just wanted to remind you to keep your World Almanacs, your Old Farmer's Almanacs, etc., well out of sight. especially if you have one of them in your car. along with, say, a road atlas. yes, virginia, this is a real headline: "FBI issues alert against almanac carriers." be afraid. be very afraid. and not necessarily of almanac carriers, either.
wouldn't Ben Franklin be surprised?
we've had a very busy six days of holiday visiting, eating, driving up and down the roads, walking in the woods, eating, looking at christmas decorations, eating, playing with children, cooking, and, oh yes, eating. now we are left in peace and quiet at an almost end-of-the-year tuesday afternoon, to pick up the pieces and get back into a resting groove. i still cannot save or edit an entry in the normal fashion on AOL journals, despite the joyful announcement on Christmas eve that all had been solved. so i am still using IE to get into my journals and write an entry. this is a pain in the neck. but i am going to spend some lengthy time later today, or perhaps tomorrow, reading other journals, reading the internet blogs i frequent, reading news, catching back up with the world. my brother in law is a newspaper addict, and he went cold turkey with nary a Post or Times, Sun or Enquirer brought into the house. i did nearly the same thing with the internet, except that we all felt a need to keep up with the events in Iran. it makes me wonder wonder wonder, why we feel compelled to inflict so much pain and injury on one another as human beings. nature, life, "Acts of God," can devastate us so utterly. we should all be here on earth acting only as agents of loving-kindness to our fellow creatures, of whatever skin color, nationality, language, religion. my soul aches for the people of Iran who have lost so much.
so, i'll be back to talk about my holidays, what i'm reading, thoughts on this, that and the other pretty soon. vacation continues for a while, i say with supreme gratitude.
This picture illustrates the preceding entry. this dancer is from Santa Clara Pueblo, i couldn't find any from Acoma. but it is so very similar that i went ahead and used it. i'm ending the previous post here, because i had Fear of Too Many Characters.
we stayed til all the public dances were finished, then skidded down the hill in the ice to our car. one of the Indians told us that after all the visitors left they would take the figure of the Infant Jesus thru the village to one of the larger houses for the night. the dancers would follow, and dance for most of the night. how we would have loved to experience that, but we knew it was not our place.
It was a special day, we felt like we were part of something stretching back through the ages, something connected to both Earth and Spirit. this Christmas we are staying close to home, going to my brother's house in Pennsylvania to visit with nieces and nephews and....wait for it....GREATNEPHEWS! on the weekend my sister and her family will come out from D.C. for some holiday time at the beach.
so, this is my wish to the AOL journal community for a time of peace, joy, family closeness and love. light candles, eat cookies, love the ones who share your journey. i'll be back online next week.
last year at this time we were in New Mexico, visiting friends recently moved to the mountains near Grants. on Christmas Day G and i left our friends, one having to go in to work and one desperately sick with a bad cold, to go to Acoma Pueblo for the dances. we were too late to catch a shuttle up the mesa, so we climbed up on foot in the bitter cold. the ancient adobe church of San Esteban del Rey was cleared of chairs, though Indians who had come from the village to watch had brought their own folding seats and were arrayed around the edges of what was now a beaten earth dancing floor. soon we heard bells, drums and chanting coming from deep in the crooked alleyways of the town, and the procession of dancers slowly wended its way towards the church plaza. the Christmas dances in the Pueblos of northern New Mexico are the Deer Dances, one of the many totem animal dances performed throughout the year. the dancers wear evergreen boughs attached to legs, arms, and coming down over their faces like a mask. they wear antlers, hold sticks in their hands which function as the deer's front legs. they wear bells and skins and all manner of things hanging from belts. the effect is of deer dancing through a forest of evergreens. it is magical and ancient. they dance into the church, then dance there in the center of the watchers, in front of the nativity scene up on the altar, in a stirring mixture of the pagan and the christian.
the magic of the Solstice is present in the totem of the deer (think 8 tiny reindeer, where did that come from? yes!), the figure of the shaman (the origins of santa claus), the evergreen branches (symbolic down thru the ages of life springing eternal even in the depths of winter), the bells again call up the figure of the shaman, the one who can communicate between the worlds of the human and the spirit. and all of this presented to the figure of the Baby Jesus in his manger-crib on the altar in the dark smoke-smelling church. the dancers then go back out to the plaza and dance around the fire that the tribal elders are tending through the day and night.
The Shortest Day
So, the shortest day came
and the year died.
And everywhere down the centuries
of the snow, white, world
came people, singing, dancing,
to drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees
They hung their homes with evergreens.
They burned beseeching fires all night long
to keep the year alive.
And when the new day sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all across the ages you can hear them
echoing behind us. Listen.
All the long echoes sing the same delight
This shortest day.
As promise wakens in the sleeping land
They carol, feast, give thanks, and dearly love their friends.
And hope for peace. And so do we here now this year.
-Susan Cooper
just in from the hot tub, feeling warm and relaxed, quiet and good. all of which are most definitely not how i usually feel. it's a beautiful cold night, clear skies full of stars, satellites, planes, etc. lots of twinkling lights up there, as well as everywhere in the neighborhood. whole herds of lighted reindeer in yards all around us, you could read a newspaper at midnight on most of the front lawns on the street. nice, but making the stars that much harder to see. light pollution, big time. that's the curmudgeon speaking, really i love holiday lights. but i love more to go to the beach and look at the skies without the surrounding clutter.
yesterday afternoon i mailed off four packages to family children, and there's still a couple to go. G and i had a delightful afternoon of shopping (yes, on the busiest shopping day of the year, so tonight's news informed me. it was the Big Story on every channel, imagine that. in this world today, THAT's the lead story, in baltimore, washington, philadelphia and salisbury.) for some of the kids, there's a few items that are proving impossible to find at this late moment. chinese buffet shored up our resolve, and we actually had a good time. it's so fine to be able to spend some time together just kicking back, to be on vacation together, light candles, buy cute little outfits for grandchildren, cook real meals, starwatch in the hot tub, stay up much too late reading novels. so, that's my story for now, the journals are very quiet today. everyone is.........shopping? decorating? baking? sleeping after working massive overtime? unable to save an entry? are they ever going to fix that? i'm using the coming in to my journal thru netscape process, which so far is working.
Chanukah begins tonight at sundown and continues for the next 7 days. because G is jewish, and we have a collection of beautiful menorahs, we celebrate this festival with panache! It is not a biblical holy day, and in the rabbinical tradition is quite a minor holy day. it has become a larger celebration in this country because of its proximity to Christmas, giving jewish children thier own occasion to light candles, receive gifts, sing special songs, enjoy special foods. The food! as the holiday commemorates a miracle involving oil, the food for the holiday also involves things cooked in oil, potato latkes and other rich greasy delights. here is a site that will introduce you to latkes and to some delightful stories about them.
since one of the names for Chanukkah is the Festival of Lights, since it occurs in deep midwinter, since it is so clearly an occasion of renewal and rebirth (they were rededicating the Temple in Jerusalem when they discovered there was only one small vial of oil for the temple lights), since the main ceremony consists of lighting an evergrowing number of candles against the darkness, it is my belief that this is but one more example of the ancient calling-back of the Sun, to light, warm and renew the earth, which we know as Solstice.
