明けましておめでとうございます

And somehow, another new year beckons, and the habit of hoping.

Just desert

Barely two days in the desert - Anza-Borrego Desert State Park and the southern part of Joshua Tree National Monument by way of Box Canyon Road - and I'm regrounded. If astronomical events remind us of the remote human past, the desert somehow takes me far deeper. Here you find the layered beds of ancient rivers and oceans jangled by the jostling of tectonic plates, all rolled and carved and cracked and embroidered by flows of absent water and wind. And in the midst of it all this inorganic wonder, life finds a way.

A perfect coffee cake for the sand-sedimented desert

Desert pastels

Weather patterns

Weather - and more on the way!

PSA

Happy holidays - but don't forget that your school's two-hour online Harassment Prevention Training must be completed by January 1st. 

Bonus: you'll encounter stale concepts of religion and the anarchic concept of "sincerely held" belief currently hollowing them out.

Verily, the U. S. Equal Opportunity Commission faithfully articulates the incoherence of American understandings of religious freedom: "A religious practice may be sincerely held by an individual even if newly adopted, not consistently observed, or different from the commonly followed tenets of the individual's religion." Is it belief or practice that is "sincerely held," and, whatever it is, how can it be distinct from "the individual's religion" and still merit religious protection?

Beach coreopsis

I didn't realize the Sea Dahlia is a rare plant species found only in our part of the California coast. This is one glorying in the moisture of recent rains. Its lovely cloud of fresh foliage is unbelievably soft.

Finding the stars

In memory and thanksgiving for the life of Archbishop Desmond Tutu (1931-2021), a prayer attributed to him:

Disturb us, O Lord

when we are too well-pleased with ourselves 
when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little, 
because we sailed too close to the shore.

Disturb us, O Lord

when with the abundance of things we possess, 
we have lost our thirst for the water of life 
when, having fallen in love with time, 
we have ceased to dream of eternity 
and in our efforts to build a new earth, 
we have allowed our vision of Heaven to grow dim.

Stir us, O Lord

to dare more boldly, to venture into wider seas 
where storms show Thy mastery, 
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.

In the name of Him who pushed back the horizons of our hopes 
and invited the brave to follow.

Amen

Listen!

Reunited in California with the familiar Mexican nativity after a year's hiatus, but still enjoying our church community in New York. In her sermon at the Chrismas Vigil (streamed), our rector recalled the late Stephen Sondheim's argument against the use of amplification in theaters: it makes the theatergoer a mere passive visitor, instead of a participant, leaning forward to make out the words. In this year's array even the angels seem to be leaning forward, even the star. 

Truly felt

Better than the Yule Log - a cosy fire in stop-motion felt animation!

Lights

California Christmas is coming

Floral burst

Not sure what this loopy flower is...

Le silence eternel des ces espaces infinis m'effraie

The coming nights will be the only chance to see comet Leonard as it will not swing past the Earth again for another 80,000 years, Accuweather helpfully reports, just the latest of many celestial events on a scale hard to grasp. Last year at this time it was the "Great Conjunction" of Jupiter and Saturn - the first such viewable in eight centuries! - and just last month was the longest partial lunar eclipse since 1440 CE. (I didn't manage to see any of them.) Centuries or millennia boggle the mind but eighty thousand years? That leaves even the Holocene in the dust. And if comets are the storytellers, none of us is more than a fleeting view out the window. It's hard to know what to feel with such news. 

Such astronomical events seem like glimpses of the machinery of the otherwise inaudible music of the spheres. They make the ebbs and flows, crises and restorations of our lives seem entirely insignificant - perhaps because these "events" are themselves no more than coincidences, remarkable only to (indeed remarked only by) us. They point beyond themselves to scales of time vaster yet. But they're unnerving at a time when we know ourselves to be caught in processes on our own blue planet of greater scale than a human life - the climate crisis, the Anthropocene, the Sixth Extinction, but also more local human worries like the threat to democracy. Did you know that, while this past November's was the longest partial lunar eclipse, there will be a longer total lunar eclipse next November 8, which happens to be Election Day in the still United States?!

