A third day of AAR and I'm sated! Today wasn't the best day in terms of scheduled activities: a philosophy of religion panel where three luminaries praised a new book by a junior scholar who, when it came his turn to speak, did a Sally Field, becoming a babbling deer-in-the-headlights so embarrassing we had to leave. And a tour of Religious and Sacred Sites of San Diego was hurried and arbitary. The pics are from the three sites of the tour: models of the California missions in the museum at Mission San Diego de Alcala; the view up in the entirely mosaic-covered Serbian Orthodox 
church of St George (built in 1967, the Italian mosaic artists not always faithful in their working out of designs sent from Serbia), and one of the few surviving buildings from a Theosophical compound on Point Loma.But the day was saved by impromptu chats with my old grad school classmate Bill and my old adviser Jeff. And then I took two Buddhologist friends I met through the Academic Study and Teaching of Religion section to dinner on the beach in Del Mar. After dinner we walked along the nocturnal beach, eventually standing watching and
listening, and I noticed the ocean has a full orchestra of sounds, from rumbling to rainlike, assorted hisses and shushes, tinkling or tinselly sounds, the sound of crumpled paper, the occasional pop and the saturated silence Japanese manga sound out as a (presumably unaspirated) シーーン shiiiiiiin. I'm sure I've written this here before, or should have, the only poem I know by heart:The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean--
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.
Greater than being shore to the ocean--
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.
Who really needs religion or its study when there's friends and Robert Frost and the vast precision of the ocean? (But I'll take the lot!)
