Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome to the mid-January 2023 issue of Odd Company. We’ve had three weeks of rain here — heavy, and pretty much non-stop. The entire coast of California has been affected, to one degree or another. It’s been most epic here in the northern part of the state, where we’ve been declared a disaster area due to flooding and landslides. In the nearby Sierras, there’s ten feet of snow. Until quite recently, NOAA had us expecting yet another drought year. Ha! We’ve escaped that, though we’ve been dry for so long, the reservoirs aren’t full yet, even now, after three weeks of almost daily heavy rain.
This morning I realized how long it’s been since I’ve seen a patch of direct sunlight that lasted more than a few minutes. I know, I know, there are places where the sun never shows its face all winter long. But “sunny” California is not one of them. It’s amazing how the sun bursting through a bank of clouds can lift a human heart. It certainly lifted mine today. And bonus! This was followed by a rainbow!
Tonight as I took a load of dinner scraps out to our compost bin, I looked up, and wonder of wonders. There were the stars! Like the sunshine, it was such a treat that I stood still a moment just to marvel and feel glad about it. Stars! And winter stars, at that, which are always sharper and clearer than the stars of summer. On a clear night at this time of year, you can always see the constellation Orion — easy to find by the three stars of his belt. I’ve been watching him all my life. He feels like an old friend by now.
In honor of the stars, I’ve chosen a favorite piece of stargazing music for tonight, “Aurora,” by the German film-score composer Hans Zimmer. Zimmer is best known as the composer of sound tracks for movies such as Gladiator, The Dark Knight, Inception, and Intersteller. The soaring combination of symphony and human voice in this composition is surely evocative of Earth’s auroras. But I find it is also evocative of the wonders of deep space. Please enjoy.
As we are all surely aware, it’s Martin Luther King Day. I have read several tributes to the great man today. You might have, too. What they all have in common is Dr. King’s oft-repeated theme of the importance of loving your enemies. The best one I’ve come across so far is an excerpt of King’s own words, from a sermon he gave on November 17th, 1957 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. It’s reprinted in Plough Quarterly, one of the few small-circulation magazines that still comes out in a high-quality print edition as well as online.
The problem with loving your enemies is that it’s hard. It goes against some of the deepest instincts humans have — those that deal with categorizing others as Us or Them. These instincts evolved from the need for safety. One of the first things we do when we see someone is decide whether they are a threat or not. If we see them as a threat — an enemy — our blood fills with all kinds of hormones that get us ready to either run away or fight. What we feel is the opposite of warm and welcoming. It takes a lot of conscious effort to overcome those natural responses to people who, as King says, “…seek to defeat you…who say evil things about you.” Or worse. It’s reasonable to conclude that Martin Luther King was assassinated for trying to love his enemies.
So how can we possibly love our enemies in a world like this? In fact, why would we want to? If we don’t return hatred with hatred, won’t it be taken as a sign of weakness, and just get us into deeper trouble? Maybe in the short run. But over time, returning hatred with kindness and love is the only way to change the situation. As King says, “If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends.” He goes on to say that the person who stops this chain of hatred is the strong one. “Just keep being friendly to that person. Keep loving them. Don’t do anything to embarrass them. Just keep loving them, and they can’t stand it too long…By the power of your love, they will break down under the load.”
Sometimes this technique will make your enemies angry at you. It certainly made King’s enemies angry at him. I recall members of my own family branding him as “a trouble-maker” before his death, and I could see for myself that he did indeed seem to be upsetting people. What I couldn’t see, because I wasn’t old enough or worldly enough to have the whole picture, was that all changes, even good ones, disturb things.
King ends his sermon by saying, “There’s something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive.” We can see this in our daily lives. The people around us who are most driven by hate only know how to take things away — “bad” ideas, the rights of others, even the lives of others. They are all about the people and things they don’t want. But what *do* they want? We don’t hear so much about that.
It’s much easier to imagine a future when you feel loved and appreciated. Which is the best reason I know of to inject a little love and kindness wherever you can. It’s like a shot of sunshine after weeks of rain!
Sorry, no poem this time. And because I was driving when I saw the rainbow, no compelling photo. You’ll have to imagine it — all the colors in an arc across the sky. I think I can better imagine how Noah felt now. Till next time!