Pieces of churchless string too short to save

Many years ago, in that far-off time when local newspapers were much more vibrant and successful than they are now, our town's paper, the Salem Statesman Journal, had a column written by someone who occasionally started his piece with "pieces of string too short to save."

Meaning, he was going to mention a bunch of unrelated things in his column that day, each of which was interesting, but didn't merit taking up the entire column. Today I figured I'd dust that saying off and do my blog post imitation of it, otherwise known as three-dot writing.

…Yesterday I heard from someone who asked me why I wanted to get the copyright for Life is Fair back from Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB), the India-based spiritual group that I wrote the book for. The question surprised me. He'd heard about this from other members of RSSB. I just replied to him.

I’ve never asked for any changes to the Life is Fair copyright. It’s always been in the hands of RSSB. All I did was research and write the book, with help from other volunteers. I have no idea how anyone got the notion that I wanted to take back the copyright, especially since I never had it to begin with. Working on Life is Fair was simply an act of devotion to Charan Singh for me. 

…I'm reading a book that appeared on a New York Times list of best nonfiction books published in 2024,  A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon. Kevin Fedarko, the author, is really talented. Here's a paragraph that caught my eye as I was reading the book in the bathtub last night.

Sooner or later, every difficult journey collides against a moment that crystallizes the imperative of accepting that the outcome of any ambitious undertaking can neither be ordained nor engineered by its participants, and that the heart of an odyssey is reached — and its deeper truths begin to reveal themselves — only after the illusion of control is permitted to fall away and disappear into the gathering night, like a loose pebble over a cliff.

This passage also is amazingly well written.

The sun stood squarely overhead, straddling the canyon's rims, pouring a column of fire directly into the abyss and driving the shadows into the deepest recesses of the rock while causing the cushion of air that hovered just above the surface of the stone to tremble, as if the ground itself were gasping for breath. But the most striking element of all, the detail that could burn a hole in the center of your consciousness, was neither the brilliance nor the ferocity of that heat, but its heft: its thickness and weight as it draped itself over the top of your head and across the blades of your shoulders, as if it were a blanket braided from material that was already in flames when delivered into the hands of its weaver. 

…This morning and yesterday I labored on writing an email to officials at the City of Salem that the Oregon Government Ethics Commission website informed me was a prerequisite for filing a complaint with the commission. In my case, I want to have them find that the Salem Mayor, Julie Hoy, engaged in a prohibited "serial communication" with members of the City Council that led to the City Manager being forced to resign.

The email was necessary to give the City of Salem 21 days to respond to the facts and circumstances of what I consider to be a breach of Oregon's public meeting law. After that, I can file a complaint with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission, either appending the city's response, or telling the commission the city officials never responded. 

It was strangely satisfying to spend several hours writing a difficult email. I wanted to sound reasonable and factual while still conveying a sense of outrage at what the Mayor had done. Standing up for what I think is right often brightens my mood. National politics is far removed from my everyday reality. With local politics, I have a chance of making a difference, even if just a small change. The email became a blog post. If you're into geeky subjects like this one, check out "I just initiated an ethics complaint against the City of Salem."

…A recent issue of New Scientist has an article called "Wearables for the mind: A new wave of monitoring devices claim to improve our mental health, but do they work?" I've tried one of the devices, the Mendi headset, buying it when it was a Kickstarter project a few years ago. After liking the Mendi at first, I then got irritated with it.  

I like the idea of making concentration/meditation more scientific with neurofeedback, but the reality is that these sorts of devices are still in an early stage of usefulness. The person who wrote the article seemed to like the Muse brain-sensing headband the most. I agree with him that getting feedback via sounds is preferable to having to look at a screen, which the Mendi requires, as I prefer to meditate wit my eyes closed.

For now I'm going to stick with good old-fashioned meditation. Just me and my brain, doing our thing (assuming there is any difference between "me" and "my brain," which I suspect there isn't.