Ice menagerie

Some amusing creatures emerge as yesterday's snow slowly melts... 

Blizzard art

Snow and wind had a field day with the cars parked by our complex.

Snowcabbage

We might be having us some winter weather this weekend... 

Setting the stage

My Wednesdays this semester have two classes - the weekly lecture for "After Religion" at 10:15, and the second meeting of the Monday-Wednesday seminar "Religion and Ecology" at 4:00. I took advantage of our being online for the first two weeks of the semester for the 4:00, beaming in from home. But I ventured down to my office for the first one. This had its purpose: that lecture will be online all semester, but I'll be zooming in from the office, in hopes of luring students to join me IRL for office hours after it. It was fun to post a picture and then show that I was already in my book-walled cave, ready! (A bright nearly empty subway car offered its blessing as I headed to school.)

Titanic

Remember when this beauty - A68a, "an iceberg the size of Delaware!" - broke off from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica? (Not this one.) Well, just four years later, it is no more, having floated, spun, thinned, and finally broken up. It had quite a last dance.

New semester

Another semester underway! All eighteen students signed up for "Religion and Ecology" were there today - one of the gifts of zoom. I guess we've learned how to do class online, even a new one, with people we've never met before... but I'm sure I'm not the only one nourished by the assurance that we'll break out of our little boxes and be present to each other bodily in just two weeks (fingers crossed).

bell and Thay

Just a few days ago, thinking I might celebrate the late bell hooks in a reading in one of my classes, I happened on this 2000 account of her relationship with the great Buddhist teacher of our time Thich Nhat Hanh. And now Thay (as his students call him) has left us, too.

I've been as surprised by the remarkable range of people lamenting Thay's passing as I was at the outpour on bell's passing. In what seems a season of devastating departures, the moving on of these two cuts particularly close. I would wager that hooks has been the most widely assigned author at Lang for as long as I've been there. Her visions of "teaching to transgress" shape all that we do. (And it's nice that Lang hosted the residencies for bell which have become the most important visual legacy of her remarkable and dialogic presence.) In tributes I learned how even more personally her work and witness inspired women, especially women of color. 

Tributes to Thay make clear he was profoundly inspiring to many kinds of people, too, for all sorts of reasons, from practices of everyday mindfulness (he's the source of the tangerine-eating meditation, as well as the slow silent group walks I've done with many classes of students over the years) to the engaged Buddhism of his "action precepts" and the profundity of "interbeing." Many of the memorials I've seen are from people I had no idea were Buddhist or had a practice. I suppose we feel so bereft - and yet, in another way, not sorrowful - is because we hold Thay in our bodies, in our very awareness and interaction with the world. He taught so many how to breathe in and breathe out and breathe in again, and that each of these breaths linked us with all the world.

I was pleased to be reminded of this poem, and that it was posted on FaceBook by my pash Rebecca Solnit:

Call Me by My True Names

Do not say that I'll depart tomorrow

because even today I still arrive.

.

Look deeply: I arrive in every second

to be a bud on a spring branch,

to be a tiny bird, with wings still fragile,

learning to sing in my new nest,

to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,

to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,

in order to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and

death of all that are alive.

.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing on the surface of the river,

and I am the bird which, when spring comes, arrives in time

to eat the mayfly.

.

I am the frog swimming happily in the clear pond,

and I am also the grass-snake who, approaching in silence,

feeds itself on the frog.

.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,

my legs as thin as bamboo sticks,

and I am the arms merchant, selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

,

I am the twelve-year-old girl, refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean after being raped by a sea pirate,

and I am the pirate, my heart not yet capable of seeing and loving.

.

I am a member of the politburo, with plenty of power in my hands,

and I am the man who has to pay his "debt of blood" to, my people,

dying slowly in a forced labor camp.

.

My joy is like spring, so warm it makes flowers bloom in all walks of life.

My pain if like a river of tears, so full it fills the four oceans.

.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can hear all my cries and laughs at once,

so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

.

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up,

and so the door of my heart can be left open,

the door of compassion.

Snow watch

It even sparkles like snow ... but it's really just salt.

Downy

Meet the downy birch, the intrepid first responder to climate change who is spearheading the reforestation of the Arctic, with potentially calamitous consequences for the lifeways of the Sami and their reindeer - as well as for slowing already galloping global heating.

As the planet warms, the Arctic treeline is accelerating towards the pole, turning the white landscape to green. The trees used to creep forward a few centimetres every year; now they are leaping north at a rate of 40 to 50 metres a year. (source)

Teach teach teach

Whew, three syllabi done! It's more work than it used to be, now that all classes live on the LMS (learning management system), but that positions us well for any bumps we might encounter along the way. Like the fact that our first 2 weeks are going to be online again! Still, two 3-course semesters back to back are making for a tiring year. At least I get to choose what I teach, and each of these classes will be a rewarding experience, whether taught for the first time or a repeat.

Tree alphabet

I'm about three years late learning about this, but did you know that there is a New York City Tree Alphabet, a font you can download? NYC Parks Department artist-in-residence Katie Holten designed it with the silhouettes of "existing native and non-native trees, as well as species that are to be planted as a result of the changing climate." Hence 

Ash, Birch, Crabapple, Dawn redwood, Elm, Flowering dogwood, Ginkgo, Hawthorn, Ilex, Juniper, Kentucky coffeetree, Linden, Maple, Nyssa, Oak, Persimmon, Quaking aspen, Redbud, Sassafras, Tulip tree, Umbrella pine, Virginia pine, Willow, Xanthoxylum Americanum, Yellowwood, Zelkova 

You could potentially plant secret messages, discernible only to those with the key. In the meantime, can you decipher my message above?

