No contribution too small!

Meet ふたまる大仏, the Great Buddha Futamaru, constructed over four months and completed March 5th of this year. Just as 2,600,000 people contributed in some way, none too small, to the construction of the Great Buddha at Todaiji in Nara 1300 years ago, Futamaru too rose from the contributions of 2,600,000 ... clicks! He was the second online Great Buddha constructed at the simple website みんなで大仏建立ボタン. His predecessor ひときゅう大仏 took fourteen months. Since his arrival, word must have spread: みっかび大仏 manifested in a marvelous 2 days, よざくら大仏 in 15, and いつゆう大仏 in just 17 more. The latest is lagging a little, though, perhaps because it's aiming for 5,200,000 clicks. You can help! You don't need to be able to read the various contributions you can make (planning, raising funds, building the temple, hewing wood, smelting, pouring, etc.) just click away!

Job in the time of COVID-19

The academic year is rapidly coming to a close - next week is the last week of the semester! For the lecture course on the Book of Job and the Arts, that meant today was the last class of lecture, since next week's class is given over to a festival of students' remarkable final projects. But I decided to keep the lecturing to minimum. In lieu of the retrospective I usually give at a class's end, I put together a collage* (students have access to my powerpoints, as well as recordings of the class) and offered four very general conclusions:

Some problems cannot be solved but need to be performed.

Nobody hears a story like Job’s for the first time.

More versions are better.

You are part of the tradition. 

But most of the class - 50 of our 75 minutes - was devoted to discussion. Discussion in a zoom lecture class, you ask? Yes! I'm getting a better understanding of the constraints and opportunities of being online. A few weeks ago I started asking students to contribute to a class google.doc in lieu of taking attendance, each time with a prompt keyed to the week's reading. Students had two days after lecture to do it. Participation was remarkably serious: students were clearly happy to have a chance to do something, to say something. Their responses were thoughtful, often profound - I'm hoping they took advantage of the chance to read through them all, too. Starting two weeks ago, I incorporated the google.doc in the class time. It's an exciting thing to see a bunch of people working simultaneously on the same document!

Today I decided to include two google doc'ing opportunities. (So 15 minutes of lecture, 10 of google doc, 10 more lecture, 10 more google doc, then 30 minutes for an open discussion spearheaded by the TAs.) I told them I'd decided to cut back my lecturing to make time for a second google doc experience because of what I'd learned from last week's, where students had given a remarkable set of stories of bad experiences which wound up bearing blessings - twelve single-spaced pages' worth! Remarkable - but not quite what I'd asked for. The prompt followed the template of Saiweng:

SAIWENG LOST HIS HORSE
Describe - from art, history, your own experience or your imagination - a series of events like those described in the story of the old frontiersman. It could be a bad thing which turns out to be a good thing, which however turns out to be even worse... or something good which turns out to be something bad, until that leads to something even better...

Their stories all had happy or at least hopeful outcomes! But then, it occurred to me (and I told them this morning), in April 2020, where we are beset by calamities and nobody knows what the future will look like, we don't need to be reminded that bad things can come on unexpectedly. We need to believe that suffering and evil are not the end of the story. To talk about the Book of Job and the arts as if we were not in a moment of general dislocation and fear would be irresponsible. So two in-class google.docs:

JOB IN THE TIME OF COVID-19 
In just a few months, the world has been turned on its head by the novel coronavirus. The stories we think powerful and relevant have changed, as have the places we find ourselves within them. How has your take on the story of Job changed? 

WHAT STAYED WITH YOU?
Describe one planned and one unplanned thing that will stay with you from this class. 

Responses are still coming in but they've amply confirmed my sense that they afforded more significant lessons than anything I could have said. More on these responses, as well as the final projects, next week!

*Georges de la Tour, "Job and his wife"; Anna Ruth Henriques, The Book of Mechtilde; drama students reading Job; old print of Purim players; the different voices of the Book of Job's 42 chapters; Rev. Leslie Callahan; Theater of War's Bryan Doerries; The Tree of Life; Rube Goldberg machine used in a TA's mini-lecture on Dostoevsky; drama student in a production of Steven Adley Guirgis' Last Days of Judas Iscariot; poet Diane Glancy; 19th century print of King Lear on the heath; Alice Walker; you know what; human rights theorist Brian Phillips; old English text of the Matins of the Office of the Dead; Carol Newsom's mapping of the arch of the story of Job; Joni Mitchell; theater director Cecilia Rubino; Groundhog Day; Archibald MacLeish's J. B.; whirlwind from Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job; image from shooting of A Serious Man; Fugui's ox from Yu Hua's To Live.

