On Self Deception

We humans hold tightly to beliefs,
as if they were vital organs.
Perhaps they are.

We need to feel safe
in an increasingly unsafe world.

Fair enough.

Fundamentalist religions understand this well—
how firm boundaries,
declared holy,
can feel like shelter.

How obedience
can masquerade as peace.

Fair enough.

But something quieter—
and more dangerous—
happens
when free-thinking people
begin to believe
they are immune.

When reason
becomes the chosen refuge.

When intelligence
is tasked with protecting the heart
from what it already knows.

When logic is used
not to illuminate,
but to justify
the narrowing of our lives.

This is not stupidity.
It is often the work
of very capable minds.

We tell ourselves
we are being practical.
Realistic.
Responsible.

We say we are choosing freely,
when what we are really choosing
is familiarity.

We say we are being patient,
when we are actually postponing our place
in the shared reality we already inhabit.

We say this is temporary—
that conditions will improve,
that love will be ushered in
once the scaffolding is complete.

And because the reasons sound sensible—
even kind—
we do not notice
how much we are accommodating
what diminishes us.

Slowly,
almost imperceptibly,
separation becomes a virtue.

Endurance
becomes evidence of character.

Self-erasure—
the quiet shrinking of one’s own truth—
begins to look like maturity.

Withdrawal, mistaken for serenity, passes as peace.

At that point,
self-righteousness
need not announce itself.

It can feel gentle.
Earnest.
Concerned.

But the effect
is the same.

Justifications multiply—
for why another’s freedom
must be curtailed,
why another’s truth
is inconvenient,
why sovereignty is claimed
as a luxury
we cannot yet afford.

Safety, once mutual,
is quietly hoarded.

And we may even feel
virtuous for it.

But there is a cost.

Because when one person
is not free—
not in theory,
but in their body,
in their choices,
in their capacity
to say no—

the rest of us
are not liberated either.

We are only managing our fear
with better language.

The question, then,
is not
Who is right?
or
Who is to blame?

It is simpler.
And harder.

Where have I made a life small
so that it would feel safe?

And what truth
have I learned to live with—
as though I were its recipient,
rather than its source?

Singled out ~ bj 2017

Is That Where It Started?

(Note** This is a poem about a lie spread sixty years ago, that Beatle Paul was dead. This is not, in fact, what happened. Paul McCartney is very much alive today, as of this writing in 2025.)

Paul is dead.
A most beloved Beatle.

I was in junior high school, bussed across town like so many of us then. Against our will. It was a confusing enough time for anybody—never mind a former Mormon girl who knew the church was no longer right for her, but had no idea what might replace it. My parents’ violent drama was coming to a head—if not an end just yet. Of course I had no idea what would take its place. Church, family, blast, boom, bam. Gone.

All my dreams had culminated in this void.

Then The White Album. Second-to-last track: Revolution 9.
Play it backward.
You would hear an otherworldly voice moaning, Turn me on, dead man.

In 1969, this was enough to convince Beatles fans: Paul was dead.

I failed Critical Thinking 101 then. You could hardly blame me, given my upbringing. I was just lost. Instead of considering possibilities—as I might have ten years later—I could only feel despair. The particular existential despair of teenagers.

I remembered The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, singing No Reply.

I tried to telephone, they said you were not home,
that’s a lie, ’cause I know where you’ve been,
I saw you walk in your door.

I nearly died! I nearly died!

Insert at this point, my dad singing, I wish you had! I wish you had!

How he hated his teenage daughter’s adoration of those mop tops. He had been supplanted—though I could not have known it then. A life saver for me, I now realize.

Paul? Dead?

John Hiatt’s lyric lines creep in years later, all jumbled up.

Gone, like the shape I’m in,
gone, like a fifth of gin,
gone, like a Nixon file,
gone, gone away.

Years later, after it was determined to be a hoax, I—and many Beatles lovers like me—still wondered.

And then, sixty years later, I see the similarities.

Feed them lies.
Repeat them often.
Seed them—again and again.

And the masses are left to wonder:
what is real?
What, fiction?

Pexels

Fairytale House

It began as a modest house.
The kind you rent because it’s in your budget.
Brown floors. Plain rooms.
We needed shelter — and yet.

Even then,
I was already measuring
what I could hold.

