Killers

Today an innocent American citizen was killed by ICE in Minnesota. 

A few days ago, several score Venezuelans were killed as a U. S. military raid abducted the president of Venezuela, a few days after a village in Nigeria was showered with U. S. missiles.

In the weeks before, the US military executed over a hundred people operating boats suspected of carrying illicit drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific.

"I'm not looking to hurt people," says the president, but his murderous lackeys know his definition of "people" excludes most of us.

Twelfth night, and the next day

Heard in a sermon that a theologian named Thomas Troeger suggested that Nativity scenes should be dynamic. The shepherds come and go and then for a long time the Holy Family is alone. Magi appear and go, instructed in a dream to go home by a different route than they came, avoiding murderous Herod. Then the Holy Family should move too, as Joseph was told in a dream to flee to Egypt, perhaps to a windowsill looking out on the suffering world Jesus came to save. It's powerful...!

Flowers of memory

Because of the unseasonal rains, the "flower fields" outside Borrego Spring have burst into bloom the way they usually only do in the spring. This was a chance those of us who visit the area only in winter and summer never get, so we took a day trip to see them on the eve of our return to New York. They're familiar from photos my parents have shared, as well as many featured in the Anza-Borrego Desert Wonders facebook group of which I'm a member, but here they really were! 

Beyond the flagship pink desert sand verbenas, white dune primroses and yellow desert sunflowers we found a dozen other flowers too (like the marvels above), though none making as big a splash. Besides the fact that verbena-primrose-sunflower trifecta seem to appear only in a few places (two are marked with a flower sign on the official Anza Borrego map), the most striking thing was something none of the photos had shown - the view from above. The verbenas and primroses spread in all directions from a single point, verbenas sprawling opportunistically along the contours of the ground, primroses with a circular symmetry reminiscent of straw stars. I had something to give back to the group!

The desert lily, the Facebook group's holy grail, seemed to be blooming too, so we asked a docent at the Visitor's Center if there was somewhere not too remote where we might find some. She directed us to a simple campground some miles beyond the famous flower fields, where she'd seen some ready to bloom on Saturday, though she couldn't promise anything. They're small, she warned us. Desert lilies creep out of barren-looking sand with tentacle-like leaves, which appear singly and doubly before buds emerge. We saw many just starting before spotting our first buds - spent! Soon we happened on others getting ready to bloom and finally what turned out to be a half dozen that were in bloom. The flowers have a lovely sweet scent, but you need to put your face close to the ground to smell it. After a while, we started noticing desert lilies popping up in many places - they're a distinctive blue-green.

I was buzzed as we drove back to my parents' house on the coast. How fortunate to have had a chance to see these glories! (Even in spring they bloom only when - if - it rains and only last for a short time.) But then I had a strange worry. Had I really not seen them before? Had we not in fact seen them together just a few years ago? Was I not then glowing just as I was now? 

As those who know me beyond the blog can attest, my memory is not the best. Its gappiness - and my awareness of it - can create some odd and elliptical sensations. Today's species of subjunctive déjà vu is one of them. It seems to show up when I've finally done something I'd long planned or hoped to, perhaps even more specifically something I'd looked forward to announcing I'd finally done... 

Except that, really, I had not expected ever to have a chance to catch the Borrego blooms. I had resignedly contented myself with triangulating from others' photos the way one does with real estate pictures. Maybe I was confused by how closely reality met my unreal expectations! Or intoxicated by the desert lily's perfume. 

As it turns out, I really haven't seen the bloom before (unless perhaps as a child), and certainly not the desert lilies! I have a new question, now that my interaction is again mediated by artfully shot and carefully selected photos, now including my own. That picture of the desert lily above: did one of the left-side leaves move?

What we believe

Two bits of verse which lifted my spirits on this dark day. First, Cornelius Eady's poem for the inauguration of Mayor Mamdani, "Proof":

You have to imagine it.

Who said you were too dark?

Too Large, too Queer, Too Loud?

Who said you were too poor, too strange, too fat?

You have to imagine it.

Who said you must keep quiet?

Who heard your story then rolled their eyes?

Who tried to change your name to invisible?

You've got to imagine.

Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it?

Who checked their watch and said not now?

James Baldwin wrote 'the place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it.'

New York, city of invention,

Roiling town, refresher

And re-newer,

New York, city of the real,

Where the canyons

Whisper in a hundred

Tongues,

New York,

Where your lucky self

Waits for your

Arrival,

Where there is always soil

For your root.

This is our time.

The taste of us, the spice of us, the hollers and the rhythms and the beats of us and the echo of our ancestors who made certain we know who we are.

City of insistence, city of resistance.

You have to imagine an army that wins without firing a bullet.

A joy that wears down the rock of no.

Up from insults, up from blocked doors, up from trick bags, up from fear, up from shame, up form the way it was done before.

You have to imagine that space they said wasn't yours.

That time they said you'd never own.

The invisible city lit on its way.

This moment is our proof.

And our rector's version of José Luis Casal's "Immigrant's Creed":

We believe in Almighty God, who guided the people in exile and exodus, the God of the prophets Joseph in Egypt, and Daniel in Babylon, and Mohammed in Medina, the God of foreigners and immigrants.

We believe in Jesus Christ, a displaced Galilean, who was born away from his people and his home, who fled his country with his parents when his life was in danger.

When he returned to his own country he suffered under the oppression of Pontius Pilate, the servant of imperial power.

Jesus was persecuted, beaten, tortured, and unjustly condemned to death.

But on the third day Jesus rose from the dead, not as a scorned foreigner but to offer us citizenship in God’s kingdom. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the eternal immigrant from God’s kingdom among us, who speaks all languages, lives in all countries, and reunites all races.

We believe that the Church is the secure home for refugees, travelers, and all believers.

We believe that the communion of saints begins when we accept the diversity of the saints.

We believe in forgiveness, which makes us all equal before God, and in reconciliation, which heals our brokenness.

We believe that, in the Resurrection, God unites us as one people, in which all are distinct, and all are alike at the same time.

We believe in life eternal, in which no one will be a foreigner, but all will be citizens of the kingdom where God reigns forever and ever.

Treating law as a joke

Timothy Snyder: 

Unvarnished evil

Utterly sickening. White supremacy is genocidal ideation. Repent!

Rebirth

A year and a half after a brush fire tore through the eastern part of the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve Extension, the nature trail through it has been reopened. We'll check it out soon. It was already getting dark today so we just walked along the trail on the bluffs above it, finding some still fire-scarred land on the ridge bursting with bush poppies. The area of the blaze below was a plush carpet of new green. 

Road trip

A little California driving between Christmas and New Year's, driving up to stay with a friend in Campbell, day trips to redwoods, Berkeley and a winery. Today we drove 450 miles accompanied the whole way by rain, and Rachel Maddow's terribly timely podcast on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WW2.

Redwoods

Back among coast redwoods, checking in on the survivors at Big Basin Redwoods, whom we visited two and a half years ago, and making new acquaintances at the sunset-lit Reinhardt Redwood Regional Park in Oakland, a vision of how Big Basin might once again look some day.

Schweigt, er ist schon wirklich hier!

Merry Christmas from our versatile Nativity crew + Torrey Pines cones!

Dress rehearsal