Cupertino

Annie Love Sunshine

2011-02-02T15:13:00.000-05:00

this is her.

photo credit to @thepaulist

we'll have been married for five years in april. we'll have been together a fifth of my lifetime.

we've grown up together. grown old together. grown young together.

she's the one my thoughts wander to when we're apart.

she's the smile I come home to.

she's the one I dream with. together we can take on anything: nothing is too small, no feat is too large.

she keeps me warm, fed, clothed, housed.

she encourages me when I'm down.

she instills wonder in the every day.

she makes me more myself.

she's my best friend. my lover. the poem in my heart. the song in my soul.

I love her.

Cafe Takesi Bolivia

2011-01-29T11:14:00.000-05:00

When Zoka Coffee Roaster and Tea Company proclaimed a few weeks ago that it would be selling a limited amount of the highest grown coffee in the world, I put a note in my calender and dug out my Groupon. I have a penchant for coffees grown at higher elevations. As one climbs, I feel that the fruit and flower notes come to the fore, especially as the coffee cools.

Cafe Takesi is cultivated at elevations between 6200' and 8500', an almost absurd height for coffee. The highest coffee I've ever had previous to this was George Howell's Terroir Coffees El Vergel, grown at 6100' (if you recall I raved about it last July). Cafe Takesi takes its name from the river valley where they are grown. This coffee won a Cup of Excellence in 2009 as well; no small feat. Apparently the Inca Trail runs right through the farm, other than placing it on the Western side of the Andes, that fact hasn't helped me find the location of either the river valley or the farm. Maybe I'll ask Jeff Babcock this weekend when I'm in Seattle.

My 12oz of these sold-out beans arrived last night and I just made a cup after coming home from pilates (so good to be back in the swing of having a core).

I filtered a fresh pot of water, ground up 26g, prewetted my paper Hario v60 filter, and slow poured 12oz at 204 degrees. The bloom was amazing. I need to wait ~40 seconds next time for a denser puck and a better pour. Nevertheless, it turned out well.

Like the El Vergel, this coffee has definite belgian ale lightness, almost floating to the roof of your mouth. Smooth, syrupy going down, finishing with a bread/yeast/graham cracker like taste. The fruit notes are super complex. Oranges, raisins... well, smells like citrus and feels like raisins. Chewy almost. Mellow. Sugary, but in a super subtle way. Like a sweet potato or a beet.

I'm going to have to ponder this one; one of the more complex coffees I've had.

happy sipping!

end of month update

2011-01-28T23:05:00.000-05:00

Hello friends!

while I have not been writing a lot here, I have been writing vast amounts elsewhere. sorry for the quietness. here's what has been going on:

we visited philadelphia last weekend to visit some dear friends: beautiful city, lovely times. can't wait to go back.

i've been catching up on school: reworking a 40-50pg paper, writing blog posts for kaplan, really getting into classes & notes for those classes. i love all my work, it's just a matter of not letting it overwhelm me.

my business partner paul and i have been hammering out a logo design for fizzy media, our new llc w/meggie, a good friend of mine & bril artist. we're also setting up a few sites for some clients and working on getting our company's page off the ground. loving being an entrepreneur. deeply.

applying for jobs and networking in seattle, where I want to be this summer. part of me just wants to focus on web development, but a legal job is crucial for further career development. honestly, i love law as well, so really its just a matter of finding a job that combines the web and law. shouldn't be too hard, right?

working out some good transitions w/the wifey: from student to breadwinner for me and from breadwinner to stay-at-home mother/blogger/crafter/photographer extraordinaire for her. it's a new stage of life and we're incredibly blessed and excited for it. excited to be a father to this little girl, hopefully some day soon.

getting back into running: ~ 20miles a week. took last week off b/c my lower legs always take a bit to catch up and injuries suck.

really learning to leverage the various social medias available to us: tumblr, twitter, readers, plugins, codes, all kinds of brilliance all over the place. it's awesome to be riding this technological wave.

anyway, i'm going to be in seattle this weekend and the beginning of next week in a slew of interviews and meeting. look for some coffee posts before too long! in the meanwhile, check my updates on tumblr and twitter. some amazing beauty and interesting ideas to be had.

namaste my friends

2011 Resolutions

2011-01-08T17:48:00.000-05:00

i) reorient my life to my values, rather than orient my life to external demands. I find that I easily wrap myself up in the demands others make on me. not necessarily a bad thing, but one that I am going to change this year. I want to spend more present and conscious time w/my wife. I want to have coffee with good friends. I want to read fiction. these things will only improve my grades and career prospects. I know this. I've tested it. 2011 is for making this a reality.

ii) recreating and blending career plans. I jumped on the work-at-a-big-firm-until-your-debts-are-paid-off bandwagon with a vengeance 1L year. it's a good career path! but I'm not sure it is for me. my career ideas are really broadening and incorporating my own interests. perhaps because the job market isn't great. perhaps because a few people close to me who are movers and shakers in the legal field are rethinking the world of law. perhaps because I live and breathe the entrepreneurial life. who knows. all I know is, that my career path will be my own. I'm tired of listening to "the way it is done." know, that if I am a barista in 15 years, it's what I wanted to do. ;)

iii) remembering that my physical being and my intellectual being are one. I alway seem to forget diet and exercise when the going gets rough. all that does is make the going rougher. this year I'm sticking with my running schedule, integrating a pilates/yoga routine, and paying attention to my diet. goals: sub 3:10 Boston qualifier; body weight btwn 155-160lbs; 300 pushups at one time; and a regular yoga practice.

iv) growing Fizzy Media, LLC. My good friend Paul and I started a web development company. we have a few clients and a list of wild ideas. we're going to make them real. we're going to learn much in the process.

v) living minimalism. I don't need a lot. but I feel I do. this year will be an exercise in parsing out the unnecessary.

namaste, my friends.

Who are you?

2011-01-02T16:39:00.000-05:00

You know those days you look in the mirror and realize you haven't seen yourself in weeks? Two-thousand-and-ten was a speeding freight train of revolving weeks of that feeling. Sometimes I was standing on top of the train, wind in my hair, arms out-stretched, thrilling the sky. Other days the train just pulled me along behind, bumping along the railroad ties, usually trying to study while doing so. I didn't really blog as a result, and my life was poorer for it. Let me recap a bit though, going into this New Year. After all, anything worth doing is worth doing badly. ;)

My sister-in-law Vivers decided to move from Long Beach to Boston in January! We spent five awesome months together watching Friends, wandering Boston, getting lost, looking for work, having long discussions over dinner, and living the life. She moved out to her own place after she found a full-time position (in her desired field nonetheless), but she's close and we're blessed to see her often.
Anne and I started the domestic adoption process in April. Still finding words to express the joy of being in this process. Anne (she-of-the-golden-tongue) has several powerful posts on this incredible journey here: http://renidemus.blogspot.com/.
I finished my first year of law school at Boston College Law. I had a blast. It was both harder and easier than I anticipated. I am so glad for the opportunity to be in law school, even in this terrible economy. It's what I am meant to do. and I love doing it.
I didn't have gainful employment during the school year for the first time since 2003. In retrospect, I would have worked 20hrs/wk. Work + school makes Taylor a better student. I missed working. I missed having something different to turn to during a long day of productivity.
I made new friends and caught up with so many old friends. Social media is amazing. Those who hate it don't understand it.

I also discovered a lot about myself:

I love IPAs. especially Imperial IPAs. Stone Brewery helped me fall in love with drinking a pine tree. Somehow they remind me of the whole West Coast. Brewery based in San Diego helping me remember the pine forests of Washington State.
I miss not playing my cello. seriously. I played for nine years and then left it in the case the last three. Time to change that.
I love to read and that means I love to write. All kinds of things. I'm good at it too. I never seem to actually do any writing though. I procrastinate on papers, I leave aside blog posts, I only occasionally write a piece of short fiction. Hm.
I'm not sure I can spend my life working for someone else. I can do it. I like doing it. But it doesn't allow me to create in the same way as starting my own venture. I start things. I begin things. It's what I do naturally and best.

Reading really took a central role in my life this year. I was doing hundreds of pages of it for law school and needed something real to keep my mind going. I subscribed to The Paris Review, One Story, the New Yorker, and Zoetrope. I blazed through The Master and Margarita (which I'm still trying to understand: a beautiful, wild book). I reread many more books as well. I delved deeper into my poetic mainstays: Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert, Robert Hass, Seamus Heaney, and Jane Hirshfield. It balanced out my law school experience, I'm certain.

That was 2010. A ramble, and conveyed in the manner I recall it. Here's to the New Year!

Being Able to Say: "That Was Awesome!"

2010-10-05T11:25:00.000-04:00

I tend to come out the Gates of Summer roaring like a lion ready for fresh meat: new ideas, new people, new projects, new experiences. Two weeks into the semester the weight of the promised towers above me, curling and foaming like a bright green wave against the setting sun. "I do this every year." I tell myself as I crunch acorns under foot on the way home from class. "What happened to having time to read Dostoevsky and The Paris Review? What happened to daily yoga practice and PRing an October half marathon? What happened to blogging?" I glance up at our third floor apartment, windows glowing orange with the warm light within. These questions linger as I trudge up the stairs and turn my key in the lock.

Inside, the inimitably dressed Archie Goodwin banters with the wise and bulky Nero Wolfe who is downing a German pint as my wife bustles in the kitchen. "Ah," I think to myself, making sense of the inattentively gathered scents on the way of the stairs "we are indeed having fig and olive roast chicken for dinner!" I wander through the living room, backpack a-sway (I always forget I have it until that moment), and wrap up my Love in an embrace, soaking in her hue, smell, warmth, and flavor. "Hello my Love! How was your day?" "My day?" the question catches me off guard in a sense because I have to pull it out of my experiential flow, "it was good!" I go on to recount chronologically the events of the day, recalling agenda items as I wander from place to place with my voice. "Let me grab a pint and brain dump for a moment, Love."

Swinging off my backpack, I slide onto a chair at the kitchen table and pull out my moleskine. I'm a huge lists person. Lists remove things from my head and make them concrete and recallable for me on a page. I categorize under four areas: school, student orgs, work, and life. School always comes first on my list. I don't know why really, maybe it's because it's such an expensive area of my life. Maybe because I spend the most time there, but certainly not because I value it most out of all those categories. I pore over a page entitled "10/4-8: Agenda:"
Homework: check. "It's all reading, and I love reading. Besides, I'll have time for Thursday and Friday on Thursday morning. Oh yeah, that patent posting for Cyberlaw needs to happen. Damn business school class."
Note research and writing: "I won't ever really be done but it's progressing, I'll work on it more this evening. Thank God I get to choose the topic. Can't imagine having to spend this kind of time on something I didn't love. Hopefully I don't make it too philosophical for my editors. It'll be an amazing paper. Ooh, I need to talk to Kohler about the Dialectic of Community."
Student Organizations: "Public Interest Law and the coordinating Mock Trial are both taking more time than anticipated. Well, maybe not PIL. Treasurer is pretty basic and routine. It's all the meetings. They are killer. Mock Trial has been amazing, but rewriting the problem was a workload I didn't plan on. Ah well, it's good to be meeting with people and working on practical things."
Fizzy Media: "Man, I love web development and learning PHP/CSS/HTML5 but I wish it was my full time job. I could do this for a living. Well, I am actually. I just hate doing it part time. It's the only reason school is getting old: I hate working part time. All these apps and opportunities! It's a whole new language and I'm on the cutting edge. Can't wait to blend it with law."
Life: ...

Looking up, I realize fifteen minutes have wandered by and dinner is nearly ready. "I heard from the adoption lady today!" Annie says, her words full of light. "She said the birth mother from two weeks ago has thought about our book and would like to meet with us." Instantly my world is back in the here-and-now, heady-organic, ripeness overflowing of human life, married life. In the swift transition I recall Fr. Peter's homily from Sunday, "Do everything you do so at the end of it you'll be able to say, 'That was Awesome!'" If you do everything with that sort of energy, that sort of drive, that sort of overwhelming joy, nothing is too hard, nothing is too mundane, nothing can keep you from pumping your dreams full of adrenaline and flying them to the stars.