(this is an entry i wrote tuesday afternoon, posting was thwarted by the gremlins in the journal-machine.)
okay, i'm back, grades are turned in, merriment and jollity of a departmental nature have been enjoyed, we've all wished one another a restful holiday. so, let the resting begin! the weekend in DC was delightful, despite Sunday's vile weather. we enjoyed good food, adorable children, high drifts of political babble. this admin has brought my siblings and their SO's into the camp i occupied alone in the family for many years. now we communally raise our blood pressure when together, out-outraging one another in fine fettle. especially after several bottles of Jim's good wine. this is a tribal activity i miss here in redneck southern DE, so the opportunity was cherished.
By now everyone - journalists, pundits, bloggers, politicians - has had the chance to pontificate upon Saddam's capture, and to begin to pontificate upon its implications for the future. from what i have read so far i offer you tomdispatch, with Engelhardt's own commentary as well as good stuff from Stephen Shalom, Juan Cole, and James Carroll. i love Tom's opening sentence: "Sometimes doesn't it feel as if we here in the US were all sharing in some vast delusionary experience?" Carroll states my own feelings about the Saddam event quite succinctly: "That he was caught in a hole, obviously unrelated to the guerrilla resistance, is a turning point in nothing that matters now, not in restoring order to Iraq, not in rebuilding structures of international law, not in thwarting terrorism, not in stemming the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, not in reconciling the West and the world of Islam."
We'll be going to DC tomorrow for three days, for a family get-together. i can hardly believe this weekend has finally arrived, it's all that's kept me putting one foot in front of the other for the past month. as the family groupings include three darling children, we will have more than enough fun, for pretty sure.
here's an essay from one of my favorite newfound blogs, Orcinus. it's a very thoughtful piece on his morphing from political conservative to liberal. it was not an overnight nor a linear process, but a journey i think many of you might enjoy following him through. i'm reading his blog entries and archives and finding much food for thought. and then, do me a favor and go here to my imaginary friend TankGurl's journal and give your best shot at answering her very sincere cry for enlightenment. (perhaps also read her two entries previous to this one, it might help.) she doesn't want the administration answers, she wants real ones. do you have any?
i give you good weekend: make cookies, light candles, play with children.
It's finally here. semester's end! friday morning writing class met to hand in Final Projects. I also had them answer some questions with an eye to evaluating the class, textbook, general direction for the future. i hate the book, and to their credit, so do most of them. it is template writing, giving them model essays to use as patterns, with stultifyingly boring topics. i did a lot of other stuff, including having them keep dialogue journals, and they've given me ideas for yet more to do beyond the book. i've been nagging the department to change to a better text, but it won't happen in the coming semester. they've already given textbook orders to the bookstore. i don't know if i'll have the class again next term anyway. won't know what i'll have until after the holidays, once registration is mostly completed. it looks as if i will have a section of Beginning Spanish, though. i haven't taught anything but ESL for such a long time, this will be a challenge.
after class a gang of South Korean students took me out to lunch. they are currently my favorite group, and fast becoming our largest constituency of ESL students. i was seriously challenged when they first began showing up in classes. i speak no asian languages, and even their names seemed impossible to learn and remember. i try to refrain from translation as a method of teaching something, but when my back is to the wall i can always use it for Hispanic, Haitian and most European students. not so for Koreans. but they are, as a group, so willing and motivated, not to mention loving and generous, that we have bridged the communication gap in numerous ways. it's kind of devastating though, they come to DTCC and learn English, then leave for Baltimore or one of the Penna cities in search of better jobs for themselves and better educations for their kids. the chicken plants are bringing them over for a year of indentured servitude, after which they are free to leave and find real lives. they do get green cards out of the deal, so they grit their teeth and make it through. many have university degrees already, and are pretty horrified at the jobs they end up doing in chicken processing.
I only intended a lighthearted telling of the origins of what we think of as Christmas imagery: reindeer, candles, greenery, holly, chimneys, trees, gift-giving, etc. BUT! I find myself lost in the wonders of research about the first known Solstice celebrations. Hoping not to bore you, I nevertheless must share some of this with any reader venturing this way. Time and space limit me to several examples, and those I'll use are from two of my own heritages: Celtic and Native American. This leaves out huge expanses of time and place, but it leaves much for you to discover yourself.
I'm still on the subject of astronomy and the building of sites to map the heavens, observe and mark the important seasonal moments. Everyone knows of Stonehenge, though no one, not the archeologists, scientists, astronomers, mythologizers, really knows much about it. And it is only one of hundreds of neolithic and megalithic sites in Great Britain whose mystery ensnares modern observers. Two that seem to have been built as both tombs and celestial observatories are Maeshowe in the Orkney Islands, north of Scotland, and Newgrange in County Meath, Ireland. They are both spectacular sites. If you go to the Maeshowe link you can connect to a webcam that is stationed in the sun chamber from now through the actual days of the Solstice. Both of the websites enthralled me, with history, photos, links to yet more information. Even the photos convey the sense of awe and mystery that this turning of the year must have embodied.
(Continued in next entry)
These were hunters and farmers sophisticated enough to have constructed a building where the light entered precisely at sunrise on the Solstice and illuminated a special chamber for about fifteen minutes during the Solstice only.
In the Southwest of the North American continent the Anasazi People built a society at Chaco Canyon that continues to amaze researchers to this day. These ancestors of the Pueblo Indians built a celestial calendar there at Chaco that today we call the Sundagger. It does the same thing the lightbox at Newgrange does, provides an opening for the sun on the Winter Solstice to precisely mark the event on the cliff walls behind it (it's in the photo that accompanies these entries). The Hopi and Zuñi peoples also celebrated the Winter Solstice; many of their houses having plates fixed to their walls that were lit by the rays of the sun passing through a small window only on this one day of the year.
In the days between now and this year's solstice I will (really) talk about the traditions we still honor in midwinter and how they have descended from far older traditions, traditions linked to nature, the seasons, the cycles of the year.
i'm not going to say a lot about al gore's endorsement of dean, but it's the happening thing today. bruce has a very good two part article about it on Old Hickory and i advocate you go read his comments. i admire and respect al gore, and will take his endorsement into account when primary time comes around. my heart and soul remain with dennis k., he's been my candidate since long before he even announced. i've suggested him on every questionnaire the DNC or Nancy Pelosi send me, i've talked him up to my friends and relations. the sad truth remains true, he won't get the votes, the endorsements, the financial whammy, to become the actual presidential candidate. i wish this were the world where that could happen. it ain't.
instead of my commentary, i'll give you molly ivins', another good old texas gal, endorsement of...yes, howard dean. which may actually matter more to me than gore's. her heart is also with dennis. she's voted for losers all her political life (yep), and she feels this time it's more important to vote for a winner than to vote for the candidate of her dreams. and that's what it's going to come down to. picking a winner and seeing to it that he (i don't say "he or she" because i think moseley braun is already out of the realistic field of dreamers) gets total support and backing and just, goddamn it, wins.
i've been reading out on the web, news and commentary. and also IM'ing with a friend in DC who shares my political outrage and feelings of angry helplessness. she's just read a book called Sleeping With The Devil, which i thought might be about Laura Bush, but is about our friendship with the Saudis. i need to check into it some more, but it certainly got her mojo working. good to have an internet rant like that.
