Here's the Yellow-Rumped Warbler

[See post below.] The one in my yard was female, and either chubbier or fluffed out against the September chill. This is Mike's picture, too. There are some things money can buy, and one of them is the digiscope lens that takes a picture like this.

Birding. Bailouts

I suspect I am not the only common person to feel that the problem of rescuing the US economy is located in another realm, far far from my street, which isn’t even Main Street. Here on the winding drive the moment is about "Where did I put those binoculars?" I found them, and the fat little warbler posed on a near branch for a moment, so I could enjoy him.

It was not, I think, a Northern Waterthrush, but a yellow-rumped warbler, a common sight, according to my bird book, but not in my yard. This photo from Mike’s Birding and Digiscoping Blog caught the round, cuddly feel of the bird I saw this morning. I was glad to discover this blog. Mike has a way of being with nature that he is able to share through close photographs of birds, dragonflies, meadows, grass. He seems to be someone for whom birding is not a competition, but a way of love.

This is the real world, and it is comforting this morning. It often is. As for bailouts, Grandma has observed that if you keep cleaning up people’s messes, they’re never going to quit drinking.

Gear up for Obama

Skittish as it makes me to think it, this is promising to be a close election. I am trying to do my part by

1. putting an election countdown meter on my page!
2. ordering and passing out Obama gear. Get the name out.

I have coming in the mail extra bumper stickers (Women for Obama) and a few extra large and small buttons. Friends are invited to write and reserve one. Remember---in heaven there is no gear.

Real Women vote Democratic

Superwoman and the Story of Sarah

I am interested in an ad for Citi credit cards in the May 2008 issue of O. It shows a woman working under a car, her white jeans rolled up, and on her feet, red high-heeled shoes with ankle straps. She is supposed to have bought them both on credit.

Even the inducement to use a credit card seems so last economy. And would anyone work under a car in white jeans? Not twice. But what troubles me most about it is the implicit story: you can do men’s work and still be valued as a traditional feminine sex object. This story spreads, like a drop of ink in a small glass of water, to a larger very American idea: You can do it all and have it all, and that will make you happy. You can!

I think this in part accounts for the wierd popularity of the inexperienced Sarah Palin. She is the one woman who seems to have brought it off: husband, kids, stellar career, masculine hobbies, beauty queen, athletic ability, profound self-confidence. And I think that all across America women are failing miserably to carry this heavy package.

But they—or we—want to believe it’s possible. It’s the new fairy tale, the distortion of the feminist ideal by the fundamental American story: greed is okay, the individual matters most of all. The Story of Sarah says to overburdened women, many of them I believe, the working poor, Have faith—it can be done. It is a myth that benefits only the bosses.

Storage

Having celebrated my birthday yesterday, I awoke today with a feeling of relief. Made it through the inevitable (at least, for me) assessment of the year, and my entire life. Managed not to make any sweeping, specific resolutions. I did tell Tom, over shrimp tempura at Ba Sho, that I'd like to get more of my poetry out this year.

Something made me wake up feeling fearless. All the archives boxes in my study closet, the ones full of manuscripts, nostalgia, old letters, term papers---how can anything in them harm me? I felt ready to begin clearing out. Some symbolism had been dissolved. I remembered that in 1978 (!) I had written a poem about storage. Here it is.

Storage
Jeanne Desy

After you left, I put it all
in storage, and I disappeared,
paid rent by the month,
never meaning to throw it away.
Everything sat in one locked room,
and I never went there until
after the rains, management
asked me to check for damage.
The first box gave, softened
with age and damp, and
what fell out was as safe and ordinary
as if I had never seen it before.
So I have continued unpacking,
looking for something that matters.
Perhaps over there in the corner
something is sitting, forgotten.
Surely something remains.

Lost Horizons

Landscape with Cows, Ralph Blakelock. [Curiously, this painting, which I arrived at searching for cows at twilight, is owned by the Butler Art Museum in Youngstown, Ohio, a few blocks from the house I grew up in.]

Today, according to the way we figure age in the Western tradition, I turned 66, turned, as if you turned a corner and now are looking at—can it be? 70.
In my circles I am practically an authority on old age. Three years ahead of the first Baby Boomer; and aged physically and mentally by chronic kidney disease so that I feel ten years older than I am. So, what is this old age like?

I think it is not entirely unlike the old age of our mothers; you realize that the shining city that lies just over the horizon, that makes the edge glow . . . that city isn’t there. The world of opportunities, the better future. You have already experienced so many times that the marvelous job comes down to grading a huge stack of tediously conceived and written papers. That falling in love couldn't save you. That no Teacher is infallible and no book can tell you what you need to do. You have not really improved yourself much. At best, you have become more what you are.

So instead of finding yourself facing that bright horizon, strikiing out on that purposeful road, you are in this big field. It is not astroturf, but dirt, pebbles, the occasional dog doo, clumps of harsh grass. I do suppose it also has its patch of sunflowers gone to seed, and the goldfinches hanging upside down, busily having lunch.

When you are old, what is all around you is not really a horizon or an edge, just more of same. Distant mountains? The thought of climbing them is not appealing. You go to all that effort to at last stand at the summit — everyone knows that you don’t spend long there. You can see seven counties, or the next state, or Tibet. Soon you are bored. It's time to start back down. They tell you the point is not getting somewhere, but enjoying the climb. Not any more. It takes too much out of you. Fact is, you can see the same view in elegant comfort from the revolving lounge at the top of a big-city hotel. And you have. And you don’t fit your black silk dress anymore, so going to that lounge isn’t all that appealing. You’d have to find some way to dress up.