I'm dreaming of a white Chrismas...

Into the sunset

Looks like the cover of a battered old sci-fi paperback, but that's the view from the window as the plane before us in the queue took off into the western sky over Manhattan's spiky new skyline. Felt a little sci-fi too to be leaving as a new wave of infections sweeps the City (we saw long lines outside testing sites on our way to the airport), and a lot sci-fi to land in San Diego and see folks at the baggage claim let down their masks, naïve. (Not us!)

Risk levels

We fly to San Diego tomorrow, safely N95 and/or double masking all the way. Feels like déjà vu as the nation is engulfed by another covid-19 wave...

Theory in practice

Because of the vagaries of holidays, courses in this endless-seeming semester have been wrapping up for over a week. My Wednesday class finished last week. My Tuesday-Thursday class finished Tuesday of this week. And "Theorizing Religion," which meets Fridays, ended today. I thought students might be ready to let it go and at last week's meeting offered to move the final class on zoom (or even cancel it), but they wanted to gather one more time - and for it to be in person. And so we were, on an otherwise empty campus. In fact, because of unseasonal weather, we spent our final hour sitting outdoors! Not everyone came but there were eight stalwarts (the mandala impresario was on my laptop) and it felt positively countercultural. 

We started with two final presentations of student research - on the dodgy "Tiger Temple" Wat Pha Luang Ta Bua Yanasampanno in Thailand, and on the flirty fishing Christian "sex cult" the Children of God. Typically tabloidy topics but I've long since learned how to spin discussion in edifying directions. Things turned really festive once we moved outside to share final reflections. Almost all who made it today are from art, design or theater, and we ended up talking about how the community of artists is like the ideal of religious pluralism - respecting and even celebrating each other's difference in a spirit of collaboration rather than competition - except that they don't know how to talk or think about religion. Some do now! Indeed it emerged that these students have been forwarding and discussing texts from our class to friends and family all semester. Not bad for a Friday class!

Masked ball

As New York's covid infection numbers go unnervingly up again (the covid positivity rate nearly doubled in three days this week), it's good to encounter again the ChalkFIT 2021 students' reminders to mask up! mask up! mask up! (Here some of them are seen in the colder light of night-time streetlamps.) 

Whatever your style, whatever your thing, get vaccinated, get a booster, and mask up! mask up! mask up! We're all in this together.

Sunset spectacular

Reminder that the sky is bigger than it seems: near simultaneous pics from Greenwich Village, Morningside Heights and Hastings on Hudson 

Eight hundred thousand

Hidden among the numbers, the US has breached 800,000 souls lost.

Root systems

Some more of the Wurzelatlas (1960-2002) of Lore Kutschera and Erwin Lichtenegger has been digitized, this time trees. And as before, I've inverted two of them just for fun. Behold the upstairs/downstairs of Pinus silvestris (Scottish pine), Quercus robur (common oak), Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglas fir), Betula pendula (silver birch), Picea abes (Norway spruce), Alnus glutinosa (common alder), Populus nigra (black poplar) and - right side up this time - Pinus silvestris.

Kinning

"Anthropocene Humanities" wrapped today, with a final day of presentations on the Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations series. The original plan had been for the presentations to finish last week and for today's to be a class for final reflections, but I was blocked from campus last Tuesday (my fault) and we moved things around. Final reflections were generated in a zoom class, and presentations were saved for days we could all be there in person. 

This had its pleasures too - the last voices students heard were each other's, in more or less collaborative group presentations, working our way through the concentric circles of the project: Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice. Each student got to choose a chapter they were particularly drawn to to discuss, but they also had to reflect together on their volume's range of texts, why they thought they were arranged as they were, how the volume fit into the larger series... and whether and how the Anthropocene was mentioned and thematized.

