Redtree Times

George Grosz- Explosion, 1917

“Ya know, Edith Evans—great actress, great brain—said something once that just blew the top of my head off: She said that harmony—something I was searching for—was the natural state of things. Harmony is the norm, you see, and we fuck it up. We get scared or competitive or jealous, and we just get all this drama and conflict. So I just relax and know that harmony is the natural state. I get up early, when the harmony is the thickest, before too many people have messed it up, and then I don’t mess it up, and then there’s harmony.”

—Ruth Gordon/Interview with James Grissom

I get up early, when the harmony is the thickest…

Loved Ruth Gordon since I first knew who she was. She was smart, tough, and funny– my favorite combo. Her acting, writing, and personality all reflected these qualities. I think her words here pretty much sum up the reason I get up so damn early every morning– to get up to soak in the harmony while it is still thick and undisturbed.

Before too many people have messed it up.

Got up this morning, even earlier than my abnormal only to find I had missed that window of opportunity to bask in harmony like I was soaking quietly in a warm bath.

Somebody had already destroyed any chance of harmony for this morning and probably much longer. As predicted, the US and Israel had started bombing Iran. I am not going to go into an invective this morning, weighing the rightness or wrongness of this action. Though there is a debatable element of rightness in taking action against an Iranian regime that doesn’t fully represent the will of most of its people while openly oppressing them– sound familiar? — there is a boatload of wrongness when viewing this against a backdrop where this action serves as distracting cover for other even more disturbing revelations and actions.

If we laser focus on this or other foreign conflicts, we take our eyes off the fact that this administration is threatening to use emergency powers to seize control of all elections and that the Department of Defense is seeking to remove all safeguards in the use of AI to surveil American citizens, and more chillingly, allow the use of AI-powered fully autonomous lethal weaponry that can target or kill without a human in the decision loop. Or that DHS spent more than $140 billion in 2025 for ICE and CBP weaponry, creating a domestic force with more firepower than the entire defense departments of most foreign nations. Not to mention the huge proliferation of huge private prisons that, to call a spade a spade, are profit-making concentration camps.

There is so much more, and I could go on and on this morning on the many atrocious, authoritarian/dystopian elements for which this new aggression serves as a distraction.

But I won’t. I will however urge you to stay vigilant and to not take the bait of distraction.

Myself, in the short term I am going to try to find some small hidden pocket of that natural harmony that may have somehow evaded being messed up by some stupid bastard this morning.

If so, I am going to soak in it for a while. Though the world is being kept from settling into its natural state of harmony, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to settle into my own.

At least until some other moron barges in and tips over the tub.

It won’t be long now.

Here’s what I will be listening to until that harmony is broken. Maybe this will extend that time a bit. It’s a favorite Philip Glass piece, Mad Rush, that I have shared here in the past. There is a deeply meditative quality to it for me, as though it is the sound of the world finding equilibrium and settling into its natural state of harmony. It may not come soon but it will find it one day. Maybe not in my lifetime or yours or even your kids or grandkids or many more generations beyond.

But the world bides its time, knowing that it exists outside of time and that it will settle into its harmony eventually. With or without us.