In age, what a rambling mind you have. Your cows roam in a wide field, having no special purpose to their day but to munch grass, drink water, stay alive; and at evening, as twilight descends, to follow the bell cow slowly home to the comfortable barn, where you expect to be warm and enclosed, shielded from the cold light of the stars.

autumn haiku

two enormous sunflowers, heads hanging
not uprooted by the storm

Tara Donovan, Toothpicks - Detail

I didn't say it wasn't art.  (See post below.)

Working at the very edge

You don't have to be an artist to envy the recipient of a half-million dollar MacArthur Foundation "genius award." Or to marvel that one just went to Tara Donovan, whose 2003 installation, "Haze," is composed of over two million clear plastic drinking straws stacked against a 42-foot-long wall.

The NYTimes quotes the foundation's president, Jonathan Fanton, as saying that this year's winners are "people working on the very edge of discovery and people at the edge of a new synthesis."

Edgy. How American can you get? And indeed, it has been true for some time, and not just in America, that artists are valued who "make it new," Ezra Pound's famous dictum. New for the sake of newness. I felt that way when I was a kid. Wow, new shoes! Patent leather, with a strap and buckle and a grosgrain bow, how they sparkled, what a marvelous noise you could make when you walked. New!

I don't think this is about that kind of pleasure. This is about a cultural value I think of as the Frontier Ethic, about what is over the horizon, the fountain of youth, the territories. At its worst it has given us the Warhol phenomenon, in which the artist merely conceives the work, and the apprentices actually bring it off. I happened to pick up a novel in the library recently that was turned out like this. The name in big letters on the cover turned out not to be the author at all, but a sort of franchise. You could tell.

Japan has plenty of very cool, contemporary art, but it also has something else I find admirable, a tradition called "Living National Treasures." These are artists/craftspeople who have learned a specific traditional art and then added their own artistic vision. The photo is of a vase made by one such artist, Ito Sekisui V, using a valued type of clay found in old gold and silver mines.

Craft, what we used to call craftsmanship, is arrived at very differently than the new and transgressive. It is a matter of practicing scales; of apprenticing; of learning to play the instrument first. I know there are awards for this, but I don't hear about them on the front page.

Another Monday

You wouldn't believe how many people have thought of forming a giant to-do list out of little to-do Post-It notes. Anything but actually work the list, I guess.

Things I didn't get done today:

• order a Rhoomba (involves research)
• order Obama bumper stickers (takes time)
• go to health club
• take a walk
• wash kitchen floor
• rewash those tee-shirts that got wrinkled last week when the power was out and I couldn't put them in the dryer
• figure out what this blog is about.

And how to get out of these bullets. There.

None of this would be an issue, would it, if I hadn't made a list to begin with? Well, I let the energy of Monday trip me up.

Things I did get done:

meditated

drew/painted a picture with my watercolor pencils, without reading the instructions

ordered a book for my grandson with his name in the title

reviewed (sort of) and erased over a thousand junk emails. What are we going to do about this?

wrote a poem about my family birthday dinner last night at Texas Roadhouse, hosted by my daughter every year. We had the ritual rattlesnake bites for appetizers, and I had my annual Marguerita. They had to explain to me that if I didn't want frozen, I therefore wanted on the rocks (I don't like ice at all, but Margueritas just come two ways. They don't come warm.) It came in a huge, heavy glass, leading me to remark that one of these years I won't be able to lift the glass, and they'll have to deliver the Marguerita through IV drip. They promised to do that.

If there is anything better than sitting with Tom and Cassie and Otto and Chris in all those peanut shells and noise and chaos, everyone at ease, friendly, happy; and receiving among my gifts two stupendously glamorous jeweled Halloween pumpkin barrettes, I don't know what it would be. Driving home I made a point with myself that this, this is what I want to remember as I am dying. I know better, but I keep trying to organize my death. You should get to organize something.

And so the day goes, so the year goes. At the grocery store I bought the season's first Fuji mum. Alas, too late. Half the petals fell off in the car, revealing an interesting green center. The remaining half is in a vase on my kitchen table.

Post-Its Get Out of Hand

Strip shows, and empathy with the cat

If you haven't received this picture in your e-mail, you probably don't have e-mail. I hasten to say, this is not my cat. Sherlock's head is much bigger than your average lime, and he would never sit still for this. And I would never do it to him. A cat is going to hate smelling like a lime. Being relatively odorless is one of a cat's instinctive protections.

I chose this picture in a weird, right-brained move because no way was I going to put up a picture of a stripper. Didn't even want to search for one. What gets me to that subject is "The Ethicist" column today's NYTimes Magazine. Randy Cohen is asked whether it is okay for an employed professor to hold a bachelor party as a strip club. His answer is excellent, as usual, but my interest is in his opening statements.

Nobody should attend strip clubs, those purveyors of sexism as entertainment. Strip shows are to gender what minstrel shows are to race.

Wow, was I glad to read these words, and coming not from another "crazy feminist," but from a man. They are statements I would not have dared to make at one time, knowing I would be labeled "a prude."

