs to meet violence with violence, even if one believes in pacifism. One can “turn the other cheek” even to the point of being crucified, if it is your own cheek you are turning. But if woman and children are being attacked, to stand by and do nothing is the pacifism of a coward. At some point you need to stand up and be strong.

It seems we are at that point. The nation of Israel is definitely at that point, and the United States may be soon to follow, though we haven’t yet been as savagely offended as the Israeli were on October 7. Perhaps it will take a terrorist attack by thousands of illegal aliens in a hundred American cities to wake us up.

Or perhaps that is just the heat and humidity addling my brain. It sure has been a hot summer in these hills. Even when it isn’t hot, the humidity wilts you. I have seen wisps of fog forming when it is seventy-five degrees, which means the dew point is also seventy-five degrees. That is normal if you live down in America’s south, perhaps in Atlanta, Georgia. Folk down there are acclimatized to such oppression, but up in our hills we struggle to walk to the mailbox for our mail.

Usually at this time of year my family rents an air-B-and-B by the sea or a lake, and we enjoy a reunion, but this year, due to “Bidinflation”, we decided to just have the reunion at my house, which is not all that large, and to make it a base-camp, and to drive to the sea and to lakes, returning to cramped quarters at twilight.

Cramped quarters were noisy, but inexpensive. I have five children, their husbands and wives, fourteen grandchildren, and some friends who are included as family. Some of the work involved, making such a cramped gathering possible, stressed me out, but it never occurred to me that such effort wasn’t worth it.

Nor did the heat and humidity, and surplus of heavy, tropical rain showers, seem to keep anyone from going to the beach in warm rains, boating in warm rains, fishing in warm rains, feasting in warm rains, and being garrulous in warm rains. Family was family. And it was beautiful, (or, at least, was beautiful in the eyes of an old man like myself.)

And, at my age, that is the best I can do to fight back. That is my middle finger to the Imams of Iran. To the Imams I say, “In your seething hate you may wish to slaughter innocents, but the innocents fight back with Truth, Love and Understanding, even after 46 years”.

However I hope you notice I am still talking to the Imams. Maybe I am a silly old man in a corner of obscurity, but I still attempt to persuade Imams that you cannot legislate spirituality. You cannot make mankind more spiritual by killing. Rather you should seek to make men thirst. Show them something so beautiful that they renounce their cumbersome past.

Looking back, one very beautiful part of my life involved me being poor, with five little children, and being a “landscaper” for a collection of rich old ladies, whom my wife joked were “my harem”. Though they were rich and I was not, never for an instant did it ever occur to me I should murder my customers, as the Arab landscapers did to the neighboring Israeli by Gaza.

Not that I wasn’t a bit radical, in my own way. I recall making up songs and singing them as I walked behind my cheap, secondhand mower, and one went something like:

I'm a lawn mowing man.
I make the noise pollution.
I just do what I can
And await the revolution.

I'm mowing all this grass
'Cause I've got to earn my pay
Using up the gas
And never making hay.
Hay could feed some sheep
Which could feed and clothe the poor.
It makes me want to weep.
What's all my mowing for?

I'm a lawn mowing man...

You will please notice my song criticizes my own self for my own hypocrisy, and not my customers. Not once did I consider shooting them. At my most militant I did tell my old lady customers I was a hypocrite, and should cut grass to feed sheep, rather than mow it for mulch and money, because many of the ladies liked my zany opinions, and would offer me afternoon tea on their verandas, and we would sit and chat about everything from Shakespeare to burping babies. Rather than hate, I came to admire them as they told me the tales of the lives they had led, though I felt my own life was superior. Superior? Of course. They were lonely old ladies, while I had the chaos of five kids at home. My life was animated, while theirs seemed a sad wasteland, where tea with a sweaty, young gardener was a big deal. So, if anyone was going to shoot a gun at anyone else for being “exploitive”, it should have been the old ladies shooting me. But (as far as I know) such a thought never entered their minds either. Instead we had, for roughly fifteen years, a lovely time.

When I think of why those times were so happy I think it had to do with the simple acceptance of the cards fate had doled out. Call it karma if you will, but it’s God who cuts the cards, and no use whining about what you are dealt. Might as well make the best of it, whether you are Arab or Persian, Shia or Sunni, Protestant or Catholic or Jew. If we start shooting each other over differences there will be seven billion wars, for we all have different fingerprints.

