Monthly Archives: October 2024

“Us Versus Them”: The Language of Haters

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I’ve been debating with myself if I should put this out there – most of us have probably already voted by now, and I’m pretty sure nothing I write here is going to make any difference anyway. But… on the flip side, I think I’d have a hard time living with myself if I didn’t say something. So. Yeah. Here goes.

I’m pretty sure the swing states are getting bombarded with a lot of political ads that never reach us here in Washington State. But every now and then – usually when we’re watching some nationally-televised sports show – one will pop up. And there’s this one I’ve seen a couple of times now that triggers something in me every time – and I don’t think I’m triggered in the way the politician who sponsored the ad expects me to be triggered.

This ad shows this tall, masculine-looking athlete playing sports on a women’s team. And then the narrator says this: “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.”

And that, right there, is just so…. just writing this I’m finding myself triggered again. “Us versus them.” This is the language of haters. This is the language that politicians use to divide us, and to incite violence in us. This is the language politicians use to bring the fearful and ignorant to their flag. This is bigotry, pure and simple. And it scares me for the safety of my LGBTQ friends.

I’m a Boomer AND a former English teacher who, in the olden days, spent time correcting my students’ improper use of the words “they” and “them” – “they” is the plural I’d tell my students and “her” is the singular. I grew up in a generation of people in which society was divided into male and female – and, being a heterosexual female who’s always felt female-ish, I never really thought too much beyond society’s binary system for the sexes. I had friends and acquaintances in the olden days who I knew were gay, but it was never a big deal to me who other people were attracted to and it never occurred to me that I should hate anyone or judge them because of their sexual orientation.

Now, as time has gone on and my circle of friendships has grown, I also have had the opportunity to develop friendships with several transgender people – in the case of my friends, they were assigned the label of “female” when they were born, but have never FELT female, and self-identify as male. And, in recent years, I have witnessed my friends – good, caring, kind, brave people – become more urgent in their cries for help as they’re bullied, threatened, legislated against, and hated on.

And I’m scared for their safety.

So when I see that poltical ad from the Trump campaign, targeting transgender people, I’m triggered. Feeding the fear and hate – feeding the “feargnorance” in others – is shameful and low. It’s despicable. That ad validates, for me, that I voted for the right person by NOT voting for Trump.

Shouldn’t our president be for ALL of us?

“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one and the same in Christ Jesus.“
– Galatians 3:28

A Healing of Clerical Error :D

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I want to share a healing I had this week.

Monday night I discovered that there had been a weird billing error – well, TWO weird billing errors, actually – one from my insurance company and another one from the optometrist’s office. The errors had resulted in the wrong person getting charged for one of my visits to the optometrist – a bill that should have been covered by my insurance, in the first place. When I first learned of the snafu(s), I was pretty stressed, and a little angry on behalf of the innocent family member who’d erroneously been listed as the “guarantor” for my bill.

I couldn’t get to sleep, and eventually came downstairs to read this week’s Bible Lesson Sermon and pray about this situation. This passage from Science and Health was helpful: “We can, and ultimately shall, so rise as to avail ourselves in every direction of the supremacy of Truth over error…” Soon I was filled with this feeling of joy and well-being and it felt like Love was laughing with me about the absurdity of it all, and reassuring me that all was well.

The next morning I woke up early, and at exactly 8:00 am I called the insurance office. A man named Loren answered the phone. I asked him if he had time to hear a really weird story, and he said he did, so I began to lay out the problem I was having with this bill. He listened and every now and then interjected some comment or question. He was very patient with me as I pulled out all the cards from my wallet, trying to find the one with my ID number on it, and when I thanked him for his patience, I could hear the smile in his voice as he told me it was okay. At one point I apologized for being so chatty when I knew he must be tapping away on his keyboard and trying to figure out what the problem was – and he laughed and said he was fine – he was good at multi-tasking. He was kind and patient and had a sense of humor, and in a short time he’d pinpointed the problem and assured me that I didn’t need to worry about this anymore – the insurance company would take care of the bill for me. I asked, “So I didn’t do anything wrong?” And his voice smiled again and he reassured me that I’d done everything right. I told him I wanted to give him a good rating, and he thanked me for that and said he would try to send me through to his manager. I started laughing. “Yes, I am Karen and I want to talk to your manager.” He started laughing then, too. (He was able to transfer my call, but it was never picked up – so I’ll find some other way to give Loren a high rating.)