Earth stanza

If there's a way to break out of zoom, Cláudio Carvalhaes will find it - and find it he did, taking "Religion & Ecology" for a hike through woods to a river, where he lay down, read a prayer to the earth, then walked us back to where we'd begun. We were really moved!

Remote

As the official death toll to COVID-19 in the US reached fifty thousand souls, some disorganized thoughts. (I'll spare none for the bungler in chief beyond that if his people think another government can be sued for letting the virus spread, so surely could his.)

An article in the Times this morning reports that while 74 percent of white voters [in New York City] said they did not know someone who died from the coronavirus, 48 percent of black voters, and 52 percent of Latino voters, said they did. Our over fifteen thousand lost are disproportionately working class and people of color.

I'm one of the 26% white voters who did know someone, but just barely. An elderly member of our congregation, whom I hardly knew, died three weeks ago. I also heard about three other cases: the teacher of the child of a friend, the father of the ex-boyfriend of a student, and the brother of a member of our college staff. There are probably more of which I don't yet know, but I don't expect it will be many.

Our staff member sent a thank you to those who sent him messages of condolences, in which he wrote: My brother Jack will be a statistic but to us he was a man that is special to us and will always be remembered.

An article in yesterday's Guardian by Robert Reich argued that in virus-stricken America a new class system is emerging. "Remotes" (35%) are doing fine, largely able to avoid the spread; "Essentials" are working but at greater risk (30%); the "Unpaid" (25%+) are jobless or furloughed, probably losing health insurance; "The Forgotten," comprising people in prisons, detention camps, nursing homes, Indian reservations and homeless shelters are at perhaps greatest risk. 

While the particulars are specific to the US and its specifically gappy social contract, there must be similar breakdowns in other countries. Most people I know are Remotes - a fact borne out for me during a zoom reunion yesterday morning with three dozen classmates from the international school I attended in 1982-84. (Some of us haven't seen each other in three decades!) All are under lockdown in one country or another, working from home and enjoying walks. The only deaths mentioned were by an alumna in New Mexico, three family members of one of whose colleagues had died; all were Diné (Navaho).

A member of our church is chaplain to a hospital in Inwood, on the northern tip of Manhattan. Moved by the plight of the unattended bodies in the "morgue tent" next to the hospital (New York's hopiotal morgues are all at capacity, most with refrigerated trailers next door), she's started reading the Psalms outside its entrance every midday. I've quietly joined her a few times (from home, of course). Not knowing who's in the tent, and not able to be anywhere near it, it feels desperately abstract.

"Desperately abstract" describes my experience as a Remote, and is probably not so far distant from that of the folks who are bridling at lockdowns in other states, or those who think think the COVID-19 death tolls need to be contextualized in terms of other losses, other potential deaths - those for whom Jack has never been more than a statistic. It maddens me to be in the same cognitive space as these folks, even though I'm apparently at the epicenter. It's sickening to be reassuring concerned friends from other places that I'm fine, and everyone I know.

Greenery

Took advantage of a dark drizzly day to venture out to the nearby woods - Riverside Park, just a few blocks away.

As planned, we had things pretty much to ourselves - so masks could be doffed!

And Spring, we were pleased to confirm, proceeds apace.

Fusion cuisine

Scenes from our preparation of Pasta alla Norma, Ottolenghi style (we used Chinese eggplant, all our local Korean supermarket carries, but no matter), prepared in four kitchens for one yummy zoom dinner party!

Get well soon!

Our quasi-quarantine reached its fortieth day today (how biblical - but we're still counting), and happens to coincide with the neglected tree lover's holiday Arbor Day. As we contemplate sitting out more time, I'm reminded of a song the incomparable Mabel Mercer used to sing...

