Three Beautiful Things 04-13-2025: Debbie Arrives on Schedule, My *The Fair and the Falls* Saga, Our No Buy Family Dinner

1. Debbie's flight out of Newark this morning was scheduled to depart for Salt Lake City at 4 a.m. our time. 

I put my laptop to sleep when I went to sleep last night and left a Delta Airlines flight status tab open.

I woke up at 5 a.m. to check on the status of Debbie's flight. 

She departed Newark on time! 

I checked her SLC to Spokane (GEG) and it was scheduled to depart on time and arrive just past noon.

Things looked great -- and they stayed that way. 

I picked up Debbie just past noon as scheduled. 

2. Over twenty-five years ago, I was shopping in downtown Eugene for a Christmas gift for Debbie.

I stopped in at J. Michaels Books and stumbled upon a book by Eastern Washington University professor J. William T. Youngs entitled, The Fair and the Falls: Spokane's Expo '74: Transforming an American Environment. 

Debbie is an EWU graduate. She worked at the BLM booth at Expo. We both had strong and deep connections to Spokane. 

I gave her the book for Christmas. 

Well, somewhere, some time, over the next dozen years or so, that book disappeared.

My guess is that it was the victim of one of our ruthless purges, possibly when we moved to Maryland. 

This book sprung back to the front of my mind on our sibling outing Friday to the MAC as I absorbed the photos on display of Spokane in 1899 and at the turn of the century in the museum's fire exhibition. Pictures in that room of the falls and a map of downtown Spokane prompted me to think about how that river area later became essentially a railroad yard and an industrial site and the natural beauty of that whole area, as described in Youngs' book, was (I'd say miraculously) restored as a way of creating the fair site. 

Back home, as thoughts and images of Spokane's history danced in my head, I happened to visit the Auntie's Bookstore website on Saturday and, to my utter surprise and delight, learned Youngs' book,  The Fair and the Falls, has been republished as a paperback after a long period of the hardcover edition being out of print. 

So, on Saturday, I immediately ordered a copy of The Fair and the Falls from Auntie's and today I dropped in and picked it up. 

Then, with over an hour to go before Debbie arrived at the airport, I blasted up to Great Harvest, ordered a strawberry and white chocolate scone and a cup of coffee and admired what a handsome, pretty large, and fascinating book I'd just purchased and began to feel a little giddy about taking it to the Wildhorse Resort to read while relaxing in my room when I'm not spinning reels, roaming around Pendleton, dining out, or joining the fellas at the bar and enjoying a non-alcoholic beer. 

3. This had been a full day by midafternoon. 

But there was more to come! 

Christy hosted family dinner tonight. 

Christy has taken on a sensible project called the No Buy Challenge as a way to take stock of what she already has in her possession (both food and non-food items), to not buy more of things she already has, and to refrain from going on buying stuff just for the sake of buying stuff sprees, however small. 

So, in that spirit, Christy made a plate of appetizers, drawing upon jars of pickled beets, dill pickles, smoked oysters, and other items she had on hand.

For our main dish, she combined chicken, frozen fried rice, canned mushrooms and water chestnuts, plus celery, almonds, and cream of chicken soup from her pantry and icebox into a delicious (and comforting) casserole of her own creation. 

I contributed a green salad and Carol and Paul brought steamed tender stalks of asparagus to compliment the casserole. 

For dessert, Christy made a crushed pineapple dump cake using ingredients she'd purchased in the past. 

As an added bonus, a friend gave Christy a sourdough starter and Christy baked her first ever loaf of sourdough bread and it was really tasty and had, for me, had an especially pleasing texture. 

We talked about a lot of different things, with some, I'd say, special focus on the early bits of news Debbie began to share about her trip to New York and Chicagoland and her report on the very happy weekend in Chicagoland when Misty met her step-siblings, her Uncle Brian, her cousins, and David's widow, Muffie, and members of Muffie's family, all on the occasion of David's daughter Sam's baby shower. 

Three Beautiful Things 04-12-2025: We Are Museum Members, Animal/Natural World Books, Why Leave Today?

1. I enjoyed the scale and the exhibitions so much at the Northwest Museum of Culture and Arts on Friday that today I enrolled Debbie and me as members of the museum.

