Seeds of hope

The balloon plant joins us in hoping the new year brings new blessings.

What's for dinner?

Dry pot!

Cross country

Valley of the winds

Torrey Pines State Reserve, looking a little extraterrestrial today... with those grid lines the sandstone looks like the remains of a spacecraft - even a little "風の谷のナウシカ/Nausicäa of the Valley of the Winds."

43 miles east of Del Mar

A walk up Volcan Mountain, perfectly timed in mid afternoon, was a bit more strenuous than anticipated... these pictures are thrown together more or less in sequence. Among them you'll see manzanita, redwood and several kinds of oak trees, and commanding views to the east - with the Salton Sea a pale light blue band near the horizon - and to the west - with the Pacific Ocean shining through a white gold marine layer.

Colors without names

Christmas prayer for safe passage

In case you've not been following the century-old movements of my great grandfather, the journalist Don Martin, at Soldier of the Pen: 100 years ago today he was six days into the voyage across the Atlantic

that would take him to London and, eventually, to embed with the Americans fighting in France. The ship (the S S St Louis) were approaching Ireland. He penned a Christmas letter to his daughter describing the mysterious appearance and even stranger subsequent disappearance of Santa Claus - along with the mood on a ship whose crew and passengers alike were on the alert for mortal danger.

At least one of the children on board knew the nature of the danger. Martin recounts she asked the man "dressed in a red coat and fur hat, with big boots and a white beard" if “Santa Claus came in a submarine.”

Happy Christmas!

Pine not

I'm entranced by this pinecone simulacrum, part of a holiday display at Peet's Coffee - so convincing a cone because it's so happily cardboard!

 

not photoshopped

Time lag

There's a certain vertigo about spending the end of the year in pacific California: the demands of life and work in New York out of view, but the news of the world murmuring all around in restrospectives of the year just ending and prognostications for the years to come...

Muddied

Walking along the beach at Torrey Pines yesterday, noticed a big rock slide. Unusual, and unusually sloppy-looking, it's not the sandstone of the cliffs but the hillside above that's dribbled down over the cliff face.

Low tide at sundown

In the desert

"Christmas is back, bigger and better than ever before," we're told by a pagan huckster who thinks himself above sin. As his friends stuff the stockings of Mr. Scrooge, he imagines a world made safer by endless competition, bullying dominance and threats of nuclear first strikes for "non-nuclear strategic attacks." How ready I was to hear - how we need to hear - the opening words of Handel's Messiah. (We heard the excellent Bach Collegium San Diego.)

Tenor

Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. 
Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned. 
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness; prepare ye the way of the Lord; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

True Christmas seems farther and farther away. But I guess that's the spirit of it. It's not a light you turn on for yourself the day after Thanksgiving (and in your bazaar already the day after Hallowe'en). Not a light you can imagine anyone lighting for you. You might even have gotten so used to the dark you think you can see just fine without light.

Bass 
The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light;
and they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined. 

Chorus
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government shall be upon His shoulder; and His name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.

Come, Prince of Peace.

Make lemonade

Arrived in California for the waning of the year, with local lemons.

Fir-lined

This "aromatic bundle," bought the day the first Christmas tree stands went up (November 28th), has been releasing an amazing array of cozy scents: peppery, spicy and sweet. Pine, too!

Gotcha

Found myself at what used to be my home subway station, A, C, E 14th Street, the other day. Tom Otterness' "Life Underground" sculpture series seems as topical as ever. They're inspired by Thomas Nast's cartoons about Gilded Age plutocrats, but they might as well represent our ruling party as it "reforms" the tax code for the rich. Shame.

Heist

Watching the British television series "Endeavour," which imagines the early career of the famous Inspector Morse in the Oxford of the mid-1960s, is a trip down memory lane for me. I was among the dreaming spires two decades later, but it feels disconnected enough from the present to make me nostalgic. (And much of the rather tatty Britain of 1984 probably was still 1960s issue.) I walked down that road, I'll muse in some wonderment as we see the Broad of a rainy morning or that lane that curves behind New College. But last night I jumped out of my seat. The site of the dramatic robbery in the closing episode of season 3, was a building I knew all too well: the Philosophy Sub-Faculty at 10 Merton Street, where I cut my teeth reading philosophical journals and books! Why would it allow itself to be dressed up as "Wessex Bank" in 2015? Turns out the Philosophy Sub-Faculty moved there only in 1976 (having been next door for a dozen years before) - and that it is no longer at that address. This distresses me more than I would have expected. While I've moved on I expected Oxford philosophy to stay put!

