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This one is fun and is sure to make you smile!

Forewarned: no synchro here.

There is something compelling about Joe Biden. I have always liked this man, liked his voting record, his personal biography, and his ability to discuss issues in a powerful yet grounded way. Joe is….well, Joe. Middle class. His name pretty much says it all.

He has lived through tragedy that would kill lesser mortals – the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident in 1972, shortly after Biden, 29, was elected to the U.S. Senate, one of the youngest people ever elected to that position. As a sudden single father of two young boys, he did what any parent would do, devoted himself to them unconditionally.

Joe understands that any country is only as strong as its middle class and this point came through strongly during the VP debate this evening. Ryan was clearly in over his head when it came to foreign policy, Medicare, Social Security, taxes, the right of a woman to choose, and just about every other issue covered in the debate. When the moderator, Martha Raddatz, a correspondent for ABC News, asked him a pointed question, asked for specifics, Ryan sought refuge in talking points.

Martha was fantastic, a terrific moderator in that she didn’t allow these two guys to take over. Better than Jim Laher, for sure .

MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donald felt it was inappropriate for Raddatz to ask the candidates, both of them Catholics, how their religious beliefs influenced their policies – particularly on abortion. O’Donald feels that religion shouldn’t enter the debate because of the separation between church and state. But the fact is that the separation between church and state has been eroding for years, Religion has been a factor in politics since the Nixon/JFK debate in 1960, when JFK’s Catholicism became an issue. And in the first twelve years of the new millennium, religion has gained a foothold in politics that is unprecedented.

For instance, Paul Ryan co-signed a bill with U.S. Congressman Todd Akin that would declare personhood upon a fertilized egg. Akin, by the way, sits on the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and wants all of you women out there to know that pregnancy from rape is really rare. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

Really? And this guy is sitting on a science committee?

That’s a whole other post. The point here is that Ryan co-wrote this bill with Akin – and is now struggling to distance himself from it. When Joe Biden answered this question, he pointed out that his religious beliefs tell him that its right for the government to take care of those who can no longer take care of themselves – the poor, disenfranchised, elderly, sick – the very people, in fact, whom Ryan’s budget would dismiss completely. In terms of abortion, Biden said it isn’t up to government to intervene in such personal decisions, that he wouldn’t interfere in Roe v Wade.

Ryan would appoint supreme court justices who would overturn that ruling and basically render any woman and/or doctor involved in an abortion a murderer. Nice, huh?

An abortion is not an easy choice for any woman. And it’s shocking that decades after the supremos ruled on Roe v Wade it’s still an issue, that we have candidates who actually believe the government should have the right to dictate the choices a woman makes about her own body. But there is no corresponding proposed ruling about what men do with their bodies.

Years ago in college, I remember having this discussion with Dr. Millet, a professor of English Lit whom I absolutely adored. He was trying to convince me to stick with English Lit as a major (rather than Spanish). “You women, Trish, always hold the upper hand because you are the ones who birth life.”

“Uh, we don’t do this alone, Dr. Millet.”

“Well, no, but because you’re the ones who actually give birth, you’re the ones who come under under scrutiny by those in government  who seek to control your bodies.”

This conversation happened around 1967, before Roe v Wade. I was a 20-year-old hippie who was against everything the government stood for. And here I was, having this surreal conversation with a professor at least 20 years older than me who nonetheless understood the stakes. “Go write your novels and books, Trish,” he said. “You will always follow the path of your heart.”

It sounded nice but it took me many years to understand what he actually meant by that statement, the greatest compliment I ever got from any professor. And right now, my heart tells me we are still a country where racism is prevalent, where many people who are going to vote for Romney/Ryan will do so simply because Obama is black. Reactionary voting is often a vote against your own self- interest.

Here’s what I’m sure of: Any woman who votes the Repub ticket needs extensive and profound psychiatric intervention.

Biden won.

Here it is, October 10, and the temperature this afternoon in the dog park was probably 85. Not too much humidity.    A breeze. Shade. Everyone was talking about how maybe – maybe – winter Florida style would be arriving soon. But the dogs told a different story.

