Beauty for Ashes

2000 years ago, Jesus Christ walked on earth. He taught us how to live well, abundantly and appropriately, in love and mercy. In one of his teaching sessions (later published in Matthew 25) Jesus said this: “I was a stranger, and you took me in.” In these times, that principle was actualized when Christians worked together to build a new home, in the aftermath of a very destructive fire, for a family in Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii. Back in the ancient times, when Jesus’ followers expressed confusion about his “you took me in”statement, Jesus replied: “Whatsoever you’ve done to the least of these, my brethren. . . (it’s as if) you’ve done it unto me.” Today, June 29, I attended a celebratory event in which a newly-built home was being presented to its new owner, a lady named Carol whose home had been destroyed in the great Lahaina fire of 2023. Let me explain. In the natural world, from time to time, disasters happen. The fire at Lahaina, Maui, in the Hawaiian archipelago, was a devastating event for that community. But in the wake of that disastrous fire, Christian organization Samaritan’s Purse stepped up to the task of constructing a new home for Carol. Local and distant volunteers labored together. In that constructive follow-up, Christian organizers and volunteers from near and far stepped in to rebuild Carol’s new home. Today, June 29, 2025, the house which was presented to her. Thus did we celebrate, today, the dedication of Carol’s new home, as it was given to her and her children, with a scriptural explanation of the salvatory labor by which Jesus reconstructs broken homes and broken lives through the efforts of His people.

So Carol took possession of her home in the presence of Samaritan’s Purse staffers and Christian volunteers from near and far. Her new home was presented with an explantation that Jesus had established in his teachings, as in Matthew 25 and in the parable of the good Samaritan. . . through which the generosity and labor of Christian volunteers worked together to construct the house, two years after the Lahaina disaster.

Those volunteers were laboring on behalf of the new homeowner, but also to express the generosity of Christian volunteers from all over the world who had contributed to the effort, thus manifesting the power of Jesus’ legacy as actualized among his people when they set their minds and hands to the reconstruction of homes for disaster victims. But that’s not all. Broken lives, as well as burnt houses, can be reconstructed for proper use. You just gotta believe. For more information, consult with your local Christian friends and neighbors. King of Soul

Down at the Crossroads

With the advent of AI, we find ourselves at a crossroads in time and history. In the state of Mississippi, where I was raised as a child in the 1950’s, there was a tale told among the ole blues-singing soulsters of yesterday and days gone by, the devil—whoever, whatever that is—went down to the “crossroads” to make a deal with whoever showed up. Be that as it may, whether it is neither here, nor there, or anywhere. . . we se that the contest harmony and invention is being played out far beyond the scripted staffs of musical history, political history, art history or just plain ole human history, always presenting consequences more grave than the mere good sense and good works of the people who inhabit this planet, Still to be found in the world today is the ongoing contest of order v. chaos.

Here’s the ever-present duel between right and wrong; there’s the Establishment beating back dissidents, fat cats banishing immigrants, the haves taking maximum control over them that ain’t got. And we shan’t shan’t neglect to mention the plight of them who think they. should be running the show, being perpetually put down by that are in charge of it. And here we learn we do have words that must be said; yet we have words that should never be spoken, but someone will pronounce those words sooner or later. Yes, we do encounter in this life lines in the sand that daren’t be crossed, and prohibitions that beg to be violated; we find rules that must be broken, and sometimes we encounter the terrible contests of convention vs. contention. And then there is AI? What's up with that? King of Soul

Many Many Jerky Persians

King Trumpednezzar was feasting in his oval lair with his maga minions when suddenly an elephant swaggered through his maga-feed, tweeting out cryptic memes of antidisestablishmentinterianistic drivel to violate his whitewashed walls, to wit: Many, Many Nukey Persians Thanks for reading Carey's Snippets! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Say what? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Suddenly, jingle jangle, now in what are we entangled? Phone calls from MAGA stalls. . . more calls from RINO halls: Persian nukers falling down, falling down! Persian nukers going down, bye, bye, Shiites! oh but!. . . Gotta look good and be a winner, oh great Trumpednezzar!

