Exhausted and exasperated (5/22/2025)

I feel empty and exhausted. Crazy, considering I sleep well, exercise (walk and bike), have hobbies (I work on at least three or four of my bonsai trees almost daily), do a lot of reading lately, you name it. I have my fair share of friends (or should I call them acquaintances). In other words, I have a full life as a retired dude. Am I depressed? Am I getting old and this is part of slowing down? My diet? I do not know.

Maybe I need more adventures. A few weeks ago, we had a great visit to James River State Park, and that was a welcome diversion. Then we experienced the election of a new pope. He is 69 years old and three years younger than I am. Leo (his newly chosen name) is embarking on a completely new adventure. I guess that in July I will embark on a new adventure as a grandfather and as chairperson (president) of our Unitarian Universalist church board. I have already been made aware of all the potential difficulties I might be getting involved with at church. Grandfathering will hopefully be easier.

I guess it is the incessant news about tRump and his antics that exhausts me the most. There seems to be something else every day ranging from “screw the poor and help the rich" to lining his own pocket with a donated airplane.

One of the books that I am currently reading (I am reading four at the same time) deals with the old Greek and Roman stoic philosophy. Very much like Buddhism, it tells me not to worry about the past (it is over), not about the future (not much we can do about, it is coming whether you like it or not), and don't worry about what is happening right now (it will be a thing of the past in an eye-blink). Remember the idea about never crossing the same creek twice? It is different every time, different water molecules. What is left? Enjoy the moment. The Buddhist say, “live in the moment.” I wish I was able to take that attitude, but it is difficult in today’s sociopolitical climate.

This is probably why it feels so good to have new and different adventures to look forward to. While apprehensive, I am excited about what’s to come. I am thinking about flying west to visit my new (first) grandson. In addition, I have been planning a trip circumnavigating Lake Michigan. We have never visited Wisconsin, and I would love to visit Holland, Michigan. We’ll see if it comes to fruition.

I think it is very important to have new adventures in life and not to stagnate. In many of my posts I write about never stopping to learn (one example is here and here). But I get 543 posts when I enter the word learn in my blog search bar. I think it crucial to keep learning and develop your critical thinking skills.

I read somewhere that the reason why time seems to go faster when you grow older is that you do not experience anything new that needs to be processed by the brain. Young folks, on the other hand, need to process all the new experiences and therefore the time seems to go much slower. What am I trying to explain here? New experiences at an older age slow down the perceptual time. In other words, I am looking forward to all these new adventures (new experiences) and growing old slower.

So many folks in this and a lot of other countries have given up on experiencing new things, on learning. They act like sheep, being herded by a dog or even a shepherd (read authoritarian leasers like tRump). It appears that they have lost their ability to think on their own, although they still think that they are thinking on their own. They are just following what the demagogues, the gas lighters or dictators tell them.

I don’t care if you are liberal, conservative, have a different sexual orientation, black, white or purple, we all need to keep learning, experience new things, think and question what we read, see or hear on the television or get from social media. Reading, learning and bonsai is how I am trying to fight my exhaustion.

One of my trees that I have been working on (a water birch)

Serenity please (5/8/2025)

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I have a friend whose adult son is addicted to fentanyl. He has been kicked out from rehab clinics for the stupidest things such as giving (selling?) cigarettes at the clinic he was in for rehab (yes, he was stupid). His son now lives out of his car in Richmond; he refuses help from his father and is still using drugs whenever he can. My friend was told that he is essentially helpless and just must wait till his son either dies or genuinely asks his father for help and to put him in rehab again. In the meantime, my friend’s counselor told him to pray. The problem is that he does not believe in a god, and we had a long discussion on prayer. We concluded that the best would be to recite the serenity prayer that I started out with in this post.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

My wife and I are extremely upset by what the current occupier of the White House is doing. So much so that when we watch some of the comics making fun of tRump or mUsk and accomplices, she gets even more upset. We refuse to watch the national news shows any longer, although we do read the New York Times and the Washington Past. She is getting more and more distressed. I told her to recite the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

I have adopted a more Buddhist attitude: you cannot do anything about the past (or dwell on it), you cannot impact or be worried about the future (or get upset about it). However, best is to try to live in the present and enjoy the shit show!

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Maybe a strange way of living; and yes, I get pissed about what these people and the republican house and senate are doing. The only thing that I can do about it is to contact my elected officials, to demonstrate, and to advertise my displeasure in my writings, postings and interaction with people.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

As I promised in my latest post, I will continue writing and let you know where my heart is and what’s going on in my mind and heart. We are living in difficult times; USAID, the EPA, NOAA, Social Security, health and money items more are being assailed by these nuts, they want the clearcut and mine our national parks and monuments. They are going after art and education, planning to turn museums into prisons. This all feels very much like what happened in the 1920s and 30s in Germany; and we know what that led to. They built their first concentration camp in Poland, the republicans built one in El Salvador. Nicely out of the way of the public in both cases (the 30s and now). So don’t get me wrong, I am angry and upset; however, I keep reminding myself to “enjoy the shit show.”