At 8:30 on the dot I called the optometrist’s office, and a woman named Savannah picked up. When she looked at my account she said a note had already been made there by the insurance company and that I didn’t need to worry about this bill anymore. “I don’t need to worry about this? It’s taken care of?” I asked. And she said yup, I could just throw this bill away. Then I asked her if I could have something in writing about this – I told her I am Karen AND a Virgo AND a boomer – basically, “I’m the trifecta of annoying” – and she started laughing and said she’d send me an email. Within minutes after we’d ended our phone call she had sent an email telling me that the bill was being sent back to the insurance company for payment and I didn’t need to worry about it.

It was such a lovely untangling. There was so much joy and humor and kindness involved in the whole experience. I’m really grateful for this opportunity to prove Love’s power.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell

There Is Kindness in Every Tribe

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Little jewels from the last couple of days:

I pull into the Fred Meyer parking lot and park off to the side near the gardening center. As I’m getting my shopping bag and backpack-purse out of my car a tall man – probably a little younger than me, with the build of a retired quarterback – returns to his truck. His truck is parked near my car. He is wearing a red hat and I’m pretty sure I know what it says on it.

I feel suddenly impelled to exchange a greeting with him, but I let the Cosmos decide what’s going to happen here, and finish getting out my stuff. When I go to get a shopping cart in the little cart corral, he’s pushing in a small cart. His red hat does, indeed, say what I thought it would say.

“It’s getting colder!” I observe – weather is always a good place to start, right? He smiles and agrees with me. I notice him glance at my little Fiesta hatchback and I’m sure he’s taking in the bumperstickers there: “GOD BLESS THE WHOLE WORLD. NO EXCEPTIONS.” “MAKE AMERICA GREEN AGAIN.” And whatnot. He glances back at me and smiles. I’m pretty sure he knows we’re from different tribes.

“Do you need a cart?” he asks, offering me the one he just put back, and I smile back at him and thank him, and take the cart from him into the supermarket. I’m still smiling as I enter the store. There is kindness in every tribe.

I pick up the items I need to pick up and check out, then head to the Starbucks counter. The barista – tall, Black, with a longish goatee dyed flamingo-pink – steps up to take my order. I love this guy. He never fails to make me smile. He asks what I’d like and I tell him this will be my first coffee in a month. He gasps. “Honey!” he exclaims in horror, “We need to fix that for you!” While he’s making my pumpkin spice latte he regales me with tales of his dogs and his husband and his grocery-shopping experiences. By the time he hands me my latte I have had a whole day’s worth of laugh out louds. He is like a one-man comedy show. As I leave, I tell a couple of the workers who are sitting at the exit that “I love that guy!” And they nod their heads and laugh. They get it.

I go to the Target parking lot to take pictures of the autumnal trees and then go in the store to explore what they’ve got in there. As I’m browsing I wander down the coffee aisle and see there are a lot of coffee options for Keurig owners, but we are not Keurig owners – so that’s not going to work. There are also, though, bags of ground coffe, and I think, “Oh! I should get one of those French presses and press my own coffee!” So I ask a man stocking shelves if he knows where I might find French presses. He’s really helpful – tells me his wife uses a French press every morning to make her own coffee – and then clicks into his Target device and tells me what aisle I can find French presses in.

I proudly bring my French press home…

The next morning I’m back in Target to return the French press. I tell the customer service lady what happened: “I came home and showed my husband the French press and he said, ‘Karen. We already have two of those.'” The customer service woman starts cracking up and, as she’s efficiently taking care of my return for me, suggests maybe I should buy one for every day of the week. I love people who make me laugh.

On the way home I decide to turn onto Allen West Road just to see what magic I can find there. And there’s that amazing pumpkin display I remember seeing last October! Darla, the owner of Eagle View Farms, comes out to greet me, a big smile on her face. “Karen!” she calls – she remembers my name! It’s so good to see Darla again. It’s our annual reunion, I guess. We talk about her son, Adam, who was in my eighth grade class a couple decades ago – a very cool person – and laugh and chat and laugh some more. She’s covered in mud. She says she’s been cleaning out the gutters while her husband went shopping. I say, dreamily, “Sounds like a Hallmark movie,” and she laughs out loud.

I snap some pictures of her display, and then buy a big yellow pumpkin from her. I ask her how much – there are no signs indicating the price – and she says, “Seven dollars.”

“How much REALLY?” I ask. And she insists it’s seven dollars. Right. So I write her a check for ten, she calls me a stinker, and I ask her how much it really is. She admits it’s ten dollars.

We hug one more time – mud and all – and I drive home with a big yellow pumpkin and my heart full of humanity’s goodness.
-Karen Molenaar Terrell

He Couldn’t Let That Door Stay Broken

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I’ve been feeling a little off-kilter lately – maybe feeling the tension of the political season and the stress of the folks around me. I love autumn, but there are certain aspects of October in our country that can be… challenging for those of us who live here.