. . . meanwhile back at the oval . . . squash the Persians; make them grovel! . . . dithering in a coup-top flipflop; . . . we’ll go make a fake news bomb hop! we’ll make them Persians STOP Stop them Persians from making nukes Magas and elephants, just ignore the flukes. Proud boys and three percenters, stand by! We’ll blow them persian nukes sky high Let’s blast armageddon

into MAGA heaven! Smoke

The Common Thread

After Jesus Christ had demonstrated, by his Resurrection, the power of Life over death, he ascended into the eternal realm, leaving behind his disciples and everyone else. In the biblical account of events after his return to heaven, a description was given, in the book of Acts, of the life of his disciples as they were living, congregating and spreading the news of eternal life through Jesus Christ. In the second chapter of Acts, a description of those early Christians’ lifestyle was given: “And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need.” Thereafter, as the ages rolled by and years turned into centuries, kingdoms morphed into empires, empires generated wars. Human history is the sometimes-up and sometimes-down intersection of various human institutions, successes and failures, doctrines and debts, with some people coming out ahead in any given situation and others ending up with the short end of the stick. In some applications of human will, effort, blood, sweat and tours, groups of people get conquered by other groups. There were slaves serving masters; workers serving bosses, poor serving rich and, as modernity crept into history, a so-called middle class, such as I am. About 1800 years after Jesus’ ascension to heaven, another well-informed Jewish person came along with a notable theory pertaining to this notion of all things being held in common. Karl Marx proposed that society should be reconstructed in a manner that would put the working people, which he called the proletariat, in charge of all the machinery of production and the management of society. As Marx’s theory were later applied in various nations, most notably the Soviet Union during the 20th century, communism was demonstrated to be a way of doing things that did not actually fill the bill of what human peace and progress requires. So the idea that all things ought to be held in common sort of fell into disrepute. Now it is seen as an unworkable basis upon which to build a society, or even, perhaps, a community. As. for the original Christian practice of holding all things in common. . .it has withered and disappeared amongst the various stages of Church history. It seems that mankind, even the Russians and the Chinese, have given up on the sometimes great notion of communal living and communal property. In American history, a trend toward commonality was initiated by Franklin Roosevelt . . .with his New Deal, designed to help us common folk get by during the Depression. When the second World War erupted, everything got damaged, ditched, rearranged or reconfigured. In America, and the so-called “West” free market policies cranked up prosperity that was unprecedented in world history.

In recent years, there was a faction of the christian religion that broke ranks with those “liberals” who wanted to share the wealth, prosperity and productivity of free society. These secessionists wanted to make us great again by following the dictates of a self-obsessed president who understands nothing except how to make money, which was not the occupation of our original Messiah, or his most fervent followers. All that to say. . . I pecked out these thoughts after reading, this morning, those words from the original guide to Christian living: “And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common.” Just sayin’. Glass half-Full

All Along the Rough Ridge Trail

There must be some path out of Now There must be some way to know How I tell myself again. traipsing now beyond the spin. . . There’s too much diffusion I’m feeling only this confusion So I think I’ll take some time . . . maybe traipse out along a rhyme

Now and then I walk this trail. Rocks may come and feet may flail. Here and there along the line I’m waiting for some kind of sign I can’t sort out what is happening I find no relief in this lapping the the joker he keeps exciting as Dems and magas now keep fighting There are many here among us Who feel they must make Life a fuss But America has seen the many and the few and this is not the best that we can do So let us not talk falsely now Let us strive to find out how our Faith degenerates to Fate while donkeys do and foxes hate each other. Stride along the trail where you’ll discern some detail