This issue became personal for me on my late brother's fortieth birthday. He planned a big pool party. It was hinted that his partner was going to hire a stripper. Of course, all the family was invited. (This was long ago, and the people I'm talking about are dead.)

I knew it would not have been enough for me to attend; I would have been required to give every appearance of enjoying this performance. My mother, whose conditioning was more thorough than mine, told me about it later with much laughter. She seemed to be daring me to say one disapproving word. A surprise stripper did come in and did her act right in front of my brother and his girlfriend. It made me a little sick to picture it. My mother muttered, "Why someone wouldn't come to their own brother's birthday party!" though I suspect she really knew.

"It was a hundred degrees that day!" I said. That would have sufficed in a sober family, as I was on a medication that gave me a very low tolerance for heat; but I could tell it didn't wash. My family could guess how I'd think, though probably not how I'd feel: keenly embarrassed and sad and conspicuously out of it. But I didn't say those things. I saw it as not seeking conflict. The truth is, I myself didn't have confidence in either my values or my feelings.

When to speak? A problem reserved for human beings.

Just today I told a happily opinionated friend that you can have strong opinions and not necessarily express them. Speaking is an action, and actions have consequences. But my friend was profoundly suppressed as a girl, more than usual, and speaking out is important to her. It is healing. I suppose that's why I am writing about this today. Speaking has consequences, but so does not-speaking, long after the party is over.

Ask Grandma: Replying to a Big Spender

I read with interest the advice columnists. They are a form of girl gossip I never have been really in on. Each letter is a narrative, for sure, and I've always liked stories.

Today, my eye was arrested (there's a strange image) by Dear Abby, who died, I believe, and is now a brand belonging to Jeanne Phillips, an intriguing concept. Ask yourself, Could I, too, become a Brand, and thus someone could make money off me when I'm dead? Other questions would surely follow from this inquiry.

The poor woman whose letter is featured today wrote to ask how to reply to a "tacky" friend (her term) who always tells how much she spent on something. A shirt is the example given, giving me the opportunity to post this pretty picture, almost a color-field abstraction.

Faux Abby replies gleefully that you could try to make her feel guilty, envious, or miserable; or just "tell her the shirt is beautiful---but that wouldn't be as much fun." She seems to be serious. This is exactly why I avoid girl gossip. There is too often a meanness to it, which can be accounted for by women's incredible one-on-one competitiveness. If this statement surprises you, you can read more in Phyllis Chesler's book, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, which documents some of the ample research on girl meanness.

A second possibility is that Abby is using irony in an attempt to shame the writer into acting polite. I came up with this thought, but am having trouble buying it. Suppose it is the case, though; shame is a dubious teaching strategy.

This kind of question is one Buddhist teachers do encounter: "ZenPerfect's measured behavior is driving me crazy." To this, a teacher may reply, "Sit with that," meaning, Ah, you have here an opportunity to learn something about yourself. Abby's student, Not a Spendthrift, might learn that she herself craves beautiful clothing or compliments, or that Big Spender taps her wrongheaded sense of personal inadequacy. I don't know what she might learn; these are examples.

A second compassionate way to work with this would be to "exchange self with other," a technique I believe is taught in the Tibetan tradition. Imagine that you are Big Spender, that when someone compliments you on your new shirt, you say, "It cost me $200." Why do you say that? How do you feel when you are complimented, or when you just walk into the office and announce how much you spent on that shirt? Could it be that in your behavior there is no attempt to harm?

Maybe you would contact a time in your life when you said something that gauche. Maybe you were only eight years old at the time, and hadn't learned yet that here in America we destroy our souls for money, and are supposed to pretend, at the same time, that money doesn't matter. That we pay way too much for clothes with visible brands, Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Prada, exactly because some people will know from the logo how much that purse cost. That's the game. Maybe Big Spender is just an innocent kid who hasn't quite figured out all the rules.

After meditating like this, maybe Not a Spendthrift could rise above her Self and say something honest and simple to her friend, like "Blue is your color." That's what friends do.

Forced Retreat

No pix again. I am on computer 21 at the library, thinking as I stood in line to sign up that many people are standing in line in Texas for drinking water or something to eat. Here, we eat computer access; four days now without power. We all got in a bad mood last night when the rumor that our power would be back on by dark proved false.

If I had the skills to pull up a picture, it would be of Grailville, where we have gone on retreat for ten years now. When the hurricane hit, I was already depressed, having realized that I am just too handicapped now to go on retreat. Even the packing and two-hour drive is hard on me, and I get sick. I can't sleep. I ache all over.

And Ama Samy's annual Zen retreat is easy, only 7 or 8 hours a day of meditation, doesn't start till 6:00 a.m., you have freedom to wander in contemplation of nature, or not attend a sit at all. Other retreats are much harder. The only kind of retreat I could go on now would be in a luxury convention center, with a good bed. If there are retreats like that, I can't afford them. So, I thought, my retreat days are over. That led me to decide that I am done growing spiritually. God help us.

Now this; forced retreat. Despite the morning New York Times and the battery-powered radio, this is more boring and uncomfortable than any retreat. And you have to come up with your own meals. And no schedule to sustain you.

The picture I would post today would be a rendering of Napoleon's army struggling back from the Russian campaign, a military debacle I happen to know about. Everyone is showing stress, even the telephone solicitors. Nice people talk bitterly about the "A-holes" who speed through the intersections where the traffic lights are still not working. People are dying for an iced drink, the 6:30 news, dying to do a load of wash.