2. The other day, Debi Mc posted a mountain lion blissing out in a cardboard box and it reminded me of when I read Cougars on a Cliff. I told Debi about that book and how much I've enjoyed the handful of books about animals and the natural world  I've read or listened to  since moving to Kellogg. She wondered if I'd send her a list of those books and I did. 

The Truth About Animals by Lucy Cook

Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller

Salmon, People, and Place: A Biologist's Search for Salmon Recovery, Jim Lichatowich

Fathoms: The World in the Whale, Rebecca Giggs

Grayson, Lynne Cox

Eager: The Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter, Ben Goldfarb

World of Wonders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil 

Cougars on the Cliff, Maurice Hornocker with David Johnson

Soul of an Octopus, Sy Montgomery

3. I thought about cruising over to CdA and doing some shopping at Costco, but I was very comfortable at home with Gibbs and Copper. The NYTimes releases its Sunday crossword puzzle online on Saturday afternoon and I had a salad to make for Sunday's family dinner -- so, I stayed home, worked the puzzle,  made the salad, and decided Costco would most likely still be there in the next couple of days or weeks. 

Three Beautiful Things 04-11-2025: Fire Exhibit at the NW Museum of Arts and Culture, The Stirring Paintings of Andrea Joyce Heimer, Watercolors -- The Cambell House -- Frank's Diner

1. What a day! 

Christy, Carol, and I piled into the RobertsMobile and Carol blasted us to Browne's Addition in Spokane.

Today we enjoyed our next monthly sibling outing. 

Carol was in charge of our April trip and decided we'd go to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture (MAC).

My first impression (and all the rest of them!) was joyously positive. 

MAC is a modest sized, even small museum. 

Granted, I have enjoyed the mammoth museums I've visited over the course of my life whether in London, New York City, Washington, DC, San Francisco, or  elsewhere. 

But, I have a limited museum/art gallery viewing capacity mentally. 

I loved going to the National Gallery in DC, for example, but I always limited myself to visiting, at most, four or five rooms or focused on displays of a single style of art.  

If I tried to take in more than that, I was running on empty. 

Today, my ability to focus and enjoy the museum was spent after visits to two superb exhibitions. 

First, I slowly made my way through "Fire: Rebirth and Resilience", an exploration of the paradox of fire, its life giving qualities, like heat, and its destructive capabilities. 

The exhibition featured recent greedy fires in Washington state in Mabden and Medical Lake, for example.

It also featured multiple displays of the savage fire that ripped through Spokane in 1889. 

2. I reached a point where I couldn't absorb any more fire destruction, photographs, maps, written commentary, and human heroics and left the fire room. 

I then entered the gallery featuring Andrea Joyce Heimer's unusual and unsettling paintings. 

Heimer paints large pictures with long, narrative titles. Her paintings are not naturalistic, not in any way photographic.

Rather, she presents collages of scenes, often from her memories of being raised an orphan in Great Falls, MT, that are a mixture of dreams, fantasies, hopes, and events from her life, combining darkness with humor, all done in overwhelming detail. Sometimes her painting style struck me as prehistoric, like cave drawings, but in color, and each of her works was like looking at visual novel. 

I couldn't begin to take it all in, but the slow survey I did of Heimer's paintings transported me into experiences with life, death, wonder, memories,  and all the thoughts and feelings these experiences called up inside me. 

3. The three of us met up again near the museum's gift shop and strolled a short ways to the Helen South Alexander Gallery in the Cheney Cowles Center to enjoy the Spokane Watercolor Society's National Juried Show of thirty watercolor paintings. 

I'm not positive, but I think what I enjoy most in paintings took shape back in 1975 (fifty years ago!) when I first stood in front of the huge dramatic paintings of J. M. W. Turner in London at an exhibition in either the Tate or the National Gallery focused on his work.

I guess the best way to say it is that I became enamored with subjective paintings, like the French Impressionists, that were less concerned with painting objective portrayals of the world (resembling photographic likeness), but more with the inner experience one has with the outer world. 

It was the impact of Turner's paintings that also made abstract art wondrous to me. 

Watercolors seem to me to be a perfect medium for subjective renderings of subjects, whether still life paintings, landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, or anything else.

In the paintings we viewed today, those painting which were, to me, more dream like, where objects almost seemed to blur into one another, were the ones I enjoyed most. 