Confusion has its cost. We are won and we are lost. All along our Watchtower the WorldNet casts its spin streaming in the web again, again while the Eagle cries in sorrow yesterday, today, tomorrow. But what’s it to me; what’s it you? Are our remaining days but few? Up high along the trail We catch a snippet of email the Eagle cries in sorrow What do we find tomorrow? Two parties tweet and try as foxes run and doves fly Pundits maintain their scowl. The wind begins to howl. Good night and good luck. Let us hope we don’t get stuck. Glass half-Full

When We Slow Down

A few months ago, Pat and I visited New York City. On a day when we happened to be down on the lower East Side, we decided to conclude our day by taking a subway up the 5th Ave line, so we would be closer to the Port Authority station to get back to our New Jersey overnight place. We got off at 59th Street, where I was expecting to see a bridge over the East River, or a lampost that might have inspired a Paul Simon rhyme from my memory.After walking several blocks toward midtown, we arrived at the entrance to Central Park, where I caught sight of the lampost. . . the one that, I had supposed, inspired Paul Simon to compose his 59th Street Bridge Song.  "Hello lampost. What ya knowing? Time to watch your flowers growing. A'int ya got not rhymes for me. . . dit didda, feeling groovy. . . La di da da." Reminiscing now. . . time warp backward. . . Back in the day, long about 1967, my high school civics class made a video that ostensibly depicted the feeling of being a happy-go-lucky teen during those revolutionary (or so we thought) curious 1960's. Wandering through those unprecedented, unduplicated times of peace-obsession and protest, and believing we could change the world. . . we clipped our collection of home-made film footage together to make a movie that would express. . . well, we weren't so sure what it would express. But it felt good just doing such a creative thing. Our civics teacher helped us put together a sound track for our little movie. We leaned upon a songster hero of those times, Paul Simon, for the sound track during that scene. The song was "59th Street Bridge Song." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xhJcQEfD5s Now fast forward. . . and then back again, just a couple of weeks ago. . . this time inBoston. . . There we were, my wife of 45 years and me, one small part of a generation, as Don McLean had mentioned somewhere along the line, "lost in space", (so to speak). . . we were sitting in some grand old theatre in Boston, listening to Paul Simon sing his songs. Accompanied by a multiplicity of musicians in the background, Paul did what I suppose all great songwriters and performing musicians do after they've achieved the heights of success and then lived to tell about it. I'm sure that Paul understood everything about what was going on in our minds. . . what we were thinking and feeling about those halcyon days of long ago. . . and surely he know what songs we were expecting to hear.

So. . . Paul did his thing. . . whatever he chooses to do during this late season of our baby boomer lives. It was all good. But . . . funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. . . Paul saved the greatest songs. . . some of those that he knew we most wanted to hear . . . for the end. "The Boxer" was an encore, and the original greatest Simon song of all, "Sounds of Silence," was the second encore. It was all good, but. . . My one, small disappointment came when Paul did not sing his song that best expresses what we are facing in America today, An American Tune. It's the song with the line:  ". . . and I dreamed I was flying: high up above. . . my eyes could clearly see . . . the statue of Liberty, sailing away to sea. . ." King of Soul

Ode to an Ancient Urn

While strolling through the Harvard museum, I came upon this relic of times past:  Inspired by John Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn,

I began scribbling out a few stanzas of verse. The outpouring of such inspiration streamed a poem which developed, as it unfolded, in a re-working of Emma Lazarus' hallowed verse, carved into the base of our Statue of Liberty :