Just one year from today 

Will be the first anniversary 

Of the day you went away 

I won't call, I won't write 

Not even one little cursory greeting 

On each holiday 

So in the spirit of friend to friend 

Here are the wishes I'll never send 

Seasons greetings, Merry Christmas 

And a Happy New Year 

Bon voyage and April Fool 

Lots of Easter cheer 

Joyous tidings on your birthday 

And on March 17 

Won't you be my Valentine 

Happy Halloween 

Have a lovely Labor Day 

Please enjoy Good Neighbor Day 

Happy payday, merry May Day 

Have yourself a nice VJ Day 

And while you're living Thanksgiving 

Shine on Harvest Moon 

Button up your overcoat 

And get well soon 

Peace on earth, Get Out And Vote! 

And get well soon.

I'm pretty sure among the recordings Victor Preller introduced me to there's another verse where she smiles into the already slightly absurd Arbor Day too, rhymed - why not - with Pearl Harbor Day.

Feed my sheep

 

Our rector sent us these images of the life of our church sanctuary during the pandemic. While the congregation cannot meet for services, the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen continues to feed almost a thousand people a day from a tent in front of the church, as well as to provide "backpacks" with a weekend's supplies for poor children and their families. While the parish house allows preparation of hot lunches, the church allows assembly of care packages with social distancing!

In Mother Anna's words: The day when we can worship together again will be joyful indeed. Until that time, I include two images of our beautiful church responding to God’s call to us today. And keeping watch over these essential supplies? On one end, the banner declaring that no one shall be cast out of our church. On the other, the image of the resurrected Christ.

Earth community poem

In "Religion and Ecology" today we spent a little time contributing to an Earth Day online project called Earth Stanzas. Eight poems are offered as models for contributions; participants are invited to chose one as a

sort of template. What you come up with is then immediately published on their website - minus the poetic spacing you might have taken from your model (as in my Thomas Berry-ish poem). All these are ours!

And here are 6 more, added after our class ended! Now it's your turn!

Spring greens are happening all over!

Spirit of place

The "Religion & Ecology" class visited with the rector of the Church of the Ascension today! Well, she joined our zoom class, and as she spoke about the importance of places we feel we belong to ecological and religious commitment, I shared some of the images she's been sharing with her congregation of their covid-shuttered sanctuary. The dynamic play of sunlight and candle smoke powerfully evoke being in that place for me, and I think it got students thinking about the lives of places - in time and in community - in a new way despite zoom constraints!

Inside out sunset

In quasi-quarantine you take your pleasures where you find them!

Death upon death

Here's what passes for good news these days - and it is good news. Over a month of social isolation seems to have slowed the spread of the coronavirus, though at terrible cost for many households & enterprises. More waves of hardship await, and possibly more waves of the virus, too, but it's not as bad as it might have been. That is welcome news. Still, still. Four hundred seventy-eight more people lost their lives - in just a day. Four hundred seventy-eight irreplaceable individuals, most dying alone, their families and communities unable to bid a personal farewell or even a formal one. May they rest in peace.

La danse

A delightful drawing by the Washington Post's Sergio Peçanha. May we soon come to see the art in this strange dance we're all dancing.

So that's why it's called a spider plant! 

Our once indoor specimen is loving the balcony light.

First impressions

We're getting better at this online thing. (We have to!) Today my friend J and I went to speak to the class of next Fall's orientation fellows -

Except of course we didn't go anywhere, just joined their zoom class. But we managed to have a fun encounter, even structuring it around experiences and questions of the people in the room, in part with the

help of a nifty little program called padlet - which I learned about from one of my students earlier in the week! In just three minutes at the

start of our time together, we "heard" from everyone! (They called up the padlet from these links or the QR codes above.) The padlets soon

filled up with more answers to our ice breaker questions than you could ever get in a live classroom, giving us material to work with (I also snuck some in, like "John Dewey"), all while letting the students enjoy the

sense of being in class with each other. What fun! Now how to resist the temptation to begin every online group encounter this way?!

Say it with flowers

 These tulips show what shelter-in-place (just six days) feels like

Mortal threat

Tom Toles nails it again. One laughs only to avoid weeping.