Anyway. I got a message from my friend, Emmy, daughter-in-law of the late great Pete Schoening, asking if I was available to meet at the Shambala Bakery in Mount Vernon, Washington, today – and I was! And we did! And it was so wonderful to chat with Emmy again – she’s one of those people I feel an instant kinship with – funny and kind and honest. We always laugh when we get together.

As we were eating our brunch, a customer in a baseball cap and a Grateful Dead shirt came through the door. There was something whacky with the door – we’d noticed this when we came in – and when the customer noticed it he started examining the hinges and the frame. Emmy and I realized he was going to try to fix it.

How cool is that?

Pretty soon the customer had borrowed tools from the server-cashier-cook, and retrieved some tools from his truck, and was working on the door.

I asked Justin, the customer-handyman, and Heidi, the server-cook, if I could take their picture, and they graciously agreed. Then Heidi went back to work, Emmy and I finished our brunch, and Justin finished fixing the door. I observed to Justin that he’d done a really nice thing there. He said that he couldn’t just let that door stay broken. He wanted to make it good for Shambala.

Laughing with Emmy, and watching the man in the Grateful Dead shirt fix the door, helped settle me this morning.

There are good people in this world.

-Karen Molenaar Terrell

Civility During Political Discourse

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Request for those who join me for conversation on my political posts: Please refrain from name-calling, condescension, and personal attacks. The people you encounter in the comments are all my friends. I love it when my friends come on to my threads to bounce ideas off each other, debate, and learn from each other. I expect all my friends who join in the conversation to treat each other with kindness and respect.

I enjoy exchanging thoughts and beliefs with my friends. This is how I was raised, I guess. My mom was the youngest of ten very opinionated, very intelligent children with a wide range of beliefs: Methodists (the church they were raised in), atheists, Unitarian Universalists, Christian Scientists, Republicans and Democrats. And when we’d meet up for Thanksgiving at Grandma’s house in Portland, the dialogue was lively, stimulating and raucous. It was also full of laughter and humor, respect and love. People could disagree with each other without putting each other down – without calling each other “stupid” or “deplorable” or “deluded.” I learned so much from these gatherings! It was so fun!

For many years, my mom and dad belonged to different political parties. On election day, they’d cheerfully get in the car together to drive to the polling booth, knowing that they were cancelling out each other’s votes and laughing about that. They loved and respected each other, regardless. (Around 1981 – when all the air traffic controllers were fired by Reagan – my mom joined Dad in the Democratic party and became more vocal about politics than any of us.)

I have friends and family from a wide-range of religons and non-religons, beliefs, and political parties, and I love them all.

Heaven at the Colophon Cafe

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I had this moment yesterday – sitting in the Colophon Cafe in Bellingham – that was perfect. I felt my whole body just relax, and this big sigh came out of me, and my eyes closed and I listened to the folksy music playing in the background, and the conversations and laughter of the diners around me, and – for just a glimmer of a moment – I was sitting in heaven. I’m trying to find the words to describe it, and I’m trying to find the words to help me get back there, but I don’t think there are the just right words that fit that experience. I think that moment was beyond words. But here are the words that come closest: For a brief moment I felt no time, no hurry, no schedule, no expectations, no past, no future, and nothing crowding in on me. I felt joy, peace, love. I felt space. I felt in the present. I felt safe.

There were three people sitting at the table across from me – maybe my age or a little younger. And I felt this positive energy coming from them. (If I were more educated about this stuff, I might say I felt “positive auras” surrounding them – but I don’t know enough about auras to use that word and really know what I’m talking about.) I think they were having a business meeting of some sort. I’m hard-of-hearing, and couldn’t pick up on all that they were saying (ahem… not that I was trying to eavesdrop or anything), but these snippets reached me:

Woman with curly silver hair in a high pony tail: People tell me they sometimes have to take a break from me because of my energy. (Laughing.) And I understand that, but I tell them if they think it’s hard being AROUND me, can they imagine what it’s like to actually BE me? Sometimes *I* need a break from me!

A little later…

Pony-tailed woman: It seems as we get older we go one of two directions – either we become more crotchety, more crabby, more…

Woman with dark, shoulder-length hair: (Laughing.) We become more of what we already are.

The iron-haired man sitting next to the dark-haired woman – her husband maybe? – winced at this and started laughing, and I found myself laughing with him.

It got me to thinking. What direction am “I” headed? What am I becoming more of?