Some of the watercolors were more objective, more like photographs, requiring a tremendous amount of skill. The skill astonished me, but the paintings didn't stir me the way the more subjective ones did, where I thought color choices, presentation of scene, and degree of sharpness seemed much more determined by feeling than by objective observation. 

We closed out our visit to MAC by admiring the handsomely preserved Campbell House, built in 1898, for mining magnate Amasa B. Campbell.  One of the Campbell House's architect, Kirtland Cutter,  is well-known in the Inland Northwest for many of his designs, including the Davenport Hotel. In designing the Campbell House, Cutter partnered with Karl Malmgren. As of now, I don't know anything about Malmgren. And, for now, I'm wanting to finish this blog post, not look into the career of Karl Malmgren! Sorry, Karl....

We ended our outing to Spokane at Frank's Diner where I threw all concern about weight loss out of one of the vintage railcar's windows (the diner is housed in a railcar) and ordered a terrific Creole Bay Benedict, a lobster, crab, and hollandaise sauce entree,  with hash browns.  I said YES! when our server asked if I'd like my hash browns with grilled onions and gravy. 

What a fun meal, made a little more saucy by transgressing my weight loss project. 

Three Beautiful Things 04-10-2025: Kidney Appointment, Part 1, Kidney Appointment, Part 2, Acoustic Grateful Dead on *Deadish*

 1. I had an appointment with Dr. Bieber, the kidney doctor I see at Kootenai Health, early this morning. 

He was clearly happy that I was reaching the one year anniversary (May 11) of my transplant and told me things usually get easier after a recipient passes the one year mark. 

I blurted out something that might have sounded stupid, but I said it, "Wow! Things have been so easy so far. That's great news that they could get easier!"

No harm done. 

2. Our conversation then took a slight shift, one that I welcomed. 

Dr. Bieber said something to the effect of this: transplants are a great thing, but we do have do deal with things that suck (his word...I chuckled inside) post-transplant. 

We talked about my blood work and, at this point in time, my numbers do not indicate that I'm becoming diabetic, but kidney transplant recipients have to keep eye on this. I've been told this several times in the past year, including during my pre-op time at Sacred Heart. 

He encouraged me to continue to try to gradually lose weight. I had lost some weight  since the last time I saw him in March and it will help my system defend against diabetes if I continue to shed pounds. 

Then there's the cancer possibility.

I will always live with lowered immunity because of the anti-rejection drugs I take.

Dr. Bieber referred me to a dermatologist. That appointment is coming in two weeks. It'll be an exam to see if any signs of skin cancer are apparent. 

Lastly, it was good news that I'm having my prostate checked annually by my primary care provider and that I'm on a regular colonoscopy schedule. 

As I thought was true, the vast majority of my blood work looked really good, really stable. 

I return to Sacred Heart for a one year exam on May 12.

Back to Dr. Bieber on June 12. 

I am now on a once a month schedule for blood work, but that could always change. 

3. Jeff played a very healthy dose of the Grateful Dead on Deadish tonight. Part of his show featured different cuts from the Dead's April 9, 1970 show at Fillmore West which included a handful of acoustic tunes. 

That acoustic mini-set was purely beautiful, as close to perfectly played and sung

 acoustic music as I've ever heard.

If anyone ever doubted that the Grateful Dead's music has roots in American acoustic folk and blues music, a listen to these songs would surely erase that doubt. 

I don't remember, as I write this, if Jeff played "Viola Lee Blues" on his show (I'll go back and check later), but I know he played acoustic versions of 

Candyman

Friend of the Devil

Deep Elem Blues

Black Peter

It was sublime. 

Three Beautiful Things 04-09-2025: Hey Knucklehead! You Bought One!, Copper Sunning in 2021, Super Salad

1. On Tuesday, I discovered that Gibbs had urinated on our living room rug. I absorbed as much of it as I could with paper towels and I then treated the rug with an anti-urine spray as directed. 

I wished to myself that I still had the little rug cleaning machine we had back in Greenbelt. 

I woke up this morning and suddenly struck my forehead with the bottom of my hand's palm.

I bought one of those very rug cleaning machines back in January! 

I'd totally forgotten. 