I wondered today, what is it that makes this so bad (once you get used to the shocking sense of vulnerability)? At first it drove you crazy, every minute you discovered something you couldn't do. But in just four days I have grown so used to it that I don't even try to turn the light on when I enter a room. In fact, it's so quiet, there's so little to do, that I find myself up by candle light resolving ancient issues, just as if it were Thursday on retreat.

Waiting an hour for my computer, I picked up a new book by Alexander McCall Smith. My daughter Cassie likes these lovely, contemplative novels. Here is a bit that struck me: "Missing names, missing persons---how remarkable it was, [Mma Ramotswe] thought, that we managed to anchor ourselves at all in this world . . . "

We took our lunch to Walnut Grove cemetery today. The dead were as peaceful as ever, undisturbed by the little piles of tree limbs, the occasional broken monument. I wondered why in the world I am ever afraid of death.

Debility, now, sickness, pain--I don't like those. I'm working on my attitude, though not working too hard. The lawn guy agrees, thinking positive just doesn't cut it.

Powerless in Ohio

No picture today--my computer "is dead," Tom says, and I am at the library on #28, which does not have an ergonomic keyboard. One of oh so many ways we are suffering.

We have drinkable water, even hot water, and a gas stove you can light with a match, but not the oven. Oh well, just use the toaster oven. No. Okay, the microwave. No. And more good news, the weather is perfect, 75 today, cool at night. If it were the dead of winter we'd have to be bundled up a foot from the gas fireplace.

It's been like this since Sunday at about 4:00, when the hurricane(!) started. That's almost 3 days now. We have emptied the refrigerator, and rolled the trash to the curb. A fine chance to clean the thing out. We have four various-sized coolers going. Yesterday Cindy brought us two bags of ice, free from Whole Foods. Mark and Karina gave us dinner Sunday night, and the next day cleared all the fallen debris from our front yard. Mark opened our electric garage door so we could get out the van, in which is the wheelchair, which so far does not need to be charged. Tina called, she has power, so we took over cellphone and electric toothbrush to charge them: things we don't want to live without if this goes on all week, as originally predicted. We dropped off the Chicken Tenders we keep for our grandson, Otto, for Barb, whose oven works.

Electric power out for dozens of different reasons. You'd be amazed. Every single thing you do is different, and that makes for strain.

By 8:00 pm the street is dead dark, except for a couple of our solar yard lights, and the nearly-full moon. We wear little LED flashlights on ribbons around our necks, then. We are too old to take a fall well. We read a while with flashlights, our habit. Tom is sleeping semi-upright, unable to use his ventilator. So far, he's okay. But even the cat has been disturbed, and can be found sitting in unaccustomed places sphinx-like, all drawn in, wary.

Of course, we are the lucky ones, we all say. Our houses are not flooded (we are on a hill, so don't rely on sump pumps.) None of us had a big tree fall on the house or us, though a branch fell on one neighbor's new car. And it could have happened, you see. We have drinkable water, food, money to eat out. We have plenty of batteries and a weather radio. We are going crazy.

I started to write by hand a Twitter of this event Monday morning. Words are the shelter I weave around myself in an anxious life, waiting for a call from the OSU Transplant center, "We have a kidney for you," a call that is not likely to come for another two years, but could come right now on the cellphone in my shirt pocket. I was dying to write the minute this started, so much to write about, and to check the blogs I follow, and my e-mail, and research things on the internet . . . you know. No, you don't know. How did my whole life come to center on my computer? Ten years ago I didn't even have DSL.

Monday at 9:23 a.m., a neighbor, Kathy, pulled up with ice, and we realized we had to get with it. I stopped my strange Twittering on a yellow pad and haven't resumed. This morning I wrote a poem by hand. I have no way to type it up. My manual typewriter's ribbon is 50 years old, and I'm older, and can't type on a manual anyway.

People who have phones are all calling each other. The community here on the street came to life during the storm we didn't realize was going to qualify as a hurricane, with winds over 75 mph. Debris was flying straight sideways, like in the Wizard of Oz, but you couldn't stand to stay alone inside.

Tom and I, being variously disabled, mostly have our communities and communications online. All gone, thrown back to, well, people you see in the flesh. You wouldn't believe how disconcerting it is.

We are seeing how easy it is to lose much of what keeps our civilization going. Stoplights not working in most of Clintonville, and no police in sight, either. A huge tree uprooted, blocking Glenmont. On another street, a tree took power lines down and landed on a car. The whole scene is surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape. A live power line can kill you.

In this neighborhood, half the stores are closed. People's phones out. At night, the dark. How close we are to that total dark, no streetlights, one lone gas coachlight, and the house so quiet, no furnace fan running, that when a train goes by two blocks away, you feel the vibration through your shoes. Only the cat is used to it. I'll post his picture when it goes back up, which will either be tonight by 8:00 or Friday, or Sunday by midnight, depending on which rumor you believe.

The Gates

Friday night some of us watched the DVD of this enormous installation of saffron flags that wound through Central Park one February a couple of years ago. The film is a half-hour meditation, very beautiful in its fluidity.

America was also watching the slow progress of Hurricane Ike that night. More of the awful karma of our global recklessness in pursuit of our convenience.