One more time: 

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Last week we spent some time at James River State Park near Gladstone, VA.  It was so nice to be off the grid and enjoy the night sky in this dark sky park,

April 2025 Update (4/16/2025)

I have been laying low, lately. This is partially because of the current political climate. I don’t want to have a knee jerk reaction to all the things I read in the news and then need to retract it, as seems to be the rule in the current administration in the Whitehouse. In addition, there has been a lot of things going on in my life. To start with, I was asked to teach a course for an outfit in Northern Virginia, like I have done in the past. This required a lot of extra time developing a course. While that was taking up a lot of my time, I got the request whether I was willing to serve as president of the “Board of Stewards” of our Unitarian Church. After some deliberation I agreed to step forward and volunteer for that position. Leading a church is a huge job and I have been slowly preparing for it. The job will start on July 1. However, I am already being sucked into it and I am reading Roberts Rule of Order. Lastly, I am going back to the Lochsa lodge (ID) and Clay Jenkinson this coming winter to talk about “Thomas Jefferson and the West.” This requires me to read all kinds of non-fiction works on and by Jefferson, although interesting, it is not something I have done a lot in the past and it is therefore not completely in my wheelhouse. I just enjoy the American west and even written a published essay about the relationship between the east coast and the “wild west.” This and the presidency will require a steep learning curve.

Let me assure you that I do not plan on quitting writing. Things may slow down in the next few months, I really do not know. Am I afraid of commenting on the political climate in these posts? Hell no, I do a lot of editorializing on Facebook, Threads, and my Bluesky accounts, and I am not afraid of being targeted by anyone. I am sure they have much larger fish to fry. Although I might have wanted to be an influencer and monetize on my ramblings, I realize now that my readership is very limited (last month I had 6897 hits and this month only 131), and I don’t reach a lot of folks. Moreover, I have given up on the idea of getting rich from my writings.

So why am I doing this? The Unitarian Universalist Kurt Vonnegut (one of my favorites) supposedly said/wrote this:

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”

That sums it up for me. This blog is somewhat of a diary and a way to blow off steam, to vent my anger and anxieties. Being a consummate teacher, I also try to educate you. It will hopefully make my soul grow, keep me young and hopefully, and if you are able to read this far into this post, maybe you are too and hopefully you will learn a little from my ramblings. I am not going to change the world, we need to do this together, and soon it will be up to you.

Participating in support of the democracy in our country

Honor your ancestors (Story of my life 4) (3/7/2025)

I have been watching a documentary on YouTube called Kintsugi (The Ancient Japanese Practice that Will Heal You). While a lot of people that know me closely might say that this is wasted time for me; I am so screwed up and cannot be healed. As part of the healing process, the 4-part series taught me about the importance of honoring the people who came before me: my ancestors. I feel that the least thing I can do is write about them, which is as close as I can get to visiting their past lives and thus honoring them. I don't know where they are buried; moreover, that is a continent, and an ocean removed from where I now live. 

I come from a long line of builders. My father started out as an engineer and road builder. After the Second World War he briefly worked for his father who owned a construction company. He married my mother in August 1948 and sometime after that they departed to Kinshasa in what was then the Belgium Congo, where he had taken a job in the road construction business. Back then it was called Léopoldville. He did not last long and after two years or so took a job as a director of the furniture manufacturing company in Albertville (now known as Kalemi) in the eastern part of the Congo. This is the place where I was born. We moved to Antwerp in Belgium when I was 2 years old. In Antwerp, dad was working on the restorations of the “Grote Kerk,” the main church in downtown Antwerp. We moved to the Caribbean in 1956 and lived 13 years in Curacao and a half year or so in Aruba. Dad started out in the road building industry, became a director of a construction company, and an architect. He continued managing the restoration of some of the old buildings along the harbor of Willemstad, the capital of Curacao. After moving back to the Netherlands, my father worked in the construction management field and traveled all over the world. He spent time in Germany, Turkey, Congo, Cameroon, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Indonesia before he finally retired. 

Uncle Willem (Wim), dad's brother owned a construction company, and when we moved back to the town of Capelle and den IJssel in 1996 he had developed and built almost ¾ of that town. As I mentioned before my opa (grandfather) owned a construction company, as well. However, my uncle Wim built his company on his own, from scratch. My great-grandfather (my grandfather’s father) was also into construction. He was a very skilled carpenter and his claim to fame was that he supposedly built the Bijenkorf (a large department store) in the center of The Hague (Den Haag). This must have been in the early 1900. The odd duck out was Karel, my father’s oldest brother. He ended up owning an optical store. Anyway, from the two brothers down to my great-grandfather they were all very skilled and talented carpenters. Even Herke, Karel's son, was a very accomplished woodworker. 

I do not know much about my mother's side. Her father was not into building. Opa van den Ende was a butcher and owned a butcher shop in Terbregge a small suburb of Rotterdam. Mom (or Ma as we called her) had three brothers, one (Jan) died in a German concentration camp, and another (Cor) was an accountant. I do not know what the third brother (Siem) did. The only thing that is somewhat related to building is my mom's second nephew Ben. Ben was the owner of a kitchen installation and renovation company. 