And I stored it essentially in plain sight -- it's not hidden behind a door or in some obscure spot. 

So today, I vacuumed the rug and then I got out our recently purchased Bissell Little Green cleaning machine and cleaned that spot again. 

Maybe next time I'll remember that I have just the machine I want and need to clean up such occasional accidents. 

2. In my Facebook memories today, a handful of pictures popped up that Christy took of Copper. I was out of town.  Christy had come over to give Copper and Luna some company. Debbie was in New York and Gibbs was with her. So, Copper and Luna had the run of the entire house back then, in 2021, and I loved remembering the days in 2021, before Gibbs returned to Kellogg with Debbie, when Copper could sun himself, perched on our ottoman, soaking up rays and looking out the living room's picture window. 

3. Tonight for dinner I fried bacon until I could crumble it and put the bits in the last of my most recent huge green salad. I had already added brown rice to the salad. In the bacon grease, I fried three or four chicken tenders, let them cool, and chopped the pieces up, adding the chicken bits to the salad. 

The mixed greens, spinach leaves, apple slices, and various chopped vegetables in the salad, along with the rice, bacon, and chicken were so flavorful that I didn't dress this salad and enjoyed it immensely as was!  

Three Beautiful Things 04-08-2025: Recycling With a Dopey Grin, Led Zeppelin Flash Mob, A Shindig With Oysterband

1. If you read this blog much at all, you know that I find irrational and incomprehensible pleasure in removing cardboard boxes, newspapers, and aluminum cans out of our garage and taking them up the road to the transfer station's recycling area. 

I did that today.

With a dopey grin and a spring in my step, I made our garage a bit tidier. 

PEP. 

Private Eccentric Pleasures. 

2. I was looking up something, I don't remember what, on YouTube this evening and the words "Led Zeppelin Flash Mob" caught my eye and, being the sentimental sap that I am, I remembered that years ago I used to watch this video of a mob, men and women of all ages , slowly gathering in, I think, a German town, and performing an incredibly beautiful rendition of "Stairway to Heaven".  

If you'd like, see if it moves you. I tear up every time listen to it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPHvwzyGwHA&list=RDQPHvwzyGwHA&start_radio=1

3. Well, I was now a YouTube goner for a couple of hours. 

I watched Dire Straits play a stunning live version of "Sultans of Swing".

I watched a band -- maybe a community band -- gather as a flash mob and play a fun and glorious instrumental version of "Bohemian Rhapsody". 

I suddenly discovered that Oysterband made a video of their rocking Celtic polka song "New York Girls" and watched it at least three times.

"New York Girls" is the opening song on Oysterband's riveting album, Ride, so I did what any reasonable person would do at 10:30, with Gibbs on my lap.

I played cuts from the album, remembering what a comfort Oysterband and June Tabor were to me as I listened to their album Freedom and Rain in the hospital as I recovered from my bout with bacterial meningitis in November of 1999. 

Tonight, though, the Oysterband topper for me was their song "Granite Years" from their album Deserters. Its refrain continued to play over and over in my head as I finally pulled myself together, joined Copper, and went to bed for the night:

Say that I was foolish

Say that I was blind

Never say that I got left behind

Three Beautiful Things 04-07-2025: BLOCK THAT METAPHOR!, Late Turnovers Doom Houston, Upheaval and Contentment

1. I miss some of the whimsy I used to enjoy in The New Yorker that the magazine has moved away from. 

One whimsical feature, so small and inconspicuous, tucked in, as I remember, at the end of articles,  that it would be easy to miss, was Block That Metaphor! It featured examples of figurative language and mixed metaphors abuses that appeared in other publications. They were unfailingly funny! 

Today, as I read some writers at The Athletic forecasting how they thought tonight's Florida/Houston game would come out, one writer mixed his metaphors in the following sentence, a sentence that suddenly made me leery about all the blood I've had drawn from my arm since the transplant, suddenly anxious that my mindset might have been drawn out with the blood! 🤣🤣🤣

So, here's the sentence. 

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR! 

Writing about the Houston Cougars, the writer asserted:

"These are grown men with a never-die mindset flowing through their veins."

2. I listened to the Houston/Florida game on the radio and, sadly for the Cougars, some of their never-die mindset must have leaked out of their veins. 