Story on story on story

In "Religion and Ecology" yesterday we discussed Laurie Zoloth's presidential address at the American Academy of Religion in 2014, "Interrupting your life: An ethics for the coming storm." (A slightly revised text is available here.) It's an impassioned and inspiring talk, with a lot going on. (Before she began she asked the audience to partner up and discuss the two scriptural passages above, one from the Hebrew Bible, the other from the Quran.) There were several things I wanted students to get from it:

1) the idea of interruption as something religions do - Judaism preeminently:

A theology of interruption demands that we … act as if the interruption were the Real, and the other stuff of our lives the Distraction. ... Religions structure the practice of interruption, which is a moment of justice, or beauty, or compassion, or grace, in such an unjust world. ... Interruption is, of course, the very method of teaching and learning and ethical decision-making in Jewish thought, and one interrupts with story on story on story, each disagreement challenging the half-finished sentence of the previous argument.

She of course had done that very thing - story on story on story - by giving us not one but two accounts of the time before Noah's flood.

2) the idea of the Sabbath as a model for structured interruption, and the way it might be used to inspire ways of breaking out of the mindset of a modern civilization rushing us toward climate disaster:

Shabbas actively ceases the marketplace exchanges and all the frenetic, mechanical action of the world, all the digital zinging, all the traveling, all the writing, all the finishing of things into other things. One interrupts the natural order, the cease-less cycle—to cease, to make an in-between— rupting or breaking the totalizing cycle of events. Break the six-day week, and make a Shabbat, an event that is exactly not in the natural order, the people are commanded from Sinai. And every six years, break the bonds to the field and the seed time and harvest time and make a stop for justice, make a Sabbatical Year....

Zoloth suggests ways in which scholars might structure in interruption by the realities of climate challenges, perhaps by tithing a tenth of time in a class, or reading time in a week, for climate issues. Or what about at the level of institutions?

We could create an AAR Sabbatical Year. ... once in every six years, we would pause. Following the biblical cycle, we could chose to not meet at a huge annual meeting in which we take over a city. ... What if instead of coming together, we spread out over the land, as it were, and read out papers to one another at our own universities and institutions? What if we could meet, each of us in our own city and turn to the faces and the needs of our fellow citizens? What if, on that day, we taught the poor, volunteered in local high schools or community colleges, or the prison, the hospital, the military base, the church, mosque, synagogue, or temple, at a place that is not your own, worked at planting an orchard or a garden, served food to the poor, offered our teaching, offered to learn? What if we turned to our neighbor—the woman who cleans the toilets, the man who sweeps the sidewalks—and included them in the university to which we are responsible? We would then be actively making an interruption in our lives, saying by this act: I will sacrifice to save my planet.

I had to inform the students that I've heard nothing about plans for the 2021 AAR Sabbatical Year she proposed - but it's looking like our hand may be forced for 2020!

3) an account of the contribution religions, for all their liabilities, might make to helping us learn to not to flee from knowledge of impending climate chaos but rather learn to interrupt our lives and the life of our unsustainable civilization.

First, religions confront the enormous terror of each as we face death, with narratives that allow us to imagine our good life as part of a larger story, in which we are mortal, broken, old, and yet beloved.
Second, religions allow ordinary people to believe in their own power to change unjust situations.
Third, religious traditions allow for prophecy. To imagine the future, to call for repentance, to see a day coming that can be imagined, changed, redeemed, all of this is possible: the road to the impossible is open. 
Fourth, religions are without borders. Just as medicine can be sans frontières, religions allow us to consider ourselves to be global members of covenants far deeper and far broader than national boundaries.

Each of these is an distinctive gift, and shows how religion might play more than a supporting role in ecological awareness and action. I hope students are getting that sense of the significance of religious modalities from my course, but I'm not confident of it. Arguably this is a place where being "spiritual but not religious" doesn't measure up. Likewise difficult to access was the last thing I hoped students might get from Zoloth's talk.

4) a sense of the power of "scriptural reasoning" - the kind of thinking that a constant engagement with scriptural texts make possible. You can't interrupt stories without more stories, and can't experience these interruptions as openings rather than shuttings-down, without a rich sense of the abiding presence and relevance of a set of shared texts. Zoloth demonstrates this approach throughout. The model for the interrupted AAR sabbatical, for instance, was a moment described in the Mishnah. But it's really there from the start, with Genesis 5 and Surah 71, the latter of which provides the central idea that people flee from the warnings which might save them. And for people more biblically fluent than I, it's there in her opening words, too:

