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").

I am the Walrus

NEW YORK TIMES

SCIENCE / ENVIRONMENT

Walruses Suffer Substantial Losses as Sea Ice Erodes

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Published: October 3, 2009

Half a century after they began recovering from industrial-scale hunting, walruses are facing a new threat.

Alicia de Larrocha

I've been watching, listening to various YouTube posts.  She was an incredible artist.
Here's a killer performance of De Falla's Danse rituelle du feu.  I especially love the shots of her eyes, widening and narrowing as she listens and plays.  She's so focused, and the music so intense!

And here's the first movement of the Schumann Fantasy Op.17, played with such emotional direction and color that it warms you like sunlight.

I'm so thankful for her music.  I hope her family is doing well, and can be comforted knowing that she brought beauty to so many people.

Overcoming inertia

Greg Wood/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Obama and Mr. Hu on Warming

Of more than 100 world leaders who gathered Tuesday at the United Nations for a summit meeting on climate change, two mattered most: Barack Obama and China’s president, Hu Jintao. Together their countries produce 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Together they can lead the way to an effective global response to this clear global threat. Or together they can mess things up royally.

Yes, and while world leaders meet in New York's perfect fall air, Australia is covered in the worst dust storms of the last 70 years.

Glorious, Beautiful, Awesome

From the 2009 Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest:

Thomas Davis (USA): Eta Carina Nebula (Highly Commended)

Nik Szymanek (UK): Milky Way (Highly Commended) 

You can see more award-winning, glorious and awesome photos here.

Oh, the yearnin

Man, this whole health and lack-of-health has magnified my usual sense of "what am i doing???"
I yearn, I crave, I search for a greater sense of purpose.  Isn't that familiar to almost everyone?  Is it human to want to know why you're here and what you're supposed to be doing?

I'm always drawn to people who project this quality, this ability to articulate and pursue purpose with great passion.  Maybe it'll rub off!  Maybe I'll learn by example.

I do learn, to some extent.  Most people who pursue their passions are driven by an ongoing sense of yearning -- they're not content with just success today, but want to know the what and why of it all tomorrow and far into the future.

What do I want?  What is my true path?

The Koran opens with a call to God, Lord of all Worlds, asking that God Show us the straight way.


The Lord's Prayer asks that God lead us not into temptation.

And so I appeal: Let my eyes and my heart be open, let me follow my path, Your path, love others and become more fully my truest self.  Let me be who I truly want to be!


On India's Railways, Women Find New Peace in Commute

Health and Illness

It's been a week since I got very, very sick.  Illness strips so much normal away and leaves you bare and fragile.  Now I'm finding my health returning, and I learn again that normal is utterly amazing.

Through all the drama and pain and fear, my family and friends buoyed me up and gave me strength.  They were generous and loving and simply there for me when I needed them desperately.
I'm so thankful for their help and love.  My family and friends are extraordinary, and my life is rich because I share life with them.

Thank God for them, and for good health!  May those in sickness be surrounded by love and strength and hope.

Orrin Harris, watching at the window, choosing the safety of being alone. I recognize this, feel the familiarity of sometimes wanting isolation more than the company of others who can hurt and disappoint me and can throw my shortcomings into high relief.

But withdrawing can't truly satisfy my heart. Being alone is more atrophy than shelter.

Oh yes, we can indeed

From THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Brain Is a Co-Conspirator in a Vicious Stress Loop

BY NATALIE ANGIER PUBLISHED: AUGUST 17, 2009

“According to Bruce S. McEwen, head of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at Rockefeller University, the new findings offer a particularly elegant demonstration of a principle that researchers have just begun to grasp. “The brain is a very resilient and plastic organ,” he said. “Dendrites and synapses retract and reform, and reversible remodeling can occur throughout life.”

“Why should the stressed brain be prone to habit formation? Perhaps to help shunt as many behaviors as possible over to automatic pilot, the better to focus on the crisis at hand. Yet habits can become ruts, and as the novelist Ellen Glasgow observed, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

It’s still August. Time to relax, rewind and remodel the brain.”

