unreasonable.org

A supremely windy New Year's Eve (winds 25 to 35 mph with gusts up to 60, according to the weather service), bringing to mind all the metaphors of "winds of change". And also a Wednesday, the day I usually go running. So I headed out, and right at the start as soon as I turned on to Edmondson Avenue, bam! Into a headwind which was like a hand holding me back. Fortunately that was just for a short bit, once I got into the woods on the Trolly Trail I was screened from the wind by the trees and the lay of the land.

But after a while, I turned around and came back; and so at the end of my run, from the same wind I got a tailwind, speeding me along.

And I'll let you judge what sort of portent or metaphor that is. In any event, Happy New Year!

For many years, at the headquarters of our karate school in New York, students near the holidays do a "walking mediation" where they take food to homeless people on the street.

I've always thought that was a neat idea, but never did anything abou it until now. Christmas Eve I made up a bunch of bag lunches - each with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a Clif bar, a little piece of chocolate, and a small bottle of water - and yesterday I stopped off in the area around the stadiums, Conway Street between Howard and Light Streets, where there are always panhandlers and homeless people out, and gave out a few.

A few of the guys (I saw all men, no women, there) were pretty spaced out. Definitely not all there. I don't know if that's why they ended up on the streets, or if it's a product of their time there. But most were nice, thanked me, said "God bless you". Which actually made me feel more powerless than anything, that such a small act would be so responded to.

When I was a wee bitty lad, I - like most of my peers - believed in Santa Claus. I literally believed that there was a guy who lived at the North Pole, and had supernatural abilities, and showed up at our house (through the door, we having no chimney - I can remember asking my parents about this), and ate the cookies we left out, and left my brother and me a bunch of loot under the plastic tree.

Of course, I - like most of my peers - got over that. By the time I was seven or eight, certainly by age 10, I knew that of course there was no Santa. It was our parents! Liars who got their jollies by fooling little kids. A sad, even offensive, state of affairs.

But as I truly grew up, I saw that there was a still something to the "Christmas Spirit". Sure, there wasn't a magic guy with a flying sleigh, etcetera, but there was an aspect of the human experience, a generosity, that we could sensibly personify as the chubby fellow in red. Santa didn't live at North Pole, but in the human heart. Yes, Santa was our parents - humans incarnating a mythological role, each becoming for a moment here and there the avatar of that Christmas Spirit.

Now, when I was a wee bitty lad, I - like most of my peers - believed in God, specifically in the Catholic Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I literally believed that there was a magic guy (well, three guys, sort of, but really one) who lived outside the Universe in Heaven, that he/they had made the world, that he/they had come down and been born as a human 2,000 years ago, the works.

Of course, I - unlike most of my peers - got over that. By the time I was 13 I had rejected Catholic doctrine as a bunch of bunk, and by age 20 I called myself an atheist. Of course there were no gods.

But now, having grown up at least a little bit more, even though I will call myself an atheist in some contexts, I will call myself a pantheist in others. Just as I don't believe in a supernatural being at the North Pole who makes toys, I don't believe in supernatural beings in "Heaven" who made the Universe. But, just as I see a sort of "Christmas Spirit" in human experience and sometimes find it useful to hang the image of Old Saint Nick on that, so I know the mystical experience, and find it useful to hang the image of Pan or Dainichi Buddha or Aphrodite or Shiva or Eris (All hail Discordia!), or even once in a while that poor old carpenter Jeshua ben Joseph, on it. The gods and goddesses live not in some heavenly realm, but in our hearts and minds, in every aspect of human experience.

So, Merry Yule to all. I hope you get a nice chance to be Santa this year - and a nice chance to be god(dess) all the time.

Thanksgiving and old girlfriends - this morning I checked Facebook and saw that a former paramour had broken up with her beau...this evening I met up with another who told me how she (finally!) had dumped her loser boyfriend. So is this a pattern, dump your lover now before you have to buy them a Christmas present? Could be a subject for someone's doctoral dissertation in socioeconomics....

Took the dogs to the vet this morning, and it turns out they both need minor procedures done. I'll pick them up this evening or tomorrow morning.

It is so quiet here now with no fuzzy ones under foot...

I've put up a rough draft of a new chapter for Why Buddha Touched The Earth. Here's an excerpt:

For believers in the paranormal, all these coincidences and visions and unexplained events are evidence of some sort of supernatural entities or powers. To the skeptical, they are the operation of random chance given meaning by the overeager pattern-recognition circuits of the brain, or illusions or delusions or hallucinations, malfunctions of the sensory nervous system.

From a Zen Pagan perspective, neither of these explanations is satisfactory. The true believer's approach makes claims about the objective universe that don't hold up to controlled experiment and observation. The skeptic's neurological reductionism neglects the fact that most events in the universe occur outside of laboratory controls, and ignores the person to whom the experience is happening. The subjective dimension is flattened out.