When you are done with your day, peering out of the cloud-wrack of this world, your body bearing man's smirch and sharing man's smell, steam rising from the murk and moil of vasty agenda, can you still say, "that was Awesome!"

Why not?

Awake, and Live.

2010-09-10T18:09:00.000-04:00

"But to the spirit which has stripped off for a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlasting forest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are as incredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are like gigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells on their stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other. Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terrible landscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here a miraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with the hues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would not have dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child in the fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sage whose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becoming larger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smaller and smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance; the whole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost to him as is the life of the infusoria to a man without a microscope. He rises always through desolate eternities. He may find new systems, and forget them; he may discover fresh universes, and learn to despise them. But the towering and tropical vision of things as they really are—the gigantic daisies, the heaven-consuming dandelions, the great Odyssey of strange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of dust like the wreck of temples, and thistledown like the ruin of stars--all this colossal vision shall perish with the last of the humble." - GKC

A Cupping at Terrior Coffee

2010-08-03T20:30:00.000-04:00

Hello Friends,

That post on El Vergel two weeks ago was picked up and retweeted by the company that produces that gem, among many other excellent single-origin coffees, Terroir Coffee. We tweeted back and forth a few times with the result that last Wednesday, I made the trek out to Acton, MA to cup this season's Kenyans with the owner, George Howell, the quality control ninja Jenny, two of the roasters Jacko and Doug, and a lovely couple from Quebec.

I managed to get lost in finding the nondescript headquarters building, but the smell of roasting coffee through my open window soon had me on the right track. As I walked in, George was just beginning a tour of their beautiful facilities with the Quebecers (one of whom was wearing Toms, as I was, and the other wearing Birkenstocks (I so need to visit Quebec: Toms, Birkenstocks, and a love of coffee? YES)). The facilities were immaculate and everyone was working in happy harmony as we wandered about learning about different storage methods, the idiosyncrasies of different countries and the wealth of information that only a legend in Third-Wave coffee can deliver. George has been in the coffee business for thirty-five years and really pioneered, in many ways, the high-end coffees that are available today. He brought this love and wisdom from the West Coast (*cough* where all things good and beautiful originate) to the East Coast and remains an influential player in the global high-quality, artisanal coffee arena.

I was able to meet the roaster responsible for one of the best coffee experiences I've had, Doug Sparks, who roasted the El Vergel I raved about. See, I have this thing for high-altitude Guatemalans and it takes considerable skill to bring out the lofty, bright notes in those coffees. There is a huge element of science but an even larger element of understanding the bean itself, it's potential, it's nature... only the best roasters can make such wonders sing. One such is Doug Sparks.

After the tour we gathered in the cupping room where ten different Kenyans were laid out by Jenny, who also had roasted them. The cupping process is one of carefully woven art and science. For each coffee offering there are six old-fashioned-sized glasses of grounds arranged around a table so all the cuppers can access them easily. There are several stages, all of which have their own ranking system for the purposes of Cup of Excellence rankings or buyer's analysis:

Aroma: first the grounds are sniffed as they sit in the cup, then the cupper shakes the cup to release the pent-up vapors in the dry grounds, keeping his/her nose close to the cup at all times. The third aroma-focused period is, after the water has been poured into the grounds and the crust noted, the cupper takes her/his spoon and breaks the crust, stirring 2-3 times. Again, the cupper should keep his/her nose as close to the surface as she/he can.

Using a spoon, the cupper will take a taste of each of the coffees, from all six cups, aspirating strongly for each one, so he/she can experience the full effect of the coffee on the senses. At this stage, the cupper is looking for several things:

Taste: as the coffee cools, different flavor profiles will emerge and decrease. A coffee that tastes decent in the beginning can become a favorite, while an initial favorite can decrease in the passage of time and drop in temperature. Not unlike a novel, no one can really tell if a cup of coffee is really good until it is finished. Rolling each sip over the tongue, allowing it to interact with each tastebud, this stage composes most of the cupping experience.

Mouth-feel: as apposed to taste, mouth-feel speaks to the way the coffee coats the inside of your mouth, the feeling that it leaves after it is swallowed (or spat out in the case of cupping), and the "weight" of the coffee's body.

The coffees were numbered and we quickly discovered that three coffees rose to the fore. Numbers 9 and 10 won out, and for different reasons. Nine had this beautifully keen acidity that sang high notes as it went out, but Ten had the completely coated mouth-feel of an epic Kenyan. A few of the other coffees were notably old, giving them a stale taste that grew as they cooled. Some tasted fine to begin with and slowly aged, others were okay, but not remarkable in any particular way.

As we finished up, George explained that he would roast the coffees again, do another blind cupping of all ten, and based on the results of both, he would place his orders. A complex and lengthy process, but one that results in the best coffee, from the best and most careful farmers.

After the cupping I headed home, three bags of coffee in hand, a better understanding of the current state of Kenyan coffees, and a place and faces to attach to the Terroir I often find in my hand.

Coding and Development

2010-07-24T16:57:00.000-04:00

When I was a kid in high school, I taught myself how to design websites using free editors and online tutorials. Eleven years, no classes, and four paying web design jobs later, I'm still cobbling together sites based on the little coding that I know. This summer though, I've decided to develop this enduring interest into something I can call my own.
Yesterday I bought six domains and unlimited web hosting for three purposes:

Two friends and I are starting a web development company to pursue our common interest. We already have several clients: a couple not-for-profits, an individual or two, and two student group websites. We hope to be incorporated by the end of the summer and look forward to the future!
A coffee blog. I love coffee, and between my love of coffee, writing, and web design, we figured we could make something awesome happen.
Personal and family blogs. We're a story-telling family, what can I say?

With these things in mind, I'm spending solid time every day really learning what I'm doing from a design and usability point of view. My coding skills are decent and a good groundwork from which to build everything else. So here is to Lynda.com, Dreamweaver, Wordpress, and a few kind friends who are willing to help me grow!

Kiamabara

2010-07-21T16:17:00.002-04:00

Woke up in the morning feeling like... a cup of Terrior Kiamabara. I find that I have to alternate between continents to really parse out the nuances of a cup. Well, maybe I don't HAVE to, but it certainly makes it easier and more interesting. At any given time I usually have three different coffees in the house, sometimes as many as seven, but that is usually during finals. and therefore more than understandable. i think.

Anyway, the Kiamabara is a Kenyan from the Nyeri region, in the central highlands. Kenya is known for its high quality wet processing and generally superb coffee. It's a solid Arabica Bourbon of the SL 28 and SL 34 cultivars, beautiful to behold and intoxicating ground. During a particularly rough week last semester, I ground this beauty up and had it in a small glass jar next to my work station and in class so I could keep the aroma around... just lovely.

The usual Hario cone (I use it often, but also particularly for high altitude coffees because the high, bright fruit and flower notes don't benefit from coffee filings ala French press or gold filter Melitta) brought out the rich blackberries and currants. The fruit lacing mellowed as the cup cooled, but still remained as strong as blueberries to the last drop. Honestly, the only other cup I've had that had more fruit than this one (and it was an absurd amount of fruit... like fruit punch w/caffeine and blackness) was Great Barrington's Ethiopian Nekisse. Remarkable, but also a solid representative of Kenya, wet processing, and the Nyeri region.

I sipped the majority of it in a travel mug while waiting for the 86 bus in Harvard Square and reading The Four-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. It was all the better for the setting :)

Rethinking Time and Actions

2010-07-21T11:34:00.004-04:00

Probably stemming from my English-major mother of ten, I love reading books that help you focus your time and energies in better ways. Here's a few that I've really enjoyed, two very recently:

1. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Sure, its old and the title sounds like you're desperate and/or a hypnotist, but this books has so many wonderful little ideas for maintain a better outlook on interpersonal interactions. So many of the little things in conversations, in meeting someone for the first time, in correcting someone gently get lost in our "must please everyone all the time or else my ratings will go down" world. There is so much value to be had in the space between Bitch and Pushover but we forget about it all the time. This book gives comprehensive advice for becoming a better friend and communicator, not through being fake, but through noticing the little things.

How can you lose with these as your roadmap:

1) become genuinely interested in other people,

2) smile,

3) remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language,

4) be a good listener, encourage others to talk about themselves,

5) talk in terms of the other person's interests,

6) make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely.

I still keep these in my head and work on them... they just make me a better person.

2. The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss

A dear friend and mentor once told me that life can be divided into four boxes: the urgent important, the urgent unimportant, the not urgent important, and the not urgent unimportant. Tim has this down to a science. His mantra is DEAL. That is,

Definition: define what is important, what your goals are, and how what you're doing helps you in achieving those goals.

Elimination: get rid of everything that doesn't help in the achievement of those goals, including wasted time in the unimportant.

Automation: put everything that doesn't require intelligence on autopilot or delegate/outsource the details that you can. (I think he takes this one a bit far, but the lesson is still there)

Liberation: frees you to do the things you want to do.

I'm not done with the book, so I'll have to give you an update when I do, but so far it has blown my mind with its super de-stressing approach to "time-management." Tim makes the point that it is not so much that we have too many things to do, but that we let distractions, poor thinking, and indiscriminate action take up all our time. Little things like checking your email only twice a day, essentially screening calls, and forcing people to interact with you in a succinct and precise manner can make all the difference.

3. Guerrilla Networking by Jay Levinson and Monroe Mann

The first two books were, while practically oriented, more focused on the theory behind the practice. Guerrilla Networking has a mere twenty-five pages of "theory" and the rest of the book is solid, practical examples of how to implement and focus your efforts in their re-thought model. Having been to many "traditional" networking events, both in undergrad and grad school, I must say that their approach makes all kinds of sense.

Levinson and Mann note that the people you want to meet are already meet-able. What you need to work on is making yourself stand out to those you want to meet. Often people constrict themselves to a traditional mode of application and interview, hoping that they will be able to distinguish themselves via their single sheet of paper and twenty minutes. Guerrilla Networking throws this approach on its head. You make the meeting times and places, you contact the people you want to work for, you make yourself the one that they want to me. It's an interesting concept and one with a lot of value.

What this approach does is change you from the passive to the active mode. It fosters your creativity and instills energy in the process. It makes you more of an independent contractor, rather than a cog in the system.

All three of these books are well worth the read. Foster creativity, free yourself from the routines that just develop rather than the ones you choose, and remember that everyone puts on their pants one leg at a time, even those giants you want to work for.

El Vergel

2010-07-20T16:17:00.002-04:00

Terroir Coffee has done it again in their Guatemala offering: El Vergel sweeps the senses.

I picked up this coffee at Crema in Harvard Square, just a few days off the roaster and brewed a cup via the Hario cone method (cloth filter/H2O just below boiling) the next morning.

The first sip was like chocolate and nuts, but somehow just their pure flavors because none of the weight was there. Certainly El Vergel is full bodied, but in the same way that a Belgian quadrupel is full bodied: light, high, keen, razor-sharp. A sort of sweet acidity, boarding on the piquant lifted the dark chocolate, hazelnuts, and almonds to a sort of ethereal level.

As the coffee cooled, the nutty chocolate flavor moved out of the candy-like realm to a bright berry/citrus, only further accented by the Hario cone brew method. Pure delight. Angel food cake.

Highly recommend this one, from the Patsun region of Guatemala. Bourbon varietal (does this varietal know no bounds? it just keeps on delivering) grown at the impossible height of 6100' as @GeorgeHowell tells me. I am looking forward to learning more about the farm where this beauty hails as home.

Enjoy!

Writing and Habit

2010-07-20T14:50:00.002-04:00

Hello Friends, (aka, those brave souls who may still have me on their Google Reader)

Here's a bit of a catch up.

So, I finished 1L year:

It took vasty amounts of time, even more than that summer I worked 80 hours a week as a barista and coffee wholesaler and was a full time student at the same time, but it was totally worth it.
I learned to write in ways I didn't know were possible and loved the process, even though it knocked me down and repeatedly ran over me with a Hummer. Out of two sets of first drafts I set the bottom of the curve. Out of two sets of final drafts I set the top. Here's to learning and not grades right?
I made friends all over the place. Seriously, law school is like a concentration of diversity and awesomeness.
I'm stoked for the opportunities that law can open up. Going through the 2011 Summer Job Apps for firms in the Pacific Northwest has opened my eyes to the wide variety of amazing things a law degreed person can do. Stay tuned for updates.