The shots of The Gates from above, like this one, reminded me of the shots of hurricanes from space. I recalled Norman Fischer's article on the impetus for art, titled, "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?" One reason we create art, he says, is to apply a sense of order to the chaos of life. Sometimes, when my life is just too messy to be workable, I feel saved by art, creating it, experiencing it.

There was a monumental affirmation in this installation of miles of huge gates, the orange flags blowing over the people who walked slowly along just experiencing. I was reminded of the film The Pianist, in which a man who has been hunted with flamethrowers and starved almost to death in the holocaust is saved and, as if miraculously, civilization returns. In white tie and tails, he plays a concerto with full symphony. This, I thought, this is also something humans can do.

How you grow old

The line is almost certainly one Hemingway never thought would become famous. Here it is, dialogue from The Sun Also Rises."

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked.

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly."

You grow old the same way: first slowly, then all at once.

What does it mean to be old? I recall a woman of my mother's generation saying, when she lost a younger friend, "I'm afraid I'll grow old now!" She was around seventy then, so I thought privately, but she is old. I came to think that to her, "old" meant she would lose the spontenaiety and fun her friend had brought to her life.

To grow old is to lose without any choice in the matter particular friends, faculties, abilities, dreams, illusions. Sometimes you lose something quite suddenly: a bone in your foot breaks for no good reason, just standing around in tight shoes. It is your driving foot, and you're grounded for weeks. That will pass, but it can happen again. Now you have to wear good shoes, ugly old lady shoes with orthotics. You will nevertheless get more stress fractures.

You have lost more than your wardrobe. You have grown aware of a fragility you never thought you had. You have learned, maybe, that you have no idea what your vulnerabilities are, what you will lose next.

As for the picture, it is found art. I had been sharpening my colored pencils, and suddenly saw the paper where the shavings had fallen. I filed it under "abstractions." The ability to see beauty in unexpected places has perhaps an accidental and tenuous connection to my subject today.

What passes for the new

I like to have poetry in my head. Recently I am working on memorizing the end of Dr. William Carlos Williams' long poem, Asphodel. I don't know how to get it to format it here the way he did, but you can find the whole thing on poets.org.

Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

You can't open a paper today without realizing that it is September 11. In the NY Times, one stately, blank ad after another pays homage to the day we could have learned something.

We could have learned---did know for at least a few minutes that morning---how very fragile our lives are, how open to interruption, and how vulnerable civilization itself is to men who feed that wolf of hatred inside themselves. We could have learned that American arrogance is an affront to desperate, hungry people.

As a nation, we refused to learn that, but responded with a crazy attempt to put up some huge memorial that could only invite more hatred. With a "war on terror," always with a war.

Buddhists talk about the trio of behaviors that get us in trouble: greed, hatred, and ignorance. They are really almost never three separate things. I know my friends understand how much war is connected with the greed of the wealthy patrons of the greedy politician, how racial hatred rests on ignorance of our true similarity and connectedness as organic life on this planet.

Compared to the devastation wrought by simple-minded boys getting the fun idea of running a passenger jet into the twin towers, you would suppose a $925 Blahnik shoe, shown here, is well, just fun. Bergdorf Goodman has had over 100 requests for this shoe since Carrie Bradshaw wore it in "Sex and the City." Mr. Blahnik may feel he has absolved himself of the responsibility for for creating and selling a product like this by commenting "That's quite obscene."

I suppose that spending so much money on a shoe falls roughly under the canopy of "ignorance," or delusion. Women who do that mistakenly believe it will make them more desirable, and that will make them happy. They believe their bodies are impervious to the strain and misalignment of such a high heel, the shock through the spine with every step. Maybe they believe that money spent through a credit card isn't really money, that you don't have to earn money. I suspect some of those consumers believe that somehow, someday they will be able to pay off their credit cards. That the bill won't come due. We believe we can get away with things, somehow.

But, as Jack Kornfield reported in one talk, a student explained karma like this: "You don't get away with nothing."

What passes for the new is same old. Same old delusion, same old aggression, same old silly concentration on things, same old us vs. them nationalism. You can read about these follies in any scripture, or just read the actual news. It is out there in reality, and in poems.

The Purity Police: Special to UU Readers

I'd like to suggest you turn to minister James Ford's blog Monkey Mind (see my blog list) for his September 10 blog/essay on a proposed change to UUA bylaws.

Why?

Because the UUA on its website is running a survey, asking for our comments. This is a chance, in a disheartening election year, to really have a voice somewhere. And because James is an especially thoughtful voice, writing from the point of view of an experienced minister, who knows what the Purity Police can get us into.

Goodbye to All That

For some time I have been thinking about starting another blog, one that will be about sickness, old age, and death. I have the qualifications, plenty of material in my life, and I see the need, but is there an audience?

In America, we don't believe in the inevitability of the big three. I had to learn that from Buddhism, which begins with the first premise, "Life is hard." Dukkha is the word, often translated to mean "suffering" or "unsatisfactory." Ahh. That was a help to me. It's not that there's something wrong with me; life is like this.

Sickness is very unpopular in America. We see posters of very old men and women with wierdly muscular bodies and fierce expressions, posing in bathing suits: Old age is not for sissies! they proclaim. We spend, spend on things that promise to restore a semblance of youth, from face creams worth more per ounce than gold, to Viagra. We buy books that tell us we can think ourselves young. Outwit the laws of the universe. We admire people who begin a second career at 65 and go on to beat the world, and warehouse those whom dementia takes back to childhood.