Houston committed four turnovers in the last 1:21 of the game and lost by two points to Florida, 65-63.

3. Maybe I should be somewhat restless. 

I write this because I've been spending the last few days since my Friday blood draw in CdA contentedly staying home, reading, working puzzles, cooking, enjoying Copper and Gibbs, keeping up on current events, and grateful that, for the time being at least, life in the small world of our home, family, friends, and pets is so calm, joyous even --I'm thinking of Debbie's experience with family in Chicago over the weekend and Carol and Paul's enjoyment of their visit to Moscow to see Bucky --while in the big world of government and finances, things are, as I see them, tumultuous, uncertain, uneasy.

Multiple realities are competing for my attention and for how I feel day to day.

I see Copper having curled himself into a ball, asleep at the edge of my small pile of flannel sheets that need laundered, and it helps my perspective to know he's not upset by wars, financial chaos, or even the NCAA basketball tournaments. He's content to be fed, have me shoo Gibbs away when Gibbs scream barks at him, have a clean litter box, and be provided with comfortable places to rest and sleep.

I've been more self-reliant during my days in the house than Copper can be, but, still, he helps keep my mindset balanced.

(My mindset, by the way, that is not flowing through my veins!)

Three Beautiful Things 04-06-2025: Letting Spiritual Variety Sink In, Helping Gibbs Relax, A Weekend of Vegetables in the Wok

1. I didn't start a new book today. I continued to let the stories and the unnerving revelations of Blazing Eye Sees All sink in. Debi Mc's comments on my blog were an affirmation to me of the joys of a wide reaching spiritual life, an openness to various traditions, and being spiritually grounded in particular foundational practices and ageless wisdom. 

2. Gibbs started scream barking and hopping and scratching at windows and then I heard the sound of leaf blowers. 

Ah! Ethan and his workers arrived to give Jane's, Christy's, and our yards a spring cleaning and a first mowing. 

The yard workers were here for quite a while blowing, mowing, and fertilizing -- well, and talking -- all human actions that Gibbs wants to protect me from! 

Luckily, if I simply put Gibbs on a leash, he calms right down, even jumps up and sits on my lap or beside me in a living room chair. 

Copper? 

I think he slept through it all, unfazed by the noise and activity, unbothered by Gibbs' cries of alarm.

3. For the nearly eleven months now that I have been (beautifully) recovering from the kidney transplant, the transplant team's emphasis has been on protein in my diet and I've enjoyed eating fish, beef, pork, and chicken. This weekend, however, I was in the mood for vegetarian meals. I fixed myself some bacon at breakfast today, but I fixed vegetable stir fries for dinners, served with couscous on Saturday and with basmati rice today.

I supplemented these meals with nuts by the handful to up my protein intake.

These stir fries really hit the spot and while I enjoy eating a variety of foods --I'm an omnivore -- I enjoy variety! -- , I have enjoyed the pleasures of vegetarian cooking for over forty years and enjoyed my weekend of cauliflower, broccoli, mushrooms, spinach, celery, yellow squash, green salads, and other vegetables both cooked and raw yesterday and today. 

For me, vegetarian eating is not only delicious, but it's (I'm not exaggerating) profoundly nostalgic and brings back happy memories I treasure, memories of decades in the past and the many times in recent months and years that I've cooked vegetarian meals. 

When I was in my thirties and forties, especially, vegetarian cooking was source of stability, a reliable source of pleasure and calm. Much else in my life was not so stable or very calm, but things were always reliably even keeled in the kitchen with vegetables. 

A  post script. 

Tonight, before I turned back the covers to crawl into bed, I sat up on the bed with Copper for a while and I wanted to go back to 1983, a turbulent and ecstatic year, when I was loving teaching but outside the classroom much of my life was in chaos. 

I wanted to feel some of the elation I felt during that year of my inward life being so polarized, so I went to YouTube and retrieved two different videos of Joan Armatrading singing, "Drop the Pilot". 

That did it. 

Forty plus year old invigoration returned, I beamed and I remembered how I used to fend off guilt and confusion and my deep sense of failure by dancing without inhibition alone in my apartment, often to Joan Armatrading. 

The second video ended. I turned to Copper, pet his welcoming head and spine, and re-entered the world of April, 2025, stretched out under the covers, and, with a hand resting on Copper, let his deep purring put me to comfortable sleep. 