.., which, by and large, it wasn't! I didn't know this when I created the course, the Kinship books having not yet been published, but it's fine with me. The Anthropocene was in the background of many pieces, students found, not referred to by that name but clearly an animating concern. Indeed, they remarked, Kinship's responses got beyond the meta-level discussions about nomenclature which made up the first part of our class, and dissolved the panicked paralysis which those discussions can produce. Instead of "Anthropocene," the word that kept coming up: "hope."

At the beginning of this semester, the concept of the Anthropocene felt too large and burdensome for me to acknowledge in a way that lacked panic or avoidance. Through our first assignment of locating ourselves in the Anthropocene, I was able to use the anecdote of my grandfather's birdwatching hobby to look at the Anthropocene through a binocular-like lens. By connecting our humanity to the climate crisis, I've noticed our class discussions fill with fewer sighs and more declarative statements of hope or productivity. 

I do have hope, although I also still hold a lot of doubt as well, but I can face the unknown outcome with acceptance now instead of just a cesspool of dread and absolute terror.

Throughout the course I’ve been sort of tormented by being pulled in both the directions of pessimism and optimism. It was a little bit easier pre this class to embrace willfully ignorant optimism, to believe no matter what I heard or thought to myself that things are going to get better. Now matter how awful the outcome is looking, and much closer we are to the clock above Union Square running out, somehow things would sort themselves out. ... Being aware of the fact that we were aware of what we were doing is just heartbreaking and humiliating. It makes me want to unironically scream. But a lot of the stuff in this class shifted me, ever so slightly, into a better point of view. 

I used to harbor this cynical sense of hatred, guilt, and culpability in relation to the Anthropocene but through plenty of course material and looking within myself, I now choose to avoid complacency and remain active in my protests against imperialism, consumerism, pollution and human waste in the many ways I can in the choices I make.

It was encouraging to be finishing with the Kinship volumes, each of which is an invitation to a community of ecological artists and scholars and activists - many of them members of Indigenous communities throughout the world - who have devoted careers to what Gavin Van Horn, one of the co-editors, calls "kinning":

The English language is noun dominant, and in comparison to many Indigenous languages, the animacy and agency of other beings and processes often receives less emphasis. ... the voices in these volumes point us toward an alternative perspective: kinship as a verb. 

Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning. ... In this understanding, being kin is not so much a given as it is an intentional process. Kinning does not depend upon genetic codes. Rather, it is cultivated by by humans, as one expression of lifeamong many, many, many others, and it revolves around an ethical question: how to rightly relate?

While the Anthropocene isn't mentioned, this project dovetails with some of the most important engagements with the Anthropocene that we read earlier in the semester, notably Amitav Ghosh's challenge to find ways to narrate our forgotten interdependence with the non-human, Heather Davis and Zoe Todd's argument that colonialism and its Anthropocene afterlife is all about a fatal "severing of relations," and Donna Haraway's call for us to learn to "make kin." The more perceptive students noticed that the sequence of essays I'd had them write had been moving in this direction from the start.

So it all came together in a fragile hope! 

But I have to say that I feel a little uneasy, as if any hope under the circumstances is a false one, as we live not only on borrowed time but stolen land where many relations have been irrevocably severed. There's much more to ponder - including the wisdom in making sure thinking about the Planet is always anchored in, and anchors, Practice! Courses wrap, but not this material. As it happens I'll have chances to work more on all this, as the students' responses moved me to decide to run "Anthropocene Humanities" again next Fall - and Renmin's just come through with a chance for me to repeat the condensed summer school version for Chinese students, too. 

Live on stage!

Festive return to live performance this weekend. On Friday, friends invited us to the vast Cecilia Chorus' first performance in two years, at Carnegie Hall no less! Margaret Bonds' charming 1954 "Ballad of the Brown King" was followed by Mozart's "vest-pocket" version of Handel's Messiah. And today it was our neighbors across the street, Manhattan School of Music, the sublimely saucy "Orphée aux enfers" their first live opera since 2019.