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.