Splitting

I noticed last week that the snow had taken down a branch of a callery pear tree near The New School. 

 

(Callery pears' v-forks make them particularly vulnerable to splitting like this, one reason they're no longer planted as much as they once were). 

 

Then, as I walked past it and found more limbs in the snow, I realized, it wasn't just one but two branches the tree had lost. In fact: three! 

 

A week later, all the fallen branches, big and small, have been removed, along with the snow, leaving just the wounded tree torso.

War crime

He did it. Why? So many possible reasons being bruited by the pundits, none probably the actual reason, none offered to the people or our representatives, or the international community - and not one of these candidate reasons legitimate. The chaos president, emboldened by past crimes, rains catastrophe around the world. Ours is now a rogue state.

I know what I know, if you know what I mean

At an intimate workshop sharing the "Theorizing Religion" class activities around definitions of religion and the religions of unexpected things like capitalism, academia and fashion, I gave folks a few definitions of religion to chew over. Three were serious, the fourth not so much. 

If you don't recognize it, that last one is from the song which VH1 listed as No. 23 of the "100 Greatest One-Hit Wonders of the 80s," Edie Brickell's "What I am" - and was inspired by irritation at a college world religons class! (I used it once before, almost twenty years ago (!).) I told the assembled people I'd included the smile on a dog to keep things light-hearted but after a while noted that it was in the list also as a corrective to the potentially merely anthropological claims of the other three (Tillich, Suzuki, Durkheim). Religion might be a fact not just about human beings muddling along but about the solicitation of the more-than-human world in which we find ourselves.

The event was my contribution to a suite of events around the "Fashion - Faith: Rituals and Dialogues" exhibition, and the conversation my prompts fostered among these fashion-focused students quickly left me behind: wearing something that "just feels wrong," the fate-like power of "trends," the rage for reusing other' clothing, the "transcendent" feeling when wearing and being recognized in the work of a famous designer who just died, the daily "ritual" of dressing, death... 

I guess that, contrary to my pious pedagogical protestations, "the religion of fashion" is to me really not (yet) more than a conceit... But the enthusiastic reception of this, along with all the other components of the exhibition, suggest I may have opportunity to learn more. Shouldn't we turn this into a team-taught course, the BFA Fashion colleague who'd had the transcendent experience wondered?

Cotton candy snow

Blizzard of 2026

After nineten inches of snow finished falling, NYC was a sight to see!

How it begins

First blizzard warning for NYC in nine years!

Repent

From the Great Litany, for the first Sunday of Lent... 

Delusions of grandeur

I'm partial to the AI versions of the banner where "justice" is replaced by "rapist" but the enabling of this cult of personality is beyond distressing.

Get the drift

Mostly people complain about the grimy rests of the past weeks' snows but it occurred to me that they're actually quite beautiful in their own way. Worthy of a Ross Gay "delight practice" gesture?!

马年快乐

This horse (from our Met daily calendar) looks a little overwhelmed. Lunar new year, Ramadan and Mardi Gras, all at once?

Out lines

More and less evanescent lines on the Kazimiroff Nature Trail

Intervention

In today's church bulletin, a copy of a public letter sent by the head of the Anglican Church in Canada to the head of the Episcopal Church. 

Our nation finds itself in a "time of distress," he writes, which is "heartbreaking for us, your northern neighbors, to watch." How good to be reminded that other hearts break with ours, see the blessing in our acts of loving resistance. How grateful I feel to read his call to Canadian Anglicans "to continue holding in prayer all of you in this intense, unpredictable season in the life of the United States of America."