Naturally, one cannot help comparing all these folks that went ahead of me with my skills and abilities. However, together, my wife and I have renovated three bathrooms, including two in our current home. In Yemen I built my own house and a plant nursery and office; I also built a wooden play structure for our daughter, in Gallup, NM. In our current home my wife and I tiled a huge portion of our home (kitchen, breakfast room and library/stove room), we built two sheds from scratch and a woodshed. I also built a large built-in bookcase in our home. Finally, during the past 15 years I taught environmental compliance to folks in the construction industry. In other words, I dare say that I somewhat continued the family tradition in the building industry (sorry Opa van den Ende). 

It is fun to see where your forefathers come from and how you fit in the continuing story of a family, of your life. And yes, I do believe there are healing properties in writing and paying respect to your forefathers. I am really not writing this as a self-gratification exercise, but also for my daughter, my future grandson, nieces and nephews. I believe that family history is important and honoring them by documenting their existence in this manner will hopefully make them live forever. We have such powerful tools to do this by being able to blog on the internet, unlike our forefathers who did not have these tools and depended on passing stories down orally. The internet can be a very useful tool when it is used in such a way, as opposed to constantly maligning one another, as is seen in the case of the social media where it is often done now, in our polarized world.

This is the only thing I have from my great-grandfather.  It is a fishing basket he made.  It is supposed to be suspended in the water to hold the fish you caught, and shaped in such a way that you can easily carry it laying on your side while hanging from a strap 

We are going to the birds (2/27/2025)

We pride ourselves on having an eco-friendly or wildlife-friendly yard. We do not use fertilizers and pesticides and mostly use plants native to the area or those that have at least some wildlife, bird or pollinator benefit. We have five birdfeeders and at least two water stations. Birds are therefore plentiful in our backyard, in particular this winter. It has been a fairly severe winter for us in the Tidewater of Virginia. There have been days that the temperatures did not come above freezing and we had at least three snow events. This has not been fun for the birds in the area, and our feeders have been busy. Below is a list of the visitors that came over for some food or drinks:

Yellow Rumped Warbler	Cedar Waxwing
Red-Winged Blackbird	Song sparrow
White crowned sparrow	White- throated sparrow
Carolina Chickadee	Tufted titmouse
Carolina Wren	Brown Thrasher
Northern Mockingbird	Northern Cardinal
Red bellied Woodpecker	Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker	Northern Flicker
Eastern Bluebird	American Robin
European Starling	Brown-headed Cowbird
Yellow-bellied Sapsucker	White-breasted Nuthatch
Common Grackle	Dark-eyed Junco
American Goldfinch	House finch
Purple finch	Blue Jay
Mourning dove	Eastern Towhee
Hermit Thrush

At least 31 species, not bad for a suburban yard. This list is not in any particular order, but just as I remember them. Watching them on the feeders or bird baths is interesting. There definitely is a pecking order amount the birds. I am amazed about how dominant the yellow-rumped warblers try to be. They will stand up to the big birds on the feeders, sit in the middle, ruffle their feathers and take a defensive stand. They even peck at other birds. Tough little critters they are! They will vacate the feeder when confronted by the bigger birds such as the mockingbird, the bluejay and the various blackbirds. But they will stand up against the thrasher. Bluebirds are a different story. They are fairly dominant as well and they will confront the warbler with varying result. At times they tolerate each other. There is somewhat of a peace between the cardinals and the warbler as well. The goldfinches use a different tactic. They dominate by the numbers, and all the sudden a feeder is swamped by 5 or more goldfinches and there just is no room for other birds, until a bully bird such as the blue jay or mockingbird flies in.

The shiest birds (or maybe the lowest on the packing order) appear to be the thrush, cedar waxwing, titmouse and the junco. The cedar waxwing only uses the birdbath. Thrasher is very secretive but will stand its ground, especially when they gorge themselves on the suet. It is just a lot of fun to observe all the birds, their interactions and behavior during our breakfasts and lunches.

One of the nicest moments occurred the other day. We were sitting inside with our morning coffee and newspaper when we heard a familiar bonk against our sliding door, a bird strike. Looking for the poor victim, I noticed a tiny bird, face down in a snow drift on our deck. Actually, the only thing I saw was a tail sticking out of the snow. I ran outside and softly scooped the poor bird up. It was a “butter but” or a yellow-rumped warbler as they are officially known as. I gently put it under a chair in our yard, in the sun but out of the snow. When I went to check it an hour later, the bird was gone; it had survived the crash. Approximately 15 minutes later I was in the yard and right above me in a tree was a “butter but’ flitting around in the branches, looking at me and chirping like crazy. I had never experienced that, and we have a large number of these warblers in our yard and around the feeders. I figured it was the warbler I pulled out of the snow and brought to its rehabilitation spot in the sun, and it was now thanking me for saving it. I realize that I am anthropomorphizing here but it just made me feel good. It made my day!

A dark-eyed junco on our feeder.