life is very busy right now, i'm working on a couple of things i want to post here, but i'm too scattered until finals and grades are over. anyway, i don't know why i want to work on political posts. the most comments i've yet gotten, i think, came from the silly little thing about johnny depp and his people mag cover! frivolity sells, i see.
yesterday we drove to annapolis to go shopping at Whole Foods, it was a bright cold day and a drive through the snowfields was a lovely thing. so was Whole Foods, such a better foodshopping experience than, say, Food Lion. we don't have a lot of local choices, for clean and healthy foods. during the summer we grow our own veggies and don't eat much meat, but now i'm making soups and stews, winter foods. as we drove home the moon rose over the chesapeake, huge and full and brilliant, in a sunset sky of mauve, pink and deep blue. ah, cosmology, how we have lost a sense of wonder. looking at that moon, that lovely sky, i thought....how could we not worship a heavenly object of such radiant powerful beauty?...not see the moon as goddess, divine entity, beseech her for favors, sing and dance on her feast days? it was all i could do to tear my eyes away and keep us from going off the bay bridge. so, fulfilling hunting and gathering and a divine experience. on a cold and windy sunday evening.
the winter solstice... the day of the "standing still sun," the turning point of the year in the northern hemisphere. from the summer solstice on through the autumnal equinox the sun has progressively been getting lower and lower in the sky until - on the day of the winter solstice, it reaches its lowest point. the shortest day. for as far back as we know anything about humans, in almost every culture in every inhabited corner of the earth, this day was noted, marked, celebrated. it was a day of holy awe, mixed (as awe almost always is) with fear. what if the sun does not return this year? what if we remain in darkness? for people whose lives depended on first hunting and gathering sustenance, then growing and raising it, the weather was of deep and primary importance. so what amount to solar observatories were built, and observations made; then ceremonies, feasting, antic noise to attract the sun's attention, coax it back, took place. the celebrations of light we know today are all descendants of this heritage. it is my intention to spend some time as we approach the winter holidays discussing solstice/yule/christmas traditions and their linkage.
the winter solstice takes place in late december, this year's will happen on December 21, around 9 pm CST. this snowy day, this frozen night, remind me to pay attention to the natural world around me, not to hide from it, to realize we are approaching a fundamental seasonal hemispheric event. i'll be posting entries about this for the next couple of weeks. or, you could go to this lovely site and spend the next two weeks browing through their wondrous lore.
(this is a previous entry, on which the photo bore an ad from the software co. i used to convert the image to a jpeg file. the incredible, the awesome, the goddess-incarnate, Muse herself, sent me instructions on how to crop an image. who knew? there is a tool lurking on the "File" dropdown menu that will let us do all kinds of things with image files. so, i removed the banner and now i am reentering my previous post.)
During the leadup to the war, the early days of the war, this piece made the lefty rounds of the internet. you may have encountered it then. in light of the continuing carnage in the middle east, i think it is time to read it again. it's frightening how something written 100 years ago, during a war most Americans have never heard of (the Philippine-American War, 1899-1902), can be so uncannily accurate about contemporary attitudes. I ran into this recently at Infinite Jest, and was hit in the solar plexus by it all over again.
it's bitterly cold, it might snow soonish, the moon is a cold bright eye. time to get some firewood around this place. put the down comforters on the beds. tonight i made a big pot of posole, just had some with a glass of red wine. warms the innards right up. we begin the descent into the darkness. heading towards solstice, the true midwinter celebration. the happy chica is beginning a lengthy series on the historical aspects of christmas. i'm not sure what this means, but i do hope it will include lots of solstice lore, there is so much wonderful stuff there.
as for me, i won't be doing too much here, descending into the pit of finals and end of term grades also. for a couple of weeks that will keep me pretty busy. ask me how much i look forward to the winter break. there are no words. it's a wordless yearning. but a deep one.
something to look forward to finding, maybe under the tree, during that break: a new book by John le Carré, Absolute Friends. if you know le Carré, you know this is an uptotheminute political novel, and not a happy one. read this interview with him in the british paper, The Independent, and see if it doesn't sound like just the antidote for all that cozy holiday cheer.
i've just come from Salon.com and Andrew O'Hehir's delightful interview with Studs Terkel. Terkel, at 91, has written yet another book to give us all hope. literally, hope. the title is Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Troubled Times. O'Hehir says:
Ostensibly, "Hope Dies Last" is a book about dedicated
political activists, the "prophetic minority" who Terkel
says are capable of imbuing their society with hope and
moving it, ever so slowly and gradually, in the direction
of justice and decency. It also feels like a summing-up,
a tour of Terkel's great preoccupations: the labor movement,
race, economic injustice, the generations who emerged
from the great turmoils of the '40s and the '60s. It's full
of inspirational tales - Terkel is never ashamed of his agenda,
and he's trying to convince his readers that social change is
still possible - but it is never saccharine.
Terkel himself says "It's my tribute to what I call the 'prophetic minority,' those who've been activists since the Year One." He also throws in a funny comment about his writing style: "I work very improvisationally, in a jazz kind of way." You gotta love a guy who can say that.
read the interview, let's find the book. Hope is the thing with feathers (or so says Emily Dickinson) that's just about flown out of my soul lately. anything that offers help in restoring its nest sounds good to me.
so, i just needed some technical help from AOL, and after i finally got connected to the right place i encountered a woman who spoke extremely accented english. i had to have her repeat everything at least twice, sometimes three or four times. we got the problem solved, she was quite helpful in her own inscrutable fashion, and when we were through with the technical part of the phone call i asked her where she was from (india) and where she was at that moment. also india. so. my internet service provider is part of the great corporate program of "outsourcing" jobs to the third world, where they can pay dog's wages to their workers and leave american workers jobless, in order to plump up the corporate bottom line. this is something i rage about regularly. i obtained the corporate address and am going to write a letter of complaint, but the only vote that really counts is my monthly payment to AOL. i've had AOL as my ISP since i bought my first computer five years ago (i still have my first computer, it's my only computer so far) and have routinely threatened to leave them for another service. this may be the time i actually do it. however, first i'll have to find out if every other ISP's phone number connects to someplace in india or pakistan or the philippines. it's great to give jobs to people in these countries, god knows they need them. it's not great to take these jobs away from american workers, and it's not great that a corporation can pay workers in third world countries a pittance.
goddamn it. now i'm in a serious funk. would you like the AOL Corporate Office address?
22000 AOL Way, Dulles, VA 20166
a serious barrage of mail about this might make them pay some attention.
Garrison Keillor hosts a delightful site called The Writer's Almanac. he puts a poem up there every day. they are almost always wonderful things. this one hit me right in the soul.
Call and Answer, by Robert Bly
Tell me why it is we don't lift our voices these days?
And cry over what is happening. Have you noticed?
The plans are made for Iraq and the ice cap is melting?
I say to myself: "Go on, cry. What's the sense
of being an adult and having no voice? Cry out!
See who will answer! This is Call and Answer!"
We will have to call especially loud to reach
Our angels, who are hard of hearing; they are hiding
In the jugs of silence filled during our wars.
Have we agreed to so many wars that we can't
Escape from silence? If we don't lift our voices, we allow
Others (who are ourselves) to rob the house.
How come we've listened to the great criers - Neruda,
Akhmatova, Thoreau, Frederick Douglas - and now
We're silent as sparrows in the little bushes?