The dogs panted, slobbered, kept going to the fountain for water. And that huge great dane there on the ground is Dharma, not even a year old, and she drinks a lot of water. She’s the  biggest dog in the park and  just wants to play – with any dog, any human. She trots over to the bench where I’m sitting and thrusts her huge muzzle at my bottle of water, knocking it to the ground.  Play with me, and if you won’t, I’ll eat your water bottle. She slobbers, she licks, she’s the kind of dog who captures your heart immediately.

Cody the trickster husky starts chasing her and for about five minutes they tussle in the grass. Here’s Cody and Noah:

And  when Dharma finally gets to her feet, Noah comes up behind her, mounts her, and knocks her to the ground. That’s when all the little dogs moved in to sniff and nibble at her feet and legs and ears. She takes it, she loves it.

Dharma, like her great dane brother Mufasa, who wasn’t around today, is probably  an old soul,   probably remembers her previous lives, her previous human companions. Dharma and Mufasa  probably have a secret school in some obscure corner of the dog park where they and their  students are invisible to humans.  I think Noah may sit in on this class, but it’s tough getting a straight answer from him on anything. He’s an Aquarian born February 12, 2009.  He’s resolute, he misses his buddy sister Nika, but oh wow, does he ever love his Frisbee.

Every time I go to the dog park, which is probably four or five times  a week, I’m invited to join the dog’s world, where everything is apparent if you watch closely enough. Where everything entails synchronicity, something dogs seem to instinctively recognize and honor.

I wish there was a cat park where I could observe our three felines. They are: Tigerlil, who at age 15, is the deaf matron and doesn’t photograph well because she is always moving; Powder, whom we fond in a library parking lot, is at least 12 and maybe as old as 13, the most accepting of our cats; and Simba, our youngest, a male brought to us by our neighbor.  I wish I could divine their psyches in the same way that that I do the psyches of dogs.

But hey, a cat will be the first to tell you that he or she is NOT a dog, dislikes the doggie slobbering and pandering to humans. Yet, I believe that cats, are also our cheerleaders, our teachers,  and even though they don’t have parks and wouldn’t do well in such parks, they get it, too. We’re all in this together. We are Indra’s net, animal and human alike, and what affects me impacts you up and down the line.

Dog Park. You, me, them. We’re on it.

Right?

Years ago, we interviewed a man  in an office with all the walls painted black. He had a great stereo system and was playing a Peter Gabriel tune when we arrived. It seemed that while in his darkened den the outside world simply vanished. His name was Michael Mann and he was producer of Miami Vice, a TV show that ironically was known for it bright pastel colors. His Mann-cave provided him a place to escape all the hoopla and buzz about his popular show.

Now there’s another Michael Mann who says many of us are living in caves like his namesake, avoiding the reality of what is happening to the climate.  This Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, recently told The Guardian  of London that low-lying island nations could see disastrous consequences of climate change far sooner than expected.

“The models have typically predicted that will not happen for decades but the measurements that are coming in tell us it is already happening so once again we are decades ahead of schedule,” Mann said, who is the director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center.

Meanwhile, more than a third of the people in the U.S. and Great Britain deny that there is any climate change going on, and that figure, ironically, has been rising along with the waters from the melting ice on the polar ice caps. “There’s a huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the public,” according to NASA scientist James Hansen.

Whether you think climate change is a normal pattern of nature or is being hurried along by 7 billion people and their carbon prints is irrelevant to the fact that the climate is rapidly changing.

It’s time for the deniers to abandon their caves and take a look at the science, which says the rise in average global temps, has been largely attributed to the burning of fossil fuels and the resultant increase in greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. That’s the overwhelming conclusion of scientists, even if politicians and their corporate allies are doing their best to tell us it ain’t so.

Even if all the scientists are wrong, the bottom line is that disastrous consequences are coming our way. As the Greenland and the west Antarctic ice sheets disappear,”we [will] really start to see sea level rises accelerate,” Mann says. Unlike with the melting of sea ice, these ice sheets would introduce vast quantities of water into the world’s oceans, and could cause the evacuation of some islands.

“Island nations that have considered the possibility of evacuation at some point, like Tuvalu, may have to be contending those sort of decisions within a matter of a decade or so.”

