Feasting, Sacrifices

This year Eid al-Adha, the Muslim holy day marking Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son to God, fell on Friday, November 27, the day after Thanksgiving.  Muslims around the world celebrate the day, in situations good and hard, with feasts of ritually sacrificed animals, sheep, cows, goats.  The New York Times Lens blog has a beautiful and sad photo essay on the festival in Iraq here.

Although Thanksgiving is a harvest feast, it's no real stretch to see it as a celebration honoring different acts of sacrifice.  The Native Americans must have sacrificed certain distrust and fear to sit down with those awkward newcomers.  And the settlers had given up their homeland and the comfort of familiarity in the faith that they would be taken care of, by God and by the land (and eventually by the new people they encountered.)

In any case, I'm happy that the two holidays lined up this year.  It feels right, knowing that this week brought so many of us together in the goodness of sharing food with family and friends.

Giving thanks

I'm so, so thankful for the wonderful, generous people in my life -- for my friends, my family, and for the kind people I cross paths with every day.
I'm grateful for the gifts in my life, for the rich and simple things that ease my days.
I'm thankful for the delicious food I ate today, for the communion of breaking bread with people I love.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Farmer and the Cowman

I'm always amazed  (naively, I suppose) at the intense antagonism between religion and science. 

I find religious intolerance to be a strange beast, and I think that the fuel that feeds the religious/scientific conflict is the same fuel that feeds the conflicts between religions, between world views, between tribes. 
You're not me -- you're wrong,  dead wrong, and so blind to your wrongness that I'm revolted and enraged and I must convince you of your wrongness, or destroy you and be rid of the evil.

I believe in evolution.  I believe in a compassionate, merciful, creative God. 
I believe in scientific inquiry.  I believe in love beyond comprehension.
I believe in my utterly unique perspective on this world and time and the utterly unique and essential perspectives of others. 
Credo.

Poles, opposites, dancing w/the stars

I'm reading the Paris Review's interview with Robert Stone (I've never read his novels) and find his comments on Freud and Conrad really interesting:

"Freud created a mythology out of nineteenth-century scientific optimism; he said that the glow in the haunted house was just phosphorescence from the swamp -- a comforting high-bourgeois myth.  Conrad was a man of the world and a skeptic who worked not on the basis of ideology but of common sense.  He saw things as they are without wanting to reduce them to theory.  In that respect he's closer to the temper of our own time and certainly closer to my own ideas about reality and about how to explore it in fiction."


I guess that I don't have a clear sense of my location in this spectrum.  I ask and ask and seek, but I have a feeling that the seeking is more central to my soul than the answers.  The questions illuminate my path, but I have no clue where I'm heading -- and indeed, I don't think the destination really matters to me, at least not to where and who I am now.

Although I envy those folks who seem to find solid answers to their questions, I wouldn't trade places with them, or anyone else.  Nope, I listen to their clarity, move on and just keep asking my questions.

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § A Miniature Miscellany

SEEDMAGAZINE.COM § A Miniature Miscellany

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So beautiful -- I love how the organization of the smallest things is so much the same as the organization of things much, much bigger.

My dear, wonderful friends

This season has been very hard for many of my closest friends.  Family crisis, health issues, heartbreak -- these things and more are being faced with grace and strength and bravery.
May I support them and offer all that I have to them!
May they have joy and hope today and the best of times tomorrow!

It's off to work I go

I'm getting ready to head off to my second job as a waitress.  It's a far cry from my week's desk work, and while I don't always relish the six-day work week, I do love the physicality of waiting tables.  

I also enjoy meeting so many people -- it puts me in contact with a huge range of people that I'd never encounter so directly anywhere else.  

And there's something so basic about serving people food and drink.  Maybe it sounds funny, but I think there's honor in serving something vital to life (even if it's a biiiig stretch calling hipster mac-n-cheese and high-end meatloaf "vital to life").