Some masters say our life lasts only seven days.
Where are we in the week? Is it Thursday yet?
Hurry, cry now! Soon Sunday night will come.
no, not me. i'm staying home. and grandmother G has gone to Denver, from whence she called this morning surrounded by giggling grandchildren. the oldest one (the girlchild in the above photo) was born, seven years ago, on thanksgiving. it makes it a doubly special day for the family.
i'm just popping in here to say that i finally have put up the somewhat impressionistic piece i did on American Woman on my book journal, The Biblio Philes. it's long, or - because of the space problem - because i had to do it in three parts, it SEEMS long. it was a lot longer. this space constraint is a pain in the ass, but it does make you reconsider those extra words. anyway, check it out if you feel like it. it's probably largely a chick novel, but because it is a political novel some of you political dudes might also find some interest.
be thankful, be happy, be full. we're lucky to have what we have, which is still, after all, a lot. renew your strength, la lucha continua..
oh the bliss, the ease, the sweet abandon....four whole days of not-teaching. four days of not having to explain anything to anybody, answer any questions, and since i gave no tests this week, four days of not even having to grade papers. i'll be entirely alone this thanksgiving, G has gone to Denver to visit the kids and grandkids. don't feel sorry for me, i'm certainly not feeling sorry for myself. i have a sister and a brother with families within easy reach, also friends who have extended invitations. this is my choice. my vocal chords are shot, i have bronchitis, the silence of the cloister is what i'm aiming for these four days. speaking only to the creatures, and only when absolutely necessary, and if i'm positive they won't answer me. a darling turkey breast is in the oven even as i type, i stopped at Whole Foods after taking G to BWI and hedonistically bought whatever i saw that looked delicious. also wine. so, i'll eat and sleep and read novels, maybe go to a movie or two, take the dog for walks. and be very very thankful.
speaking of thankful, mark morford's column today is titled Be Thankful You're Not Dubya, with an excellent list of juicy reasons to give thanks. yeah, he's crazy and it's over the top, but it's full of lovely truth worth considering.
you might also want to check this list of the 10 Top Myths About Thanksgiving, in order to be historically accurate and have some potentially irritating dinnertable conversation for the big meal. many people will not believe these items, and will hate you for destroying what they've been told all their lives. it will make dinner much more fun.
a later p.s.: i just visited Progressive Musings and found he'd already put up the list of 10 Thanksgiving myths! it's great minds in the same groove, obviously.
i'm working on a "review" of the novel i've mentioned here before, American Woman, and will be putting it up on The Biblio Philes pretty soon. other than that, i'm trying to put one foot in front of the other until weds p.m., when the all-too-tiny thanksgiving break will start. i try to sound newsy and cute and interesting and funny (sometimes) here, but the truth is i am none of those things. in real life, i'm an exhausted depressive who suffers from panic attacks and insomnia and fibromyalgia. when my SO reads this journal she is always amazed at how it doesn't sound anything like the tormented wreck of a person she knows. so, there we are. hello, it's me, the tormented wreck. on a monday afternoon in november.
the weekend was pretty good. the three movies were terrific, every one of them. and we did see all three: "Winged Migration" "Whale Rider" and "Bend it Like Beckham." three very different movies, having only "artiness" in common. and the fact that none of them came to the big screen in our area. so it's good that there's blockbuster. Winged Migration was stupyfyingly beautiful, spiritually overwhelming. one of my passions in life is birding. G and i have spent our best hours traipsing through woods, across beaches, up hillsides, all over this country, with binoculars and bird books. we have a dear friend in MA who is our bird mentor and guide, who got us started on this path. i could happily do nothing but bird, and once we quit working, that's our plan.
anyway, after we saw this film on saturday night, we got up early on sunday morning and went up to Bombay Hook, a wildlife sanctuary on the Delaware River. (where you can look across to New Jersey and see the nuclear power plant puffing steam into the air. appropriate symbolism for the age in which we live. a wildlife sanctuary in the shadow of a nuclear reactor.) we spent some magical hours there with the geese, ducks, herons, hawks...even a very close bald eagle sighting, and what may have been a juvenile bald eagle. then to dover for an enormous amount of very good mexican food, and home to grade papers.
in case you're at a loss for what to give that person who has everything this year, here's a few suggestions culled from mark morford's morning fix column in the sfgate.com. (a good site for all kinds of things, mostly making me wish i lived in san francisco.) but my question is: how does he find these things in the first place?
so, first and foremost, to play barbie to your gwbushinflightgear action figure's ken, we have: the ann coulter talking action figure. talking, mind you. of course she's talking. you can see a sampling of what she says before you order. (don't forget extra batteries!)
any expectant parents on your list? or new parents? well, here's the very thing to help them get that little one off to the best possible start. (or, as they say in the copy: think of the impact this could have on a young family's life!) chew on that, junior.
this next gift is for your jet-setting friends or relatives who'll be taking off for The Islands during the holidays, it'll be way too cold to enjoy these in chicago or philadelphia or even dallas. but those happy beachbums will thank you as they undertake their "beach evangelism and mission trips." how beautiful are the feet of those who bring the good news!
the holiday shopping season officially opens a week from today. my students who are new to this country are actually all excited about experiencing their first "black friday." they're planning to go to malls. you now have a headstart on shopping, from the privacy of your own homes.
p.s. in another dickensian coincidence, at the happy chica's aol blog she too has a gift suggestion for you.
........but does it seem like too much of a coincidence to be written by anyone but charles dickens? the feds swarming into neverland ranch, michael jackson racing out of las vegas in a white bronco, oh wait, no, that was another movie, i mean...michael jackson whisking in and out of arraignment on his private plane, the Strange One in cuffs, primetime specials rushed into production, etc etc etc ad nauseum. i don't know about where YOU live, but on my eleven o'clock news last night that's just about all the news from beyond about a 100 mile radius we were given to occupy our little minds.
not a glimpse of 100,000 protestors in the London streets "toppling" a huge simulacrum of bush (just deja vu all over again, huh?), not a peek at police in Miami firing rubber bullets into the crowd of FTAA protestors. not even the horrors in istanbul (my turkish students are so upset) showed up. so, i went from local Delmarva channels to Phila and B'more to see what they had to offer....and, it was all michael, all the time, there too!
ultracynical? coincidence? you be the judge.
without time to compose anything very thought-out, i'm just going to put together a few bits and pieces i've run across recently and found interesting. from my D.C. sister: this NRABlacklist is worth a visit, to view some of those the NRA has placed on its anti-gun blacklist. here you can also sign a petition for more, and more stringent, gun-control legislation, thereby putting yourself on the blacklist. then you can click a link to the actual NRA site where you can see the entire list of organizations, corporations and individuals who are for greater control of guns in this country. it's a list i'm proud to join.
lots of chat everywhere on the internet about the ruling from the MA supreme court. we all know it's only the beginning of the discussion, the struggle, the backlash. we know the "christian right" plans to make it the social issue of the '04 campaign. in the spirit of "know your enemy" i give you this post from The Right Christians (not what you might think, motto is "it's time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christians," give it a look). the gist is that those we've known as the leaders of the religious right have faded from the frontlines (pat robertson, ken connor, ralph reed, jerry falwell) of power and glory. here we get profiles of four new names and faces in the current generation of the christian right, those who will be playing prominent roles in the coming battles. you'll most likely want to meet these folks.