When we practice ritual, or engage in meditation, or seek otherwise to alter our consciousness, we expect to see and experience strange and unusual things. To encounter "spirits" or to have some other sort of transpersonal experience after staying up all night dancing or drumming around a bonfire, or fasting for days, or sitting unmoving in mediation for hours at a time, or ingesting strange herbs, or working yourself into a ritual frenzy, is not odd. To the practitioner, these experience are the goal of the work.

Dismissing the experience as "mere delusion" is like calling a performance of Bach fugue a "mere disturbance of air". It is technically correct, and even captures important information - understanding that disturbance of air allows for the proper acoustic design of concert halls, after all. But it misses the aesthetic dimension that makes the whole thing worthwhile.

In the same way, calling a shaman's vision a "hallucination" may be accurate, even useful in certain contexts. (If someone was going to risk their life or well-being on information that came to them in a vision, for example, it would be good to point out that such information is not a reliable guide to objective reality.) But it misses the mystical element, the deep emotional content, of the experience.

Heading for Kate's party last night, I was headed west on Edmondson Avenue, about to turn left on Old Frederick Road. A car coming the other way got into the right lane, pulled out into the intersection, stopped, put his left blinker on, and just stood there. WTF? As I tried to go around him, I saw the driver waving at me. Guess he was lost.

I rolled down my window.

"Excuse me," he yelled, "can you tell me how to get to Edmondson Avenue, back in the the city?" (For those who don't know, I'm a short way out into the suburbs of Baltimore, just a few miles from the city line.)

"Well, this is Edmondson."

"You're kidding!"

"Nope. Just keep going the way you're going and it'll take you into the city."

"Thanks!" And we each went on our way.

This is certainly a metaphor for something, isn't it?

Tom's Post-Election Reflections: 2008

My friends,

Four years ago, I sent out a little screed about the disappointment of the 2004 elections (http://www.infamous.net/election2004msg.html). It seems fitting, after recent events, to send out a follow-up.

So. Wow. This is a new experience. For the first time in my life - all the way back to that "Weekly Reader" mock election in 1976 - the Presidential candidate for whom I voted, has won. (Yes, I voted for Ford when I was six. Ah, the folly of youth.)

Last October, I wrote that Obama and Kucinich were my favorites among the major party candidates, and praised Obama's commonsense take on nuclear disarmament, diplomacy with rival nations, and the demonstration of patriotism by action rather than by jewelry.

Given my history with Presidential candidates, I figured that my positive reaction meant that his campaign was doomed.

As it turned out, somehow this time was different.

Yes, I was disappointed along the way: Obama's backpedaling on marijuana decriminalization, his reversal on FISA, his softening stance on getting us the hell out of Iraq, and his failure to stand up for full legal equality for gay and lesbian couples, saddened me.

I thought about giving my vote to Cynthia McKinney (the Green Party candidate) or Ralph Nader. But in the end, when I marked my ballot next to the name Barack Obama, I felt good. I felt proud.

And on Tuesday I left Maryland and joined thousands of other volunteers in Virginia. I got partnered up with a Navy veteran (a gay submarine veteran, no less!) and we walked around Reston, knocking on doors and reminding Obama supporters to vote. And we helped get the state that at one time held the capital of the Confederate States of America, to cast its electoral votes for the first black President.

Wow.

Now what?

I fell in love again last night. This time it was the girl at the tollbooth at the Fort McHenry tunnel. She was blond, hair bobbed just above the shoulders, a navy blue watch cap contrasting nicely with her orange safety vest. I could see this job wasn't her life ambition, she was working it for a greater purpose, and I wanted to know what it was, help her toward it. As she gave me my change from my $20 bill I saw a small tattoo on her forearm above her glove, I wanted to ask her about it, get a better look, but there were cars behind me...and so I moved on...

Friday, I went to the "Evening With an Angel on a Jazz Note" event for the Allison Fisher Memorial Fund. Allison was a middle school and high scholl classmate, who (I learned last year at our 20th reunion) died of breast cancer a decade ago. Also there were Alan Reese, our middle school English teacher, and old classmates Melissa Buis and Scott Winneki and Carol Gilpen. I'd seen Melissa and Carol last year at the reunion, and I see Alan around the Baltimore poetry scene, but I hadn't seen Scott since eighth grade...he's now a pediatrician! And Melissa, a professor. So we had a little mini-reunion...Alan brought some old photos, and Scott brought old yearbooks. And we reminisced about Allison.

Tonight's exercise: write about ancestry, both genealogical and metaphorical, and how it shapes your opinion/understanding of art.

Statistically, I'm sure that
somewhere in my great-great-great-umpity-great grandparents was a painter or sculptor
someone whose eyes and hands were connected to record their visions.

That gene didn't make it down to me.