That whole writing experience of 1L year (by far harder than finals) taught me that I love writing and will never give it up. What I'm good at though is letting things slide and be forgotten.

Like yoga.
Like pilates.
Like my running schedule.
Like taking my vitamins and drinking enough water.
Like reading instead of bouncing from link to link online.
Like really learning CSS and HTML5.
Like writing daily. fiction. articles. dreams. ideas. posts.
Like maintaining a conscious breath instead of letting the whims of the urgent unimportant rule.
Like meeting with friends.
Like responding to my pen pals.

habitus overtake me.

Every Morning

2010-02-10T15:55:00.001-05:00

Do you want to know how I wake up every morning?

Listen: http://tinyurl.com/yjrhk4y

What dreams I remember are wild, wooly adventures in a hyper-reality where I can fly, teleport, communicate with multiple people at the same time and understand things as they are in themselves. That accounts for the first two minutes, approximately of the song above.

Having been all sorts of fantastic things, met hoards of fabulous people, and wandered all over the mossy dream world (always mossy, must be the Seattle child in me) around 1:30 I hear the call of the waking world, the world where dreams can become reality, not just for me, but for every one I meet, every one I love, every rich, unique person in their nearly infinite complexity. It's sobering really, but certainly, deeply exciting.

About 2:30 I began to shift to awakeness. The sun is dawning on a world entirely new, a world that didn't have to be there for me to wake to. The earth spins, letting the sun dance up the sky, lighting up the rushing waves as they too hurry to greet us.

Breathe in my friends, Aure Entuluva! Day has come again! Become one with and yet a member of the Great Dance, the Dance we've been a part of from the beginning, not merely because of who we are, but because of the gifts we've been given.

Dance through your day with your brothers, sisters, friends.

Live. Love. Dream.

Day has come again.

The Usual Day

2010-01-27T13:25:00.004-05:00

I wake at 6am nearly every day. When I'm caught up on sleep I'm an awesome morning person and get mountains of work/exercise/life done in the wee dark hours when the newspaper persons beat the streets. When I'm not caught up on sleep I kinda sit in the dark and think about being awake. Usually I'll be alive enough to brew a pot of tea/cup of coffee and make some oatmeal. Class starts at either 8:30am (MW) or 10am (TRF) and it takes between 20 and 60 minutes to get to school via school shuttles. While I have a car I hate it (well not it, just the idea of it and using it. it's a pretty cute beastie all told and has seen us all over the USA: Yosemite, Glacier, Chicago, Death Valley, NY...) and never use it unless what we're getting is too heavy or impossible to get to via public transportation... or cycle.

Anyway, I wander off to school glorying in the noises of the city or in the pulsing, throbbing life-that-is-trance in my Skullcandy. Coffee in hand. I've realized that the coffee is very important. I don't need the caffeine; I've tested that theory and have proved that I'm good and awake without it. I need it because it tastes sooo good. It's like my insta-break mid-conversation, drift-off catcher in class, and connection to living things that grow and aren't cement/frozen/gray. I imagine the hills where the coffee is from, the certainly-poor-but-not-really-worse-off-because-they-live-in-green-hills coffee farmers, the journey of the bean, the roastmaster who realizes the potential lying within the bean, and my careful selection and preparation of the end product. Ah. Richness. Bliss. Coffee.

It's good to ride public transportation because you get to talk with other people and make friends... you know, be a social being. Much better than flipping off the honker you just cut off, Dirty Harry raging in your head (You think you're lucky? Well do ya, punk?"). It's fun to take an open mug and ride the wave too. Reminds me of the ocean. I need that.

Anyway, arriving at school the grind of the day begins. The only way I get anything done is by catching it with a net as it passes through my consciousness and writing it down, physically, pen & paper style. No list, nothing gets done, primarily because I believe there is nothing to do. If it wasn't on my list/calendar it doesn't exist. (This is kind of true in a very real sense too. but I won't bore you with that.) So I look at my schedule, the various bitty notes along the side, the homework assignments, the meetings, the classes, the errands: and I jump on the treadmill.

Honestly, I love it. Ideas, applications, intellectual challenge, the vast conversation of understanding going on between me, the professor, my texts, my classmates, and history never ceases to amaze me. I've felt the world change, seen the visual overlay shift just from understanding. Learn, learn, learn all you can. Never stop. Don't learn for your job, for your career, for the letters after your name, because you can't think of anything else to do... learn because it shapes your world, who you are, and what you become in supremely profound ways. Down to the reality you experience.

Around 3:30 (MTW) or 12:30 (RF) classes and meetings are usually done and it's time for homework. Loads of it. It never ends. If I don't have any then I need another list.

Sometimes I'll head the library, other times I'll head home. Both are great places to study but have varying levels of distraction. I think wifeys and good friends are inherently distracting. But that is a good thing.

Three things I've noticed that would really make me feel better about life in general (which is hard to do because life is pretty freaking amazing):

1) Sleep such that I can run/yoga/exercise in the am. I can do it. I have done it. It would be good for me and everyone around me would cease hearing me bitch, therefore it would be good for them.

2) During that late afternoon/evening study time I should head to a cafe once a week, to spice things up, see different places, and read in transit. Mmm need to remember that. Reading in transit is important.

3) Make solid space in the evening for relaxing w/my Love. Often just leaving it "open" makes it seem disposable and therefore overlooked... homework runs into the evening, we'll veg when we don't really need to and could be doing something more interactive... hm. That one warrants more thought.

How do your days run? What ideas do you have that could enrich the flow?

namaste

Renewal

2010-01-25T12:35:00.002-05:00

I've a really good feeling about this year:

1) marriage is awesome, continually challenging us (me in particular... the Wife seems to get it all before I do) to reach new heights of self-appropriation, friendship, and self-giving. A sort of microcosm of the universe in that sense. We had several solid opportunities over break to think/talk about how we hope this year to turn out and fit into the overall goals of our lives... and it's exciting! Yay for love!

2) i'm slowly acclimatizing to school, realizing that it is indeed something that I want to do and care passionately about. I think I'll always be a philosopher at heart and always bring theory into practice, but it's nice to practice too. So many of the underpinnings of our societal ills are legal... anyway, that is for another post.

3) one of my favorite persons in the world moved in with us, which makes every day a party! So good to have a mini-community right in our place... community just becomes more and more important w/every passing week.

4) as some of you who read the Wife's blog may have heard, we're planning on adopting and pursuing that glorious possibility.

So, here's to the new year and it's infinite possibility! Since bucket lists are fun to read, here's a few (some carry overs as well) things that I hope to accomplish this year:

A blog post a week for three reasons: non-academic writing... so I don't lose it all; non-academic thought... so I don't lose that either; and developing the awesome online community I've slowing been realizing the potential of.
Half Marathon sub 1:15. My last half was precisely 1:40, so it's ambitious, but I didn't train for that last half either, so I'm hopeful.
Depending on the one above: Full Marathon sub 3 hours. Qualifying for the Boston before I leave would be awesome.
A summer Century. I found cycling balanced out my running perfectly, and when I move back to the West Coast I don't want to be too out of shape for the mountains. Also, rumors of doing the Laramie Enduro this summer...
Keep a journal. I often feel I let things slip by in the stream of consciousness that would save me a lot of trouble/time/heartache were I to pay more attention to them. Journaling is a first step.
Read non-school books. Sort of along the same lines as blogging, I don't want to "drown in the sweet honey-head of Plato". See?
Running/Cycling are fabulous, but I need pilates/yoga to be a really integrated person. Making more of an effort in that arena. Hopefully before my ten-class card at Back Bay Yoga expires. Yes it is good for a year. ;)

Namaste!

Anticipation

2009-12-20T14:25:00.003-05:00

Twenty-four hours from now I will be heading to the airport, bound for Inyokern, CA. I do not think I have looked forward to a break more in the thirteen consecutive semesters I've completed in the last six years. Law school is draining in a very unique way, but more on that when I have time. This is just an anticipatory post, one reminding myself that this last final, tomorrow morning, is the end of this semester. A little unreal.

Snow is blowing outside as I write a few things that I'm looking forward to over break:

1) Family!!! & Friends! I've missed everyone so, and every year, every thing I learn just builds the love that I have for them & my yearning to spend time with them.

2) Reading: one super-awesome thing about law school, is that we get actual breaks... I think this will be my first break in three years where I haven't had some sort of writing project to accomplish by the beginning of the next semester. Sure we have job apps but those pale in comparison to the amount of work a 30 page research paper or half-hour academic presentation can take. Here are the titles I'm planning on imbibing:

All Hallow's Eve by Charles Williams. I've started this one, over a nice break for Jury Duty in November and it is one of the best I've ever read. Without giving anything away, Williams can blend spiritual and physical reality so well, when you 'come back' to the 'real world' you're not sure it is.
The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun by JRR Tolkien. As you all know, my favorite author of all time and this book is his retelling/mix of two old Norse sagas, probably my favorite era of literature. Should be blazingly awesome.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. As a avid fan of Russian literature (Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Solzhenitsyn in particular), that this book has slipped by me (how?) is a crime deep and terrible. Luckily one of my lovely friends from law school Alisa has illuminated my path and even provided me a copy of her most favoritest book to glory in over break. I'm stoked, to say the least. Expect raves.
War in Heaven, another Charles Williams :) and an early Christmas present.

Usually I would list many more, but, attempting to be wiser every year, I figured that break being from December 22nd to January 10th, that is a manageable chunk that I can hope to tuck away.

3) Cycling & Running: I've actually been pretty good about both over the semester, until these last few weeks where all my energy was directed at my books. But it will be nice to cycle a good hundred road miles or so in the Mojave, mountain bike a few trails in the Pacific Northwest & trail run in the Sierra Nevadas, as well as the Cascades. Nothing refreshes and rejuvenates like miles flowing under my feet.

4) Coffee: I've stocked up on a few cafes I need to snuggle up w/aforementioned books and sip dry cappuccinos: http://www.stumptowncoffee.com/; http://www.victorscelticcoffee.com/; http://www.zokacoffee.com/index.php/page/Display/Default. One old favorite, two new storied locales :) looking forward to bringing beans back. Cuppings in the spring for sure.

Those are the stand out things at the moment.

What are you looking forward to my friends? Namaste

The First Week & Thoughts

2009-09-03T08:35:00.002-04:00

Hello Friends,

As many of you know, I just started at Boston College Law School, indeed, this is my second day of classes. After two days of orientation and one of class, I am happy to say that I am really excited for the next three years! This venture is unlike any I've encountered so far, in that it commits me to a relatively solid path for the next three, and more likely seven years.

In many ways it is like undergrad in that the course load is similar, classes are often and in the morning, and the mix of people is, if anything, even more diverse. When the Dean of the School introduced our class, it was humbling to hear the impact my classmates have had on the world and thrilling to realize that I'll be working with them closely for the next three years and beyond.

Two things I've gathered in my very short time here are that
1) Law School is all about method, learning a new, precise, and powerful method of reasoning, namely legal reasoning. I'm interested in seeing how this style of thinking differs and coincides with my studies on cognitional theory and epistemology. The thing about inculcating a method, is that it takes a lot of work and time... hence the infamous 1L year :) http://www.hulu.com/the-paper-chase

2) (and perhaps this is just my current orientation, but) Law School emphasizes relationships much more than I anticipated. The law community is a small one, and everyone ends up working with and knowing everyone else. Sure there are abuses and many of the negative images associated with lawyers show keen insight, however, those images do not represent the majority of lawyers.

A few unrelated thoughts:

I've been attempting to choose between Google and Bing as far as reliablity of searches go, and have yet to make a decision... I feel that Bing is indeed better, but, alas, I have adapted so well to Google that I can often find things faster and more efficiently with the scatter-gun approach. Hmm... try it for yourself :) http://www.bing-vs-google.com/

As I may have mentioned, I'm training for the 2010 Laramie Enduro. Having added cycling to my running has really improved my running speed and lower heart rate endurance. I've cycled to the BCLS campus every day this week over Heartbreak Hill which, with 20-30lbs of books on my back, has and will be good climbing training for next summer!

