8/26/2023

JRB,

            Have you sensed the higher power in your life recently. I have had a couple of those magical moments this week & I feel blessed!

On Th, I encountered to-be-neighbors at the Davis Food Co-op. Neither of us shops there often. On the last leg of their journey home from the World Cup, they had decided that they shopping would be preferable to sitting in a traffic jam on I-80. I needed a plant-based, carb-free sugar substitute. As they await the completion of WSWC, they live at their vacation retreat at a clothes optional trailer park in the foothills of the Sierra. They radiate joy. I was so happy to see them & told them our chance meeting was a sign of the higher power. They readily agreed.

            This AM’s magic came after googling, “Quaker yin yang,” & finding “Games of 2 halves,” an article in the G which speaks to my condition. In it Barefoot Doctor(BFD), writes about their experience with “quirk & quake” when they shared their “neo-Taoist spirituality” with  Friends in Birmingham. They “basked in their joyful sobriety, marveled at their open-minded & enlightened attitude to life and relaxed in the oasis of calm in a mad-mad world.”  BFD promotes the idea that we need to balance the extremes within ourselves as we accommodate paradoxes.

            Paradox was on my mind today as I wondered about AI & the fact that it could save humanity by helping us solve the problems of climate change or the robots could take over. China is home to amazingly smart people who could team with us to solve the problems of climate change or their army could overrun us. Burma is home to generous, creative, cheerful people with the courage to speak their truths & to misguided thugs who try to silence them through brute force.

            The Yin/Yang of life is our on-going struggle, as  Mikhail Bulgakov reminds us in  the Master & Margarita, “What would your good do if evil didn’t exist, & what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?”

HYIL,