One reason I spend the extra money to belong to the McConnell fitness center is that it is also a rehab facility, associated with a hospital system. The majority of people there are "older" and have experienced big hits, stroke, heart attack, pulmonary disease. They are plump and gray and mostly cautious. Few would dream of trying to run marathons.

I have no idea how many of them are online. There is a prejudice or fear among even some people younger than me, the Boomers, against all this technology that got going while our attention was somewhere else. And who, under sixty, wants to read about the realities of old age? I found when I got on Facebook (briefly), that it has a special section for the elderly, defined as those over age forty.

You do write to be read, the same way you speak to be heard. So I may do it or not.

If I do a blog like that, I might call it, "Goodbye to All That." It is a very heavily used phrase, so resonant, but I haven't found another blog by that name. Today I read for the first time Joan Didion's classic essay of that title. It is perfect, an elegant, finished piece of art, the way essays sometimes were when they were written on typewriters, or by hand, and published on real paper, before the days of . . . tossing off a blog. That sort of personal essay is now part of literary history. I was amazed to find that "the number one public library in the country," here in Columbus, does not own a copy of Slouching to Bethlehem, the book in which it is collected. I'll have to buy it online.

And just now the tiny iridescent green hummingbird paused midair in front of my window, then passed on, reminding me how surprising and sudden happiness, too, can be.

The Reality of Jesus

As far as I know, this Jesus is by Rembrandt. Not quite as Semitic as I think he may have been, but real. I note the smudges on the forehead, perhaps Rembrandt decided showing a crown of thorns was a bad idea, and painted over it.

This painting is a fact, a thing. An art historian could probably tell me whether my supposition is true; paintings are examined by x-ray techniques sometimes.

Was Jesus "a fact"? Did he actually exist? Recently I was conversed with by a radical atheist, who brought forth several "facts" that proved to him that Jesus was not "a historical figure."

Do I care? Not at all. And it does seem to me that people argue passionately about the damndest things.

If I "am" anything, I am a Unitarian Universalist, and subscribe to the principle of approaching all religions and world-views with respect, and asking what value they have. Perhaps there is no intrinsic value to ideas, so I ask what value a conceptual framework has for me.

The idea of Jesus was a window for me when I was five, and my mother dragged me (literally, furious that I had slipped in mud and fallen down) to a Sunday School. Baptist, maybe. On the wall in that room was Jesus the Shepherd, holding in his arm a little lamb. The idea: that there was someone who cared and protected us. As a child in an abusive family, oh how I wanted to think that somewhere, someone would hold me in their arms. The concept of God was too misty for me; the idea of a handsome, rather feminine young man in robes, I could relate to that. (In the late forties I never saw a man with long, wavy hair.)

I think it was that Sunday School that taught me the 23rd psalm, the one that begins "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." I was to use that some fifty years later to combat the terror I felt during radiation treatment for breast cancer.

No historical figure is real. The past is no longer real, except as the consequences of past actions unfold in our lives. What is strikingly real is the need of some people to argue vehemently and irrelevantly against some particular religion. The people I run into who call themselves atheists are in fact anti-Christian; the theism they are specifically against is the Christian concept of God, as they understand it. What is real is their contempt for everyone, it seems, who does not agree with them one hundred percent.

I know dreadful things have been done in the name of Christianity, and of other religions, like Democracy. And I know, further, that all dreadful things done under any banner are based on contempt for someone who does not think like us: The Other. What I liked about the Jesus I met when I was a child was his message of universal love.

Street Mu

My neighbors have several cats. The two black ones are named Jake and Elwood. They can tell them apart by temperament; one is friendly. But I don't try. I enjoy calling them both Mu, which is a Japanese word that means something like No, or Nothing. This is a picture of one or the other of the Mu's, taken one sunny day.

Mu is the first koan worked in some traditions. Many non-Buddhists have heard of it. A student asks Joshu, "Does a dog have Buddha nature?"

Joshu replies, "Mu."

One way this koan was presented to me was that the student is asking, Worthless as I am (gosh, I'm just a woman, and I'm not exactly perfect . . . ) can even I be enlightened? Is happiness open even to me? Much Zen operates on metaphoric levels; it is considered helpful to confuse you.

So I was out this evening in a misty twilight, trying to walk my way out of surprisingly strong feelings brought on by a note from what we like to call in Buddhism "a difficult person," one for whom you have feelings you don't enjoy. I had grown bored by the question of whether my physical sensations represented anger or fear, and was noticing that the crickets in the lawns were louder than the ones in my head, when something brushed my ankles. Mu! I said. It was the friendly one.

I bent to stroke him, he was very alive. He set up a purr, and the koan came to my mind. I thought about it. Does even that difficult person have Buddhanature? . . . have worth? Does that person deserve my compassion? The answer seemed obvious.

Mu walked along beside me on the curb, and then doubled. I laughed in surprise. The other cat had come out of the dark to join the procession. I pulled out my cellphone and tried to take a flash picture of them, but all I got was a black screen.

Creationists, Evolutionists, and Elitism

(Was it Lyndon Johnson who memorably referred to his opponents as "effete liberal snobs?")

Let me say right out that the above cartoon does not represent my point of view. I reproduce it to show the crux of the bitter feud between creationists and evolutionists, which is going to get oh so much worse as Sarah Palin throws out red meat on this topic.

