From Fallout: A Survivor Talks to Incest Offenders (And Others), by moi.

And I am not special, although I still struggle with this. During many years of “keeping the secret” and believing that I had wielded great magnetic power destructively, I did feel special–especially wicked, especially confused in the head. I still feel different from others. It’s a weird mix of feelings, debased and inflated, and is a flip-flop survivors have come to know well. (p 9)

A REPEATING LINE  for d.Verse

repeating line– what’s worth repeating…

Sit up straight!

Don’t talk with your mouth full.

Don’t drag your feet.

Eat all your veggies.

If they weren’t worth repeating

why did we hear them so often?

A repeating line might just a well be

I love to hear you sing.

You’re so gentle with the baby.

Your drawing looks just like us.

I’m so proud of you.

What’s worth repeating?

Food for thought:

What do I  say that’s

worth repeating?

While trying to organize my office I found the following, unfortunately without attribution:

Hatred of evil affects the one who hates. It makes him or her a hateful person, a person who also has absented his self or her self from the light. If you strike without compassion against the darkness,  you yourself enter the darkness.

Later however, I turned to Google and Pinterest and found a similar quote by Alice Harz Sommer:

Hatred eats the soul of the hater, not the hated.

Daily Kos by Jen Hayden

[Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) issues statement re Inauguration]

“Inaugurations are celebratory events, a time to welcome the peaceful transition of power and honor the new administration. On January 20th, I will not be celebrating or honoring an incoming president who rode racism, sexism, xenophobia and bigotry to the White House.

“Donald Trump ran one of the most divisive and prejudiced campaigns in modern history. He began his campaign by insulting Mexican immigrants, pledging to build a wall between the United States and Mexico and then spent a year and a half denigrating communities of color and normalizing bigotry. He called women ‘pigs’, stoked Islamophobia, and attacked a Gold Star family. He mocked a disabled reporter and appealed to people’s worst instincts.  I cannot in good conscience attend an inauguration that would celebrate this divisive approach to governance.

“After the election, many hoped the president-elect would turn toward unifying our country. Instead he has shown us that he will utilize the same tools of division he employed on the campaign trail as our nation’s Commander-in-Chief. We need look no further than the team he is assembling to find signals that the era of Trump will be one of chaos and devastation for our communities.

“The president-elect has named Steve Bannon, a white nationalist as his chief strategist. He has nominated Senator Jeff Sessions to the office of Attorney General, despite his long career of opposition to civil and human rights. And in perhaps the most damning sign of the chaos to come, the president-elect has expedited the process to repeal the Affordable Care Act and make America sick again.”

“To make matters worse, after the intelligence community reported Russian interference in our election, Donald Trump frequently and forcefully defended Vladimir Putin. He insulted senior intelligence officials in order to preserve his reputation and disguise the truth. The American people will never forget that when a foreign government violated our democracy, Donald Trump chose the interests of another nation over our own.

“Donald Trump has proven that his administration will normalize the most extreme fringes of the Republican Party. On Inauguration Day, I will not be celebrating. I will be organizing and preparing for resistance.”

Nothing new to say today

but I still want to play

blogger with you.

You paint my nails

and I’ll paint yours,

and we’ll eat pickled herring; eew!

Nothing new today you  say?

What about Aleppo and Putin

and that red-headed man?

You can’t stop now!  

Well, d’Verse’s Mr. Linky has expired.

I don’t know how to tell the world.

Did you ever read Loren Eisley’s

“The Star Thrower?”  Read it.

HUBRIS

Our heads have grown so big that we

want to one-up nature by climbing

into the creator/evolution’s seat

ourselves.  Half human/half robot?

Adding letters to our DNA?

Our  scarlet petticoat is showing,

discounting  and gambling our precious

humanity and creativity, our  struggle

to  actualize our love, and nurture that

with which we were uniquely born.

Oh power-hungry one in the lab, it

is our lives and our grandchildren’s

that you want to gamble with!  Nurture

nature!  Surely there are sufficient

challenges in  our own back yard.  Crossed

fingers may not work for you, taking all

that we hold dear with you.

What’s the word for having trouble with perspective?  I’m loosey goosey in firm-footed perspective on many (most? All?) things. As a result I tend to be too acquiescent.

Looking back on my life I see that I am a reactor, not an actor.  I have gone with the flow until the flow ends me somewhere else.  Now, at 81 (I know, elsewhere on this blog I have miscounted my own age),  a decision to ACT  is too vulnerable to being discounted as the loosening of my marbles.

Intellect, Instinct or Genes?  Or Randomness? Or something else?

There are so many crossroads in  life!  I have been swept along, usually (always?) without a struggle.  I can see every side of an argument (usually) and can justly be called wishy-washy.  Anger is so far underground that it may  have mouldered away.  I suspect this is a woman issue.  How else to explain away the women who have voted for a man who denigrates, insults and dismisses  them so unashamedly?.

Tears come to my eyes when I think deeply about penguins, whose lives are entirely pre-scripted.  Their lives follow a narrow red carpet laid out before them. Why do I feel sorry for the penguins but not the migratory birds?  Come to think about of it, maybe humans?

I’ve also agreed with the wise ones who encourage us to “go with the flow.”   Ira Progoff says that we’re born with the seed in us of what we have the potential to become, if that isn’t limited or interfered with in some way to prevent our blossoming/becoming.

I apologize for (see, there I go again!)  entangling so many issues here,  but the fact is that they’re already  entangled. Oh, and I forgot, a second problem I struggle with is poor judgment.  That’s much more noticeable to others.  Maybe it’s just my ripe old age that  lets me look back and  notice the zig-zaggy path my life has taken. To tell the truth, I’d not be willing to have another chance to live this particular life because  I’m almost certain I wouldn’t end as well as I have,  despite all the detours, potholes and roadblocks. I’m remarkably content at 81, despite, or maybe because of,  the  narrow misses….

From catapult.co  via Digg

…These were my stated reasons for leaving. What I never said was that I was having a hard time maintaining my optimism around children, that instead of feeling hope when looking into their eager faces, I felt despair at how much we’ve failed them and how little of everything we were leaving for them—how little of the earth, how little joy, how little justice, how little of the things I was telling them every day the world was about. Maybe because I didn’t have any young children of my own, my body rejected a biological imperative to believe in the inevitability of their survival….