Sangha space

"Buddhist Modernism" wrapped up today - here's the classroom after the students had left. The room gave us nothing but trouble, being by turns too hot and too cold (sometimes both), noisy, and both dim and too bright to see much when using the overhead projector. The chairs were uncomfortable, and stuck to the vinyl floor when you tried to move them into a circle; their little desklets periodically flipped a student's things onto the ground. I commended the class for its success in forming a learning community (a sangha, one said!) despite the room. And I promised we'd find a way to get together in half a year in this very space, where we'd find ourselves nostalgic precisely about its discomforts.

Easy to say on a day of beautiful winter light... Notice all those prime colors peeking in the windows!

I wonder how we'll look back on our experience together. Several students dutifully pledged that the ideas they'd encountered in the class would be with them for the rest of their lives; I said they should wait and see. Beyond encountering the many faces of Buddhist modernism we've done a lot of thinking together about the mysteries of learning ... some of it personalized, liberating, unselfing. It all might mean more to them after they have a few more semesters of college, and of life, under their belts!

Cloud of (un)knowing

For today's final session of "Theorizing Religion," I painstakingly recreated the word cloud we generated three months ago (compressed from filling the board to filling the area on which I could project my photo of the board that day), and invited students to fill in the space opened up as they shared their final reflections on the course. New words swirl arond the old on the left, right and bottom: power, center, pluralism, DIY, infinite, hermeneutics, ineffable, self-identification, community, and of course never ending! Someone's added the word challenge twice, once with (yourself, your beliefs), once itself in parentheses after authority. And one student mixed a word in with the original words three times: truth, TRUTH, truth. There's room for more!

Colors beyond color

Colors, expected and unexpected in a wintry Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Courting trouble

For the penultimate session of "Theorizing Religion" today, we read a recent blogpost by Winnifred Fallers Sullivan on the legal incoherence of notions of religious freedom:

The notion that religion exists and can be regulated without being defined is a fiction at the heart of religious freedom protection.

We read this is as a reminder that, free as our discussions in the academy (and even in our private lives) might seem to be about what counts as religion, etc., in real life what's sanctioned is constrained by legal definitions woefully uninformed by research and reflection about religion in general and about the diverse hybrid realities of contemporary US religion in particular. Sullivan is calculatedly frustrating - she doesn't suggest a way out of our jurisprudential fix; there can't be a neutral definition of religion, fair to all comers. But we got mired in details about drug laws in Oregon, cemetery practice in Florida, contraception for employees of closely held craft supply megastores in Oklahoma... and that evangelical "wedding cake artist" in Colorado whose case was heard before the Supreme Court last week.

It all left a bitter taste. Why? Because religion is not nice? Because reality is messy, and law can't fix it? Because we can't all just get along? Because life isn't just one long liberal arts seminar?

Morning after

'Tis the season

First snow of the season!

Intergenerational

Just about exactly one hundred years ago Don Martin, a correspondent for the New York Herald, left New York for France to provide first hand reports of the American efforts in the Great War. His adventures, written in stirring prose in articles, a diary and letters, notably to his young daughter Dorothy, are fascinating to read. We've been enjoying them in the family for a while now, but now you can, too! Dorothy was my grandmother, and her son, my father, has demonstrated the most remarkable filial piety in tracking down Martin's publications, and in transcribing them, too. He will be sharing them through the blog Don Martin: WWI Soldier of the Pen, each on the precise centenary of its writing or publication. The filiality doesn't end there: Don Martin's great great grandson (one f my nephews in that Great War-obsessed land down under) helped design the website. Official launch today! Enjoy!

非常道

Daoism came to "Theorizing Religion" today, in the form of two chapters of James Miller's China's Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future. It was a way to introduce the "religion and ecology" discussion (still some seats in the class I'm teaching next semester on that topic), and to get at the "Daoism as a religion" question. The Harvard Divinity School MOOC series will run again next year, with a sixth course - on Sikhism. Why not consecrate Daoism the sixth world religion, as the Norton Anthology of World Religions did? But first we needed a sense of what Daoism is, no easy matter...

Following Miller's lead I emphasized that Daoist practice is about experiencing the body in the world, the world in the body - and "the world" is not some amorphous blur but full of local landscapes and powers, just as time is not a gauzy mist but calendars with specific cycles where particular named forces are close or far. (It all waxes and wanes: yin yang.) For this reason, Miller argues, western categories of nature - human - supernatural don't know what to make of Daoism. By the same token Daoism offers a powerful alternative to understandings of "religion and nature" premised on the western categories, which are all about distinctions and boundaries (protecting nature!), not the flows of vital energy (qi) which are what it's all about. It makes for a different way of approaching ecology if the environment is in me, as Miller puts it, and a different form of education if this is something to be understood not intellectually but "aesthetically," in the way we feel our living.

