Where a Geranium Blooms

 Miles are a measure of distance in space; they do not accurately measure connections of the heart or the soul. 

I’m perched, having migrated to retire, on the edge of the Mediterranean, very close to Africa though within Europe.  Large ferries depart from the port near my flat several times a week for Algeria. Everyday, I cross paths with Algerians and Moroccans; often women in beautiful scarves, although there are also men with families and men alone, as well as numerous sylph-like youths who show great soul. I also see and hear Europeans of every type on the streets around me, many tourists, others refugees, and some retirees like myself.  The majority of people, like the National Police having breakfast across from me, are from here, Spain, a rich and varied country with its own terrors as well as rich political traditions and joys. 

Still my heart and soul are tied to people on the other side of the Atlantic, and to the vast country that used to uphold vast ideals and dreams to humanity, It saw itself as a torch lighting the way, a vision of hope for humanity. Now most everyone shakes there head and wonders what happened. 

Those things tear at me. More so, the recent assassination at Utah Valley University. It has filled me with a generalized anxiety, interrupting sleep and demanding my days, and I am across the world, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and Iberia. 

This morning, the television news is filled with images of police attacking protestors who interfered with a major, international bicycle event’s final in Madrid. Yet my heart cannot escape what happened, the faces of my students, and a governor’s tears when he realized his state and people were not a safe haven but a part of a vast and cruel world. He would reduce it to the influence of social media and the dark web, but it is so much more. 

My questions here are not what happened. We know the bullet and the name of the assassin and the fallen. We know their backgrounds and we even know what is engraved on the bullet’s companions.

My desire is to find peace, for myself and others, and move past this event. I wonder how to strengthen and cultivate that peace in my soul and among those with whom I associate. 

My name is not Polyanna—far from it. I have never been an optimist. Storm clouds are simply storm clouds and a riot a riot.   

For self preservation, I need that peace inside. 

I think of people that to me are images of peace and how it accompanies them like robes moving in the air.  It also emanates from them like a wonderful and fragrant perfume where, when you walk by, you smell it for a moment just feel good. 

Were I a religious leader or a guru I could propose a path to it for other people, a kind of nirvana. I cannot, That is not my path nor my reality. 

However, to find it, I turn both outward and inward. Though the TV blasts images of violence in Madrid and in Gaza, I see green plants and flowers around me. I look into the heart of the flowers to see the multiplicity of colors inside and dream of the bees that may have visited them. 

I lift a basil leaf or a mint leaf, rub it and smell it.  Its redolence fills me and calms me as I focus on it.. 

I see the beauty of the sky—though I am also aware of how quickly that can turn. Still I see it and let it inside, where I also hold to the majestic sea with its calm waves lapping at the beach and the feet of children and their elders. 

But I also turn inward to create peace.  For me that involves writing. But, according to a conversation I had yesterday afternoon, it also involves cooking: the satisfaction of preparing ingredients—even pungent onions that make me cry, seeing the cook and smelling them on the stove, and then serving homemade food to my friends. 

In the conversation it also came out that many people crochet or knit, mostly women but increasingly men. Manual arts like that focus the body and can also calm themind and the heart. 

I go out and walk. While moving I focus on what I am seeing, including something out of the ordinary to photograph and perhaps post on my social media. 

And, I pay attention to my breathing, the how the oxygen enters my body and flows through my blood relaxing tension inside me. 

This is no manual. It is simply a list of practices and desires. Though anger and anxiety may visit, I shall do little more than greet them, hear them, and bid them farewell. 

Today, I shall work to cultivate peace and till my garden where it is planted and grows next to bougainvillea and geraniums as well as hot peppers. 

UVU and a New Saint

Utah Valley University and I have a close relationship. 

I walked its halls for twenty-two years as a professor. I appreciated my job and had great students. Nonetheless, it always felt strange: a hybrid that has learned to function. 

Though I am retired and live thousands of miles away, I could not help but be very moved by the assassination of Charlie Kirk in a patio I often tread and in which I sat and read or just conversed.

UVU, formerly UVSC, was a technical school that became a university, an officially secular university in a highly religious county, a university of open enquiry in a dogmatic and extremely ultra-right wing count, an open enrollment school in a valley with strong academic elitism. 

Most of its students and maybe a majority of its faculty were conservatives, though that latter is hard to know. Its administration certainly tended to the right, though we saw little in the way of overt politics from them. 

We lived the various jeremiads that Kirk exemplified, created, and led against the main stream university in the US. His world of of struggle against entrenched supposed academic left-wing ideology imposed on students always seemed a fantasy and far removed from any reality we lived. 

Perhaps I and many of my colleagues were naive. We misunderstood the degree to which. most of mainstream humanities and social sciences were defined by Kirkians and allies as left wing in opposition to the new nationalist world of Trumpian-style patriotism. 

Their’s seemed a John Birch dream-verse.

Well, after Wednesday a family has been left fatherless and a school traumatized.  A new martyr has been born for what still seems to me a Taliban-style cause against foundational freedoms and intellectual rigor. 

As with most popular saints, as long as there is social value, St. Charlie, will continue to gather adepts. A myth, a sacred story, what we academics call a hagiography, will be created around him and the event whose point is less truth, than truthiness.

Pamphlets and books will appear. Devotional documentaries, reels, and Tik Toks will appear like flies and vultures near a cadaver.

While skeptics like me may wonder if the assassination wasn’t an action from within the factions of the Right, as long as there is Trump and Trumpism—or this strange American Right with international connections—St. Charlie will continue to grow. 

Pilgrimages will appear, as people come to participate in the sanctity of where he died. 

Ritual to expel the demon, envisaged as the assassin and all the mentally unbalanced leftists (demons) who enabled the murder, will abound. 

A cause will take greater form and expand. 

But I worry about those left behind. A university president who just lost her husband and who has spent body and soul working to make UVU a better and more successful place.   Deans and Department Chairs who have spent decades developing this University into the fine place it is / was. 

I worry about the students who were there or simply part of the community who have now had terror driven deep into their hearts with an image of blood spurting from an ivory neck. They are marked and will live with this forever. 

In whatever happens in this case, whether they find the assassin or not, I hope people can spare some time and effort to help a community and University heal and regain its quality, value, and aplomb.

They and it deserve your compassion and concern.