You will be found on the YBR.

Optical illusions. Just parlor tricks to amuse and entertain us?

In the pen and ink drawing above, you see. And then again when you look at it you see. The amazing thing is you can see both (but not at the same time). There is no right or wrong. Or at least there shouldn’t be.

We are living in what I call optical illusion times.  You might see pain, suffering and death. Or you might see sacrifice, selflessness and courage. Then again you might see grave administrative mistakes. But then again, you might see political power used to benefit…all of us.

Having only 300 posts to my name since I started this blog one thing remains constant.  I keep following the yellow brick road. Over 70 years as a passenger on planet earth I can’t even see the Emerald City. And that’s a good thing.

Despite the fact that I don’t have enough followers to be considered as crowd and despite the fact that none of my posts have gone viral, I continue taking one step after another on the YBR. (Maybe the word ‘viral’ shouldn’t be used during a pandemic. Just saying.)

My drive or motivation always seems to come from pieces of life that don’t really go together until they all do come together and I understand what was going on in that old head of mine.

This afternoon my youngest son sent me a very old but classic puzzle. It’s called the Trick Donkey puzzle or what I call the Donkey Trick.

If you are game, print it out and follow the instructions.  It’s just the thing to make you totally bonkers during the quarantine.

I printed out the puzzle and followed the instructions.  My head was filled with questions and doubts.  The puzzle looked impossible. I It was a joke.  It was a waste of my time.  So after ten or fifteen minutes, i put it aside and had dinner.  After dinner I cleared my desk and placed the puzzle pieces down and didn’t think about how impossible it was.  I knocked down my walls of doubt. Wonder of wonder, without thinking about it, I didn’t solve the puzzle. It solved itself.  I let it happen.

That got me thinking.  We are living through a period of time that challenges us. It is filling us with doubt.  On the road to Oz we’re in the deep, dark part of the forest that is closing in on us.

It’s an optical illusion. We are alone. We are not alone. We are on the verge of despair. We see rays of light.

Dorothy’s journey to Oz eventually led her to the Wizard. He, too, was an optical illusion.  He looked powerful and scary. But when Toto pulled back the curtain, the great and powerful wizard of Oz was a humbug.

With a twister going on inside my head, I sought relief in a movie. For reasons that escape me, I watched The Great Debaters with Denzel Washington. (If you’ve never seen it, I heartily recommend it.)

The movie is really an optical illusion. It’s about the racial disgrace that polluted America during the depression. (Racism is and continues to be a pandemic.)  It got me thinking that no voice should go unheard.

In the end, the puzzle, the oppressive sense of pandemicism, and the movie all came together.

Every day we are on the yellow brick road we have opportunities to understand that we don’t take the journey alone.  We have opportunities to discover new and wonderful things about the power we have to make a difference.

I only hope that after the corona bug is put to rest that we don’t forget the lessons we (should) have learned on the YBR.

We are not lost. We will be found.

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Fear on the YBR. It comes in all forms…even in the shape of the Coronavirus.

Life for a kid growing up in the 1950s was not “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father Knows Best,” or even “Lassie.”  That’s what my generation was led to believe, but the truth did not have a laugh track.  Early Baby Boomers were afraid of nuclear annihilation.

60+ years after the fact I still have nightmares about the monthly atomic bomb drills we had. With our heads tucked under our hands and our little bodies scrunched up against the wall we were preparing for the inevitable dropping of an atomic bomb.

Fear. It was part of our food chart, right between fruits and vegetables and protein.

Fear is what drives us to be less than human because it causes us to lose all sense of compassion.  Fear of the unknown was behind the Salem Witch Trials. Fear of taking a stand against tyrants is what led to the Holocaust.

Fear filled Dorothy’s slippers the moment she stepped foot on the yellow brick road. Fear of the Wicked Witch of the West haunted her on her journey to Oz. But, fear was not Dorothy’s undoing as it is for many of us. Dorothy wasn’t afraid of her fear. (That’s what I think FDR meant when he said “all we have to fear is fear itself.”)