and, if it's cold and windy where you are....we had the mother of all storms here last night...you might like to try this wonderful-sounding recipe from the foodblog, chicken squash soup (i can't get the actual entry to link right, but look for it, or any damn recipe you want, on the list of entries on left sidebar). with apologies to the vegetarians and vegans among us, you need a chicken carcass to do this right.
perhaps everyone knows about this. or perhaps not. i haven't come across any other posts on the subject. it's a chance to do more than kvetch, either aloud or in writing, about the chance to put in Anyone But Bush in 04. moveon.org is holding a huge fundraiser for their nationwide dump bush ad and PR campaign online, and George Soros will put in .50 for every $1 we give. don't know moveon.org? hard to believe, but go check them out. don't know George Soros? my sister thinks he's god or, at any rate, a god. he is one of the world's richest men, and he's committed to ending an administration that's "leading the U.S. and the world toward a vicious circle of escalating violence." he's been waking up in the wee hours shaking "like an alarm clock" with his thoughts and fears about this administration. he is, of course, writing a book, and is reeling out millions of dollars in what he calls "The central focus of my life...a matter of life and death." hearing in the sound and fury of this administration and its policies echoes of his childhood in occupied Hungary, he'd be willing to sacrifice his entire fortune if someone could guarantee him doing so would result in bush losing the election.
you can read more about Soros in this washington post article, just don't let his toupee frighten you too badly. good guy, bad rug. and after you go here and find out more about Soros, the Open Society Institute, and the Soros Foundations, you won't care at all about his toupee. this is an impressive guy, doing impressive and much-needed work with his money.
we rant and we rave, but here's a chance to do something concrete about effecting change. and a billionaire will help us.
or maybe i have a strange idea of fun. anyway, this seems to have been all over the place in the past week, but i just caught up with it today. through a twisted journey beginning with sapphosbreathing, through ampersand at Alas A Blog, i arrived at the original essay called (really) "The Pussification of the Western Male." although at first read it might almost seem to be a joke, a satirical rif on neanderthal thinking, it isn't. it's a warped misogynistic destroyed-frontal-lobe raving, or perhaps more accurately "whining," piece on the supposed total feminization/mother-domination of the Manly Man. who is, therefore, rapidly becoming the girly-man.
i have several regular journal buddies here on AOL who seem to be pretty fine exemplars of the male gender. what do you think of kim dutoit and his ruminations? i have a hard time taking seriously a man who can include this quote (he says he's quoting john belushi......???) in his essay: "Did we quit when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"
the guy seems very scared. scared of women being in any way considered the equal of men, or having any power or influence in both private and public life; scared of losing the false vision of entitlement most men let go of long ago. it's not about hunting and big dogs and smoking cigars, it's about a really really deep sense of insecurity.
but, what do the rest of you think? i warn you, it's a nasty piece of work.
and the sky is grey. what a wild and crazy wind is whirling those brown leaves everywhere. as i went from one campus building to my next class in another this morning, i had to wade through piles of leaves in the corridor before i got to the door. vacuuming won't take care of this! they'll have to RAKE the carpets. it sounds like freight trains constantly roaring by right now, outside this little room which has windows on two sides. i keep expecting a locomotive to come charging through.
but what i've been thinking about is Ramadan, and those who observe it. some of our muslim students are, some are not. i don't really notice much difference in their class performance, though most of my students of all nationalities report not eating breakfast on a regular basis, so maybe it doesn't make a difference until later in the day. thinking about food, reading the riverbendblog, where she has started a new blog with iraqi recipes for Ramadan. for myself i've gotta bet observing Ramadan would make me think about food all the time. kind of the way a serious diet does. although one usually does not diet for religious reasons. anyway, there's riverbend, living in the chaos and madness that is baghdad, writing about the chaos and madness that is her country in one blog, then moving over to Is Something Burning? and giving us a delicious lentil soup recipe. life is a mysterious thing, isn't it?
been listening to bob dylan all late afternoon and early evening, a trip thru time, nostalgia for nostalgia's sake. although i have to say, "Times Have Changed," the most recent song in the compendium is one of the best. the old boy still has it, in his own strange incomprehensible way.
but that's not what i meant to say. i meant to say i have done it, yes. started another journal. as i said. one for meandering bad prose about matters literary, endless reams of it perhaps. i've already made two entries over there today. and yet i find myself wanting to talk about the book i'm reading right now, in this journal. (nostalgia again.) the book is American Woman, by Susan Choi. a novel about young leftist radicals in the militant underground of the 70's. can you say symbionese liberation army? so, listening to bob dylan, reading about the fringe left radicals of my youth. and wondering, where are the radical youth of today? where in hell are they? are they somewhere? i am a tribal elder now, but i have more rage, wrath, brainfrothing anger, than i had years ago as a protestor for civil rights, against the VN war, against the nixonion tricks and games. but what's happening now makes those years seem like the good old days. there were many young people (but as many older ones and downright elderly too) in the antiwar protests i attended last spring in D.C., but the universities aren't exploding with actions and protests, student protest groups don't seem to be forming. i'm not championing the SLA, don't get me wrong. but i'd sure like to see some evidence the young are paying serious attention to current events. perhaps like the arrival of coffins from iraq, or any sort of protest in the area of a bush photo-op, student protest is happening on a regular accelerating basis and getting no media coverage or being shunted into a "free speech area."
or, am i completely out of the youth loop? entirely possible. quite likely, in fact. send me websites, blogs, whitehot radical writing, send me hope. if you're plugged into anything of the sort. if it's happening i want to know about it.
the moon now so bright and unshadowed, a spotlight rising over the chimney last night, shining down on us in the hottub. so very cold, down into the low 20's this early morning. i don't yet know how the plants fared in the greenhouse. i covered the things still on the patio and porch and they survived.
i can't write about things political right now, it's too nonfiction for my exhausted heart and mind. other aol journallers are covering the waterfront, fdtate, bruce miller, the happy chica. i'm reading them, i'm reading many other news sites and weblogs dealing with the myriad issues and questions spiraling on ad infinitum. right now i have little or nothing to add to the chorus. i'm lost in a strange black space and i need poetry, mystery, magic. not candidates' debate (everything's a song lyric, isn't it? eventually?), not war issues (for a while, only a little while), jessica lynch, pollsters, opinions. i need wine, sleep, a good novel. and i think i've found one, American Woman, by Susan Choi. inspired by Amused's second journalsite, ex libris, i am thinking of starting a second journal also. a book journal, or at any rate, a journal where i can put my poetry and writing sites and blogs, literature and language, where i can talk and think about what i am reading, sometimes what i am writing. a name for it has even floated into my mind. so far it's only an idea. but i think it's what i want to do. news at eleven. or, as it happens.