And the crux is a failure of respect on both sides. A failure of empathy. I tend to be on the side so pithily described these days as "elitist," that is, educated and keenly interested in thought, and in education. But I would not describe myself as "an evolutionist" anymore than I would say that I hold fast to the theory of gravity (though it certainly holds fast to me, as much as I would like to fly.)

I know people who are nuts about evolution. They explain that this way of making inferences about the origin of humankind from the mass of possibly-relevant data, this has enabled them to discard a constricting point of view imposed on them as children. It has freed them to feel awe, to wonder at what they would never call the "intelligent design" of the universe. The fantastic working of its laws.

These folks worship Nature, a Poet might say. For them, the theory of evolution is not a theory, but a cosmology with the quality of religion. While they are extreme, they are not really outliers; the educated liberals I know also believe, I suspect, that evolution is not "theory" but "fact." I invite them to ponder the difference.

I also know, mostly through family connections and my checkered religious past, people who would say they are creationists. With some trepidation, I'm going to describe them as people who believe there is only one sacred book, and who interpret it literally in places. I find myself wondering why, of all the stories in that Bible, the Genesis creation story is so important. I don't hear these folks decrying the school lunch program on the grounds that the Bible also presents the miracle of loaves and fishes.

Here's what I hear when these folks talk about evolution: Don't you tell me I'm descended from a monkey!

Educated white Americans are among the most privileged people in the world, and we usually forget that. It's hard for us to put ourselves in the place of the guys setting up a wedding tent on the neighbor's lawn, or their mechanic, who built his own business starting from nothing, or the guy whose major accomplishment in life was a fifty-yard run on the high-school football team, and it's all been downhill since then.

Or his wife, who lives in a community where there is a very distinct separation between Men and Women, very clear regulation of roles; who knows that the professionals whose house she cleans subtly look down on her. In today's New York Times, Paul Krugman refers quite correctly to "the angry right," an anger he believes is "based on the perception . . . that Democrats look down their noses at regular people."

I do not mean to stereotype creationists; just a glance at the internet or at public school battles will tell you there are many who are educated and articulate. What I am trying to put forward is the possibility that, as a broad demographic, creationists are more likely to be people who know they are stuck, who feel they are looked down upon by those who were born to more money and more opportunity; and they are probably right. Classism is even more subtle than sexism, and more widespread, and Americans really don't like to think it grows here.

The creationist I'm postulating has one thing going for him or her, though. A religion that tells them authoritatively, "You are a child of God, created in God's very image. You are quite special." This dangerous concept surely must be a source of self-worth in the face of working poverty, of not "making it" in a country that preaches the myth that anyone who wants to can make it. Not true, of course. How many small businesses fail every year?

I want to write more later on how we, the elite, those of us lucky enough to have learned how to think scientifically, might begin to think of this fight as an opportunity for empathy, for trying to understand why the other side cares so much. Maybe this is called non-violent communication; maybe it is respect, or negotiation, or just attention.

And just as important, we need to think carefully about what it is we really need and want to teach in science class.

He meant well

Tonight I saw a film that made me think about what the road to hell is paved with. Up the Yangtze is a beautifully detached documentary that follows two teenagers from peasant families displaced by the massive Three Gorges dam project. (Photo above is from the film.) The film is worth seeing if only for the astonishing slow images at the end, which make the point in a way no argument can.

A statue of Mao is shown only once, but he is certainly present in spirit in this characteristically massive attempt to fix things. As so many political leaders are, Mao was willing to sacrifice the individual for the good of all. Here, this does not seem so much dangerous as sad. And it is clear that the old way of life in which many worked small patches of land, were illiterate, lived without the electricity the dam would create, was a hard life deprived of opportunity. Certainly not idyllic. But is working for tips on a cruise ship an improvement?

There is a scene in another film, Kundun, in which Mao (in black shoes) says to the teen-age Dalai Lama (in gold brocade slippers) "We are going to liberate you." His Holiness replies, "Only I can liberate myself." Mao means liberation from a feudal theocracy, a peasant life, poverty, into the modern world. HH has something more important in mind.

I am reminded of a bumper sticker: We are America. Be good to us or we'll give you democracy.

More and more I realize the danger of tampering with lives. Somewhere I have read Suzuki Roshi's comments when his students got fired up to build a Zen Center. He says something like, "A great many bad things will come out of it, but maybe something good will happen, too."

It's about the trickiness, the unpredictability of the effects that will flow from any well-meant action. A mother supports a grown son who can't hold a job. A father lets a daughter refuse to go onstage in the grade-school talent show because she's scared. A politician crusades for censorship in the public library (gosh, back to Sarah Palin again.) What will the outcomes of these actions be? Are the intentions entirely benevolent and respectful, or are they self-serving? Do we take the trouble to examine our intentions?

I am not advocating doing nothing. But maybe we should do less, more slowly and carefully. I do like a saying in Pidgin English gleaned from some old novel about the British Raj: "Softly, softly catchee monkey."

Grandma Answers a Tricky Question

I imagine I am one of a fairly small number of Unitarian Universalists who can honestly say, "I was born again." This makes me the best kind of expert, experiential.