But now those ladies are distant figures waving at me from the mists of my past, and now I’m the oldster attempting to draw the young into conversations, or just sitting back and chuckling as I watch life promenade past. Life is so nice, if you don’t shoot people.

I have never been to a Trump rally, but from afar they do seem to involve nice people being nice to each other. While Trump’s criticism of the “swamp” and “globalists” can be caustic, a careful examination of his words exposes no sign of him urging of the crowd to shoot their neighbors. The weapon to be used is the vote. The reformation is to be peaceful. The most violent chant is, “lock them up”, (which is, after all, what criminals deserve and have earned). There is no chant of “Death to Hilary”, or “Death to Biden”, or death to anyone else, for that matter. Therefore the crowd does not deserve a force eight earthquake, and may in fact have deserved the “coincidence” of Trump turning to gesture just as the assassin pulled the trigger, and the bullet just barely missing his skull.

If you are of a suspicious nature (as I have become) one does not think the young man who attempting to shoot Trump was a “lone gunman”. Instead one suspects Iran was in some way involved, despite a complete lack of evidence. Nor does it seem mere “coincidence” that immediately after this attempted assassination there was a counterattack right in Tehran, and a leader of Hamas was assassinated right in his own bedroom. There is a mysterious “lack of evidence” involving that incident as well, with some saying a bomb was hidden in the bedroom, but Iran insisting their security allowed no such lapse, and the explosion was caused by a very small missile. So all remains conjecture, in the fog of war, in the heat and humidity of a summer full of murk. My imagination tends to be overactive even without all these stimuli, and sometimes I just want to run away to a garden.

My garden was much smaller this summer, and yet I still found it too much for me, in the sweltering heat. In my case aging has been like falling off a cliff. My COPD has me huffing and puffing over ridiculously simple tasks. I find this annoying because my former way of handling my anxiety over the crazy behavior of world leaders was to drown myself in work. It’s hard to worry when hoeing a row of beans. But now I have to sit back and face worry, which must be defeated, as worry is a terrible waste of time and energy.

When I can’t face the world I face the clouds.

The clouds represent a world free of propaganda, free of Fake News, and indeed free of all the backstabbing skullduggery of politics. The clouds are what they are: Truth pure and simple, yet also wondrously complex. They involve a complexity you can never really figure out, (the way you can figure out the art of driving a car so well that you can do it without thinking). ( A robot could do it.) Instead the deeper you look the farther you see, and majesty gives way to majesty, and wonder to wonder. It is not chaos, for it is perfectly and intricately ordered, but it contains so many variables it overwhelms our puny minds, leading to despair if you seek control, but awe if you are free to be a slave to the Creator. In terms of worldly intelligence, it might be best to simply call the swirling over our heads “multiple variables”, and hope that creates the impression we grasp what we don’t grasp. But…

But there is something so lovely about the heavens that we, in a sense, fall in love, and there is something about love that seeks to understand the beloved. And so it is we are entrapped. We are caught up in an enchantment and drawn ever deeper into beauty. The clumsy theories we produce as we are enchanted are like a child’s love-poems to their parents; they are inadequate, but the best we can manage.

I have lived long enough to witness some very big changes in how scientists view various subjects. When I was very young “Continental Drift” had not been accepted as a valid theory, and geologists felt mountains were raised because the cooling earth was shrinking, and its skin was wrinkling like the skin of a withering apple. I got to see the excitement of a new idea being accepted, as evidence for “Continental Drift” became available.

In like manner I feel the meteorological community is on the verge of a great shift in how weather patterns are envisioned. When I was young the way weather was mapped involved seeing air-masses and low pressure systems as simplistic entities. For example, the maps of my boyhood had high pressure systems with labels; I can’t recall the exact system, but something like “PoP” would abbreviate “Polar Pacific”, and indicate the air within that high pressure system originated from the north Pacific, and therefore would be different from air labeled “PoC”, which stood for “Polar Continental”. Though useful in its way, weathermen soon observed air-masses were altered as they shifted, and no two “PoP” air-masses were quite the same, and so they sought a better way to map the weather. The advent of satellites greatly improved the vision without improving the maps. Increasingly meteorologists became aware of differing layers of the atmosphere, and of vertical interactions as well as horizontal ones. Now we have satellites which increasingly see the atmosphere in a 3D manner, and have computers which can take tremendous amounts of data and portray it in a visual 3D manner which, in an embryonic form, is like a new sort of weather map.