RUN outside right this minute and watch the moon disappearing into the earth's shadow. i've just come in and will be going back out. sky and telescope mag has a good article on it if you want to find out more, or if you want to participate in timing some of the movement of the umbra, or perhaps it's the penumbra,for reasons i don't quite understand. my science is weak, but my mystical amazement is quite strong. and i love those words, don't you? "umbra," "penumbra." dark, latinate, secretive words.
ok, going back outside now. and it's deliciously cold too.
read previous two entries first.
so we made it through. still unmarried. still not interested in getting married, still kind of enjoying our outlaw status as a lesbian couple. living outside the law, as it were. i guess that's what outlaw means, huh?
and today more than ever aware of all human fragility. of the need not to wait for a time "down the road" to make things right, to repair fissures we have created in the human fabric by our errors in judgment. there is a blog out there in the blogoverse called "nobody knows anything." and more and more as life goes on i see that this is the only true statement. nobody really knows anything. we do the best we can. we make mistakes. we go on.
bad prose! endless reams of bad prose! this has been a more confessional day than i am likely to have again soon. although i will continue to muse upon this whole subject. it seems to have captured the imaginations of all realms of society: same sex unions, gay marriage - good? bad? necessary? evil? a necessary evil? our right as citizens? an intolerable excess? a chink in the armor of all decent persons? a simple realization of equality????????
or, perhaps, as it often seems to me: a red herring to distract us from so many other enormous issues facing us as a society, a nation, a world, a planet? although i am a member of this minority, i see the saving of the planet from the hideous environmental crimes being visited upon it by this administration and its corporate allies as a far more important issue. if there is not water, soil, air to support life for future generations it won't matter a whit if they are married or not. will it?
read previous entry first.....
since so many marriages, 50% i think it is, end in divorce, clearly the promises of "forever" have little or no meaning. the struggles and strains of a committed relationship are the same, whatever the external trappings, rules, regulations. the divorce rate shows that the supposed "supports" of society for "marriage" don't really help all that much.
the reason i can pick a mood (sad) from the pathetic roster of moods above is that something happened today which has made me reflect on an event in this lengthy relationship. the event which almost ended us five years ago. this is more personal information than a public journal should contain, but my mind is entirely overwhelmed by this. during a time of extreme stress on both G and myself, i had an affair with another woman who had been our friend. a really stupid thing, a thing i regret deeply. everyone got badly hurt, and everyone behaved badly at some point. the woman (we'll call her M) involved ended up with a good friend of mine and moved across the country; G and i endured several years of hell working thru the pain of the affair plus the issues underlying my foolish decision. for four years the two resulting couples have had no contact. bitterness for some, bewilderment and confusion for others. feelings never resolved.
this morning a friend called to tell me M died last night, suddenly and unexpectedly, although she'd been in the hospital for several weeks. she was only 49. a painful situation ends painfully. bad behavior will never be redeemed. i am in shock, in pain, in disarray. should i call her partner, my former good friend lost to me for years now because of bitter feelings? should i let the dead past bury its dead? i need time to let this sink in. sad, indeed.
if G and i had been "married," chances are we would have gotten a "divorce" over the whole thing. as it was, we had to marshall all possible resources of heart and character to talk, fight, cry, yell, throw things, hold each other, spend time apart, talk to those who loved us both, threaten suicide, slam doors, etc.
June 3, 2004
i'm back with a little addendum to this entry now. because krobbie asked in her most recent entry a question from her Book of Why - the question is what is the biggest (worst?) mistake you've ever made in your life. the above story is mine, hands down. for so many reasons. all the people i hurt when i had the affair, my partner, my longtime friend (who turns out to have been involved with M during the time she and i were having the affair), M herself, and in some terrible way i haven't yet recovered from - myself. there's a poem in the play Colored Girls where the woman talks to a lover who has "run off wit all her stuff" and she wants it BACK. her "stuff" is not material goods, her "stuff" is her ego, her self esteem, her sense of worth and dignity and goodness, her very self itself. these are the things i lost in that episode of my life. and have not really entirely recovered. feel i may never recover entirely. i never gave myself away in that total a fashion, and have never been injured that badly. because M died, there is so much that can never be resolved in any way.
i did have a meeting, in March, with L, the friend who ended up in an actual realtionship with M. it was short and strange and sad. we have had to contact since then, but i think we should - and i'm trying to decide how to do it.
i know people have affairs, relationships, breakups, etc all the time, every day, millions of people. this was the mistake that felt like a dirty bomb that blew up the person i thought i was, that G thought i was, that i would like to be again. and never will be. G and i are in an okay place, most of the time, we have such a deep friendship that we cannot imagine life w/o one another. there's bomb crater in there, though, no matter how hard we try to make it go away.
the happy chica has an entry today (11/6/03) detailing the prez candidates' positions on gay marriage. or whatever we're supposed to call it. some few of the candidates are okay with, apparently, everything. some support civil unions, or partnership benefits, but don't support gay marriage. one in particular thinks all homosexual people should be packed into missile tubes and dropped in the middle of the night over "axis of evil" countries.
what i want to know is this: what, exactly, are we talking about here? what is the difference between civil unions, and partnership benefits, and marriages? why should candidates for government office have any position whatsoever on marriage, if by marriage we mean religious ceremonies in sectarian houses of worship performed by religious clergy of whatever stripe? and if that's not what we're talking about, what are we discussing? as a lesbian who has been in a relationship for 22 years, i'd love to be able to have access to the civil/legal benefits (tax, health insurance, medical visitation/permissions, survivorship, etc.) of what is generally known as "marriage." these, i take it, are the "partnership benefits" that "civil unions" would grant?
i have no desire at all, however, to be "married." i really don't see why anyone has, straight, gay, or otherwise. married by the church or by the state...all i can say is: not me. this seems to be an unpopular position in the GLBT community right now. marriage has always appeared to me as an antique institution from the days when women were considered property whose ownership passed from one man to another, as symbolized in the changing of patronymic to husband's last name, at least in cultures of anglo-saxon descent. women no longer bring dowries of land, money, cattle to their marriages, but all the symbolism of the marriage ceremony still shouts "property transfer."
a happy birthday to marcia ellen, aka the happy chica. i envy her this wondrous birthday. to the rest of us, blessed samhain. hallowe'en has always been my favorite holiday. as a child i could hardly hold still in school all day long, waiting for time to rush home, carve pumpkins, and disguise myself in some dark way. witches were my favorite, with pirates a close second. i grew up in a time when trick or treating (in the neighborhood) by ourselves without parents lurking at the edge of the porch was still a safe possiblity. skulking thru the dark in the company of other mysterious beings was the biggest thrill of the year, better than christmas or birthday.
aol has a puffy piece on the welcome page, with the "news" that witches are still among us. this comes as no surprise to many of us, especially women who came of age during the feminist days of the 70's, when wicca was the feminist religion of choice. you might be surprised at the witches among us. NPR fans may not know that margot adler is a witch, and an author of some good books on the subject. wicca is an ancient earth religion that has gone thru many transformations, whose adherents have suffered greatly at the hands of established religions and governments. this is a site to comb for history, contemporary practice, materials, etc. beliefnet, that general store of religion, has a section on pagan/earth religions with information, chats, columnists - one of whom is perhaps my favorite witch, starhawk. she has linked her devotion to the earth with serious political activism, and her websites will take you off in many directions if you have the time. if i could belong to a "religion" this would probably be my choice. i've actually tried joining wiccan groups a couple of times, but i get the giggles in inappropriate places, i just can't be serious about some of the silly stuff....and, it starts smacking of Organized Religion. so, i howl at the moon in my own way, i honor the earth and all Being (except, maybe, the current administration and fred phelps), i try to walk lightly.