And here, the theory in practice! Utterly lovely.

Lutherans to Allow Sexually Active Gays as Clergy

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: August 21, 2009

No end in sight

But my God, we can choose new directions, right?

THE NEW YORK TIMES, Wed, August 19, 2009

C.I.A. Sought Blackwater’s Help in Plan to Kill Jihadists

Thanks be for increased transparency, accountability, disclosure. I know the need for security is genuine, but fear-born, hidden contracts of this nature surely don't give us actual security. Nope, only the illusion, like a blanket or a pacifier.

Thank God for Panetta's choice to lay this open to Congress. It can be so foolish and stubborn, but the individuals of the Congress and the institution itself do great good and necessary things, and all of it is nullified and neutered when the checks and balances are ignored. The truth will set us free -- and isn't freedom and liberty pretty essential to the very existence of the country the C.I.A is aiming to defend?

Grey behind the lens

I was caught today by the lovely images in the New York Times "Lens" blog essay on the photographer Grey Villet. There's such magic to the role of perspective in life. It's so utterly wonderful that we can capture our literal perspective with a camera.

In particular, the image of Grey and his wife Barbara is simply beautiful, caught in a moment of laughter, in the intimacy of a shared life, looking at someone or something beyond the photo's frame.

In my own albums and pictures, I love seeing the way that the people in the photo look at the person taking the picture. I see my mother smiling right at me in the photos I've taken of her, and I see myself looking at my father with love that's his alone in the photos he's taken of me. It's a dialogue, because only the person taking the photo could possibly see the photographed people that particular way, and in the gaze of the subject, you learn something about the way they see the person behind the camera.

"All of which gets back to the problem of reconciliation: What are the humanizing effects of culture? Evidently, there are none."

From this New York Times article written by Michael Kimmerman for the "Culture Abroad" series, on the brutal murder of Egyptian-born, Dresden resident Marwa-al-Sherbini. What heartbreak! What horror!

In the photos and memorial posters of her, her beautiful smile is all the more wrenching, knowing how her life ended. On July 1, 2009 "She was stabbed 18 times in a Dresden courtroom, in front of her 3-year-old son, judges and other witnesses, reportedly by the man appealing a fine for having insulted Ms. Sherbini in a park."

She was pregnant. Her husband was stabbed too as he defended her, and when the police arrived (I guess they don't have law enforcement in the court?) they shot him in the leg, thinking he was the attacker.

Kimmelman's article goes on to ask the question -- how, in a city of such restored architectural splendor and artistic and cultural wealth, can such ferocious xenophobia exist?

Although he concludes that there are no humanizing effects of culture, I find this answer too easy and pat.

A walk through the Louvre won't wipe anger from the heart of someone who nurtures and feeds their hatred and suspicion. Hitler was an artist, and was proud of the cultural superiority of the Germans -- look, our glorious culture gave rise to the magnificent Wagner!!

There is no one-step causal relationship between the arts and love of others.

But art IS an expression of a love. Creation of visual art, singing a song, writing a sonnet, working the turntables, is an expression of self, a learning of self, a calling out to the immensity of all that is outside each of us. When we share in art, look at the paintings, hear the music, read the poetry, give ourselves up to the story, we learn something of ourselves, and therefore of others, those who made the art we share, and those we share it with.

It's just not as simple as: surround someone with art, and fear of others and fear of the unknown will melt from their heart.

Life is not so simple.

Art can help us love more, but it must be part of the whole world loving more. Knowing more about other cultures, other religions, other peoples, absorbing the lesson again and again that, hey, no matter our differences, we're all human!; this must happen over and over and over, in school, in work, in practice, in play.

Oh, Marwa al-Sherbini, my heart breaks for you, your husband, your son, your friends. I don't know how it all works, but my God, Allah, oh Jehovah, be with them all. Help them be strengthened by love, help them in this most despairing of times. I cannot fathom the agony!!! My heart breaks.

Help them.

Help them.

Help us love ourselves and each other. Help us all.