The 9/11 attacks gave us something to fear, but as a people we didn’t let our fear get the best of us. Instead, we turned fear inside out and we discovered something magical. We discovered that what was dividing us as a nation was our fear.  It took a tragic incident to wake us up.

Today,  fear has once again reared its ugly head in the form of another deadly pandemic. It doesn’t matter a hoot that pandemics are a part of world history.  It doesn’t matter that the bubonic plague wiped out nearly 75% of the world’s population or that the Spanish Flu of 1918 eventually stole the life of 50 million people world-wide.  What matters is what is happening today…and along with the Corona virus fear is spreading faster than the germs of a sneeze.

There’s no denying that our nation is divided. There is no doubt that ignorance is what is fueling our fear. Our fear is getting the best of us. That does not mean to say we have no reason to be afraid of what COVID-19 can and is doing. However, our fear is making us turn into very ugly people.

It hasn’t happened yet, and I pray that it doesn’t, but our fear could drive us to turn savage. God knows what could happen between two people fighting over that last roll of toilet paper.

It reminds me of a Playhouse  90 television show I saw as a kid. It was called Alas, Babylon, and it was about none other than the dreaded dropping of an atomic bond.

The scene was burnished into my brain. People were in line at a grocery store.  It was pure pandemonium. The shelves were empty. People were beating each other up over food.  (The scene made me very sad.)

We are like Dorothy, but instead of dropping a house on a witch, the house has dropped on us and we are all crawling out from underneath the rubble. The look of fear is etched on our faces. We are beginning to fear that this is the end times.

I think we have to go back and see what Dorothy did. More importantly we have to remember that she didn’t do it alone.  She found friends with a common goal and marched arm-in-arm with them to Oz.  Even though she and her three traveling companions…and Toto, too, were filled with fear, they supported one another.

We need to do that.  That doesn’t mean we have to be care-free. We need to be cautious as cautious as the travelers were on the YBR when they were in the deepest and darkest part of the forest. (Lions and tigers and bears, oh, my. Rinse. Repeat.)  Dorothy had already embraced the Scarecrow (brains) and was filled with heart (the Tin Man), but she lacked the courage she needed to vanquish her fears.

It was fitting that the king of the forest had not yet discovered his inner courage because that’s what happens to us.  We never know how brave we can be until we come face-to-face with fear.

While we have to place our trust in the hands of scientists and “leaders,” we are not helpless.  We can relieve our fear by relishing the love that we share with family and friends. We can face this pandemic by using our head, heeding our hearts and finding the courage to do the right thing.  And what is the right thing?  Spreading kindness wherever we go. Don’t let this pandemic reduce us to savage beasts. Let’s all rise to the occasion and be kind to one another.  Don’t kill each other over that last roll of toilet paper. Figure out a way to meet each other’s needs.

Who knows, when this pandemic passes maybe we’ll all remember how kindness won the day and fear was sent packing.

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The seasons of our lives on the YBR. Don’t pass the salt shaker.

Up until recently I was like the character from Jimmy Buffett’s classic song, Margaretaville. I was always searching for that lost shaker of salt because I was addicted to salt.  In fact, if I ate something sweet I needed to follow it with something salty.  Health factors aside (I came to realize that my consumption of salt from a shaker on top of the high levels of sodium added to most food products) I have learned something about not reaching for the salt shaker.

As we pass through the different phases of our lives, there are definite “seasons” that help define us. Our lives can be well seasoned without adding any salt. And by salt I mean the many distractions that hamper us from appreciating the full flavors of the moment.  By adding salt to those seasons of our lives we can’t taste life at it was meant to be lived.

In a culinary sense I have come to taste food as it was meant to be tasted.  By adding salt I was only tasting the salt…not the food. Now I am re-discovering the flavor of the food I am eating.

Instead of searching for that lost shaker of salt in our lives we would be far better off rediscovering the flavor of life.  It might take awhile to get used to a life without adding salt to it, but in the long run I believe life will taste much better.

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