Peace,

Taylor

Use and Philosophy

2009-08-28T11:48:00.002-04:00

Friends,

This post is occasioned by a few hours of peaceful reading at 1369 Coffeehouse in Cambridge, MA in which I blazed through a few chapters of the forever insightful Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America. Two thoughts occurred in conjunction with this passage:

"The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint-that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery-indeed, the impossibility-of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists-people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way of integration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus the average-one is tempted to say, the ideal-American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and 'agribusinessmen,' the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequence of which somebody else-or, perhaps more typically, nobody else-will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists who propose to entertain him.

The beneficiary of this regime of specialist ought to be the happiest of mortals-or so we are expected to believe. All of his vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts. He is a certified expert himself and as such earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together. Between stints at his job he has nothing to do but mow his lawn which a sit-down lawn mower, or watch other certified experts on television. At suppertime he may eat a tray of ready-prepared food, which he and his wife (also a certified expert) procure at the cost only of money, transportation, and the pushing of a button. For a few minutes between supper and sleep he may catch a glimpse of his children, who since breakfast have been in the care of education experts, basketball or marching-band experts, or perhaps legal experts.

The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people's. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not want to know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found incurably ill. And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties."

For the most part, I think Berry, with his usual clarity, has described the root of many of the social problems we are faced with now. As my brother-in-law notes, in the words of Heinlein: Specialization is for insects. But what of the particular specialization I have majored in, and gone on to earn a Master's in, and intend on pursuing to the bitter end in a PhD and teaching career?

I think that philosophy can be the ultimate of either side of the coin: an ultra-specialization or the ultimate anti-specialization. As a specialization, not only is it divorced from other pursuits in the classic absent-minded professorial way, but also, the system of reality proposed by many philosophies is so abstracted from reality, that the person living within a particular system can never find the "ground". Our absent-minded professor has no "reality" to return to. Not only can this specialization talk in it's specialized language about other things, but, unlike other specializations, this specialization can talk merely about specializations. A meta-abstraction problem if you will.

The other side of the coin is the way in which (as Berry does, in a very real sense) philosophy can analyze the problems of those disciplines which are not self-reflective. Most specializations do not have corrective mechanisms within themselves such that becoming immersed in the specialization would be apparent or seen as a bad thing. As a sort of birds-eye view, philosophy can "stand outside" the other disciplines (and itself for that matter, which makes those philosophers who pursue mere abstraction so much worse) and help them realize their mistaken orientation to the world.

Of course, it isn't the specializations themselves that are a problem. Specialization in and of itself is a good thing; it creates a very particular forum for answering very particular questions. The problems arise when, rather than being an occasional mode of thinking, a specialization becomes a way of living, the fabric of community, and this, I believe, is the evil that Berry is pointing out.

(This thought touches on the understanding of general bias as developed by Bernard Lonergan, an essay I've written on the topic with respect to the I-1000 in Washington State can be found here.)

The other thing that came to mind in that reading session came in reading this passage:

"One reason that an organization cannot properly enact our relationship to the world is that an organization cannot define that relationship except in general terms, and no matter how general may be a person's attitude toward the world, his impact upon it must become specific and tangible at some point... The conservation movement has never resolved this dilemma. It has never faced it... With the increase of pollution and mining, their interest has become two-branched, to include, along with the pristine, the critically abused. At present the issue of use is still in its beginning."

Berry goes on to describe how "conservationists" will buy a large chunk of land, and just leave it to the wild. As people who know land will tell you, there is a sort of three-level 'being' to land where the middle ground is "untouched" wilderness. The lower level is effected by man in the form of ecological rape, however the upper level too is effected by man in the conscious, humble, respectful cultivation and care of land. Land left to its own resources (which, I believe is an impossibility these days, given the widespread effect of our lifestyles), simply does not take care of itself as well as a properly oriented human being.

How then, are we to understand "use?" When I use the term "useful" or "use" what comes to mind? With many people, I find, "use" has many bad connotations: "using" another person, or what's the "use" of something. I agree, but also I think there is an important element of "use" that is neglected.

As Aristotle notes in his three levels of friendship (utility, pleasure, and virtue) at the end of Nicomachean Ethics, each of the lower levels can be sublated/incorporated/'taken up' into the higher levels. Thus, when I pick up my wife from work in our car, even though it is a short walk away, she is deriving some use from me, though neither of us look at it that way at all; our friendship of virtue has changed the whole relationship such that use does not enter in, save in analysis.

I believe the key, and I think Wendell Berry approaches this understanding in a sideways manner, is entering into relationship with land in its full "thing-ness," into relationship with everything about it, asking all the proper questions, being in love with the earth and the beings that inhabit it. Only this relationship can transform the notion and reality of use into its proper form, that is, consciously, organically, interacting with life, writ large, around us in the fullness of our creative intelligence, a creative intelligence that, in the end, is a creative love.

Ndiara Estate, Kirinyaga, Kenya

2009-08-11T10:46:00.005-04:00

The second coffee I've been imbibing this month is a Kenyan (I try and mix up the continents when I get coffees, of late. Eventually I'd like to stick to the same country and discern differences) from the Ndiara Estate. George Howell tells us that,

"Ndiara is another powerful coffee from Kirinyaga, easily an equal, in my opinion, to Mamuto and very different. If ever there was a coffee that should be called 'jammy', this is it! It presents a massive body with a berry fruit-basket of flavors. If you have not tried it you should.

Ndiara is an eight acre farm in the Kirinyaga district on the southren slope of Mt. Kenya at 5,500 feet. It is named after a pre-historic site nearby. Mr. Daniel Waruri Muriuki started it in 1979 when he acquired the land and planted 6,000 Bourbon SL-28 and SL-34 coffee trees; he later added an additional 500 trees."

You may be asking yourself, what do those designations Bourbon SL-28 and SL-34 mean? They are essentially the pedigree of the type of coffee, what in coffee jargon is the "varietal" or "cultivar". Here is a nice little primer on this sort of language: http://www.coffeeresearch.org/agriculture/varietals.htm/.

I found this coffee so sweet it was like it had sugar in it, bright and airy. Taste went something like this: Sweet - Mellow - Tangy/Nippy mix... it was hard to characterize with the strong aroma of blackberries. Reminded me of our five acres where I spent a good bit of my formative years... ah. Tasty!

On a related note, I briefly stopped by one of my all-time favorite cafes: 1369 Coffeehouse (two locations) in Cambridge, MA. They are a fantastic shop, full of all that is Cambridge (awesome tattoos, mustaches, avant-garde clothing, posters for local bands, taro card readings, and goth raves). The coffee is delicious, particularly their espresso & espresso drinks. Their house roasts tend to be on the darker side, certainly in the dry distillation range, but that is their expertise (after the European fashion) and they are quite good at it.

A Draft of a Dream

2009-08-09T16:38:00.005-04:00

Friends,

While proctoring an LSAT at the Cambridge Kaplan Center yesterday, I read the majority of a delightful book by Hilaire Belloc entitled An Essay on the Restoration of Property and it sparked a solidification of many ideas that have been mulling for several years now. I thought I would share them with you all, and give a few titles that have contributed to these thoughts.

Some/many of you have heard us mention/discuss/rave about an idea we've been kicking around about a community of families, living in rough proximity to each other, working in the world yet, at the same time, maintaining a strong spiritual, economic, ecologic, and familial haven for the growth and development of ourselves, our friends, and our children. In our increasingly complex world, it is becoming harder and harder to live a fully integrated and moral life within the structures, the schemes of recurrence, the webs of the world. Tracing the lines of each decision leads to places many of us only experience first-hand in our nightmares. Hence this withdrawal from practicality to save practicality.

Having seen The Village and read stories about super-families w/in strange cults, I want to dispel any ideas that this will be "cut off" from the world in that sense. While some geographic and certainly ideological distance will occur in the implementation of this dream, the key feature of it, is to "rest up," to change, to enrich, to reinvigorate in the micro in order to bring about change in the macro, in the short term in order to bring about change in the long term. Utter removal from the course of world is a good thing, in many respects: just look at the rich monastic traditions in the world's great religions. However, for the family, I do not think that such a choice respects the freedom of the children, nor fully understands the call (inherent to many of the great religions, particularly to Christianity) to change the paradigm we live in.

What would this community consist in? Here are a few (by no means exhaustive) features that have arisen in conversation over the several years we've considered it:

Food: Having read Omnivore's Dilemma, and the host of excellent literature surrounding that tome, we're more than a little leery of the whole food situation in the US. Having a farm to grow nearly all of the food we would need is high on our list of priorities. Better health, better lifestyle, better whole.
Green: I know the whole "green" lifestyle is really in, for a host of good and poor reasons. Our reasons for going green, really green, even really, really green, are legion, but primarily, we're not fans of paying for things we can produce ourselves without damage to the ecosystem, other people, and life in general. See the whole "oriented toward the long term" speech above.
Community: We've found that community is a vastly important element in real, holistic, human living and this community would provide a source to foster that growth in a host of ways, from geographic proximity, to a sharing of costs in a Schumacherian land/house buying scheme, to providing shared resources in farming/schooling/living.
Spiritual: Having an organic basis for life helps reorient one's whole being to the most fundamental aspects of life, the Great Dance to which we are all called to be a part, but are so often driven away by the urgent unimportant.
Social: As I will show later, once the groundwork for this community is laid, like the smaller unit of the family, it has the potential to be a profound source of solace for anyone coming into relation with it: guest houses, homes for the elderly or homeless, soup kitchens from our local produce... once the means of production has left the hands of the macro and been taken back into the hands of the micro, the family, the possibilities move at the speed of thought.

Anyway, that is a short list of ideas that come along with this notion of a community.

Pipe dreams, Taylor, Pipe dreams! Perhaps, but I think not. Here is a plan to make it more concrete, I did, after all, minor in Entrepreneurial Leadership and am heading to Law School in the fall... though Philosophy can be concrete too ;)

Concreteness: (for the Good is concrete)

I've broken up the venture into three primary phases: 1) Beginnings, 2) Building, 3) Giving.

1) Beginnings: Like any venture, the first phase will be the most difficult, so first, a note on organization.

We'll begin by forming an LLC, that is, a limited liability company, to buy a significant amount of arable land, near a relatively large urban center. (Amount & arable-ness is important for the farming aspect, the urban center for jobs, particularly university... though the exact location is easily negotiable). The beauty of the LCC structure is that it allows people to buy in or out, really own the land, have a better tax position, establishes a formal relationship between community members, and provides for a intelligible unit for dealing with "outside" entities, such as the IRS, or other things.

The startup phase will require the most resources as well, because of the slow transition to farming, the need for a large amount of land, and the usually high startup cost of many renewable energy sources. Also it will require a lot of patience with the transition to a radically different lifestyle.

2) Building: To a certain extent, there is no definite line between these two phases, but they are distinct in practice.

Once our schemes of recurrence start kicking in: food, energy, and housing costs will shrink dramatically, allowing for our disposable income to develop more communal aspects and set up the conditions for the schemes to recur. How will the costs shrink? Partially due to the land/housing setup, partially due to very low energy costs, partially due to negligible food costs, and largely due to our hard work in both starting this community and still working "real" wage-paying jobs.

3) Giving: The Saving, Giving, Developing Stage.

Having set up our own recurring scheme, we can solidly begin really reaching out as a community and building resources for the future of the community and our children.

Speaking of children, a side note on them: a danger of this setup is the preparation of our children for a solid economic transition to life, education, work, etc. once they are ready to set off into the deep. Many of the communities like the one we are discussing, do not really respect the freedom of their children, in the sense that life within the community is set up, but there is no real, healthy way to transition to life "outside" the community. College costs are high, little work experience, culture shock... the list goes on. Part of this problem will be solved by having a more permeable barrier than most communities, the other part will take careful work through all three stages, but particularly in stage three. Building resources for an easy transition for our children, or those whose work we see as valuable and worth supporting (eg scholars, not-for-profit orgs). Freedom from debt is a huge gift in helping people begin life, not just economic life, but moral and spiritual life as well. Planning and sacrificing for this is a necessary element in the recurrence of this scheme of community. However, an element of this community and the strength of communal living, while still participating in the world is the way in which resources can build. With little to no housing, energy, and food costs, we will be able to sock a lot away.