I got inspired to think about this by reading in this morning's NYTimes that one of the crucial attributes that got Sarah Palin (yes, her again) elected to her first office, as mayor of Wasilla was "the religious born-again thing." (A quote from former city administrator, Stein)

I don't know when Mrs. Palin (as she probably prefers to be called) was born again. I was twelve years old and had been taken firmly in hand by a new friend whose family was so profoundly fundamentalist Daddy wouldn't pay Social Security. She took me to their Evangelical United Brethren church one Wednesday evening for prayer meeting, and as we all sang, "Just as I am without one plea . . . " she muttered in my ear, "Would you like to accept Jesus as your personal savior."

I nodded. Well, sure. I was raised more or less Christian, my family went to a liberal Congregational church.

This turned out to mean that my friend proudly walked me down front, where I was made to kneel at a railing and prayed over loudly. Then I was taken around back and counseled by a woman who could see, I think, that I had no idea. The text was John 3:16, and the part that was emphasized in this 1950's Ohio fundamentalism was ---

. . . that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Next thing I knew I was carrying a little red Bible everywhere and going to Youth for Christ meetings, and behaving in a very holy way. Even my father noticed.

Within two years, I "backslid," on the indeed slippery question of why I was suffering so much if God was all-powerful and all-loving and I was being so damn good. That was a sad time. But my extensive immersion in this religion has often been helpful. When anyone asks me, "Sister, are you born again," I say truthfully, "Oh, yes."

And what does that mean? Seemed odd even then---all you had to do was say to someone that you believed something. That still doesn't seem like enough to me. As a student of words, and of Zen, I find words pretty empty. But it was enough to set a little knot of us off from our peers, indeed, from the rest of the world, which we saw as overwhelmingly wicked, with its dancing, cards, movies, and makeup. Jeez.

Maybe that was the point. Being so special. So much better than just about everyone else. Having, as it were, a secret handshake with a select few, though we didn't have at that time anything like the nifty keychain shown in today's photo.

I once had a Zen teacher who began a dharma talk, "All religions are used by some as tools of oppression." I loved him right then. Indeed, they are. And they are also used too often to make us feel superior. All religions.

My mother was tended in her last years by a middle-aged woman who clearly identified herself as born-again, wore a cross, "prayed over" problems. She must have worried about me, as I had Buddhist artifacts in my home. At last she found the opportunity to ask me, "Are you familiar with The Scriptures?"

I thought a moment and asked her, "Which ones?"

Sarah Palin: Not what we had in mind

What a treat with my morning coffee--all the Sarah Palin news. Makes subscribing to the New York Times worth while.

Above, what I believe is a genuine photograph of the February 2008 cover of Vogue magazine, though I was not able to pick it up from the Vogue site, but from a progressive Alaskan blog.

I want to take this opportunity to say, Girls, this is not what we feminists had in mind. "We feminists"---who? Those of us more or less in my generation who worked in NOW chapters, testified for gender-neutral language in our state constitutions, pointed out the awful news of pay discrepancies and the glass ceiling (which now seems to be made of bulletproof glass), began demanding that we be treated with respect in all our relationships, including marriage.

We feminists. I can really speak only for myself, of course. Among other things, the vision feminist thought made available to me was one of a society in which raising children and creating a hospitable, healthy home would be exalted as the most important work in the world. I hoped to one day see mothers salaried for their at-home work, and given health coverage and pension benefits. Devotion to mothering would not entail the personal sacrifice of economic security, and dependence on pleasing a partner. It was a vision of a new kind of family.

But what has happened is that too many women have adopted male competitiveness and striving for power and money, while retaining some of the worst of traditional gender roles. One is the beauty queen syndrome. Another is the shouldering of the impossibly heavy burden of working full-time outside the house, then coming home to work the second shift, for an average of 33 hours a week of housework/mothering in a two-parent home.

And here we have her, the feminist backlash personified. The only good thing I see about this is that the dreadful judgment shown here may help McCain lose the election. As my grandmother would have no doubt said, "It's an ill wind that blows no good."

Female anchor displays breasts

(This is not what a feminist looks like. The photo is of a French newscaster named Melissa Theuriau, who was not the newscaster described in the letter below. You won't be surprised that I found this photo on the website of an appreciative male member of the demographic that spends lots of money on beer and gear.)


Hello, Mythical Reader. Not knowing what to write today, I happened across the e-mail below, which I sent to Nightly@NBC.com in late March. I thought it might amuse someone. A note: that same anchor appeared the next night decently clad. If you are wondering whether NBC replied to me, no. I would have been surprised if they did. And yes, I do know the world has changed.

Tonight a woman anchored the NBC Evening News. Sorry, I was not able to get her name, but you'll know who I mean.

It is rare to see a woman on television in a responsible role that implies intelligence, and I appreciate it. But this woman seemed to have lost her blouse. There seemed to be nothing under her suit, so it revealed a large expanse of chest, including cleavage.

To appreciate how a woman feels watching this, the men who make decisions there might imagine that you showed Brian Williams full length in his suit jacket, shirt, and tie, and tight red silk jockey shorts.

For all I know, that is how he dresses to deliver the news. But that's beside the point. The point is, you would never show it. Every care is taken to give him an appearance of dignity and good grooming. That includes not having hair falling in his eyes like a teenager. You should absolutely do the same for any woman who reads the news. Every newscaster should look like a sane, responsible person. I mean, what were you thinking?
~~~~~~~~~
postscript: It is still true that the personal is political.