I now read printed books “for a living.” Translation: to feel my aliveness.

July 23, 2026

I think I said here somewhere that I have recently returned to reading actual printed books. And I am SO glad I did!

Books that I get from the local public library, perusing their many shelves of new releases, and leaning usually, toward books that combine the personal with the historical: either autobiographical, where the author tells his or her own story within a certain historical context, or biographical, where a seasoned author tells the contextualized life story of someone they likely deeply admire.

I’m shocked to recognize how my inner life is mutating now that I’m reading one of these books daily for at least one hour, and usually two. It’s as if I’ve re-entered a much richer, deeper understanding, resonant with history, and how what human beings do on this planet, is repeat, repeat, repeat!

I don’t even have to force myself to read printed books! I thought I would have to force myself, so much has my usual focus been fractured into a zillion fissioning bits flying into space.

Somehow, to help ground — not my body (I do that daily, with two full hours of “physical culture”) but my mind! — I needed the ability to concentrate on the larger, longer, much more textured and resonant reality of a printed book; and, voila! Once I made the decision to develop this ability, it turned out I didn’t need to develop it! I just needed to ask my brain to remember it! To remember this old old way of concentrating within 3D reality. This old way that I learned as a child, and kept alive, easily, until computers took over, for me, back in the mid-1980s.

Of course I was happy I got that old used Apple 2E computer; it meant that ideas, which for this very fiery double-Sagittarian soul, fly through like lightning, could actually, finally, flow through my fingers unimpeded. I’m still extraordinarily grateful for this technology, for this reason, for me.

But let’s get up to date. Let’s realize how hi-tech communication is also robbing us of personal connection, communion. Instead of authentic, heartfelt connection, we get attention. And attention flits from one item to another, without ceasing, without pausing to ascertain the meaning (whatever that means); we don’t care about meaning; we just keep going. Is it any wonder there is a rapacious mental virus infecting our human world?

Every time I’m out for my morning walk with Scampi, I pass by IU students on their way to somewhere else, usually head down, open phone in hand. I’d say at least 50%  fit into that category; another 30% have their phones in hand, like a baby bottle; and some of both in these categories, plus probably 15% more, stride along with ear buttons, listening. Not here, but there. As long as they have their phone, they can walk in peace! But phones are not like pacifiers. Instead, unless we put on dreamy amnesiac playlists, they stir us into stormy emotions, which we either express openly as volatility, or try to contain. Contained, depressed, the emotions settle into fat on the body, as we hungrily eat what does not satisfy.

All of which makes me happy to have my little ambassador of Love, Scampi, by my side, prancing along, meeting whoever tears their attention away to glance down, a flicker of joy spreading across their face, as they plunge into childhood memories of their own pet dog. Sometimes, of course, they stop, look up, ask me if they can pet him. YES!

Sometimes, Scampi manages to actually interrupt the robotic digital acceleration we are all subjected to, all day and all night long.

So, to return to books, and the fact that I have actually resurrected the habit of, and the ability to, actually concentrate on the entirety of a printed book.

So many current reverberations from becoming more familiar with history!

For example, the book I’m currently pursuing, THE WAR FOR MIDDLE EARTH: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945. 

I wrote this post specifically to draw your attention to two tiny nearly adjacent quotes from this book, ones which I copied into my journal this morning . . .

p. 25:

“Indeed, the moral necessity of war — as a check upon great evil — would emerge as a dominant theme common to the works of both authors.”

For .. .

“Though both men had reasons to despise what Tolkien called “the utter stupid waste of war,” they were both rooted in traditions that offered a more complex perspective on war and the human condition.”

 

This is how I feel about current “war” fronts, especially Iran, once again, heating up.

From my journal, in response:

“This is Trump’s point of view. Stalwart, determined, and if necessary, self-sacrificing.”

 

Yes, when confronted with great evil, the only option is to crush it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It’s as if I’ve plunged my fingers into very fertile soil, crawling with worms and seeds and roots, literary, linguistic, cultural, the crawling and speeding centuries disgorging their complexified fullness.

I’m using metaphor here to try to convey just how very very different it is to read a printed book.

Capitalism, Socialism, and the Lady at the Dollar Tree

July 22, 2026

I was going to put up something on socialism vs. capitalism yesterday, but got quickly diverted by everything  going on at home. But here’s the twitter post that got me going in that direction. Made me laugh out loud.