Still, world religion #6? One student astutely observed that you couldn't possibly provide the aesthetic education in the significance of particular places and times through a MOOC. (I'd summarized an article by Yang Der-Ruey about how the conventional 9-5 M-F schools of the state-sponsored Daoist organization in China have killed Daoism by divorcing it from specificities of geography and calendar, leaving only the empty husk of abstract philosophy and arbitrary ritual.) But, we'll have to ask next week, can you really MOOC any religion without turning it into abstract philosophy and arbitrary ritual?

Befriending the silent observer

I got goosebumps in "Buddhist Modernism" today, not something I was expecting. As a final example of our topic before they give final research presentations, I'd given the students two chapters from Haemin Sunim's The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down: How to Be Calm in a Busy World, a book currently climbing Amazon charts in various western language translations, but originally a compilation of tweets. Sunim's observations became the most retweeted tweets in South Korea, and the books that have brought them together have been major bestsellers there.

There are few zingers among the tweets we read, though - that's not what they're about - and our discussion was a little flat. It got a little better when I asked students to read aloud one which spoke to them, so we had a taste of retweeting. Now each appeared as something someone else had cared enough to send on. But the advice and observations still seemed pretty common-sensical: slow down, relax, be yourself, enjoy the little things. There were a few clearly Buddhisty ones, like the one I was surprised it was left to me to read aloud:

I wish you could see my true nature.

Beyond my body and labels,

there is a river of tenderness and vulnerability.

Beyond stereotypes and assumptions,

there is a valley of openness and authenticity.

Beyond memory and ego,

there is an ocean of awareness and compassion.

but in general it seems a pretty ordinary, slightly New Agey, self-help book. If you read to the end, though, you find that all rivers lead to the sea. The goosebumps came when I read the class the book's epilogue:

Your Original Face

When you are so busy that you feel perpetually chased, when worrying thoughts circle your head, when the future seems dark and uncertain, when you are hurt by what someone has said, slow down if only for a moment. Bring all of your awareness into the present and take a deep breath.

What do you hear? What does your body feel? What does the sky look like?

Only when we slow down can we finally see clearly our relationships, our thoughts our pain. As we slow down, we are no longer tangled in them. We can step out and appreciate them for what they are.

The faces of our family and colleagues who always help, the scenery that we pass by every day but fail to notice, our friends' stories that we fail to pay attention to - in the stillness of the pause, the entirety of our being is quietly revealed.

Wisdom is not something we have to strive to acquire. Rather, it arises naturally as we slow down and notice what is already there.

As we notice more and more in the present moment, we come to a deeper realization that a silent observer is within us. In the primordial stillness, the silent observer witnesses everything inside and outside.

Befriend the silent observer. Find out where it is, and what shape it has assumed. Do not try to imagine it as something you already know. Let all your thoughts and images merge back into silence and just sense the observer already there in silence.

If you see the face of the silent observer, then you have found your original face, from before you were born.

Acting plural

Had a wonderful moment in Theorizing Religion today - not just a moment, a class which afforded wonderful moments. In last Wednesday's class we'd poked and prodded the charming and deceptively clear arguments about religious exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, and I thought we might have a little more discussion in us. Did we ever! "I've never met a real pluralist," one student had written in a response. "How can anyone not be a pluralist?" another had asked. "Can anyone say they think their views are true but incomplete, and that others have truths they'll never be able fully to assimilate, and really mean it?" I added. So off we went.

One moment which I particularly relished came from R, a student in the Theater BFA program, responding to the Lang cliché that "everyone has their own truth." I rail against that every year, but usually nobody agrees with me. R, however, took it and ran with it. If it can't conflict with what others believe it's not truth, just opinion, he said. R told us this was a point stressed by his acting teachers. Characters don't have "their own truth," not if they're well acted. The actor's job is to let the character live the truth.

Now doesn't that throw things for a lovely loop! I told R after class this recalled a discussion we had in "Theater & Religion" years ago about whether belief is an inner thing or observable. I remember getting excited about how the idea of "believable" performance complicated the idea that one's beliefs were entirely private and could be known by noone outside. But none of the actors in the class took me up on that. I have a sense R, and his teachers, might. Is the practice of acting a pluralism, then?

Toled you so

Always spot-on Tom Toles. (Bottom right always offers a 2nd punchline!)

Hard times for higher ed

We'll be reeling from the consequences of the perfidious tax 'reform' of the plutocrat party for a long time (and paying for it for even longer) but one consequence seems clear, and devastating for folks in our biz. This is a message I got from an alum, who's recently arrived at a calling to pursue an MDiv/MSW after many years of discernment, and found what seemed to be the perfect program for pursuing it, out in Denver:

Taxing graduate students isn't a significant revenue boost, and will have the effect only of thinning the ranks of those who can afford to pursue further study. Why do it? It only makes sense as part of the broader attack on the institutions of civil society which is what, alas, you'd expect from a party beholden entirely to Mammon and its jealous God.