A monumentally challenging day. Up at 4:15, to have a very early breakfast, so as to enter into a day of fasting, for various lab tests to be done at Palo Alto Medical Foundation at 2 pm (in preparation for two medical appointments next week, one on Tuesday, one on Wednesday). After breakfast, several hours of clearing things out of my bedroom, in preparation for the removal of my excellent bed (which is too big for an assisted living facility) and its replacement by a substantially smaller one, from a mattress company contracted by my daughter Elizabeth, a company now scheduled to do removal of the old and installation of the new between 11:45 and 1:45 (my grandchild Opal will be here to supervise this process). I am dead tired from my labors, my fingers are in great pain from them, and I am surly from the fasting.
So I’ve scanned the file of dozens of postings waiting to be polished and offered to the world, in search of something small but indisputably important, and found something that I’ve been saving up for months as a reminder that great works can take lifetimes and that I, personally, must be willing to do some little bit in the belief that it will smooth the way to an end devoutly to be desired but probably not achievable until long after I’ve died. What I need to muster up is a combination of doggedness and humility; I’m am old hand at doggedness, but have a lot to learn in the humility department: how to free myself from the desire for credit?
What I saved is two voices from the past, from 175 – 250 years ago, that continue to resonate for me, but also remind me that the ends are not yet in sight, even though the visions are brighter than they once were.
The first voice, from 1787: the Wedgwood medallion. From Wikipedia:
A Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of ArtThe Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion was an abolitionist symbol produced and distributed by British potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood in 1787 as a seal for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The medallion depicts a kneeling black man in chains with his hands raised to the heavens; it is inscribed with the phrase “Am I not a man and a brother?”
The second voice, from 1851: Sojourner Truth. Speaking for the rights of women as well as enslaved blacks. From Wikipedia:
“Ain’t I a Woman?” is a speech, generally considered to have been delivered extemporaneously, by Sojourner Truth (1797–1883), born into slavery in the state of New York. Some time after gaining her freedom in 1827, she became a well known anti-slavery speaker. Her speech was delivered at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, and did not originally have a title.
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