I wish I had thirty years more to live, so I could watch what the young meteorologists make of this increased understanding. I get an inkling by going onto the web and clicking to various local offices, and avoiding the “forecast” in favor of the “forecast discussion.” It is there one is free of all the claptrap about “Global Warming”, (for the “forecast discussion” is too short-term to involve politics).

Instead one sees young minds daring to try to figure out Infinity. If you frequent a local office for long you get the sense the young minds at that office have differing and sometimes conflicting theories, and if you wander from station to station you become aware of a small army of young minds, which are all hard at work. I really do think they (and we) may be on the verge of major revelations, but also fear they may be silenced. Our world may be falling backwards. Some “Green New Deal” proposals are downright destructive, and the maintenance of our technological advances may fail, and satellites fall from the sky, and become a mere legends from the past, mere lore which a staggered humanity, reduced to pastoral lifestyles, will talk about like we discuss flying carpets, or Atlantis, (Or Moses, or Jesus, or Mohamed.)

But even if we are rescued from that doom, and progress continues and major discoveries are thankfully made, they too are merely a child’s poem to a parent. The deeper mankind looks the farther it will see, but you can’t ever get your arms around Infinity. Truth is too vast to be “figured out”, and I think the hopeful arrogance of many young scientists tends to give way to the humbleness of old geezers like myself. What both scientists and poets tend to “figure out” is that we all face Something beyond comprehension.

But don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Infinity is offended when we try to figure It out. Actually I think God sort of likes it when we scrutinize Him, rather than gratifying our desires and pretending life has no purpose beyond lust, and lust for power.

But that is exactly where the Imams of Iran seem to utterly screw things up, (in my opinion.) They started out trying to turn people to God, (or at least to a by-rote semblance of worshiping God like robots), but they get too caught up in the wish to overpower the people they wish to convert. Overpowering involves power politics, which corrupts saints into Stalins, or at least Gollums.

One knows one is astray when rather than converting people one kills them.

When I look to the heavens and am humbled I sense the omnipotence of Truth. Truth is Lord of lords and King of kings; Knowledge so knowing that It knows all minds and all hearts; Power so creative it not only created this universe, but an infinite number of parallel universes; and so timeless that It created time itself. What are we in comparison? We are smaller than dust, but Truth is also infinite Love, capable of loving specks smaller than dust, and knowing each one by name.

The Koran over and over and over stresses the compassion of God. That is why the Imams are so sure God so cares for the good that He will whack those who hurt the good, with storms and earthquakes. But they made a big mistake when they, smaller than dust, decided they should help God whack those who hurt the good. They made mistakes, even hanging a teen aged girl who refused to wear a veil and who handed out pamphlets. Would a compassionate Father have done that?

Don’t ask me. I cannot be called any sort of an authority on the Koran. I am just a curious layman, a dabbler. But there was an Iranian cleric who was a recognized scholar of the Koran, the best of the best, who pleaded with the leadership of Iran not to do what they were doing, and not to lead their nation the ways it has gone. He was for a while second in command, and in line to succeed the ruler, but he threw all such worldly gain away by opposing the leader, not with any sort of brute force, but with mere gentle words. For example, he dared say mothers with children should not be hung for handing out pamphlets. (He also said, “”Unfortunately, it is only by name that the [Iranian] revolution remains Islamic. Its content has changed, and what is taking place in the name of Islam gives a bad image of the religion. This is the religion of kindness and tolerance.” His name was Hussein-Ali Montazeri, and his life is well worth a bit of study, if you have the time. (He makes it a little easier for me to love my enemies.)

The simple fact of the matter is that Truth is as true in Iran as it is anywhere else, and every land has its people who try to speak the truth. It is so sad when they are not heard, but some listeners have a strange wax in their ears. Where Beethoven made otherworldly music even though deaf, others are so utterly tone deaf they take the music in the clouds, and all around them, and sing it in such an out-of-tune manner that it shatters glass.