Oh you regal monument of American glory Oh, fastened-icon in silence and slow time, Immigrant enlightener, who can tell our story? with American verse more welcoming than your shine? What flame-fired legends ascend around your glory from immigrants and travellers in Time? What immigrant pursuit? What struggles to escape? What cultures and traditions? What foreign experience? Seasoned citizens are sweet, but those unbound are fresher; therefore, ye winds of change, blow on; Not to the sensual ear, but to the more profound Enlighten still the nations, challenges unknown. Oh Liberty Lady, amidst the waves, you must not snuff out your torch above our golden door! You must not fade; though foxes rave and magas pout! For Freedom you shall stand on our American door! Who are these at your Enlightened stand? To what carved altar, oh Liberating lady, Do you welcome those fair immigrants who land with their baggage and burdens so weighty? What faraway clan from adversity's shore, from mountain slope or valley glen, is destined by their hopeful and hallowed lore, to be transported to our new world den? Oh hallowed lady! poised on Liberty's shore in sculpted stone, with torch so bright! Greet your huddled masses, rich and poor Lead them with your liberating light! As huddled masses yearning to be free sail through their their troubled plight Hold high your torch, Lady Liberty! Smoke</i>

Other Side

I don't know but I but I been shown . . . this old note, found in the dark corner of a closet in the US Capitol, to whit:

I can see by your hat, my friend, You're from the other side There's just one thing I'd like to know: Can you tell me please, who won?

Four years and several months ago, our citizens brought forth to this Capitol, a new election, conducted in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that whichever candidate gets the most Electoral votes would become President.

Now we are engaged in a futile cultural war, testing whether this nation, or any other nation so conceived, can long endure. We are met on an unlikely battlefield of this contention, the democratic republic of the United States of America. Now we are online, to commemorate an appropriate part of our national memory for all men and women who, in years past, have given their lives, that this nation might live, and prosper, and remain free and protected by our Constitution and all subsequent laws that have provided, since our inception, a nation of the people, governed by the people, for all the people. It is altogether fitting and necessary that we do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot resolve - we cannot mend - the divisions that now threaten to blow our Union and our Rule of Law to smithereens. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we post here . . . in the awesome swirl of social media and the boogling blingly gobblydgook that occupies our attention so relentlessly on a windswept web that has entangled our attention in X-raided tweeter storms of outrageous fortune, and lobotomized our comprehension of profoundly complicated national issues, even as it stultifies and arrests our appreciation of democracy. . . it hath rendered us mere bronco-busters on the storms of outrageous fortune in this. . . our great, four-century-long grand rodeo. I mean, this ain't our first rodeo, if you know what I mean; we been around the 20th-century fox block a century or two, or three, or maybe even four if we don't get too plucky with our cultural contentions and our newfangled internet and our Make America Go Awry civil war that started on January sixth, back in the day. . . whenever that was. But I do feel it in my bones that this nation, under God, must have a new birth of goodwill toward all Americans, be they red or blue, be they many or few, be they old or new, be they immigrants new or citizens old, because back in the day when we used to pray we caught a glimpse of some lady standing at the golden door out there in the harbour with the torch of Liberty in her hand.

and she said send me your tired, your weary, your huddled masses yearning to be free, and I think it's time we raise Emma Lazarus' plea from the dead letters, and bring them back into the interstecies of twitterous time and googlish glob and wacky web confusion and contusions of contentious social mediocrity. There's a time for war and a time for peace! Lastly, as I once heard a little Byrd sing. . .I swear it's not too late.  Glass half-Full

We Won't Forget!

. . ." for my mind misgives some conseqence, yet hanging in the stars . . . shall bitterly begin with this night's revels. . ." Romeo Montague, in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet Contemporary version: . . . for our nation suspects some consequence, yet hanging in our stars and stripes . . . did bitterly begin, in that day's rebellion, January 6, 2021. Now the magamaniacs and the foxes who did strive to steal the vines of our American governance may insist, with irrelevant nitpicking, that the Capitol guards did, during the Jan6 insurrection (wait for it) . . . "let the rioters in." But this American citizens responds: So what? if they let 'em in! What would you do if a gang of violent attackers had you surrounded while they were wielding, in overpowering mobs, weapons, riotous destruction and nooses hanging outside? If I had been one of our Capitol police on that day, I do believe I would have stepped aside while my life was being threatened by an angry, violent mob, rather than offer myself as a victim of their violent rage.

