DEEPLY AWAKE – HERE

I must finish my thought. I have been in a wonderful place all day, into the night, contemplating, holding, exploring, loving such a great light, loosely translated in the way the snow is falling, the woody smell of coffee hanging like a cloud in this little home, the way my nightgown now hangs off my body.

I've been a shuffling magician today, an American gandhi, a bestower of blessing and hope. Everything has felt so golden today, so singularly beautiful, so mysterious. So deep runs my river now. So calm lies the body of my true love. So serene do the objects glow within my field.

I awoke today with the thoughts with which I wish to put myself to sleep.

This morning I was told, understood, breathed into and breathed from an understanding which came once the body flush had passed. I saw me as a big being, a tall being, living on the upper floors of a very large home. I realized that the me who works as a nurse, who struggles to find peace with her family, who stumbles and falls and is in debt and can't seem to keep her house tidy, she has taken refuge with the bigger me for many months. She has let things go, caught up in ecstasy and understanding, remaining, for all these months so deeply awake.

   Having worked in both the non-profit and government sectors most of my lifetime, I have concluded one thing for certain: Government programs are seldom desgined to actually correct the problems they were created to resolve.

Of course they sometimes do resolve the problems, albeit inefficiently. But primarily a program's purpose from the perspective of government bureaucrats is to sustain the need for the government itself and by consequence, the bureaucracy whose very existence depends upon those programs' continuing need for funds. There are countless example I could point to and at one time (before the advent of Google) I would do so again right now. However, I see no point or even a learning advantage to be gained from such an futile exercise for a system which is destined for the dust heap.

Nonetheless, here is one such example that plopped right into my lap the other day and so I thought I'd share it with you. It seems that our tax dollars were used to fund a grant for an experiment at Iowa State University whose results clearly demonstrates that there is hardly any further need, nor continued justification for the use of pesticides and herbicides. So what did our illustrious Department of Agriculture and USDA do with this ground-breaking discovery?  They said: Meh.