Drop the pilot.

Try my balloon.

Drop   the   monkey

Smell

My

Perfume

ahhh zzzzzzzzz

 

Three Beautiful Things 04-05-2025: Thinking About Deliverance, Sickened by Abuses, My Enriched Spiritual Life

1. When I put down Leah Sottile's book, Blazing Eye Sees All Friday night, I made a firm resolution, as I obeyed Copper's urgent command to roll over and face him, to finish the book on Saturday. 

I checked in on basketball scores, learning that I missed one of the most thrilling finishes ever to a tournament game when Houston roared to 9-0 scoring run with just 42 seconds left to defeat Duke 70-67. I 

I ate. 

I tended to other domestic duties. 

But, I spent most of the day reading. 

Sottile's  book provoked me to think a lot about deliverance. 

I might not have this exactly right, but the words "New Age" don't refer so much to the time we live in, but to a time that is to come, a New Age of harmony, bliss, prosperity, reconciliation, beauty, and other utopian qualities -- a New Age humans can help bring about through attending to the teachings of deceased masters who speak through mediums, channelers, and other prophets -- like the mostly women leaders Sottile profiles. 

Again and again, Sottile told one story after another about individuals who became obsessed with, even manic about, a New Age commune or community/organization with a prominent New Age figure, often through online platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Skype, and other means of direct communication. Many of these people were looking to be delivered from the unhappiness of their lives or from the corruption of the world we live in. The leaders of these collective New Age entities effectively persuade followers with  paranoid conspiracy stories and theories. It's the cabals, the government, Jews, the illuminati, and other key players in these conspiracies that followers must be saved from and in the New Age, they will be vanquished. 

2. Sottile researches and explores the viciousness, greed, abuse, mind control, and exploitation that lies behind the pastel colored veil of universal love of the New Age entities she focuses on. 

It's awful.

It's disheartening. 

It parallels similar abuses in the Christian world.

Egomaniacal leaders in both worlds link their promises and manufactured joy to money, selling merchandise, seminars, and, in the New Age world, elixirs, potions, creams, and spiritual paraphernalia like crystals, candles, and other goods. 

3. I thought a lot today about people I know and others whom I've had conversations with or observed who I'm convinced have benefitted from and not been corrupted by their involvement either as individuals or with friends in New Age-y kinds of things. When it comes to reasonable and thoughtful readings of Tarot cards, to focus on inherent (but not exclusive) human goodness, the benefits of meditation and yoga,  connectedness, the power of cultural mythologies, and other similar things, New Age-y kinds of things have bolstered and enhanced my life long practices of Christianity, added dimension to my spiritual life, and have not led me down divisive or dangerous rabbit holes. 

My life continues to be enriched by a variety of spiritual influences and it's deflating to read a book like Leah Sottile's or to read stories from other sources about abuses of power and the greedy acquisition of money in spiritual movements and Christian churches and fellowships when the potential for goodness and meaningful service to others can be so strong and ought to be at the heart of these spiritual traditions. 

Three Beautiful Things 04-04-2025: Leah Sottile Writes Solid History, Extremist Intersections, I'm In the Money!

1. After attending the Northwest Passages event Wednesday evening featuring Leah Sottile, I wanted to read her new book, the one I came home with, Blazing Eye Sees All: Love Has Won, False Prophets, and the Fever Dream of the American New Age. 

I worked my way about half through the book today and, as with any solid historical study, I'm seeing again that very little in our world today is unique or unprecedented, largely, I suppose, because human beings don't change much from generation to generation regarding what they are drawn to, what they become obsessed with. 

The particular obsessions Leah Sottile explores in the flow of United States history involve preoccupation with lost ancient, mythical,  and utopian civilizations and centering one's spiritual life around making mystical contact with these civilizations, like, for example, Lemuria, and seeking to elevate human existence to higher planes of reality, through love, seances, divine revelation, and a host of other means. 

Because a critical mass of people are drawn to New Age legends, practices, promises, disciplines, charismatic leaders/prophets, communities, and other aspects of this spirituality they find powerful, clever and mendacious con artists and charlatans exploit the power of New Age attractiveness and bilk people of money, valuables, and property -- much like a certain kind of Christian evangelical. 

