Chuck Sandy

Writer, Teacher, Pilgrim, Seeker cofounder. Newest Book: 28-day Pilgrimage

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

The creative life is simple: get up, get dressed, get on with it.
#amwriting #amcreating #amalive

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@ElysiaXBT I’ve lived in Japan for 30 years. After dinner most people watch tv on or walk to a train station is this why the are more obese people then ever or is it because many don’t eat rice every day. Hmm Whst you sat about walking after eating true. Why wrap it in Japan is x nonsense

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@JapanTripFriend Such a wonderful place tho I haven’t been in years. Good to see it’s still there

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

Be kind

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@CacheThatCheque Eikaiwa schools - I agree. Dead end. University positions in English departments and ELT materials development and teacher training work beats 9-8 Japanese company work any day.

[𝒮𝒪𝒩𝒩𝒴 𝒮𝐸𝐻𝑅𝒜 ੴ @sonnysehra]

in 1974, a japanese pharmacist in tokyo released a dreamlike psychedelic acid-folk album. it was the only record he ever released and it was lost for DECADES, until being rediscovered in 2024. he passed away in 2021, never living to see people listen to his music again.

[T.E. Jentzen @Faithful2Pray]

Let nothing disturb you, 
Let nothing frighten you, 
All things are passing away: 
God never changes. 
Patience obtains all things
Whoever has God lacks nothing; 
God alone suffices.
Amen.

- Saint Teresa of Avila

[marqix ☆ @fwmarqix]

I lived in Japan for a year. Most of my experiences were exhausting in ways I’d rather not get into, but this one still makes me laugh.

I was on the train in Osaka, minding my own business, when I noticed a group of school kids a few seats down. They were whispering, glancing at me, then whispering again. They kept passing a folded piece of paper between them as if they were planning something top secret.

I watched this go on for two stops.

Finally, one of the kids was pushed forward by the others. He walked over to me slowly, like he was approaching a wild animal that might bite. He stopped right in front of me, bowed politely, and held out the folded paper with both hands.

I opened it.

Inside was a handwritten note in careful English: “Hello. We think you are a very cool person. We are practicing our English. We hope this note is correct. Please give us a score.”

At the bottom, they had drawn a literal grading box, out of ten.

I looked up. Seven pairs of eyes were staring at me as if their entire semester depended on my response.
I pulled out a pen, wrote “10/10” in the box, and added a note: “Perfect English. Well done.”

The boy carried it back to the group. They read it together… and absolutely lost their minds. High-fives, jumping, and one kid even pumped his fist in the air.

Their teacher, who had been pretending not to watch from the end of the car, was biting her lip, trying hard not to smile.

I rode the rest of the journey grinning to myself.

That’s the Japan I always remember.

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@Its_ereko @NicoleinJapann This is complete nonsense

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@Microinteracti1 What a beautiful essay. And sadly, true

[SonnyBoy🇺🇸 @gotrice2024]

This young lady ordered a taxi fresh off the plane in Japan. She got in the back and got comfortable. She then asks how much the fare would be, after the conversion she found out it would be $213.

After expressing concern over the price of the fare, the taxi driver helped her find a cheaper option. The taxi driver takes her to the bus station in a nice area with good shopping awhile she waits for the bus.

The driver even asked her if she had cash because the bus was cash only, the young lady said she would go to an ATM, fearing the young lady would not have been able to get money out, she runs back to her cab and gets money out for her. It’s amazing to me that the taxi driver wasn’t willing to take advantage of the tourist. Not only did she find her a cheaper option, she even paid for it too, the world would be a better place if we all looked out for one another, wouldn’t it?

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@ikwofirstsrr @gotrice2024 Yeah but you know what? Who wants to take the train on a cold day when a beautiful taxi will come to you, ping yr phone when it’s close.Then you emerge & the driver holds the door open. Inside it’s super nice, has phone charging, driver checks the route w you and boom. Yr there

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

And his last song - Pressure Drop by The Clash. Previous to that: Should I Stay or Should I Go? Not a word about having cancer. @Casual_Bob_ go in peace. Thanks for the amazing playlist

[Casual Bob @Casual_Bob_]

Hi Im Bob's sister Sharon. I wanted to jump on to let everyone know Bob passed away on 3/16. Bob had colon cancer for the last 7 yrs & handled it with strength and a hopeful spirit. This music community kept him entertained on long days. He loved it. We will miss him terribly.

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@softypapa Japanese tax officials are so much nicer that those in the IRS. This has been my experience. Much more interested in helping you work with them to make things right than in penalizing you for getting it wrong

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@timothyjphelan I’m in Japan, too, and as a practicing Lutheran, can say you that it’s not much different for Protestants here. I sometimes have good chats w/ the @thehadman and a few others. There is a tiny Christian community if one is willing to cast a wider net for community. Welcome.

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@njuarez1217 Dear Lord please be with Bella and her mom at this time of transition. Please bring peace and comfort as her mom joins your heavenly kingdom and as Bella grieves. Blessed the time they have left together here on earth with special significance and love. Amen

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

Things can be very challenging for me but I became a grandpa for the first time. An honor and a new task. So once again I say yes. I must, I can, I will.

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@charliersmith1 You look fabulous - shining from the inside. As someone who has battled depression and more let me say that you are one of my heroes for many reasons including your honesty, strength and willingness to keep moving forward no matter what. Never give up, Charlie

[Chuck Sandy @chucksandy]

@kateryna30363 Cigarettes?