I felt tenderness for the older man who owned it —
he could not afford to live there otherwise,
so our modest contribution mattered —
a deciding weight.

Somewhere between evening and morning
the house grew,
as if it had been given
a dose of Jack’s magic beans.

Rooms multiplied.
Floors appeared
where I did not even remember stairs.

Doors appeared —
some led to occupied rooms,
others went nowhere at all.

What a curious Wonderland.

People then began to arrive,
leaving their footprints everywhere.

By dawn I was holding a mop,
and the certainty
that the job was fruitless,
that it could never be done.

Surely not by me.
Not even with help.

The floors stayed dirty.
And I didn’t feel anger,
or even that I was a failure.

The task was simply
beyond me.

And that was finally
a boundary I could live with.

Saying no
to no one in particular
went against everything
I was raised to believe.

Yet it was the only answer.
The conclusion.
And it felt like a victory.

Mt. Tabor park ~ bj 2023

Deferring to the Now

Daily writing prompt

Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

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Mindfulness is brilliant in its essence—
always here, always now.
But I would be lying
if I said I lived there
all the time.

My mind keeps me alert, attentive
to details I would otherwise miss
in the complexity of daily life.
Yet it can mislead,
moving too quickly
when important choices are required.

So when decisions arise,
I return to mindfulness
to discover clarity and space.
Still, the mind wanders—
drifting forward and back,
like fingers on a guitar’s neck:
often melodic,
sometimes dissonant.

That dissonance most often appears
when I look backward.
Memory is an unreliable witness.
My siblings’ recollections of childhood
differ from my own,
just as my children’s memories of me
will differ from mine.

To remember how we felt at five
is like stuffing a king-sized quilt
into a mailbox.
We have grown too much
to make it fit.
And so I step away
from the past
with relative ease.

The future is the opposite.
Anything is possible.
With optimism, imagination
creates worlds.
When I travel forward,
it is to envision peace—
equality among all beings,
a world like the Hawai‘i I call home,
where Aloha is practiced
and the common good
is shared.

Between past and future,
one feels expansive;
the other, fragmented,
often unsettling.
Measuring inner progress
from then to now
keeps me from slipping backward
into confusion and fog.

In the end,
I return to the Now—
the only place
where choice is possible,
and growth occurs.

Stormy horizon ~ bj 2026

Instinctual

Daily writing prompt

Do you trust your instincts?

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Instinct is older than language—
a pulse beneath thought,
a knowing shared with every creature
that breathes in rhythm with the Earth.

Yet somehow we,
the ones who call ourselves intelligent,
forget to listen.
We override the whisper
for the noise of ambition,
ownership, control—
ideas the wild world
has never required.

My own instincts speak quietly:
a drop in the gut,
a shimmer of unease,
a soft expansion when something is true.
It isn’t a choice anymore to heed it—
the cost of ignoring it
has carved its lessons into me.

I think when I was young
I had to tune it out.
I lived among people
whose needs overshadowed mine,
and survival meant adapting
to a world less democratic
than it claimed to be.
Even strong instincts
cannot always guarantee safety.

But with time
I’ve returned to the old language—
the one spoken beneath thought.
And when I listen,
life arranges itself
in ways that feel almost choreographed:
paths clearing,
doors opening,
as if the unseen world
were making room.

Instinct, after all,
is not a guess.
It is the body’s way
of remembering the truth
before the mind awakens to it.

Island deer ~ bj 2019

Fusion

My ego is not an animal
that needs feeding; the place
you can touch is my heart —
but please go gently,
with due respect.

You need only possess
a genuine concern
for the inner person,
fragile being not unlike yourself —
fellow traveler through
this brief burst in eternity.

You may keep your agendas,
images, projections;
I am overly weary of users
and artifice, and have no need
for hungry ghosts
whose desires appear bottomless.

I do not wish to increase
the volume of some
larger-than-life figure
you wish to impose
on a world already
overfull with blowhards,
attention-seekers,
spotlight-needers.

The circle is small
and can grow smaller
without my willing it so.
There is work
to be done in loving.

If you deny your own
quaking heart,
perhaps this deserves
attention.

There are many
desirous of the simplest
gestures of kindness;

find these ones,
seek them everywhere you go.

Then perhaps
we will have much to mull over
when next we meet.

---

Upolu Pt. ~ 2025 bj