But whether the gangsters were allowed in, or not, is not the point! The point is, . . . We have a Constitution, in which the process of electing a President is laid out in plain English, in Article 2: "Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature may direct, a number of Electors. . . The President of the Senate (Vice President of the United States) shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the (States') certificates, and the votes shall be counted." It was this Constitutionally ordained process that our founding fathers had laid out for the selection of our President. Thus did they establish what we refer to as a "Rule of Law." This Rule of Law is the Law of the land. Mob rule is not!

What the Jan6 insurrectionists were trying to provoke was an overthrow of the government of the United States, instigated by the chief insurrectionist, who happened to be sitting in the oval eating a cheesburger at about that same time.  Now you may ask, why can't you just forget about all that stuff? Here's my response. I was raised as a child in the Deep South, back in the day, where we would see, every now and then, a license plate image of an old southern soldier proclaiming, "Hell no!! I won't ever forget!" And now that the chief instigator of the Jan6 insurrection is, like it or not, in the Oval, the word on the street among us law-abiding citizens, be they democrats or republicans, is this: We are watching you! and. . . remembering the riot that you instigated on January 6, 2021. That law-despising insurrection is not dust that you can just sweep under the rug. We will not let the chief insurrectionist of that fateful day get away with stealing our Rule of Law, even if he is sitting in the Oval, and even if he has the richest men in the world to scatter his power around with.

Now, at long last, this good ole deep-south boy ( me, at age 73) can identify with that old rebel on the license plate. 

Bottom line: We are watching you, donald, and we will not allow our Constitution-mandated Rule of Law to be obliterated by the chief insurrectionist! Glass half-Full

Microscopic World

In chapter 13 of my novel, Glass Chimera, the reader is transported into an imaginary microcosmic world, inside of a human cell, where we catch a glimpse of a dutiful driver in the circulatory system, Luke O'cite. His job is to deliver red blood cells to a specified location inside the cell. Arriving at CircCentral , Luke catches site of the sign that directs him to his next destination:

Neuropsin II Convention passengers, take Tram B to Sector 23. 16S-type RNA delegates take Tram C to Sector 18. When Henry arrived, five minutes later, Vena Cava gate, he had a few minutes to chill out. He sat on the floor, gazing out the membrane, beyond the crowded concourses of Mitey Kindria, at an ocean of cytoplasm stretching as far as the eye could see. On the horizon, barely visible in the distance were the Golgi Islands. And far beyond that, Henry knew, was the great Continent of Nucleus, the deep interior of which drew the brightest chromatins and the most talented sugars, movers and shakers who climbed that great double-spiraled ladder of success, making decisions, wonking policies that extended far beyond the nucleopolis itself, to every reticulum in the great hinterland and every centriole between here and the next universe. He aspired to go there himself one day. But not today, just another day in the life of a specialized protein. He did like his job though. Henry considered himself fortunate to be a guide, and he usually enjoyed the commutes between all his assignments and CircCentral. But as he watched the great open cytoplasm, his heart was pierced with a pang of desire, for looming up from the horizon was a magnificent sailing ship, with brilliant sails rippling in the breeze, and azure-white sprays jettisoning from both sides of its bow.  Henry couldn't keep his eyes off it. He stood and watched it for a long time, until it came quite close, and he forgot where he was, and he missed the next Vena Cava push. When at last the golden galleon passed straightway in front of him, he saw the RiboNucleic flag flapping atop the mast, royal blue background with a red orb in the center, and white border. And he saw written upon the bow in gold letters the name of the ship: HMS RuNAbout.

Oh, that he were on that great ship! Oh, that he might climb to its apex, and survey from its crow's nest cytoplasmic grandeur and the boisterous cellular wind in his wings! Such adventure! Such freedom! Where is it going?

Read Glass Chimera to discover his destination.