We were up and out early this morning for a fast walk around the neighborhood -- a sunny and surprisingly warm morning already.  Cia did four laps, me just three, and then back inside to cool air and some cool writing and reading.

Below, a great quote from a Friend, Parker Palmer: 

"Human beings have a well-demonstrated capacity to hold the tension of differences in ways that lead to creative outcomes and advances. It is not an impossible dream to believe we can apply that capacity to politics. In fact, our capacity for creative tension-holding is what made the American experiment possible in the first place. . . . America’s founders—despite the bigotry that limited their conception of who 'We the People' were—had the genius to establish [a] form of government in which differences, conflict, and tension were understood not as the enemies of a good social order but as the engines of a better social order.

As 'We the People' retreat from the public square and resort to private gripe sessions with those who think like us, we create a vacuum at the center of America’s public life. Politics abhors a vacuum as much as nature does, so nondemocratic powers rush in to fill the void—especially the power called 'big money'. . . .

When the Supreme Court gave big money even more power [in the 2010 Citizens United decision], it made many Americans feel even more strongly that their small voices do not count. . . . Wrongly held, our knowledge of the power wielded by big money can accelerate our retreat from politics, discouraging us from being the participants that democracy demands and reducing us to mere spectators of a political game being played exclusively by 'them'." 

          --  Parker J. Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of      the Human Spirit (Jossey-Bass: 2014, ©2011), xx-xxi.