And how can I bring more of these perfect moments into my life?
-Karen Molenaar Terrell

“Heaven is not a locality, but a divine state of Mind.”
-Mary Baker Eddy

(photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell)

What Did They Think Was Going to Happen on January 6th?!

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I have friends who tell me that Donald Trump didn’t expect there to be violence on January 6th – that it was actually “leftists” who brought the violence to the capitol to make Donald Trump look bad. And I keep coming back to this one question: What did the people who showed up for Trump’s “rally” expect was going to happen on that day? Did they really think that they were going to stand peacefully outside the capitol, holding their signs and yelling “STOP THE STEAL!” or whatever other lies they’d been told and that the legislators were going to go, “Oh, okay. Let’s discount the votes of the more than 81 million people who voted for Biden, and the 306 electoral votes he got, and just give this to Trump”?

Did Donald Trump really think he was going to change the results of the election by sending his followers to the capitol building to peacefully protest? Seriously?!

Wouldn’t It Be Cool if We Stripped Away the Political Labels?

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I think it’s sad that our politicians have to beg us for money to “win” – the inference being that whoever has the most money wins the election. That just seems like a really dysfunctional way to choose who will run our government. I mean. That doesn’t seem like the way a democratic republic should work, right?

And wouldn’t it be cool if we stripped away labels of “right” and “left” and “Democrat” and “Republican” and actually talked about the issues, as individuals, rather than as members of a “side”? I think we’d find we have more in common than we think.

  • I mean, who doesn’t want fair pay? (And if you don’t want fair pay for all, then you wouldn’t be able to hide behind a party, you’d have to actually come out and say, “No, I don’t believe in fair pay for everyone.”)
  • And who doesn’t want equal rights for all, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, religion? (And if you DON’T want equal rights, you couldn’t just say, “I’m a member of the _ party” and spout the party jingle, you’d have to admit, “Nah, I don’t really believe in equal rights. Some people should have more rights than others.”)
  • Who DOESN’T believe in honesty and truthfulness and being presented with the facts? (And if you don’t believe in honesty and truthfulness and being presented with the facts, you wouldn’t be able to hide behind some party-mob mentality, you’d have to actually come out, as an individual, and admit that you don’t believe in talking honestly, and with the facts.)
  • Who DOESN’T want a clean and safe environment for everyone?
  • Who DOESN’T want our children to be safe in our schools?
  • Who DOESN’T want those with handicaps to be treated with dignity?
  • Who DOESN’T want our younger generation to have the financial ability to buy homes, pay for childcare, afford training and higher education, without becoming financially bankrupt, or in life-long debt?
  • Who DOESN’T want a strong Federal Emergency Management Agency to care for victims of hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, floods?
    -Who DOESN’T want health care to be affordable for everyone?

Anyway.
That’s what’s on my mind this morning.

Cosmic Magic in Alpine Fields

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Cosmic!

October 8, 2024
Last week my son, Xander, and I planned a trip up to Mount Baker today. But this morning when I woke up and checked the weather it looked like it was pretty miserable up there. The son and I decided to call the trip off. A couple hours later, though, when I checked the weather again, it looked like there might actually be some sunshine at Baker. So I texted my son and told him about the change in the weather forecast, and asked him if he’d like to give it a try. Then I opened my thoughts up to the Cosmos and put the day in Her hands. I decided I’d be happy with however the day evolved for me.

Pretty soon the son texted back and said he still wanted to go up there. Within the hour I’d picked him up and we were on the road.

And it was glorious up there! We stopped at Picture Lake to take some quick pictures of Mount Shuksan (and we got there at the just right time – not long after we left the clouds moved in and blanketed Shuksan). We did a quick little hike on the nature trail at Heather Meadows and then went on up to the Artist Point parking lot and hiked up to the top of Artist Point.

On the way up we came upon a bride and groom, Sarah and Etienne, in full wedding regalia, and they cheerfully agreed to let me snap a quick photo. Later I asked a couple from Canada if they’d like me to take a picture of them together with their camera and they thanked me and said yes. On the way down we ran into them again, and this time I asked Kathy if I could take a picture of her with her sweet pup, Coriander.

It was such a lovely day – a gift from the Cosmos. I really needed this.

Blueberry Pie from Scratch

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There’s something really satisfying about going out in the backyard on a quiet Tuesday morning and picking the last of the blueberries on our bushes, then folding them into a pie crust I made my very own self, filling the house up with pie-baking smells, and enjoying cocoa and a slice of blueberry pie as the leaves turn autumn-gold outside my window. Run-on sentence, but I ain’t apologizing.
-Karen Molenaar Terrell