For vulnerable island nations, like the Maldives, Kiribati, the Torres Strait Islands and many others, rising seas will bring significant coastal erosion and saltwater contamination of limited freshwater supplies. Environmental group Oceana recently noted that nations dependent upon the sea will face food security threats as greater temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide increase ocean acidity and put marine life at risk.

Yet, the disbelief that it is happening is widespread. So maybe one day we will step out of our Mann-caves and discover that we’re on an island and water is rising.

This year’s record melting, which occurred under more “normal” conditions than the previous record set in 2007, left Arctic sea ice at a minimum “nearly 50 percent lower than the average … for the years 1979-2000,” according to Climate Central.

Despite the increasingly clear picture painted by scientific observations and climate modeling, “There’s a huge gap between what is understood by the scientific community and what is known by the public,” according to NASA scientist James Hansen. Recent polling suggests that as much as 35 percent of the U.S. population and 37 percent of the British public remain unconvinced of the scientific reality of climate change.

After watching this flash mob dancing, I wish I worked for Twitter!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YLnrH6E9lxs

That was the theme of a meditation class I taught recently and it was accompanied by synchronicity before class even began. I arrived about 15 minutes early to open the yoga studio and found one of my students sitting by the door. She said she was glad I arrived early because she had a question. She seemed anxious and said she was worried about going too deep into meditation.

I asked why. It seemed an odd question for a beginning meditation class, since most of the students were having a difficult time quieting their minds and getting into a meditative state. She spoke rapidly in a quiet, accented voice and told me that when she was 16 she was put into a deep trance by a man who did something to her. She didn’t say what, but said that maybe she would tell me later. I think she was waiting for me to ask, but I didn’t. She repeatedly said that she was worried about going too deep because she might re-live the experience. I thought that was what she was already doing.

I told her that the class was going to focus on overcoming worries and anxieties and it should help her overcome her fears. A couple of minutes later, another student arrived and the first thing she said was that she was worried about something. I can’t recall what it was – something about her teenage son -because I was too amazed that people were not only bringing their worries to class, but were talking about them. I hadn’t begun the class or told them that we would focus on dealing with worries and anxiety.

I’d brought a book along called, Matrix Meditations, and had marked a couple of passages in a chapter called Worry – Uncertainty and Anxiety. What I’d noticed about both the worries presented to me before class was that they probably weren’t worth worrying about. Certainly, the first woman had experienced something traumatic 25 or 30 years earlier, but if was so worried about reliving it, why had she signed up for the class?

The very first lines of what I read to the group actually reflected my thoughts. “Worry and anxiety sometimes reflect inner conflicts that need resolution, but many times they have little basis, and can waste a great deal of time and energy. Mark Twain remarked, “I’ve seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true.” Worrying can be purposeful, but often it is not. Psychologist Fritz Perls called anxiety “the gap between the now and the later.”

I like that line. “The gap between the now and the latter.”

I had decided to make use of whatever the students were worrying about by turning it into a visualization for something better, what Maxwell Maltz, author of Psycho-Cybernetics, called constructive worry. Maltz recommends that you imagine the possibility of a positive event that you would like to see happen “so clearly that it becomes real to your brain and nervous system.”

So I told the class to create an intention – something that they wanted to see happen that would overcome any  worry or anxiety. (Worry is a mental process while anxiety is a whole body process. When you’re anxious, you muscles tighten, your breathing changes, a furrow forms on your brow.) The second step is to give it attention. Not the worry, but the positive resolution. Create the details of what you want to see. Then, no tension – release it, let it go.

So the mantra for that particular meditation was intention – attention – no tension. Over and over.

Hopefully, the meditations helped. But I had feeling that I was going to hear more about the woman’s trance  experience before the course was over. That last part – release it, let it go – can be the most challenging aspect of overcoming a negative experience.

After class, she approached and I was hoping that she would say something about how the exercise relieved her worry. Instead, she said something odd. “I’ve been in your house.”

Huh?

“Did you write a book about the Bermuda Triangle?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s what I thought. I remember my client talking to you about it. That was years ago. I’m a realtor and he was interested in your house.” Apparently, he was more interested in the Bermuda Triangle, because we’re still living here.