We are living in the Last Place. There is no other world for us, no second chance. This one world is so beautiful, with the sweet green willows shushing in the August breeze, and the halting, diamond turns of water from small plastic sprinklers, the ordinary grace of a swerve of bright white birds and the spun net of high, floating clouds. The blue–green weed called miner's lettuce, abundant in the sidewalks of the city, the first snow on the black iron railings, the wet tear and tear of it, and the shocking shimmer: the yellow of oak in October. The trailing guitar from a block away, the way that wood rubs dark gold and soft from use, the crack of a hammer, clear and high, the sway of each of us on the train, in wet wool coats, the bodies of others in the soft black coats, elbows, the downward glancing grin, the way the old man down the alley whistles a song he learned as a boy. Seedtime and harvest time, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, always and again.

That last phrase is from Genesis 8:22, after the flood, and coming at the end of God's decision not again to destroy His creation, although humanity remains wicked.

So rich, so demanding: religion and religious studies at its best!

Ten thousand souls

 

Astounding. New York City may have reached the apex but unspeakable numbers of lives have been lost, and many more will likely die, too. How can it be I knew only one, a fellow parishioner at Holy Apostles?

On the shelf

 

Yesterday marked four weeks of quasi quarantine, surreal suspended animation for us in our apartment above it all, but out of sight below the virus rages. New York State has tallied its ten thousandth life lost.

Easter joy

Because we're not doing Eucharists online, our church left the Easter Vigil as vigil, candle lit with lots of stories, saving the light of Easter - otherwise rushing in midway through the Vigil with bells and lights and flowers and brass and Handel's Halleluia Chorus - for the Sunday morning service. This made the triduum into something more like a 3+1, but even though the Sunday service, too, was without a Eucharist (and bells and flowers and brass and Handel), I didn't mind. The light, which we'd seen fading across several dozen living rooms, was now here in full force. The community created through these four days' gathering in zoom galleries, of a Thursday evening, a midday Friday, a Saturday evening and this Sunday morning, is something real and special. Each in their own "house church" (that's ours, below, third balcony from the top) we ache to be fully together, and together fully with the world, but Easter's promise replenishes our hopes. He is risen, and goes before us.

Memory lane

In less ponderous news, we fans of "Endeavour" had a chance to watch the opening episode of "Inspector Morse," the series it prequels. "Endeavour" had already taken me back to the Oxford I knew, albeit in a sparkling 2010s recreation of what had happened half a century before, but here was the rather duller Oxford of the 1980s which I actually knew. Indeed, not half an hour in, Morse drives past the place I lived in my final year, in decidedly unsparkly Jericho (the second row house on the right)! The episode aired in 1987; I lived there 1986-87! Maybe I was there in my dingy second-story room, facing the blank brick wall of the back of St. Barnabas Church, as filming happened!

Good Friday

After listening to the Passion narrative from the Gospel of John today, as part of the Good Friday liturgy, recast somewhat for our zoomed "house church" (I was in our bedroom), we were encouraged to contemplate the Cross. If we had one to hand, we might use that; if not, we could close our eyes and imagine one. I didn't have one to hand. As I conjured up the Cross, it shared my awareness with another image, which had come to me while hearing the end of Passion narrative.

After these things, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, though a secret one because of his fear of the Jews, asked Pilate to let him take away the body of Jesus. Pilate gave him permission; so he came and removed his body. Nicodemus, who had at first come to Jesus by night, also came, bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds  They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, according to the burial custom of the Jews. Now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified, and in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of Preparation, and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there.

The image was of Hart Island, the place where New York City has always buried unknown and unclaimed bodies, where yesterday a long trench was dug for victims of the coronavirus. We've been reading about the city's morgues reaching capacity for some time now, and know that many funerals can't be scheduled. Contemplating the Cross I felt the forlornness of those bodies. It's been a gusty day and the wind started howling just at that moment, more loudly than I can remember, and more sustained. It seemed the moan of all those dead, and of those fearing and facing death, terrified and alone. Or maybe not alone.

 

This didn't have to happen here.

Upstream

Fewer people made it to class today. Two told me of technical issues but others simply didn't show, and one vanished partway through. Zoom, for all its gifts, hasn't the draw of actual presence. It's rewarding enough for those who let it be, but for those skeptical it may be the opposite.