Is this idealized? Are there going to be hard questions that arise? Of course. Nothing worth having is ever easy. But, it is possible, and oh, so worth trying.

A Short Reading List:

The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs

The Unsettling of America, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, and Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

Small is Beautiful by E. F. Schumacher

An Essay on the Restoration of Property by Hilaire Belloc

The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour

Musings on Twitter and Intimacy

2009-08-04T10:51:00.002-04:00

Hello All,

Here's a collection of random musings for your enjoyment :) I'm working on balancing the various elements of homework/sleep/class/eating/fun/friends but I'm hopeful for catching up on my blogs, as I promised at the beginning of the year.

Taking what Life Without Pants said sometime last month to heart, I have decided to stop spending so much time worrying about what to write, and just focusing on the writing. As an old philosophy professor once told me, "the best way to move forward is to make as many mistakes as fast as possible. then you know what not to do."

Twitter and Intimacy.

Do you think that letting all your little stories go abroad to the hoi polloi of the world via Twitter change your close relationships for the worse?

I came home the other day and realized that a flurry of tweets had exhausted my store of stories for the day. Stories I used to tell to my wife as we shared our days, I now share with a little blue bird who scurries off to deliver that wee missive to a number of good friends, solid organizations, and random people. I've made some awesome friends via Twitter, but am I losing ground in others?

It seems like not talking about Twitterable things might deepen and enrich our conversation, ridding it of the mundane, the 140 character worthy. We could explore deeper issues, get at the heart of matters, having already been abreast of the little things in each other's accounts all day. It seems too that it could make us more attentive in our day-to-day activities, because we would be more conscious of the stories we tell. We're made of stories, stories are who we are, and developing that element, telling the stories to two audiences could be powerful in shaping our daily experience. We'll see. It will take work to follow those routes. What are your thoughts?

Namaste

La Soledad, Acatenango, Guatemala

2009-07-30T10:34:00.004-04:00

Friends!

A new shipment of George Howell's arrived fresh yesterday (roasted Monday)! I order two pounds every four weeks, I find that is about the time it takes to really soak in the flavor and nuances of a particular coffee.

I tried the La Soledad first and am sipping it as I write. Guatemalan coffees have been my favorites for a long while now, because of the "crisp acidity." A little on Guatemalan coffees from Kenneth David's quintessential resource Coffee: A Guide to Buying, Brewing, and Enjoying:

"The highlands of Guatemala produce several of the world's finest and most distinctive coffees. The mountain basin surrounding the austerely beautiful colonial city Guatemala Antiqua produces the most distinquished of these highland coffees Guatelmala Antigua, a coffee that combines complex nuance (smoke, spice, flowers, occasionally chocolate) with acidity ranging from gently bright to austerely powerful.

Generally, Guatemala has preserved more of the traditional typica and bourbon varieties of arabica than many other Latin American countries, which may account for the generally superior complexity of the Guatemalan cup. Most Guatemala coffee is grown in shade, ranging from rigorously managed shade on large farms to the serendipitous thickets of small growers."

La Soledad contains Bourbon, Pache, and Caturra varieties, and is produced in the Acatenango region of Guatemala, near the city of Guatemala.

View Larger Map

Interestingly, there are three live volcanos around the region, which might explain some of the coffee's complexity... (reminds me of a personal story about forest fires and apple cider... mmm). This region is on the other side of the beautiful ancient city of Antigua’s two (of three!) volcanoes, one of which is currently spewing smoke.

La Soledad’s quality dominates this coffee region, having received several Cup of Excellence awards over the years. The 270 acre farm averages over 5,000 feet in altitude and is heavily shaded with soil-enriching leguminous trees.

Henio Pérez's family has owned La Soledad, named after his grandmother, since 1895.

Anyway, back to the coffee.

Howell describes this coffee as "full bodied, honeyed, smoky-orange and dark chocolate notes, balanced with that classic razor-fine acidity." A gem of a Guatemalan coffee all around.

Using the nifty wheel from my last coffee post, I came up with much the same thoughts, though I thought that though the coffee's taste was certainly sweet-acidy-piquant, that there could be hints of a winey-tang. As far as aromas go, La Soledad deftly bridges the gap between enzymatic-fruity-citrus-apple and sugar browning-chocolaty-chocolate-like-dark chocolate... The depth and complexity of Guatemalan coffee is hard to beat. Mmm! Enjoy!

Friends

2009-07-28T10:38:00.002-04:00

I was walking to work today along the B line, around the reservoir, up Beacon, sipping the last of my Konga Coop and saying my chotki when I was overwhelmed by the number of people I missed. So many people from so many different pages of my life. I decided that this longing is yet another personal, experiential proof for the existence of God (and an afterlife I suppose). It is such a strong longing that, in my mind, it cannot but have an end. Like several other experiential proofs I've encountered and encounter often - Annie being the strongest & most often, trance being numbered among them as well - in the words of GK Chesterton, "it is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear thinnest and something beyond burns through."

I miss you all, love you much, and know that you are in my thoughts and prayers on a nearly daily basis. Namaste & Christ Be with you :)

Taylor

An Update: Law School, Work, and Thoughts

2009-07-26T16:44:00.004-04:00

Hello Friends,

Just thought I'd put a sort of summative note up for those who are interested :)

Work:

I'm finishing up my job at Boston College's Office of the Vice President for University Mission and Ministry, a year in the same position! It's been a lot of fun, at time a lot of work, and occasionally a lot of stress. I redesigned their entire site within a basic framework, invented a newsletter design (in the process teaching myself CSS and relearning HTML), learned to write according to strict principles, and learned a lot about working for Jesuits. I'm looking forward to being done, but at the same time, I'll miss it.

A few weeks ago I started working for Kaplan in earnest, teaching the LSAT to an awesome group of 7 students at MIT.

It has been great working with people again, rather than spending 8-10 hours in front of a computer. :) I've been relearning a lot of what I knew about teaching in Civil Air Patrol and really prepping well for Law School as well.

I'm not planning on working (really, I might have an "on-call" sort of position with the Lonergan Center, but we'll see) during Law School b/c the first year is notoriously hard, time-consuming, and crucial for a lawyer's entire career. It'll be nice to focus only on school for the first time since freshman year in undergrad!

Law School:

I'm going to Boston College Law in the Fall, as many of you know. For more information: http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/home.html ; http://officialguide.lsac.org/SearchResults/SchoolPage.aspx?sid=11 ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_College_Law_School. I'm really excited for it! It's an awesome school, Annie and I are already enculturated into the city, and we won't have to move. :)

I just finished Law Preview, a course that my good friend Dave recommended to me and I learned many things that will have a huge impact on the next several years:

The first year is very time consuming, so much so that, honestly, for the next nine months I anticipate spending a good half of my total time on homework. The reason for this is two-fold: first, the grades made in the first year of law school direct the entire remainder on one's law career; second, it's 15 graduate credits a semester.
Law school is expensive, not a whole lot of aid because the schools know that the average salary right out of law school is $160,000/yr which pays off student loans pretty swiftly. (I'm still seeking out and applying for all the scholarships I can find, of course) I was aware of this but also am looking to go into the public/not-for-profit sector which pays a quarter to a third of that figure. Often law schools will assist their students in paying off their loans if they choose a public service type job so until taking this course, I was planning on that route. However, (see next number)
I learned something about working at large firms where the median salary is $160,000 a year: their training is the best in the industry. So, if I ultimately want to work in human rights, does it behoove me to have the best training in the industry or not? It's a deep question, which doesn't need to be answered now, but at the moment I'm leaning toward a 2-4 year jaunt in "big law". Doing so would help to set us up after a good 9 years of school, moving back to the West Coast, setting up our farm community, and provide awesome training for the remainder of my legal career.
What about the PhD in Philosophy one might ask? Integrating that in has become a little more difficult, but I still plan on doing it, when has just been made a little more vague. Most likely after the jaunt in Big Law if that happens. I plan on staying in touch with the philosophical world as well though. With an MA I can "legitimately" write in journals and present at conferences, especially on the combined law/philosophy topics.
I'm of the belief, having had a good introduction/preview of law school, that their emphasis on writing will really help in my writing in all areas. This is good.
The possibility of transferring after my first year is still a strong one, however, I learned that it is not worth doing so unless one is making a jump of some 20-30 ranking points. This being the case, I intend on applying to Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley next summer. Whether I get in or not isn't too much of a concern for me at this point. BC is a great school and produces a good number of law professors in its own right.

All thought out? Certainly not, but there is a lot to consider... the first year is the crucial part and determines a good bit of the further pertinent questions.

*Note too though, even though law school is a lot of work, tucking one's head and blocking out all else is a bad idea, so don't fear, I still plan on seeing you all, having the occasional beer, hitting up the BSO, and movies as well. :) (as if any of you doubted that Taylor the Social would ever wholly become a library ghost)

Summer:

So far we've visited both sides of the family and had wonderful visits both times! Keeps us certain that the West Coast is to be our home. Sure, our ideal would be the Seattle area (with a cabin on the beautiful Lake Chelan to write disserations ;) but God knows best. I'll be done with UMM the first or second week of August and Kaplan by August 24th. It'll be nice to have a few days off before the plunge.

Konga Cooperative Reserve

2009-07-14T11:39:00.018-04:00

After my last coffee post, one of my very good friends, M sent me this beautiful wheel, whereby I will be able to include more tasting detail in my coffee blog posts! Thanks M!

Today's coffee, one that I have been sipping for awhile now, Konga Cooperative Reserve produced in Ethiopia. Terroir Coffee says this about the beans:

"Konga Cooperative Reserve, Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia (Fair Trade, USDA Organic)

We paid extra for this small specially prepared lot from the Fair Trade certified Konga Cooperative. The coffee is organic as well. The Konga Cooperative has 1683 farmers of which 133 are female heads of family. The average size of a farm is 1.25 acres on which coffee and various foods for the local market are grown. Yirgacheffe is amazingly lush with vegetation. The coffee is grown at over 6,000 feet in altitude. This Konga also has that lush full-bodied apricot core with exceptionally pronounced clarity and sweetness.

Yirgacheffe is one of the great aromatic coffees of the world. It is often used in the finest Italian espresso blends, such as Illy, to add a critical floral element. The scientist- quality coffee pioneer Ernesto Illy (Illy Coffee) stated at the SCAA Conference in Boston, 2003 that the coffee of this region shared an aromatic component found in Darjeeling tea and Chanel #5.

Favorite of Food & Wine Magazine, March 2006

Roast Style: Full Flavor Roast
Harvest: 2006
Altitude: over 6,000 feet
Soil: volcanic
Arabica Variety: Ethiopica"

Using my nifty wheel, I'd have to say it's nose is certainly fruity, almost to the flowery point, giving me a scent of cherries rather than apricots. The taste is a sweet-mellow-delicate, especially brewed with a Swissgold filter.

One of my very good friends, J came over for dinner last night and had a few questions about espresso makers. She is heading to Marquette in the fall for a PhD in Philosophy, looking to have good coffee on a budget (aren't we all), and driven to the point of really desiring a good espresso maker by the lunatic ravings of our mutual friend P who is currently filling the tweetosphere with mocha talk...

A noble enterprise to be sure. I pointed her to this fabulous site:http://www.sweetmarias.com/prod.espresso.php which has a solid offering and even better guidance in purchasing a good machine. I use the stovetop brewer personally, primarily because my tastes still lie in the full flavor roasts, which espresso doesn't bring out well.

Enjoy!