Not all prominent New Age speakers, writers, leaders, etc. are charlatans, not all are fatally dangerous, but this book examines quite a few who are (or were). 

Sottile focuses on some of the more prominent false prophets in our country's history and the power they accrue(d) over countless followers. The growth of the power of the World Wide Web, especially the growth of social media and platforms like YouTube and TikTok has greatly increased the reach of these spiritualists and made it, of course, possible for followers to be in real time contact with each other through live streams, chat rooms, texting, and other means. 

I admire how Leah Sottile approaches these New Age practitioners and the history of this spiritualism without mocking or deriding them (for the most part). I admire the number of scholars in the world of higher education she's sought out for help in understanding this subject. I admire how Leah Sottile devoted herself to countless, mind-boggling hours of research in archives and other written records and books and more mind-boggling hours of watching online videos and live streaming presentations. 

The book is an unblinking combination of journalism and scholarship and to top it all off, Leah Sottile's writing is accessible, direct, and absorbing. 

2. Leah Sottile's focus as an independent, free lance journalist is mostly, but not entirely, on extremism in the USA. Blazing Eye Sees All is a study of extremism, and I'd like to add to what I wrote above that while the aesthetics and the manner of New Age spirituality appears to be very different from, say facism or militia groups or QAnon or other prominent extremists in the USA, these extremists often intersect at the junctions of anti-semitism, anti-science, anti-government, anti-vaccination, preoccupation with conspiracy theories or stories, and other similar flashpoints. 

I find this aspect of Leah Sottile's research and reporting fascinating -- and I was fascinated by her comments about this intersection on Wednesday evening. 

As I mentioned in my blog post yesterday, I was in the company of people practicing some form of New Age spirituality daily when I lived in Eugene. In addition, and this is just one example in the Silver Valley, if you go uptown in Kellogg, you can shop for New Age/Metaphysical items at Positive Practice on the corner of Portland and Main.  Here's the link to this shop: https://tinyurl.com/5xe3tbxj

I have no idea what, if any, intersections between New Age spirituality and the far right exist at Positive Practice. I haven't visited the shop beyond exploring its website. My immediate impulse is to be happy Positive Practice is in business. 

Because I don't have to be scientifically accurate in an informal blog post like this one, I'll just post a few of my impressions. 

Yes, I would say that it's highly likely that people whose company I shared in Eugene and whose spiritual lives leaned toward the New Age/Metaphysical were suspicious of pharmaceuticals and medical professionals and were likely, in most cases, to look to naturopaths, body manipulation of one kind or another, acupuncture, essential oils, and herbs, tinctures, and teas, and other similar means for medical treatment. 

From time to time, I did the same. 

I trusted the integrative/holistic medical specialist, Dr. Andrew Elliott whom I consulted on several occasions in Eugene. 

I trusted him because he knew naturopathy had limits.

For example, Dr. Elliott fully supported the pharmaceutical therapy that saved my life when I contracted bacterial meningitis. 

Other naturopathic remedies he sent me home with successfully cleared up other medical problems I had. 

I never got the impression that Dr. Elliott's medical practice or his outlook on life intersected with the far right. 

If Leah Sottile's research, interviews, and observations are correct, the pandemic mightily affected the intersection of the New Age movement with far right perspectives. I'd sum it up by saying the intersection occurs in suspiciousness, distrust, investing one's hopes and dreams in a single idolized leader, and (I might be out on a limb here!) in a yearning for a return to an imagined golden past and the desire for ethnic cleansing of the population that accompanies such yearning. 

3. I had more on my mind today than extremism in the USA! 

A couple weeks ago, Ed and I buzzed over to the Spokane Tribal Casino and laid down modest wagers on NCAA tournament basketball. 

I bet on the women's tournament and decided to bet on two teams to win it all: the University of Connecticut and the University of South Carolina. 

Well, as luck would have it, guess who's meeting on Sunday, April 6th in the tournament's championship game.

That's right. 

UConn and South Carolina. 

I'm in the money no matter who wins -- I'll win a few dollars more if UConn triumphs, but no matter who wins I'll come out -- are you ready for this stunning news? -- about 30-35 dollars ahead! 

I'm not much of a high roller. 

Luckily, I have fun making small wagers!