So quickly stemless...

Tulips

満開

We somehow missed it last year but now we see that nearby Sakura Park (tucked in front of Grant's Tomb) well merits its name. Happily some seeds from these trees seem to have blown into the woods in the northern end of Riverside Park below, too!

Pronouns of God

This morning I stumbled on wonderful words from the brilliant womanist biblical scholar Will Gafney (whom we met in the Scholar Strike), part of a recent panel on "Rainbow Theology: Intersections of Race, Gender, and Sexuality." Her focus was pronouns, and what a difference they make to theology, and to liturgy. Gafney began:

Human beings contain multitudes, multiverses, like our Creator. That she, he, they, One who is three, seven, twelve, many is ultimately inarticulable yet mysteriously, in some way reproducible. The earthling created from the earth, the human created from the humus, was soil and spirit and bone and blood. And it, they/them was gender-full and in that gender-fullness was the image and likeness of God.

There is an incantatory loveliness to this she, he, they, One who is three, seven, twelve, many. It feels like praise, joyful praise. I'll try using it. Simple pronouns, or even the careful but abstract gender-less language of "God" and "Godself," don't communicate the fullness of the creator, or the creation.

I use the example of our language because I have made the argument as a woman that you tell me what you think about me by how you talk about God in whose image I am created. If your language about God does not include my creation, that tells me that you do not see God when you see me and you do not see me in God. This is also true for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and asexual people. If your entire theological and linguistic framework is binary, then there is no room for the fullness of God’s creative artistry with the human palette.

The first tree flowering in Washington Square Park joins me: Amen!

Budding

Gaggles

of daffodils swarm the still wintry hillside of Riverside Park 

Trara, spring is here!

Covid 365

The newspapers are full of reflections on the year that covid knocked us off our feet - March 11th was the day WHO officially declared the world was in pandemic - and reports from when "people knew" that something bad was starting. On March 11th last year, I had my last in-person class, although I'd told the students to stay home (I had a visitor who was willing to talk to an empty room). We'd learned the day before that our classes after Spring break would be online for at least a few weeks. It was still a few days before the last in-person service at Holy Apostles. My last trip to school was still six days away. And yet already on March 11th last year I had intimations, and some crocuses in Washington Square Park, which in any other year would have delighted me, instead made me think of coronaviruses...

According to the Johns Hopkins site, 2,628,363 souls have been lost to covid, 530,624 of them in the United States. May they Rest In Peace.

Spring approaches

Some of the Spring color which surprised us in Morningside Park today.

D e m o c r a c y   w i n s !

据了解呢？

I've found a fun new Mandarin app. News stories are presented at various HSK levels (I'm at level 4), with an audio recording, grammar notes and a set of effective exercises on comprehension, vocabulary and sentence structure. They choose good stories, too! So far I've done:

长沙的一个矿井被改成了游乐园 

Pit converted into amusement park in Changsha

一艘货船撞上黄浦江西岸

Cargo ship crashes into west bank of Huangpu River in Shanghai

羊奶粉在中国越来越受欢迎

Goat milk infant formula rises in popularity in China

上海两家公司因小笼包商标都将对方告上法庭

Shanghai companies enter legal battle over xiaolongbao trademark

天津一个图书馆的猫陪伴孤独的读者

Cats accompany lonely readers at Tianjin library

and, since not all entertaining news happens in China,

德国野猪成网红，粉丝救了它的命

German wild boar became internet star, fans saved its life

I didn't of course know most of the topical vocabulary for all these, but the app helps you out seamlessly, and I was able to figure out what was going on in all of them without difficulty... reading, at least. (Which isn't to say I got all the comprehension questions right the first time.) Listening comprehension is still the biggest challenge for me, though it must do something to listen a few times in a daze, read through the vocabulary, listen again, and then start of make sense of things.

I'm learning some important new words, like 新冠疫情 (xīnguān yìqíng), COVID-19 epidemic situation, and newsy phrases like 据了解 (jù liǎojiě), which has cropped up several times, is unhelpfully rendered it's understood that in dictionaries, and must correspond, judging from its use in these stories, to "apparently" or “reports suggest" or perhaps "it would appear." 

Like all the Chinese language learning materials I've used, the site furnishes translations of none of its texts (just vocabulary and grammar), so I'm having to feel my way to understanding from the inside. These texts are just the right length and level for me to do a new one each day, so I think I'll soon get how "it's understood"!

(The image is unrelated, from our Saturday Central Park jaunt.)

Gezielt geschielt

I was discouraged that the cool flowers I'd picked up at the Morningside Park Green Market yesterday (named Rudbeckia "Henry Eilers," apparently) were looking so very glum until it occurred to me to seek out one of Egon Schiele's unbeautiful flower pictures to send a friend to express my dejection. 

The startling similarity between Schiele's sunflowers and my coneflowers suddenly made everything seem alright! 

There's some kind of lesson in this about the power of art... !

Face time

M, the friend who was our last guest before people stopped going to each other's places - it was March 15th, the eve of New York City's shelter in place - came over from Brooklyn today! We had negronis and nibblies, and gave him some sourdough starter to take home, and a donut peach we picked up at a farm market on our way back from Pennsylvania on Wednesday. Just like old times! And, since we arranged to sit rather far apart, we were unmasked.

What an unaccustomed pleasure! (March 15th is four and a half months ago!!) I've seen two friends in person these last months but always masked. (The exception were the friends who took us to the Rockefeller Preserve six weeks ago, incidentally also the provenance of our sourdough starter.) It's actually pretty disconcerting to sit on adjacent park benches with a friend, her voice and face muffled by a mask. Online you can't be with people but at least you can see them smile! (Goodness knows how we'd all be faring without the real comforts of FaceTime, zoom, etc.) So being able to be with someone and see him smile was quite the treat!

Reflecting on the weirdness that we can see the expressions on the faces of people we care about but only when we're not physically with them, M named what's still missing: "I miss seeing stranger's faces."

Neighborhood flowers