As I continue to recover well from surgery, gaining mobility and strength daily (with occasional half-steps backward) I’ve relied on Liberty puzzles for several hours a day to keep my spirits up. My new puzzle for the season is “Summer Swans,” a platter of vibrant eye candy whose whimsy soothed my soul for a few days when I could do little else. While I’m puzzling, I listen to dharma talks like the marvelous selection from Upaya Zen Center, and various other sources including Tricycle and Lion’s Roar. Thus exercising my brain with the puzzle and my practice as I listen, and getting up frequently to exercise my new hip. Many of the Upaya talks revolve around engaging with the world to improve conditions for all beings; starting, of course, with bringing the best of ourselves into each day through practicing things like generosity, ethics, patience, wisdom, compassion, and kindness.

Spending hours each day in contemplation and practice of these many facets of living mindfully, I can forget for minutes at a time that there are people in this country who see the world through completely different lenses. The three poisons of Greed, Hatred, and Delusion are surging through the veins and arteries of the American people these days like never before, under the insidious influence of a madman. What has happened to the Republican Party of my parents, my grandparents, Abraham Lincoln, hell even Ronald Reagan? What has happened to the ideal of “Duty, Honor, Country” that motivated my father and great-grandfather as graduates of West Point and career Army officers?

An old friend asked me tonight how she could talk compassionately with her sister about voting. Like an unfathomable number of women, the sister plans to vote how her husband tells her to, which in this case is most definitely not in her own interest as a woman, nor in the interest of her daughter of reproductive age. It was good timing to make me to share a couple of links that another friend sent the other day, after telling me of her stealth sticky-note plan for her road trip this weekend. She’ll be sticking post-its on women’s restroom mirrors and stall doors all the way from northern Virginia to southern Tennessee, on which she wrote short messages like, “We didn’t get the right to vote, we fought for it. Fight now!” and “Your vote is secret – he’ll never know – vote for your rights!” and simply, “Vote for your daughters – vote for Harris/Walz.”

I hadn’t heard of this grassroots effort that some woman, somewhere, started a couple of months ago and many other women quickly got on board. My friend sent an article in Ms. Magazine and another on NBC describing this women-to-women movement that reminds women they can vote “freely and privately regardless of the political beliefs of their spouse or partner.” In addition to restrooms, women are putting the notes discretely on shelf items like tampon boxes. An 81-year-old woman interviewed said she is posting them everywhere “to atone for the fact that I voted for Trump in 2016.” This is just one of many grassroots people-to-people efforts that give me hope that our democracy will not fall to the fascist regime promised by the violent insurrectionist former president, and outlined in Project 2025. Read more about this proposed decimation of our rights here.

I need to confess a personal failure. I was inspired by our local Indivisible chapter zoom to take a one-hour phone bank training to get out the vote for the Democrats. I was impressed with the training, and girded my loins to do the 15-minute call session included in it. But I have been unable to rise to the moment and connect into the Anytime call center again. Each day I intend to buck up and do it, and each day comes to an end without my having done it. In a past life I sold underwriting for public radio, a cause I still deeply believe in, and if I got one harsh no, I drove home and curled up in bed for the rest of the day. I’m afraid I’m constitutionally unfit to make cold calls to engage reluctant or even hostile people in conversation even about the urgency of keeping a dangerous criminal out of the White House, despite some remarkable inspiration to do so.

But I am able to have mindful conversations with friends about ways to keep calm, stay strong, get engaged, participate in being good stewards of this fragile spinning globe we get to live on for a short time; I’m able to offer guidance to those who ask even as I continually learn how to navigate this increasingly challenging world we are passing through. There’s not much we can control. But we can control where we place our attention, how we bring our values into our thoughts, speech, and actions, and how clearly we are willing to see reality. And we can choose to practice gratitude, meet suffering with compassion wherever we encounter it, and engage in life with an open heart. Even when it’s hard, even when we can do nothing else. And we can vote for people who truly reflect the universal spiritual values taught by Jesus, Buddha, and many others; not for people who twist and distort for personal power.

I’m grateful that women and their supporters fought for the right to vote and won it barely a hundred years ago; and grateful that I got to vote this week in support of basic human rights for all Americans. I hope that you also will vote for the decent candidate for President, Kamala Harris, and not for the candidate who is the first president in US history to refuse the peaceful transfer of power, who is a convicted felon and sexual predator, and the only presidential candidate ever to openly admire Hitler. Remember, your vote is confidential and anonymous.