Toraja Tocaro

2009-06-13T09:36:00.004-04:00

Friends,

At long last, given the amount of coffee I consume and the number of coffee shops I frequent, I have decided to keep a coffee log. Should the whole grad school thing not work out I can fall back upon this blog, perhaps... (:D)

In my search for good local coffee, I have come across a true gem of a roaster, George Howell, who roasts mostly single origin coffees at a lighter roast that keeps many of the bean qualities. The result is a strong, rich cup that hearkens to the far-flung areas of the world from whence it has come. http://www.terroircoffee.com/

Before I continue my review, here is what Howell has to say about today's cup:

"The coffee formerly known as Celebes returns and it is a far better quality version than ever before. Toraja Toarco has taken on a certain legendary status amongst the coffee cognoscenti. It has been impossible to get any in the US because Toarco was developed and financed by Japan’s Key Coffee Company which sold all its production to the Japanese market. Coffee is grown there from moderate elevations to six thousand feet. Toarco works with over 7000 families to produce this coffee.

The coffee cup exhibits notes of malt and nutmeg-spiced dark honey. The beans are peaberries which are round shaped; they have been separated from the common flat beans using sieves. Peaberries grow in single seed coffee cherries, as opposed to paired, and typically develop near the tips of a coffee tree’s branches. A coffee tree will produce about 5% peaberries. They often have a slightly higher acidity than their flat bean counterparts. This lot has a very pleasant smooth fruity liveliness in the cup."

While I can brew three different ways (Melitta, french press, & espresso) I find that for the single source, full flavor roasts, the best brew method is Melitta (either gold or paper filter). Espresso is definitely only for dark roasts, and the french press I find best for blends. Anyway, that is mostly personal preference.

The water to whole bean ratio I use is 2 tablespoons per 6oz of water, though occasionally, for a strong coffee, I'll bump the water up to 8oz.

The Tocaro peaberries aroma is unmistakably rich, and the body calls to mind a mix between African and Guatemalan coffees: bright, yet earthy. It's the youngest coffee I've tasted, but neither the brightest, nor liveliest.

After several weeks of attempting to characterizes tastes more closely than this, I've decided to forego my own length analysis and serve mostly as a showcaser and highlighter of particular coffees. I may be able to taste nuances, but unless this forum develops my abilities, I have yet to be able to articulate these nuances :)

Enjoy!

Manalive

2009-05-29T12:47:00.001-04:00

For those of you who have not experienced the wonder that is Manalive (by GKC) do yourself a favor and toddle out and read it; it is out of this world in order to return to it. I've just finished it myself (after much coaxing by my loving wife)!

Here are a few choice quotes:

"A wind sprang high in the west, like a wave of unreasonable happiness, and tore eastward across England, trailing with it the frosty scent of forests and the cold intoxication of the sea. In a million holes and corners it refreshed a man like a flagon, and astonished him like a blow. In the inmost chambers of intricate and embowered houses it woke like a domestic explosion, littering the floor with some professor's papers till they seemed as precious as fugitive, or blowing out the candle by which a boy read Treasure Island and wrapping him in roaring dark. But everywhere it bore drama into undramatic lives, and carried the trump of crisis across the world. Many a harassed mother in a mean backyard had looked at five dwarfish shirts on the clothes-line as at some small, sick tragedy; it was as if she had hanged her five children. The wind came, and they were full and kicking as if five fat imps had sprung into them; and far down in her oppressed subconscious she half-remembered those coarse comedies of her fathers when the elves still dwelt in the homes of men. Many an unnoticed girl in a dank walled garden had tossed herself into the hammock with the same intolerant gesture with which she might have tossed herself into the Thames; and that wind rent the waving wall of woods and lifted the hammock like a balloon, and showed her shapes of quaint clouds far beyond, and pictures of bright villages far below, as if she rode heaven in a fairy boat. Many a dusty clerk or cleric, plodding a telescopic road of poplars, thought for the hundredth time that they were like the plumes of a hearse; when this invisible energy caught and swung and clashed them round his head like a wreath or salutation of seraphic wings. There was in it something more inspired and authoritative even than the old wind of the proverb; for this was the good wind that blows nobody harm."

"'Yes,' he said with a huge sigh, 'I am free in Russia, you are right. I could really walk into that town over there and have love all over again, and perhaps marry some beautiful woman and begin again, and nobody could even find me. Yes, you have certainly convinced me of something.'

His tone was so queer and mystical that I felt impelled to ask him what he meant, and of what excattly I had convinced him of.

'You have convinced me,' he said, with the same dreamy eye, 'why it is really wicked and dangerous for a man to run away from his wife.'

'And why is it dangerous?' I inquired.

'Why, because noboday can find him,' answered the odd person, 'and we all want to be found.'

'The most original of modern thinkers,' I remarked, 'Ibsen, Gorki, Nietzsche, Shaw, would all say rather that what we want most is to be lost. To find ourselves in untrodden paths, and to do unprecedented things; to break with the past and belong to the future.'

He rose to his whole height somewhat sleepily, and looked around on what was, I confess, a somehwat desolate scene; the dark purple plains, the neglected railroad, the few ragged knots of the malcontents.

'I shall not find the house here,' he said. 'It is still eastward-further and further eastward.'

Then he turned to me with something like fury, and struck the foot of his pole upon the frozen earth.

'And if I do go back to my country,' he cried, 'I may be locked up in a madhouse before I reach my own house. I have been a bit unconventional in my time! Why, Nietzsche stood in a row of ramrods in the silly old Prussian army, and Shaw takes temperance beverages in the suburbs; but the things I do are unprecedented things. This round road I am treading is an untrodden path. I do believe in breaking out; I am a revolutionist. But don't you see that all these real leaps and destructions and escapes are only attempts to get back to Eden-to something we have had, to something at least we have heard of? Don't you see one only breaks the fence or shoots the moon in order to get home?'

'No,' I answered after due reflection. 'I don't think I should accept that.'

'Ah,' he said with a sort of sigh, 'then you have explained a second thing to me.'

'What do you mean,' I asked; 'what thing?'

'Why your revolution has failed,' he said...

Thoughts on Transition

2009-05-19T09:34:00.000-04:00

Friends,

It has been far too long since my last post, but school and work will do that to one. For the record, this semester was the busiest of the 12 (twelve!) semesters I've experienced thus far, for both happy and sad reasons. One of our mothers fell asleep in the Lord (and that is not a euphemism, it is closer to reality than "death" is), Anne's mother, mine for a brief three years. I worked 20+ hours a week with University Mission and Ministry, completely editing their entire website and creating and publishing two campus-wide newsletters. I presented an academic paper on Aquinas and helped plan a workshop showcasing Marginal Theory. I completed and passed six weeks of Kaplan teacher training for the LSAT. I thoroughly studied (with "a little help from my friends") for and passed comprehensive exams and completed the coursework for an MA in Philosophy. We've awaited (and are awaiting) law school responses, witnessed baptisms, and look forward to four weddings. We've had awesome conversations with better friends, beautiful times with family, and powerful experiences that have helped bring life into focus and guide us "on the way."

Being the Philosopher that I am (entitled now), I've pondered all these things (treasured them up in my heart as it were) and come to some small conclusions:

1) I've read A Severe Mercy, I've read A Grief Observed, I know that those that die experience a reality that we dream of achieving all our hours on this earth... but that does not make the death of a loved one any easier. We're biological creatures, matter and form, creatures of habit, and when a piece of that manifold, that vasty interconnected web of human relationships is no longer there, even in the physical world... we miss him or her. There is no one on the other end of the phone, no one to ask for help, no one to request that you build a fence, no one to hold where there has always been someone before. It's more than that though, as CS Lewis knew so well, we miss that she is not there for the other strands of the web that were even more closely connected than we were: "You do not know loneliness until you've lost a spouse." I know I cannot explain it to someone who has not lost a dear loved one. I had not until March 11th and could not know before then.

2) Our culture, our society is not set up to care, primarily because the things worth caring about (indeed, those that everyone still does care about whether they admit it or not) are shunted away precisely because of their "careful-ness". We fear death, mortality, life, youth, age, so much... but it is what we care about most as well. To distract us from these "first things," these "urgent importants" we work, we set up schedules and deadline, we smoke, drink, fornicate, we drive fast and honk loud, we increase the ease of slipping into the biological pattern of experiences because it is our only "escape". But it is an escape just as much as shooting yourself is. It's giving up on the joy of living, it's giving up on the "battle to the death", it's giving up on yourself. Pull out, pull up, uproot before the poison gets you. Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam and ask the further pertinent questions of your situation. Don't live the subtle, oh so subtle lie.

3) In studying for comps and in having a conversation with Dr. Stebbins, I realized the crucial, enriching value of understanding the history of ideas, not just history, not just philosophy, but the whole kit and kaboodle of human living through time. You've heard of Great Books programs and how valuable they are, but their value isn't in what is usually touted. Some of the primary reasons I've heard are: the value of a classical education, in reading "good" material, working through ideas somehow making you a better person... which are all noble and valuable things in themselves. The two primary (and operative is some way whether recognized or not) reasons are these: 1) in understanding history writ large you come to an understanding of yourself in the here-and-now in every decision you make, and 2) following along in a dynamic fashion with the flow of ideas, questions, and answers throughout history, your own questions and answers change. More on this later... it's the topic of a inchoate essay.

4) I find that my quality of life improves roughly in direct proportion to the amount of time I spend with friends and family. My GPA improves, I'm happier, more peaceful, more communicative, get more done... thank you all for your love and friendship! :D

Anyway, back into the rest of this post. I've created a reading list for the summer, and I thought I would share it because you all have such good comments and suggestions on further good reads! Here goes (don't laugh; I know I prolly won't finish it all this summer either):

The Lorica

2009-04-30T07:29:00.001-04:00

I arise today

Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,

Through belief in the threeness,

Through confession of the oneness

Of the Creator of Creation.

I arise today

Through the strength of Christ's birth with His baptism,

Through the strength of His crucifixion with His burial,

Through the strength of His resurrection with His ascension,

Through the strength of His descent for the judgment of Doom.

I arise today

Through the strength of the love of the Cherubim,

In the obedience of angels,

In the service of archangels,

In the hope of the resurrection to meet with reward,

In the prayers of patriarchs,

In prediction of prophets,

In preaching of apostles,

In faith of confessors,

In innocence of holy virgins,

In deeds of righteous men.

I arise today

Through the strength of heaven;

Light of sun,

Radiance of moon,

Splendor of fire,

Speed of lightning,

Swiftness of wind,

Depth of sea,

Stability of earth,

Firmness of rock.

I arise today

Through God's strength to pilot me:

God's might to uphold me,

God's wisdom to guide me,

God's eye to look before me,

God's ear to hear me,

God's word to speak to me,

God's hand to guard me,

God's way to lie before me,

God's shield to protect me,

God's host to save me,

From snares of devils,

From temptation of vices,

From everyone who shall wish me ill,

Afar and near,

Alone and in a multitude.

I summon today all these powers between me and those evils,

Against every cruel merciless power that may oppose my body and soul,

Against incantations of false prophets,

Against black laws of pagandom,

Against false laws of heretics,

Against craft of idolatry,

Against spells of women and smiths and wizards,

Against every knowledge that corrupts man's body and soul.

Christ to shield me today

Against poising, against burning,

Against drowning, against wounding,

So there come to me abundance of reward.

Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me,

Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ on my right, Christ on my left,

Christ when I lie down,

Christ when I sit down,

Christ when I arise,

Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,

Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,

Christ in the eye of everyone who sees me,

Christ in every ear that hears me.

I arise today

Through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,

Through belief in the threeness,

Through confession of the oneness

Of the Creator of Creation.

As You Like It

2009-04-28T15:05:00.000-04:00

Annie and I watched Branagh's 2006 version of Shakespeare's As You Like It last night and it was delightful! I recommend it to all who are fans of Branagh's work... a few choice sections from the master of English prose:

I must have liberty
Withal, as large a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I please.

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
’This is no flattery. These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

All the world's a stage,/And all the men and women merely players./They have their exits and their entrances/And each man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ‘tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you; and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them— that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

For all those wishing to seriously study Insight...

2009-04-21T11:16:00.000-04:00

PL 772 01 Insight and Beyond I

Patrick Byrne W 4:30-6:20

Description:

“Insofar as there is a struggle about agreeing with Insight or disagreeing with it, that struggle arises on a very fundamental existential level. It is akin to Heidegger’s classification of a person as authentic or inauthentic; in other words, there is a deep existential level of self-criticism.”