any of you old enough to know who camille paglia is might enjoy a trek over to salon.com to read today's interview with her. she rehashes many of her old subjects: bush, madonna, rush, pop culture, and talks about the current offering of democratic candidates in a refreshingly critical fashion. most of all though, i enjoyed her thoughts on blogs. a sample:
"Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you're condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose!" ....and there's more!!!! she has inspired me to change the description of this journal.
check 'er out, it's fun. i used to really hate her. but today i was mainly amused. i'd love to take a class with her. philadelphia's not all that far away......hmmmmmm.
it was Progressive Musings latest entry that sent me on this search. and a nasty one it was. fd was musing on fred phelps' most recent assault on human decency, his unspeakably presumptuous plan to put an antimemorial into a public park in casper, wy, to "celebrate matthew shepard's entry into hell." (a note to la happy chica: phelps was carrying on his campaign of homophobic hatred long before this homophobic administration, but i agree the current atmosphere does nothing to check this violent madness) from his stronghold in topeka, ks, phelps and his followers routinely sally forth to picket and demonstrate at any major gay/lesbian event: conferences, conventions, yea, even funerals. the motto of this man of the cloth is "god hates fags." yes, that's actually the name of his church website. you can visit this site and see for yourself a model of the obscene "antimemorial" they have in the works. now in case you just got in from a planet in some far distant galaxy, you can go here to read about matthew shepard and a laundry list of other hate crimes, or here for more of the same.
then, feeling sullied by being a resident of this planet perhaps, you could go visit the Freedom from Religion Foundation. i don't think of myself as an atheist, but i find the Foundation's term "freethinker" a useful one. their outline of the history of first amendment freedoms, the founding fathers, the constitution, separation of church and state, is concise and dispassionate. i may print it out to use as a reference.
some thoughts on the california fires. horrifying and apocalyptic as they are, even they are not without political connection. tom engelhardt, of tomdispatch.com, invited mike davis to do a guest piece which he titled "The Perfect Fire." some quotes from this piece:
"This is a specter against which grand inquisitors and wars against terrorism are powerless to protect us. ... many fire scientists dismiss 'ignition' - whether natural, accidental, or deliberate - as a relatively trivial factor in their equations. They study wildfire as an inevitable result of the accumulation of fuel mass. Given fuel, 'fire happens.'
The best preventive measure, of course, is to return to the native-Californian practice of regular, small-scale burning........but the suburbanization of the fire terrain makes it almost impossible to implement it on any adequate scale.......as a result, huge plantations of old, highly flammable brush accumulate along the peripheries...of new, sprawled-out suburbs. Since the devastating 1993 fires, tens of thousands of new homes have pushed their way into the furthest recesses of So Cal's coastal and inland fire-belts. Each new homeowner, moreover, expects heroic levels of protection from underfunded county and state fire agencies.
Fire, as a result, is politically ironic. The voices of the recall roaring to the skies against the oppression of an out-of-control public sector.......now scream for fire engines, and 'big government' is the only thing standing between their $3 million homes and the ash pile." it's an interesting perspective on issues facing CA's new governer. note that the area of the fires largely follows the geographical boundaries of the recall vote. the most interesting bit is the factoid that "fire insurance in California is 'cross-subsidized' by all homeowners."
those who build their homes, $3 million ones or shanties, in these locations are well aware of the annual possibilities for wildfires. this one may be "the fire of the century," but it won't be the only one. if these residents aren't willing to pay higher insurance premiums or higher property taxes to protect the dream homes they put directly in nature's path, what in the world are they thinking?
yesterday i picked up joan didion's new book, Where I Was From, at the library. i requested it after reading the review/interview with didion by Andrew O'Hehir on salon.com last week. a quote from that article seems to me directly related to the matters brought up by mike davis in my first entry on this subject. didion is a native californian, her family has been there for generations, she grew up steeped in the mythology of the state. all of which is the subject matter of the book. the quote that struck me, relating to current political events and natural disasters, is the following:
"She sees a state whose history was poisoned at the root by a heritage of carelessness and hucksterism, whose residents have always been willing to mortgage the future for a short term payout, and whose myth of freedom and independence has always been funded, at mind-blowing, almost unimaginable expense, by the same federal government many of its citizens profess to hate."
I haven't started the book itself yet, but didion is one of my favorite writers. she is one of the few nonfiction writers whom i read regularly and avidly, so i look forward to it.
it's still grey and damp, also cold. feeling like the approach of winter. this time change always puts me a little out of things for a week or two. dark so early, the urge to hibernate. and no hibernation possible. coming home this afternoon i noticed how the remnants of color in the yard stand out against the grey sky. the crysanthemums: deep red, bronze, gold, deep pink, still vibrantly blooming; asters and some salvias still going; even the geraniums, different pinks, deep reds, still with color; and the crape myrtles, what leaves were left after Isabel, are bright torches of all the autumnal hues. i need to clean out so much that is finished, get started mulching up leaves, get things into the greenhouse. we've had one frost already, the really tender things turned black after that. soon frosty nights will be the norm.
have spent some time here today journeying through blogs, always discovering new ones. i need to do some blogroll work, group some things together under one link again, when i can find the time. i could have an infinite blogroll, the constant discovery of new sites is my favorite part of this activity. having many interests is both a joy and a drawback, looking at political analysts and commentors, writers and poets, naturalists and gardeners, spirtual thinkers, and all those entirely sui generis bloggers takes me spinning through universe after universe.
so, now i must get ready to race off to my evening class. no deep thoughts, no outrage, no insight. kind of low key, grey, muted....a late october feeling.
watch Whoopi tonight, she's a good laugh. with a political underbite that i love. i'll tape it to watch when i get home.
and here we have them combined into one rainy monday. it was a very monday kind of morning at school, we all seemed to have brainlock, me and the students. so now i'm safely at home where it doesn't matter. sad to have the weekend over, it was so perfect. with our chincoteague trip canceled because of our friends' family health problems, we were contemplating going into DC for the protest rally and march. exhaustion won out, however, and we stayed here on delmarva: took walks, did a little birding, ate barbeque, read novels. a mini-vacation. some guilt occasioned by not going in for the demo, but it took me so long to recover from the one last march, i just couldn't risk that in the middle of the semester. we sent our vibrations across the chesapeake to the demonstration.
something that i'm having trouble understanding right now is the big project for journal excellence awards, complete with nominations, categories, votes, and probably even campaigning. seems like lots of folks are gearing into this. why? aren't journals something we do for ourselves? clearly some people are always better at things than others, but...so what? seems to me that the listing on journals of others we like is a good way to disseminate good writing, or graphics, or humor, or political commentary (a category not even listed) or whatever. i'm not understanding the impetus behind this vote. how many aol journals are there? so far i've found 7 of them i care to read with any regularity. compared with the large number of blogs outside aol that i could spend day and night visiting and reading. it's an amazing blogistan out there, the new face of journalism. it's the linking to the larger world that i find worthwhile. but i'm open to hearing other opinions.
i would have put this in the previous post, but for the character limit. oh hated limit. soon to be gone, as i understand it. not soon enuf for me. anyway, to lighten things up a bit here, though i think mark is totally serious - after his fashion - i give you this link to mark morford's sfgate column. it certainly made me feel much better.