What a ridiculous joke these arrogant people can be, strutting about like puffed up fops, sneering down haughty noses at the true spokesmen for churches and temples and mosques, even mocking Truth, and claiming they have all the power.

And indeed they do clutch a sort of facsimile of power.

When I gaze at the clouds I know they are deluded. Their powers are melting even as we watch; their idea of order is increasingly confused and doubtful; we need not do worse than what they are doing to themselves.

So why worry?

But I confess I do worry. I see too many innocent bystanders crushed by the cruelty and heedless hate of the powerful, and don’t want to be crushed myself, and especially don’t want my children and grandchildren to be crushed. I am not like those crazy Iranian youths who ran over the Iraqi mines. I don’t want to be a martyr.

I suppose this reveals a selfishness in me. Not that I have ever tried to hide it. When young I wrote an atrocious poem which stated something along these lines:

I do want to see
Stuff be profounder
But don't want to be
A martyred meat-grounder;
I want the glee
Of a farter arounder.

What did I mean by a “farter arounder”? I suppose it is a youthful form of lounging, more frenetic than lounging is with elders. “Farting arounding” is the freedom to have some time off, and be free to just have fun, “Horsing around”.

One aspect of the Childcare I run involves the idea children are too regulated, too scheduled, with soccer practices and ballet practices and curricula of every sort, and are never allowed to just goof off and play, and be free to learn.

I like to take the kids fishing, and show them the fun of hooking a four pound bass, but I’ve noticed they are not always in the mood for that “curriculum.” Sometimes they just want to throw rocks into the water, which scares the fish and ruins the fishing. While I do inform them of this consequence, I am open to the idea of abandoning fishing, and then show then how to twirl rocks as you throw them, so that the rocks skip over the surface. Suddenly we are not fishing, but instead are skipping stones. My “curriculum” is flexible, because we had best be able to flex, in a world that is constantly changing.

Of course there are some horrified by any movement beyond the given “curriculum”. Rules are rules. The fury of the Imam (or “Karens”) will be faced, if you dare disobey, yet youth tests limits.

I am of the opinion that when we think we “know it all” we are sadly misinformed. In actual fact we are smaller than specks of dust, compared to to being one with the truly all-knowing (omniscient) Truth. Therefore God, in His omniscience and in His compassion, has to gently inform us we are mistaken. Whereupon we, humbled, no longer exist in a know-it-all state of authority and power, but instead goof off and live as “farter arounders.” The Beatles captured something of this state of mind with these words,

Two of us riding nowhere,
Spending someone's
Hard earned pay;
You and me Sunday driving
Not arriving
On our way back home.

Where are we going, when we are “on our way back home”? We are unsure, but the road is beautiful. And the goal is not here, where we are.

In other words, our worldly “home” is not a static place. It is on the move, on its way to an otherworldly “home”. Traditional values are not stagnation when “home” and “family values” are seen in this light. Like the shells of snails and turtles, such shelters are on the move. It is communists who haven’t changed since 1848, and who regard all change as “counterrevolution”, and it is the clerics of Iran who are horrified by change, as are the so-called “progressives” of the United States. If truth be known, actual progress threatens them. They cling to a musty status quo,

One sad thing I’ve noticed about the orthodox people who think they “know it all” and “have it made” is that they are always on the defensive. They are forever backpedaling. They fail to understand we are only passing through this world. They need to protect their position and power. They own a fancy car, but never do more than sit in it. What good is a fancy car if it never takes you to a place where you can get out and leave the fancy car behind? The fact of the matter is that, though they have a fancy car, they get left behind by the poor, who get to where one “gets ahead” by walking, or even by “farting arounding.”

What I seem to be glimpsing is that we are about to witness those in power stunned and humbled by the powerless. It makes no sense. How can the powerless overpower the powerful? It can only be because they have God on their side.

Don’t ask me to explain it. Ask God. My meager intelligence can only see that which opposes my faith: I see that honest work, even in fables, is rewarded. The hard-working ant prospers as the grasshopper shivers. The speedy hare slumbers, and loses the race to the plodding tortoise. There is no fable I know of where the hard-working lose to the “farter arounder.”

