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Wednesday, April 2, 2025

They're Screwing With Us Folks.

Let's take back our power by listening to that still small voice that says, "What!!!?" "What were you thinking?" 

Remember when we got excited when a President told us that we would send a man to the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the decade? We didn't know how in the world we were going to do that, but smartness rose to the occasion.

We had a vision.

We developed space travel when a leader told us we could. I remember when Sam Shepherd, the first man in space, did a quick up and down, only going into orbit. And I remember Shepherd while suited up and sitting in the space capsule regretted his morning coffee and needed to go to the bathroom. The crew discussed the problem and finally told him to wet his pants.

Remember when John F. Kennedy conceived the idea of the Peace Corps? 

Kennedy, arrived in Michigan at 2 am in the morning, not to speak, but to sleep. When he found himself surrounded by 10,000 students he spoke extemporaneously. Kennedy challenged American youth to devote a part of their lives to living and working in Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a way to foster goodwill and peace. 

Their response was immediate: within weeks students organized a petition drive and gathered 1,000 signatures in support of the idea. Several hundred others pledged to serve. Enthusiastic letters poured into Democratic headquarters. This response was crucial to Kennedy's decision to make the founding of a Peace Corps a priority.  He executed it by executive order, and three days later appointed R. Sargent Shriver as the Director?

Maybe you don't remember, for this was March 1, 1961.

From the podium at the University of Michigan, Kennedy asked:

 

"How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?"

 

"On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend on the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can! And I think Americans are willing to contribute. But the effort must be far greater than we have ever made in the past."

 


By 2018, 141 countries had hosted more than 235,000 Peace Corp volunteers.

 I once witnessed the far-reaching arm of a Peace Corps volunteer:

I was part of a training session. One of the group, a Caucasian young man raised in Africa, was deep into his feelings of being alone. not wanted, grieving for what he had lost. He lamented that once in Africa, he knew friendship where boys would happily walk down the street with their arms around each other, and think nothing about it. He had no such friends in America.

 From the back of the room came a voice in Swahili.

 We didn't know what it said, but the boy did.

 Neither did we know we had a former Peace Corps volunteer in the group. The voice said, "Welcome, brother."

 The kid fell apart, and so did we as soon as we knew what had happened. We were leaping from our seats, hugging the kid and each other, crying and laughing all at the same time.

 

 

 

 

 

 Once, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow said: "Stop studying the ills and look to the positive way things work."

 What a concept.

Spiritual life, as Maslow puts it, is an instinct. One hears it from the voices that arise from within. However, two forces are pulling at the individual. One pulls us toward health and self-actualization, the other towards weaknesses and sickness.

 


 Self-actualization (Maslow's term) is not an endpoint or a destination.
 

It is an ongoing process in which people stretch themselves to achieve new heights of well-being, creativity, and fulfillment.

Maslow believed that self-actualizing people contained several characteristics—self-acceptance, spontaneity, independence, and the ability to have peak experiences.

Peak experiences are high points where the individual is in harmony with himself and his surroundings. Some would call that one's spirituality.

Peak experiences are moments of love, understanding, happiness, or rapture, during which a person feels whole, alive, self-sufficient, and yet a part of the world. They are more aware of truth, justice, harmony, and goodness.

 Religious or spiritual values are not the exclusive property of any religion or group. Self-actualizers are religious in character, attitudes, and behavior.

 "Spiritual disorders" tend toward anger or a loss of meaning. Sometimes, it is grief or despair regarding the future. There is often a belief that one's life has been a waste and that finding joy or love is impossible.

I'm attempting ever so carefully to pull myself out of media whitewashing of the Presidency, although tears are appearing in its fabric, and people see through its holes. It's like, 

"Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice; shame on me."

I'm sorry civilization creeps along slowly. We make giant strides ahead, only to lose some. It wobbles. We oscillate between elation and depression.

Some people thought that everything was rotten and that we ought to tear it all down and let Daddy build it back up.

 When donkeys fly.

 


 

 

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Hang with Me, It Gets Better--Staggeringly Awesome Information

Dear Folks,

For the last few weeks I have been trying to find my footing with The Muse Newsletter. Isn't that the way it goes when beginning a new venture? "I wrote something on Saturday, took it out on Sunday--all in all, it was a good weekend."


Initially, I intended to charge for the Newsletter since one person paid me $12.00 to write it. Thank you, thank you, kind person. I am, however, offering them for FREE. Few people run out to buy a book they have never heard of, or anything else for that matter.


I will post them on Substack. Please join me there. A Free subscription will allow you to receive a notice whenever a new post pops onto the scene.


Don't be intimidated by a notice encouraging you to join a paid subscription. It isn't required. It's the way Substack can offer a free site to writers. Substack will take a percentage of the subscription fees and leave the rest for the author. That way, both stay in business.


This is the second The Muse Newsletter this month, posted March 27, 2025


I just had to forward some Staggeringly Awesome information.
(Is there such a word as staggeringly?)

 


 

March 27, 2025

Hang With Me, It Gets Better

Staggeringly Awesome information

My desk sits atop two stacks of two file cabinets—one of which I use like a suggestion box where I leave the drawer ajar and slip in papers--statement receipts, miscellaneous receipts, medical information, bank statements, brochures, strange notes, important things and, you know, some things I should have thrown away long ago. It was a mess.

You don't do that, do you?

Did I find the one thing I wanted?

Nope.

But I filed papers in file folders and was rewarded with clean, organized drawers, and in the process, I found this quote:

"I love being a writer. What I can't stand is the paperwork."

 –Peter DeVries

Yep.

After the drawers were clean, I couldn't leave the avalanche of papers on my desk's surface, so I shoveled, went into the back yard picked some flowers, and took a picture to prove I can have a clean desk for a millisecond once every six months, and found this:

"Worrying is praying for things you don't want."

—Jen Sincero (I love that girl.)

Oh boy, The Muse is talking to me.


And then I found something that dwarfed everything I had just written.

It was Staggeringly Awesome.

Husband dear had told me about an earth-penetrating device where investigators could map beneath the planet's surface down to over one mile. It is like Google's surface map, but this one is in 3D and underground.

It's a CAT Scan for the earth.

I looked up something I had heard regarding the pyramids and found that a team of researchers using SAR technology were looking inside the Great Pyramid, and found something beneath it that was startling.

Under the Khafa Pyramid, the second largest pyramid on the Giza plateau, they found massive structures that go down 648 meters. That would be 1,944 feet!

Capella Space and Umbra announced on March 16, 2025, that SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) found massive underground structures beneath the Khafa Pyramid on the Giza Plateau.

Eight cylindrical structures extend from beneath the pyramid to mammoth square structures beneath.

Some have supposed that the cylindrical structures are wells and that coils wrapped around them could be stairs. (Climbing 1,944 feet of stairs would take massive muscles and joints made of iron.)

Listen to Jay Anderson tell about it—his enthusiasm is contagious.

https://x.com/TheProjectUnity/status/1902380527002275890

 


I couldn't help but think about the intellect exhibited by individuals who can create such astounding technology as a non-invasive earth-penetrating device, which starkly contrasts with the intellect running our country right now.

That could be the way it works, Power vs Innovation.

"Never doubt what a group of individuals can do—whoops, I've quoted Margaret Mead many times.

For those who haven't read it:

"Never doubt what a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

--Margaret Mead

May the Muse be with you.


 P.S.

To read the first The Muse Newsletter, March 24, 2025 please go to:

https://joycedavis.substack.com/p/the-muse-newsletter-official-beginning