Oh well, at least the students who weren't there didn't have to hear me try to make sense of Dogen's On the Spiritual Discourses of the Mountains and the Water (山水経), without being able to register whether people were following me or not! (I get a little crazed talking about certain subjects, Zen being one of them, and the body language of the class lets me know I'm not pushing people too far.) I'd chosen five lines to focus on, pointedly taking them out of sequence, but that may still have been too many. These three would have been quite sufficient.

If we recognize [water] only as something that flows, the word ‘flowing’ slanders the Water. One reason for this is that the use of the word forces It to be something not flowing.

In the opinion of the everyday stream of the ordinary and the befuddled, water is unquestionably that which exists in rivers, streams, oceans, and seas. This is not so, for the rivers and seas have come into existence within the Water. Thus, there is the Water even in the places where there are no rivers or seas. It is just that when the Water descends to earth, it creates the effect of ‘rivers and seas’.

When a dragon or a fish views water as a palace, it will not be like a human being seeing a palace, nor will such a creature perceive the water to be something that is flowing on. Were some onlooker to say to the dragon or the fish, “Your palace is flowing water,” the creature would at once be startled and filled with doubt, just as some of you may have been startled earlier when you heard it asserted that mountains flow like water.

Or maybe just this, in my own words: if what goes up must come down, then what comes down must first have gone up! (Streams are fed by rains, which are fed by clouds, which are fed by seas...) To think of water as something that essentially flows down is to miss part of its nature and most of its life. Maybe the same goes for everything else?

But any sort of Zen insight, especially glibly verbalized, may be a bridge too far in this moment of unfathomable flows.

Tenebrae 2020

Today is Wednesday of Holy Week when, for decades, the Church of the Holy Apostles used to offer a service called Tenebrae, "a service of darkness." As readings were offered, the candles in the church were progressively extinguished, issuing in an overwhelming dark stillness. I told the students in my Job and the arts class about it this morning, and that it had been started during the AIDS pandemic, by a music director who would himself later die of it. I mentioned it as one of our texts today - Archibald MacLeish's J. B. - is its own kind of Tenebrae, the stage dimming steadily into darkness. Only after the last words - when

most plays fade to black - does some "plain white daylight" arrive, through a humble door from which no light had shone before. Even reading about it makes for powerful theater. J. B. has been part of my course from the start, indeed it's been with me since high school, when I was a series of hapless "First Messengers" delivering the news of the deaths of J. B. and his wife Sarah's children, one by one. I've discussed the closing scene with students before, too. But on April 8, 2020, I said, I had to say something more. The devastated world at the end of J.B. is all too resonant as the covid-19 pandemic destroys lives and worlds around us. (806 deaths reported in New York City just yesterday. Unfathomable; 10 days ago the mind already short circuited at 222.) 

Sarah's words The candles in churches are out. / The lights have gone out in the sky. resonate in a different way when churches are shuttered - no candles will be lit this Easter in many churches - and when the universe seems implacable and indifferent to the horror and heartbreak in every part of the world. I ended with the zoom Powerpoint equivalent of Tenebrae, whiting out all but these words from the texts final pages. I think my voice had fallen to a hush, too. I mumbled something about the audience and actors alone together in the dark, hearing as much as seeing the halting, caring movements of Sarah and J.B. finding their way back together on the stage, blow[ing] on the coal of the heart.

Rel Studs in the Env Hums

 

Gave my lecture in the environmental humanities course "Writing the Environment" today - by zoom. I'm not sure how well it went, not being

 

able to see more than two of the students' faces, and not able to move around... I fear I was just "lecturing," without the spark I usually get

from being in a space with my listeners! But my slides were nice, in a template Powerpoint somehow suggested and I somehow accepted. The

only thing that didn't work was breakout rooms - the sort of "turn to your neighbor" activity that egts a class' juices flowing... 

getting ahead of myself, zoomwise! But it gave me a chance to to lay out my sense of what the contribution of religion might be in the

 

default-secular environmental humanities. And to introduce some more people to Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, "the best gift

I can think to give you." From Kimmerer I also took my title, and my surprise suggestion for how to define religion, and the role an 

ecologically inspired religion can play for environmental humanities: appreciating and addressing the depth of "species loneliness."

Topsy turvy

Can't resist posting this picture, snapped during a first family zoom session on Sunday (Aussie time) spanning 3 generations, NY, CA and VIC.