But the humble will inherit the earth, as the arrogant “gnash their teeth and rend their garments.”

Not that I am all that humble. Age is making me humble against my will. I huff and puff just stacking twenty logs of firewood. I used to think nothing of stacking hundreds, and worked laughing at the Arabs withholding oil, because I didn’t need to heat with their stupid oil. Now I’m not so tough.

I haven’t become humble because I chose to be such a gracious thing. I’m brought to such a state with an arm twisted behind my back, kicking and screaming. But it is not Iran, or the “Swamp”, doing this to me. It is the Creator, and that makes all the difference.

The leaders of Iran are no different than I am. They too are getting old. They too are being brought to a humbled position with an arm twisted behind their backs, kicking and screaming.

I have a sense we are witnessing something that glorifies God, and that we should not mind it even if the food vanishes from the grocery stores, and we all go hungry for a while, in the process. We’re on our way home.

Rather than worry, I am going to attempt to just sit back and watch the weather of my old age. Midst the murk of this summer, as much odd stuff is occurring in the clouds as can be found in the rumors from the world’s capitals.

For various reasons it has taken me two weeks to peck out this post on my laptop, and all the while the weather has been a mood music, highlighting life. So far it has been nice music, for all the storms have missed my little town. We have dodged bullets like Trump did. Both Hurricanes Beryl and Debby brought flooding rains north that just missed us, to our west…

…And Ernesto now looks like it will just miss us, out to sea to our east.

The tropical air has also brewed all sorts of thunderstorm complexes that also just miss us, or else “collapse” and turn into light rain, with mild-mannered sky-thunder, as they approach us. According to the theory of Iranian clerics, I am not being punished because I am not guilty of a great deal of sin. But I’m not so sure I am all that innocent. (I won’t go into details.) And just like that my eyes are dropping from the clouds.

For it is easy to criticize others from afar. Distance allows one to make sense of chaos; even the fury of Ernesto becomes a harmonious pirouette.

But Ernesto did hesitate, as it was first steered by a preceding upper air trof, and then was handed off to the following trof which now accelerates it away to the northeast. As it hesitated it was like it was considering a northwest turn. And, if you study maps of the past, you see some hurricanes did accelerate northwest and clobber New Hampshire.

In 1954 Carol flattened the trees on many nearby hilltops, and you can still see signs in the woods, even after 70 years, for though the logs have rotted there are green stripes of moss on the forest floor where they once lay, and piles of dirt and stones where their roots were torn up and tilted. There are even some deformed trees that were tilted as saplings, and now survive as 75 or 80-year-old trees that grow at a slant for ten feet, and only then become vertical. It is as if the woods remember, and whisper of wildness few now remember, as they build houses high up on hills, for the spectacular views, unaware Carol blasted their lot with gusts over a hundred.

When I was young I wanted to see a repeat of such wildness, for I was strong and could make good money with my chainsaw cleaning up the mess, but now such a storm would be pure punishment, and I’m wary of the tropical weather and murk. The hurricane that is so harmonious when viewed from space is sheer chaos when you’re in the midst of it.

And in like manner the problems of others are much easier to dissect than the chaos at home. It is easy to criticize the evil in Iran, and harder to face evils that effects your own homeland, especially when it is evil signs your paycheck.

For example, our government-funded school-lunch program is overseen by the same people who once amassed a fortune selling cigarettes, and, just as smoking was not good for the health of my parents or myself, the food modern children eat has led to an alarming increase in childhood diabetes. But evil sacrifices the well-being of others for a buck. So other lands can look at us and see Satan stalking our streets like a roaring lion, just as we see the same on their streets.

So down, down, down comes my thinking from the heavens to the sod. What can I do? I am but a single raindrop in a drought.

Lord, what can I do? Even at my best
I am but a single raindrop in a drought.
This world is so thirsty it cannot rest
And walks a parched desert with no way out.
It's You who bring rains that water flowers
Or scour evil with punishing floods.
It's You who turn drips into showers.
It's You who open blooms from shriveled buds.
Alone I'm a dot; a speck of no account,
But if I'm part of You I'm something great.
Teach me to be Yours, and to surmount
The thorny hedge that separates with hate.
Though I am but a drip, You have the power
To let love reign. Show us that finest hour.