so much so that i'm out of here now. off to enjoy the rest of this lovely weekend with my honey, in what's left of planetary beauty and delight. may you do the same. namaste.
holy shit, too freaky. everywhere i go folks are talking about this connection between the rightwing religous element and government. i haven't checked in on the daily KOS lately, so just now i did. and guess what? yep. a great thread going on re this very subject. go browse around in this thread. the RR's have linked to the discussion, so it gets interesting. a later P.S.: here's the link to the post that started the whole thing. and an interesting list of links, which i am investigating.
i linked to a group of sites on religion and spirituality because of all this. clearly this is one i'll follow a while. a little background on my own take on all this. i grew up roman catholic, went to catholic schools all my life, including georgetown univ. i actually spent a total of about 9 months in a convent of a belgian order, though this house was in texas. then i spent a couple of years teaching in catholic schools. longtime brainwashing, huh? but my recovery was sudden, swift and total. i'm all over it now. i have friends who remain in the church, even have friends who are priests and sisters in the church. they are dedicated, spiritually and socially, to bettering life on earth for the poor and helpless. i love and admire them, but consider myself a spiritual person, not a religious one. buddhism has many aspects that i take to heart and practice, though i cannot truthfully call myself a buddhist. i am reading and studying buddhist writers, and have quite a few friends doing the practice. i am on a path, that's all. i firmly believe in the separation of church and state, in the right of people to practice the religion or spiritual direction of their choice, including that of no religious belief at all. i believe that the direction that we are headed under this administration will lead us to a position little different than that of iran under the ayatollahs. this is not and must not become a theocracy of fundamentalistic evangelical christian ideologues. it must be stopped. we must become aware of what's going on, and speak out at every level.
my newly discovered blog-treasure, the slacktivist, discusses the wal-mart immigrant roundup in this post, closely echoing my own feelings. the more i learn about this, and think about it, the angrier i become. this is one company only, i have to assume it is just the tip of the iceberg.
slacktivist also continues his comb-through of the Left Behind series on his site. this morning i read joan didion's entire review/essay, Mr Bush & the Divine, not just the quotes in slacktivist's post. it's long, but riveting in its pellucid exposition of just how scary this whole christian/right/highest-levels-of-govt association has become. the first part of the essay will familiarize you with the story line for the books. from there didion connects the dots from the rev. la haye et al to the rev. mr. bush et al. despite the fact that joan didion's wry, dry humor (in the midst of horror) can always make me chuckle, the title of this post is how i felt as i read this piece.
last night on bill moyers NOW i listened to joseph c. hough, currently president of the union theological seminary, redeem christianity in its saner form. the dialogue between these two distinguished gentlemen kept me spellbound with wonder and hope. this morning i researched dr. hough online and came upon this sermon given, eerily enough, on 9/9/01. despite what happened two days later, his concern for the environment and the poor remains as relevant now as it was then. he wants the banner of, not only christianity but all three abrahamic traditions, to be flown not for death and rapture and destruction, but for this: life. abundant life for all of creation. yeah, man, let's listen to this guy. P.S. i just drifted over to scalzi's journal and discovered his allusion to this very conversation on NOW. here, from john's post, is a link to the transcript of the entire dialogue.
a second post re what seemed to be just a passing mention in today's previous post. the review and comentary on the Left Behind series in the slacktivist's blog. any of you who may be getting worried about the evangelical fundamentalist drift of our very government (narrow sliver of separation seems to be all that's left between church and state currently) from the top down need to gear into this. i went back to do some more reading on this blog, and will need to spend more time there when i can. begin with this entry.
a few years ago, in a slacker time between Real Jobs, i worked in a local bookstore. we were constantly reordering this series, restocking, selling, reordering, ad infinitum. the series itself expanded at an alarming rate. the shelf space it took up was ever encroaching on real books. we never quite knew in what section to shelve it. science fiction? religion? new age? general weirdness? certainly none of the fringe characters working in the store (musicians, poets, literature students, like that) ever read any of it to get a grasp of its drift. i only knew that it had to do with "the rapture." a concept that didn't really take up much space on my own personal hard drive.
finding out that tim lahaye's wife is the head of "concerned women for america" woke me right up. known to the irreverent as "ladies against women" this group is the main force behind "marriage protection week" and a lot of other idiotic crap. the popularity of this series may have more to do with the way our leaders think than we have known. i return to the comments of general boykin, for instance. to the idea many seem to have (himself included) that dubya was annointed, appointed, elected, whatever, by jesus himself. go back to the slacktivist and read this post where he quotes joan didion in the new york review of books. this guy is a deeplevel christian, with theological knowledge beyond the garden variety. let's pay some attention to this. now.
this is just a journal. just a place in virtual space where we all write ephemeral comments about this, that, and the other. things come and things go. today's big deal is tomorrow's dead letter. so the fact that i've managed to stay out of here for three days is just another thing. the fact that it was so oddly difficult is perhaps a matter for concern. i know from reading others' journals that this is not just my phenomenon, that others are equally, or even more, addicted to reading and writing on their flat screens. but i did it, and now i feel so Left Behind (to cop a title that is being discussed on a whole lot of blogs. the Lahaye series on "christian" "rapture" is being reviewed by the slacktivist and i've read at least three blogs where the "philosphy" is talked about. it's a phenom that leaves me stone cold, but the interest being kicked up here is in itself interesting.) and Out of Touch. world events, national politics, zogby polls, wedding plans, indie bands, california strangeness, the constant soup of life and blogs roars on and on. step out of the river for three days and you don't step back into the same river, no indeed.
but here i am, and i got a lot of things done. there are, always will be, scads more undone. my hope is to work this journal into life the same way i do laundry. do it when i have the chance, the odd interstices of time between things on the main menu, let it all hang out, hope there's clean underwear when it's needed.
the 300 illegal immigrants arrested this morning in a sweep at wal-marts all over the country have the real stuff to worry about. cleaning crews working for a contractor, cleaning up behind america's biggest retailer. if all the illegal immigrants doing the dirty work for america's big businesses were to disappear overnight what a howl of protest would ascend to the highest places. don't tell me these businesses don't know what's going on. it's in their best interests to keep it happening.
early morning dark, chilly, monday. steaming cup of tea. just a few thoughts here, so it won't seem as if i've disappeared in the manner of those despised journal starters-and-leavers. don't know if it's my usual autumnal depression movin' in, or sanity catching up. or what. but i'm realizing the incredible amount of time i've been spending reading internet blogs, magazines, aol journals, etc, and then writing my own journal entries, is making me a candidate for a 12 step program. i'm not reading much of anything else, not doing any other writing, not paying the attention to my classes that i should. i'm not doing the necessary work to get yard and gardens ready for winter, not connecting with real friends in real time and space. this is ridiculous. my work takes up a great deal of time, that is necessary, that has to be. but for this to be taking most of the rest of my time makes no sense at all.
so i'll be making fewer entries here, though by no means abandoning my journal, nor anyone else's. the amount of attention i've been paying to politics is also a factor. daily outrage is turning to constant depression. which helps nothing at all. i'll be checking in here probably once, maybe twice, a week. just not...several times every day. for now i leave you this piece by ira chernus, giving sage and loving advice for taking Time Out, time to re-experience what should be our inspiration for dreaming the dream, for fighting the good fight. namaste for now.