Bernard Lonergan

This course begins a two-semester project exploring Lonergan's unique invitation to "self-appropriation" as a response to the crises of our times. Bernard Lonergan wrote his major philosophical work, Insight, to address what he regarded as the great challenges posed by Modernity: modern natural science, modern historical thought, and the great revolutions in modern philosophy, especially in Descartes, Kant and Hegel. In many ways Insight shares the concerns of post-modernism, but departs from its pervasive relativism. Written after his scholarly investigations of Aquinas, Lonergan set himself the task of developing what he learned from those studies into a methodical way of treating philosophical metaphysical, ethical, historical, hermeneutical and theological issues. He called that method “self-appropriation” – that is, coming to better know oneself as an agent of one's own conscious activities, and as a contributor to the destiny of human history.

Students in this course will have the unique opportunity to be part of an online, international learning community. Class sessions will be edited, placed online, and shared with the international community of others also wishing to study Insight and Lonergan's later works.

Course Requirements:

(1) Class preparedness (15%); careful reading of the weeks assigned chapters, responses to study questions and exercises, and prepared notes of questions and comments for class discussion);

(2) A short paper (4-5 pages) describing an insight you have had. (15%);

(3) Term paper (of 20-25 pages) (40%);

(4) Final Exam (30%).

Reading List:

Lonergan, Insight

Lonergan, Topics in Education

Selected essays

Flanagan, Quest for Self-Knowledge

"Esse" by Czeslaw Milosz

2009-04-17T06:53:00.000-04:00

I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of metro stations flew by; I didn't notice them. What can be done, if our sight lack absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign, like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or a bird? A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - by why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava. To absorb the face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty. To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious. And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal betong which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousand-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

Brie-Comte-Robert, 1954

Easter Homily by St. John Chrysostom

2009-04-13T11:56:00.001-04:00

Let all pious men and all lovers of God rejoice in the splendor of this feast; let the wise servants blissfully enter into the joy of their Lord; let those who have borne the burden of Lent now receive their pay, and those who have toiled since the first hour, let them now receive their due reward; let any who came after the third hour be grateful to join in the feast, and those who may have come after the sixth, let them not be afraid of being too late; for the Lord is gracious and He receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him who comes on the eleventh hour as well as to him who has toiled since the first: yes, He has pity on the last and He serves the first; He rewards the one and praises the effort.
Come you all: enter into the joy of your Lord. You the first and you the last, receive alike your reward; you rich and you poor, dance together; you sober and you weaklings, celebrate the day; you who have kept the fast and you who have not, rejoice today. The table is richly loaded: enjoy its royal banquet. The calf is a fatted one: let no one go away hungry. All of you enjoy the banquet of faith; all of you receive the riches of his goodness. Let no one grieve over his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed; let no one weep over his sins, for pardon has shone from the grave; let no one fear death, for the death of our Saviour has set us free: He has destroyed it by enduring it, He has despoiled Hades by going down into its kingdom, He has angered it by allowing it to taste of his flesh.
When Isaias foresaw all this, he cried out: "O Hades, you have been angered by encountering Him in the nether world." Hades is angered because frustrated, it is angered because it has been mocked, it is angered because it has been destroyed, it is angered because it has been reduced to naught, it is angered because it is now captive. It seized a body, and, lo! it encountered heaven; it seized the visible, and was overcome by the invisible.
O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? Christ is risen and you are abolished. Christ is risen and the demons are cast down. Christ is risen and the angels rejoice. Christ is risen and life is freed. Christ is risen and the tomb is emptied of the dead: for Christ, being risen from the dead, has become the Leader and Reviver of those who had fallen asleep. To Him be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen.

The Startling Strangeness

2009-04-04T13:32:00.000-04:00

"For the appropriation of one's own rational self-consciousness, which has been so stressed in this introduction, is not an end in itself but rather a beginning.  It is a necessary beginning, for unless one breaks the duality in one's knowing, one doubts that understanding correctly is knowing.  Under the pressure of that doubt, either one will sink into the bog of a knowing that is without understanding, or else one will cling to an understanding but sacrifice knowing on the altar of an immanentism, an idealism, a relativism.  From the horns of that dilemma one escapes only through the discovery (and one has not yet made it if one has no clear memory of its startling strangeness) that there are two quite different realisms, that there is an incoherent realism, half animal and half human, that poses as a half-way house between materialism and idealism and, on the other hand, that there is an intelligent and reasonable realism between which and materialism the half-way house is idealism".

The Human Understanding of Death

2009-03-28T17:53:00.000-04:00

My Last Breath

Hold on to me, love
You know I can't stay long
All I wanted to say was I love you and I'm not afraid, oh
Can you hear me?
Can you feel me in your arms?

Holding my last breath
Safe inside myself
Are all my thoughts of you
Sweet raptured light, it ends here tonight

I'll miss the winter
A world of fragile things
Look for me in the white forest
Hiding in a hollow tree (Come and find me)
I know you hear me
I can taste it in your tears

Holding my last breath
Safe inside myself
Are all my thoughts of you
Sweet raptured light, it ends here tonight

Closing your eyes to disappear
You pray your dreams will leave you here
But still you wake and know the truth
No one's there
Say goodnight
Don't be afraid
Calling me, calling me
As you fade to black

Holding my last breath (Say goodnight)
Safe inside myself (Don't be afraid)
Are all my thoughts of you (Calling me, calling me)
Sweet raptured light, it ends here tonight
Holding my last breath
Safe inside myself
Are all my thoughts of you
Sweet raptured light, it ends here tonight
Holding my last breath

I think this is why we cry, why the death of a loved one breaks our hearts, why the shape and color of the world changes after they leave.

This is why we need God. Without God there is no hope beyond the grave. We just fade to black.

"Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all fall asleep, but we will all be changed, in an instant, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For that which is corruptible must clothe itself with incorruptibility, and that which is mortal must clothe itself with immortality. And when this which is corruptible clothes itself with incorruptibility and this which is mortal clothes itself with immortality, then the word that is written shall come about: "Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?" The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ."

Rilke's Annunciation

2009-03-26T09:18:00.000-04:00

I know it's a day late, but we're always in the Season of the Annunciation by my way of thinking. This poem was recommended to me by a friend:

Not that an angel entered frightened her
(you see that). As little as another
would if in her room a ray of sunlight,
or the full moon intruding past midnight,
creating itself with light made her start;
rather she attended to the hard art
in which an angel, incensed in matter,
went bracing itself for dense encounter.
She could scarcely know how for an angel
(summer lightning slowed into a gazelle)
time was perverse--she was that innocent--
Legend has it the wild doe's resplendent
forested horn was shown to her alone,
as once startled from hiding in the wood,
it was aroused as if sight had been thrown,
revealing the unicorn where she stood--
see-er and seen, each alone and unpaired,
the animal of light, purely revealed.
Not that he entered, but that he stared
and broke out into poetry annealed
in the light, this angel, of a girl's face
so to him inclined, his and hers in sight,
that within and without could so interlace
as everything spatial became insight,
and what millions acting, forcing, tricking,
contracted into her. She and he,
vision and seer, eye and eye's feasting,
were nowhere other than this place. See,
this fright was time where time did not belong,
and then the angel turned time into song. - Rilke

The Annunciation being one of my favorite feasts of the liturgical year I thought I would also post a bit of St. Gregory the Wonderworker's Second Homily on the Annunciation:

It is our duty to present to God, like sacrifices, all the festivals and hymnal celebrations; and first of all, the annunciation to the holy mother of God, to wit, the salutation made to her by the angel, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured!" For first of all wisdom² and saving doctrine in the New Testament was this salutation, "Hail, thou that art highly favoured!" conveyed to us from the Father of lights. And this address, "highly favoured,"³ embraced the whole nature of men. "Hail, thou that art highly favoured"⁴in the holy conception and in the glorious pregnancy, "I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people."⁵ And again the Lord, who came for the purpose of accomplishing a saving passion, said, "I will see you, and ye shall rejoice; and your joy no man taketh from you."⁶ And after His resurrection again, by the hand of the holy women, He gave us first of all the salutation "Hail! "⁷ And again, the apostle made the announcement in similar terms, saying, "Rejoice evermore: pray without ceasing: in everything give thanks."⁸ See, then, dearly beloved, how the Lord has conferred upon us everywhere, and indivisibly, the joy that is beyond conception, and perennial. For since the holy Virgin, in the life of the flesh, was in possession of the incorruptible citizenship, and walked as such in all manner of virtues, and lived a life more excellent than man's common standard; therefore the Word that cometh from God the Father thought it meet to assume the flesh, and endue the perfect man from her, in order that in the same flesh in which sin entered into the world, and death by sin, sin might be condemned in the flesh, and that the tempter of sin might be overcome in the burying⁹ of the holy body, and that therewith also the beginning of the resurrection might be exhibited, and life eternal instituted in the world, and fellowship established for men with God the Father. And what shall we state, or what shall we pass by here? or who shall explain what is incomprehensible in the mystery?

Peace Friends!

Taylor

Wendell Berry: Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse

2009-01-30T09:00:00.000-05:00

The following is an essay by one of my very favorite authors, Wendell Berry. He works have done a lot to shape my view of political action, community, and family.

Out of Your Car, Off Your Horse: Twenty-Seven Propositions about Global Thinking and the Sustainability of Cities (Taken from his collection of essays entitled Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community)