Then, this morning, while at the check-out counter in the nearby Dollar Tree store (for more twice-daily “treats” to satisfy 7-year-old “puppy” Scampi’s addiction to fierce chewing), and while I was busy taking 7 packages of treats out of the bag the clerk had put them in and stuffing them instead, one by one into my backpack — the man in line behind me (old, skinny, hauling several stuffed cloth bags, looking beaten-down by the world, wouldn’t make eye contact) — had his card “rejected.”

The middle-aged woman behind him, waiting for this transaction to end, with a composed face showing no emotion, looked on as the old man, flustered, embarrassed, asked the clerk what he should do with the stuff he had hoped to buy (I didn’t notice what it was), and she, empathizing with his plight, embarrassed for him, was trying to explain to him, pointing, “Put it over there,” etc., — when the woman behind him in line remarked, in an even voice:

“Just put it on my bill.”  And again, “Just add it to my bill.”

Well, you can imagine the hoopla that caused within the man, and the clerk as well: “Thank you, thank you,” erupting over and over again from their mouths, both obviously surprised and full of gratitude.

 

I turned away at that point to leave the store, noticing how witnessing that encounter had suddenly shifted the entire world into blessing. And, made me feel guilty. “Why didn’t I offer too, or first?” Or, was I simply feeling competitive, ego involved?

But the lady who paid for the man’s goods did not make a big deal out of it. Not at all. I doubt she felt proud of herself for doing so. Maybe she just wanted the line to move along so she could get out of there faster? Possibly. And/or  perhaps she had just spontaneously opened her heart to the man, obviously distressed beyond all measure. A fact that I, personally, did not really register until I looked back on the encounter.

I wonder how many spontaneous, or seemingly spontaneous gestures to help others are happening? In the Dollar Treat store, in my neighborhood, in Bloomington, regionally, nationally, everywhere fractious individuals live in  fractious community?  Wonder if more generosity, or less, than usual?

I remember back in 1974, when I was newly married to the man who had been my high school boyfriend 12 years earlier. I was back in my hometown, Twin Falls, Idaho, where he was the Editor of the local paper. While out riding my bike, I had been noticing the many ways passerbys help each other, give way to each other, smile in greeting hello. Then one day I after witnessing a particularly generous scene, I suddenly asked my new husband why his newspaper doesn’t report the good news? Why only bad news? To which he replied, “Because that’s what sells papers.”

It would be wonderful if someone would try to obtain metrics that show “unexpected, good deeds, gestures of generosity” in some location, for a certain amount of time? Would that be possible? For example, at Aldi’s. So many many times when I shop there I notice myself either offering or receiving this kind of generosity, when needing a quarter to get a basket. So many times we leave each other our baskets, smiling and waving “no” when the other offers  the quarter in exchange. No. Pay it forward!

Aldi’s may indeed offer this kind of metric, if someone bothers to map it. Meanwhile, let us remember: generosity is an attitude, the attitude of Love, rather than Fear, and ultimately, its expression does not lend itself to being reduced to data points. And, these days during the likely final climax of materialism, which depends on the perception of scarcity, if Elon is correct and abundance is in the offing (search, for example, google’s Gemini AI: “Elon Musk on Scarcity vs Abundance”), it may be that pretty soon, such metrics won’t matter in the least. Everyone will get what they want. So the question is, when robbed of scarcity, when confronted with abundance, what will happen next. How much “stuff” do we really want, when so much of that stuff burdensome, and moreover, will no longer serve to create and maintain social hierarchy?

At this point, and for many decades at least, most humans have been indoctrinated into seeing the societal world hierarchically, with themselves at the bottom of the pyramid, numbed to their own latent aliveness, laboring ceaselessly for “the man,” with no recourse but starvation, death.

What happens if people are freed up to follow their own purpose? How many among us have ever even conceived of having one? Of seeing oneself as a true individual, with a life path as shown by our unique astrological chart, configured for that time, that date, that place? A chart our soul agreed to prior to birth:  with the date, time, and place exactly needed to express our own unique nature, this time around, as it unfolds through time and space?

This kind of question is not usually asked. Not yet.

 

In any case, what the lady did in the Dollar Tree: would that fall under the rubric socialism or capitalism? Obviously capitalism. She did it, spontaneously of her own free will. Nobody asking, nobody expecting. And the result was what socialists often preach the absence of unless socialism is instituted.