This morning , another song in my head, a refined version of an old oldie:

Let me call you sweetheart, I'm in love with your machine,
Let me hear you whisper that you'll buy the gasoline,
Keep the headlights burning and your hands upon the wheel,
Let me call you sweetheart, I'm in love with your automobile.

And then I began my day-- starting before coffee, silly me-- with the news.

What is an individual citizen's responsibility? What can one citizen not do alone, or even in a small local group? Or regional group?

How many of us want to call Uncle Sam sweetheart as long as the machine has plenty of gasoline and seems to be running along just fine, but do not want Uncle to have any expectations when the automobile stutters, needs to shift gears?

I think of such basics as unpolluted air and water and food. Molecules from as far away as the nuclear accident in Russia have fallen on you and me. Probably not enough to injure us, or our water, or the land that provides most of our food. But what about adding the smoke from coal-burning power plants in Ohio and Indian? And, oh, let's add in what happens on the roads, and in... You can create the list.

Dignity and freedom. I have observed even wild animals ruffling up and stretching, straightening, grooming, resuming dignity after (sometimes amusing) incidents in which something awkward transpired. And there are numerous stories of animals willing to even gnaw off a limb to achieve freedom. So, by implication of basic animal imperative, humans all seek some basic dignity and freedom.

Dignity and freedom are not concrete, touch-it values. May we call them spiritual values? Our country was not founded on any specific religion, but it was surely founded on deeply held spiritual values. For lack of a better world, our nation's founding documents include the word God to designate the power of those spiritual root values that support all there is.

My own twisty life journey has taken me ( unexpectedly, unplanned) into an intense search for spiritual root strength. Heart strength, perhaps. I have been searching (and, for myself, finding) heart pieces, central pieces of what the sages taught. Useful, practical, workable pieces. At heart core, at the power place, all the world's religions seem to have commonality.

How do I find words and ways to communicate what I've been finding? Is it thus that religions grow? That someone has found a workable path, recognized as a workable spiritual path, and starts to (believably, persuasively) say "this way, this way, this is the way." Let's see: Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus...

How do we get beyond our religious persuasions, get deeper, back to some core of shared, useful, spiritual values for our shared world? Even for our shared continent? Our shared nation? How do we even share local community with individuals who hold "other" views?

A light rain falls on this house and its surrounds, air moist and in the upper sixties. Enough light sines through to make me trust and believe the sun still shows in the sky above the heavy, covering clouds. In the passage of time I trust, too, the scientist's observations that this, my earthly world, moves around the sun.