AI religion

Attended an interesting panel discussion on the huge topic of "AI, Religion, & Humanity" tonight. The panelists were tasked with talking about religion in the broadest terms (including shibboleths like "Abrahamic," "Africana" and "Eastern" religions) but even this was a contribution to discussions that tend to be dominated by theist mindsets. Is intelligence something that only creatures with souls can have, or is that just the idea of some traditions? Can gods choose objects, including machines, as avatars? But the main question became "values," something humans presumably share and AI, unless we program it in, doesn't. An inventor of AI wearables for people dealing with various health challenges said she'd met AI pioneer Marvin Minsky and he'd quipped that our future would soon be in computers' hands, and "we'd be lucky if super AIs kept us around as household pets." 

What "values" would we try to bake into AI, if we could? Ethics in AI discussions focus on overcoming various kinds of human inequality (though the inventor also said some people she'd met abroad had told her they wondered why they were helping people whose afflictions they believed were the result of things they had done in their past lives), but a scholar who's written on the history of colonialism, race and religion predicted that the first big ethical issues we face will involve new inequalities - not humans vs. machines but humans vs. cybernetically enhanced humans like those the world's militaries are feverishly working toward: do we let them vote, have children? 

Perhaps it's having Ishiguro's Clara and the Sun on my mind but I started to wonder if some of the values we'd want AI to have shouldn't include things like the capacity for wonder, for love, for relations with the non-human world, for knowledge of God...

Carved

Have you seen pictures of the amazing sculptures the wind carved in frozen sand along the shore of Lake Michigan recently? As much as 15" high, they have been likened to chess pieces. They replicate in 

a matter of days forms we're more used to see as the accumulated work of thousands and millions of years of erosion. I think they're awesomely time scale-jangling but a Texan friend declared: "Unfair!"

Unpredictable

This sign was posted beneath the iPad-register at a bakery-café we went to yesterday with a friend. It's not original, I learned later, but no matter - it seeded our conversation in all sorts of ways. The obvious was the Great Resignation, and the compounding indignities of always demanding customer-facing service work. This led us to reflect on AI service workers, and how they might be shaping customers' expectations and behavior. Soon we were talking about Kazuo Ishiguro's Clara and the Sun, which I read over the break and the friend had started as an audiobook before stopping as it was breaking her heart. If you don't know it, it's narrated by a robot created to help children overcome loneliness as they approach adulthood, and the power of the book is as much in her story as in the way she describes the near sci-fi world she lives one. It's a world she only dimly understands or seeks to comprehend; she's programmed only to engage things that might help her in her caring task. Her dedication to that task of course puts unpredictable humans to shame...

Arboritecture

Who knew that trees have only a limited set of "architectures"? Francis Hallé, Roelof Oldeman and P. B. Tomlinson observed as many as 23 (later revised to 24), each a different combinations of six options: 1) To branch or not to branch? 2) If branching, only at bottom of stem or all along it? 3) Do you grow without rest or is there a dormant season? 4) Do all your branches grow upward or outward, or do some grow upward and outward? 5) Do you flower at branch tips or on smaller lateral branches? 6) Do your branches change back and forth between growing upward and outward?  

Hallé, Oldeman and Tomlinson, Tropical Trees and Forests: An architectural analysis (1978), cited in William Bryant Logan, “The Things Trees Know,” Old Growth: The best writing about trees from Orion magazine (Northampton, MA: Orion, 2021), 25-38, 26f; image source

Winter scenes

Took our car for a spin up the Hudson River today. On a bitterly cold day it was definitely winter. The snow that fell in NYC the day before we returned has melted, but it was holding on here. I've always wanted to grab a snap of the impressive icicle clusters along the roads so this was a good chance. 

The light snow's outlining (this isn't a very good shot) reminded me that forest trees are not just vertical but as important to the life of their community once they've fallen, criss-crossing the forest floor.

Patterns everywhere

Window condensation after a chilly night

Well placed

Some more satisfying discoveries at the Brooklyn Museum, which has again restructured its art of the Americas floor in fascinating and urgent ways, including reflecting on past collecting and showing practices and weaving works by living artists into the historical rooms For instance, African American, Cherokee and Shinnecock heritages inspire Richard Mayhew's gauzy landscape "Pastoral" (1962) provides an obscurely dreamy horizon in the dimly lit room of precolumbian sculptures. This early 18th century traveling desk, from Bolivia or

Peru, includes on its front (hard to photograph because of reflections on the glass case) images of enslaved African and an indigenous figure being trampled by a bull. Inside is Eden itself, complete with unicorns... but I noticed that this Adam got fruit from the Tree of the 

Knowledge of Good and Evil before Eve did! And this gorgeous 2016 work by Shinnecock Courtney N. Leonard, "Artifice (Breach Series)," one of the last things you see, references the tribe's restoration project to seed new oyster beds on the eastern end of Long Island. 

Pop

Went with my friend M to the Brooklyn Museum to see "Revelation," an exhibition exploring the significance of Andy Warhol's religious life. Who knew that he was raised a Byzantine Catholic (or even that there was such a thing!), and continued to attend masses daily throughout his life? We were transported by its opening hall, which felt like a chapel, and thought the show might offer some interesting queer Christian insights, but in the end were disappointed. There was little sense of the distinctiveness of Byzantine Catholicism, and the broader understanding of Catholicism was lifeless, too. Not being a Warhol aficionado, I'm not sure how much the lack of depth was part of his pop art practice. As we sat facing two life-size pink and black prints of Leonardo's "Last Supper" side by side (with another pair in yellow and black behind us),  we were stupefied but couldn't look away, it almost seemed like there was something significant going on - maybe even something connectable in a non-trivial way to the mystery of the Eucharist - but the show didn't help us name or understand it.

Spiking again

Just got my latest test result - negative - but trends are troubling.