The Ever Widening Circle

When I decided to teach swimming, I had pretty good credentials, I was taught by the same swim instructor who taught Lloyd Bridges of Sea Hunt and in those days, there weren't any better! And, I was working on the documentation of pollution in our city. It was my conviction to do something about the problem because my father’s business was at stake.

But when my camera and microscope went missing, I began to realize that the motivation for that kind of behavior may include the desire to cover-up, or disrupt what some consider to be slander, or defamation of a business, or place. And when I tried to find Protozoa and Paramecium for my science project, and still couldn't find any in our city ponds or lakes, I even tried soaking straw in our groundwater and I still couldn't find any. So open water swimming is forbidden in much of our city and there aren't always signs, or warnings to stay out! Embarrassing problems like these led me to work for organizations like GreenPeace, which led to even more serious commitments, like direct action campaigns.

And one time, we blocked access to a local Landfill by chaining a school bus full of children across the gate in order to protect the groundwater from the garbage they kept bringing in. I monitored climbers nearby by bannering an old Drive-in Theater movie screen by keeping watch with a two way radio. This event was covered briefly in a book called: "Who Will Tell the People", probably because most of us don't fare very well after involvement with activities like these, and finding a way out becomes necessary.

The tap water of the residents nearby was dangerously polluted by the drainage from the Landfill, but we ended up with 'challenged reputations' for doing our best to prevent it from continuing. For example, perhaps as a result of action like this, the mother of my child posted my name on MAFIA dot com (Mothers Against Fathers In Arrears). I left to make my way elsewhere, but they used the Internet to prevent me from making progress everywhere. And the location they used to identify me in didn’t really matter, because it was a ghost town that dried up as a result of fracking oil, which was sometimes used by my father’s business.

So I prepared to use this medium, I was well prepared to deal with problems like these by the 1990s, but most of us aren't. As children, we found it hard to believe that grown-ups could do wrong, but most of the time they do, so, if it's clear that what we're doing isn't working for you, then at the very least, learn to be clear about the hazards you're likely to encounter when working for change.

Prior to the Digital Age, many of us had the opportunity to use publishers. People who had better knowledge and experience with anticipating how the public would respond to a given work. Those of us who do both, and most of us who author and publish everyday, now realize that it's a kind of check and balance, or look and see that each corrects and leads to skill in both areas necessary to our survival. Please see: Maps and video about the waterways below: Father Hennepin Bluffs.

With my blind side recreated in a new study, I returned to reflect upon that part of myself I'm not familiar with. Efforts to understand the consequences of experiences I can’t fully recall require me to reacquaint myself with what was missing by way of a new medium to glean a new strategy from the culture that I believe is better prepared to solve our problem. Events that I blocked out; so shocking to me as a child, had become new instances of the problem in the world and I had been advised to respond online.

The health care system chose not to be accountable for their questionable practices and responded by proposing that I field alternatives to my objections elsewhere, much like the church and anonymous communities, so I returned with a more competent form of my objection by suggesting that the electronic forum is precisely how we intend to replace their barbaric practices.

The first falls of our river served as a safe haven for the kinds of threats we live with. Investigators using my children were apparently trying to determine how the feat that I confessed to health care professionals was accomplished. But I was hit as I returned to confront the challengers and the falls were the only place where I could rest. Fortunately, I had the advantage of new tools at my disposal and was well prepared to publish at a moment's notice. Already familiar with the kinds of problems that resulted from previous efforts to report and combat pollution, strange circumstances surrounding a day surgery returned me home.

The fact that I left an injured friend behind without adequately summoning emergency services must've pressed so hard on me that I aspired to apprehend every threat. And seeing myself and my brothers cut up and scarred not only by the scalpel, but also by our own fanatical effort to heal the wounds made me somewhat of a rebel.

Still attached to visions from the East, I drove with the surgical wound that remained after a surgeon removed glass from my ankle. After being placed in a geriatric ward with a bloat beside me, I chose to leave with my papers and a trunk full of odds and ends. With a compass my friend Dave gave me was able to navigate a road I was told to drive by my mother’s boyfriend, but it was not enough to set me back on course after a short nap.

Realizing I had arrived in a State that was not on the map, I regained the suggested route by returning to my point of departure. When I woke, I carried on by drive back out onto the road I came in on in the same direction, but there was a turn planned and by then, I was not in the foothills of the mountains where I was supposed to be.

It only took about an hour or two to realize I had traveled too far to the east, but by returning to my place of departure, I was able to return to the course I was given and it was well after noon before I encountered body parts and unidentified remains left along the left side of the road. So I made a sincere effort to notify the authorities before I left. I was terrified, and wondered about the bright white flash of light that I encountered the night before by the previous State line and the abrupt nature of my departure. Perhaps the tortuous path I was told to drive somehow affected my attachments; how I wondered, could it be possible to have such a horrible impact on a fantasies at a distance?

By studying different forms of attachment, or making use of the different meanings of an ambiguous term, we can study these mechanisms of action without becoming offending. But when required to report details about violence we encounter as a result, my prayer returns to One who, as we draw near, discloses Himself to us to be rid of the behavior we agree is objectionable.