I. Properly speaking, global thinking is not possible. Those who have "thought globally" (and among them the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers tend to be dangerous also; we now have national thinkers in the northeastern United States who look upon Kentucky as a garbage dump.  II. Global thinking can only be statistical. Its shallowness is exposed by the least intention to do something. Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place. Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble of it. Look at one of those photographs of half the earth taken from outer space, and see if you recognize your neighborhood. If you want to see where you are, you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large, and full of beguiling nooks and crannies.  III. If we could think locally, we would do far better than we are doing now. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question "What will this do to our community?" tends toward the right answer for the world.  IV. If we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe, we must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as independent and sulf-sufficient as we can - not by the presumptuous abstractions of "global thought."  V. If we want to keep our thoughts and acts from destroying the globe, then we must see to it that we do not ask too much of the globe or any part of it. To make sure that we do not ask too much, we must learn to live at home, as independently and self-sufficiently as we can. That is the only way we can keep the land we are using, and its ecological limits, always in sight.  VI. The only sustainable city - and this, to me, is the indispensable ideal and goal - is a city in balance with its countryside: a city, that is, that would live off the net ecological income of its supporting region, paying as it goes all its ecological and human debts.  VII. The cities we now have are living off ecological principal, by economic assumptions that seem certain to destroy them. They do not live at home. They do not have their own supporting regions. They are out of balance with their supports, wherever on the globe their supports are.  VIII. The balance between city and countryside is destroyed by industrial machinery, "cheap" productivity in field and forest, and "cheap" transportation. Rome destroyed the balance with slave labor; we have destroyed it with "cheap" fossil fuel.  IX. Since the Civil War, perhaps, and certainly since the Second World War, the norms of productivity have been set by the fossil-fuel industries.  X. Geographically, the sources of the fossil fuels are rural. Technically, however, the production of these fuels is industrial and urban. the facts and integrities of local life, and the principle of community, are considered as little as possible, for to consider them would not be quickly profitable. Fossil fuels have always been produced at the expense of local ecosystems and of local human communities. The fossil-fuel economy is the industrial economy par excellence, and it assigns no value to local life, natural or human.  XI. When the industrial principles exemplified in fossil-fuel production are applied to field and forest, the results are identical: local life, both natural and human, is destroyed.  XII. Industrial procedures have been imposed on the countryside pretty much to the extent that country people have been seduced or forced into dependence on the money economy. By encouraging this dependence, corporations have increased their ability to rob the people of their property and their labor. The result is that a very small number of people now own all the usable property in the country, and workers are increasingly the hostages of their employers.  XIII. Our present "leaders" - the people of wealth and power - do not know what it means to take a place seriously: to think it worthy, for its own sake, of love and study and careful work. They cannot take any place seriously because they must be ready at any moment, by the terms of power and wealth in the modern world, to destroy any place.  XIV. Ecological good sense will be opposed by all the most powerful economic entities of our time, because ecological good sense requires the reproduction or replacement of those entities. If ecological good sense is to prevail, it can do so only through the work and the will of the people and of the local communities.   XV. For this task our currently prevailing assumptions about knowledge, information, education, money, and political will are inadequate. All our institiutions with which I am familiar have adopted the organizational patterns and the quantitative measures of the industrial corporations. Both sides of the ecological debate, perhaps as a consequence, are alarmingly abstract.  XVI. But abstraction, of course, is what is wrong. The evil of the industrial economy (capitalist or communist) is the abstractness inherent in its procedures - its inability to distinguish one place or person or creature from another. William Blake saw this two hundred years ago. Anyone can see it now in almost any of our common tools and weapons.  XVII. Abstraction is the enemy wherever it is found. The abstractions of sustainability can ruin the world just as surely as the abstractions of industrial economics. Local life may be as much endangered by "saving the planet" as by "conquering the world." Such a project calls for abstract purposes and central powers that cannot know, and so will destroy, the integrity of local nature and local community.  XVIII. In order to make ecological good sense for the planet, you must make ecological good sense locally. You can't act locally by thinking globally. If you want to keep your local acts from destroying the globe, you must think locally.  XIX. No one can make ecological good sense for the planet. Everyone can make ecological good sense locally, if the affection, the scale, the knowledge, the tools, and the skills are right.  XX. The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the reach of one's love for the place one is working in, and for the things and creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results. An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.  XXI. The question before us, then, is an extremely difficult one: How do we begin to remake, or to make, a local culture that will preserve our part of the world while we use it? We are talking here not just about a kind of knowledge that involves affection but also about a kind of knowledge that comes from or with affection - knowledge that is unavailable to the unaffectionate, and that is unavailable to anyone as what is called information.  XXII. What, for a start, might be the economic result of local affection? We don't know. Moreover, we are probably never going to know in any way that would satisfy the average dean or corporate executive. The ways of love tend to be secretive and, even to lovers themselves, somewhat inscrutable.  XXIII. The real work of planet-saving will be small, humble, and humbling, and (insofar as it involves love) pleasing and rewarding. Its jobs will be too many to count, too many to report, too many to be publicly noticed or rewarded, too small to make anyone rich or famous.  XXIV. The great obstacle may be not greed but the modern hankering after glamour. A lot of our smartest, most concerned people want to come up with a big solution to a big problem. I don't think that planet-saving, if we take it seriously, can furnish employment to many such people.  XXV. When I think of the kind of worker the job requires, I think of Dorothy Day (if one can think of Dorothy Day herself, separate from the publicity that came as a result of her rarity), a person willing to go down and down into the daunting, humbling, almost hopeless local presence of the problem - to face the great problem one small life at a time.  XXVI. Some cities can never be sustainable, because they do not have a countryside around them, or near them, from which they can be sustained. New York City cannot be made sustainable, nor can Phoenix. Some cities in Kentucky or the Midwest, on the other hand, might reasonably hope to become sustainable.  XXVII. To make a sustainable city, one must begin somehow, and I think the beginning must be small and economic. A beginning could be made, for example, by increasing the amount of food bought from farmers in the local countryside by consumers in the city. As the food economy became more local, local farming would become more diverse; the farms would become smaller, more complex in structure, more productive; and some city people would be needed to work on the farms. Sooner or later, as a means of reducing expenses both ways, organic wastes from the city would go out to fertilize the farms of the supporting region; thus city people would have to assume an agricultural responsibility, and would be properly motivated to do so both by the wish to have a supply of excellent food and by the fear of contaminating that supply. The increase of economic intimacy between a city and its sources would change minds (assuming, of course, that the minds in question would stay put long enough to be changed). It would improve minds. The locality, by becoming partly sustainable, would produce the thought it would need to become more sustainable.

Escape, Manufactured Calls, and Patience

2009-01-29T10:04:00.000-05:00

Occasionally, (to quote Wendell Berry)

"When despair grows in me

and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

Except, for my part, the peace of wild things is a larger vision encompassing many things, a farm in the Pacific Northwest, a coffee shop near a university teeming with ideas, wool, and color, and dreams streaming around the tastes and flavors of the rich earth of the the tropics, mountains and dark, moist, hot climes, perhaps, climbing the stairs in the back of this mapleoakbirchchestnut paneled breathing space, one would come to a different beeswaxy kind of stretch, soaked in sweet smelling sweat, the sweat that streams from the heads of lofty mountains at the birthing of the world, flying bodies twined in search of peace, flow and primal waters, chanting ancient words of power at the lowering skies, opening to the world in ways forbidden of the animals, the animals, the animals of mythos, nay of science, or running through fantastic forests feeling the mould of life that is slowly reincarnating into stone, not stone but powerconqueringconcretedeath, run, run, run away through the vanishing dream, it isn't gone, it hasn't left yet, remember, remember, wait, don't confuse life with speed and rush, rush, rush of productivity 'CAUSE IT ISN'T don't live the lie.

What, what, what else can it be than escape when, when, when it is all so interconnected and demanding of time, mind, body, full of hate, hate, hate and spite spitting spat in the face of love in the name of love. Ah, love, maimed beyond (beyond?) repair in this which was once its realm, province, feeling, breath of hope, breathe... breathe... slow... where, why, when NOW see, watch listen it is behind all that is, just look, hope is in what you don't know, do you know? Now live now peace now love because it is not in the future it is a memory in the past now now now is all you have enriched with dreams of what could be and what was. Dance dance dance, trip the light fantastic for whatelse is there to keep you you you going in the wild wild wild world of beings immortal naked, spandex, hair saliva eyes flashing eyes tread, tread, tread the wandering earth and the drip of sweat.

Never give up is the cry of the postsuicide the one who, when all else fails looks and death and laughs in his overbearing sense of wild, wooly fantastic freedom that can say no even to the grim (grim?) reaper, don't give up, don't ever give up this is only the beginning of the the the dancing, tripping, dirty, wishing, licked, sucked life you lead on the edge of the prophetic knife of this world and the next, don't you see them wear through all the time in red, in the dance of running hair, the translucence of the redorangefire of the irish skin, the eyes (have you seen eyes?) trees green green green light of the immortalimprobablespirits in the of the the trees, trip trip trip on a stone because it is real (right?)... save the people save the people (people? what the rutting hell?) woman man that one the one I can know talk about can universals even work work work NO! it is in love and skin sweat dreams that we try to reach reach reach to the "other" naming a human human human is impossible impossible only know know know that it is the other the powerlovetranscendentpersondaughtersonmotherfatherstorylifecoffeecryrattlegreenblueMoscowSeattle you can't know just be in reverence breathe breathe "Bless the Lord, Oh my soul" the wonderawemajestyachieve of the thing THING I TELL YOU

Several Poems

2009-01-29T09:30:00.000-05:00

All of these poems have been on my mind for reasons I'm still attempting to discern:

Muslin by Jane Hirshfield

"I never knew when he would come,"

my friend said of her lover,

"though often it was late in the afternoon."

Behind her back the first plum blossoms

had started to open,

few as the stars that salt the earliest dark.

"Finallyweeks would go by, then months,"

she added, "but I always let him in.

It made me strong, you see,"

"the gradual going without him.

I think it taught me a kind of surrender,

though of course I hated it too."

Why he would appear or stay away

she never fathomed -

"I couldn't ask. And that also seemed only good."

A small bird fluttered silent behind her left shoulder,

then settled on some hidden branch.

"Do you ask the weather why it comes or goes?"

She was lovely, my friend, even the gray

of her hair was lovely. A listening rope-twist

half pity, half envy tightened its length in my chest.

"When he came, you see, I could trust

that was what he wanted.

What I wanted never mattered at all."

The hands on her lap seemed quiet,

even contented.

I noticed something unspoken begin to

billow and shimmer between us,

weightless as muslin,

but neither of us moved to lift it away.

A Story About the Body by Robert Hass

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking mack from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity - like music - withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl - she must have swept them from the corners of her studio - was full of dead bees.

"My Last Breath" by Evanescence

hold on to me love
you know i can't stay long
all i wanted to say was i love you and i'm not afraid
can you hear me?
can you feel me in your arms?

holding my last breath
safe inside myself
are all my thoughts of you
sweet raptured light it ends here tonight

i'll miss the winter
a world of fragile things
look for me in the white forest
hiding in a hollow tree (come find me)
i know you hear me
i can taste it in your tears

holding my last breath
safe inside myself
are all my thoughts of you
sweet raptured light it ends here tonight

closing your eyes to disappear
you pray your dreams will leave you here
but still you wake and know the truth
no one's there

say goodnight
don't be afraid
calling me calling me as you fade to black

holding my last breath
safe inside myself
are all my thoughts of you
sweet raptured light it ends here tonight

A Few Poems around a Common Theme

2008-11-18T07:58:00.000-05:00

The Country Of Marriage

I.

I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.

II.

This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I stood
still and said nothing. And then there rose in me,
like the earth's empowering brew rising
in root and branch, the words of a dream of you
I did not know I had dreamed. I was a wanderer
who feels the solace of his native land
under his feet again and moving in his blood.
I went on, blind and faithful. Where I stepped
my track was there to steady me. It was no abyss
that lay before me, but only the level ground.

III.

Sometimes our life reminds me
of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing
and in that opening a house,
an orchard and garden,
comfortable shades, and flowers
red and yellow in the sun, a pattern
made in the light for the light to return to.
The forest is mostly dark, its ways
to be made anew day after day, the dark
richer than the light and more blessed,
provided we stay brave
enough to keep on going in.

IV.

How many times have I come to you out of my head
with joy, if ever a man was,
for to approach you I have given up the light
and all directions. I come to you
lost, wholly trusting as a man who goes
into the forest unarmed. It is as though I descend
slowly earthward out of the air. I rest in peace
in you, when I arrive at last.

V.

Our bond is no little economy based on the exchange
of my love and work for yours, so much for so much
of an expendable fund. We don't know what its limits are--
that puts us in the dark. We are more together
than we know, how else could we keep on discovering
we are more together than we thought?
You are the known way leading always to the unknown,
and you are the known place to which the unknown is always
leading me back. More blessed in you than I know,
I possess nothing worthy to give you, nothing
not belittled by my saying that I possess it.
Even an hour of love is a moral predicament, a blessing
a man may be hard up to be worthy of. He can only
accept it, as a plant accepts from all the bounty of the light
enough to live, and then accepts the dark,
passing unencumbered back to the earth, as I
have fallen tine and again from the great strength
of my desire, helpless, into your arms.

VI.

What I am learning to give you is my death
to set you free of me, and me from myself
into the dark and the new light. Like the water
of a deep stream, love is always too much. We
did not make it. Though we drink till we burst
we cannot have it all, or want it all.
In its abundance it survives our thirst.
In the evening we come down to the shore
to drink our fill, and sleep, while it
flows through the regions of the dark.
It does not hold us, except we keep returning
to its rich waters thirsty. We enter,
willing to die, into the commonwealth of its joy.

VII.

I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.
I give you the life I have let live for the love of you:
a clump of orange-blooming weeds beside the road,
the young orchard waiting in the snow, our own life
that we have planted in the ground, as I
have planted mine in you. I give you my love for all
beautiful and honest women that you gather to yourself
again and again, and satisfy--and this poem,
no more mine than any man's who has loved a woman.

Wendell Berry

The Wedding Vow

BY SHARON OLDS

I did not stand at the altar, I stood

at the foot of the chancel steps, with my beloved,

and the minister stood on the top step

holding the open Bible. The church

was wood, painted ivory inside, no people—God’s

stable perfectly cleaned. It was night,

spring—outside, a moat of mud,

and inside, from the rafters, flies

fell onto the open Bible, and the minister

tilted it and brushed them off. We stood

beside each other, crying slightly

with fear and awe. In truth, we had married

that first night, in bed, we had been

married by our bodies, but now we stood

in history—what our bodies had said,

mouth to mouth, we now said publicly,

gathered together, death. We stood

holding each other by the hand, yet I also

stood as if alone, for a moment,

just before the vow, though taken

years before, took. It was a vow

of the present and the future, and yet I felt it

to have some touch on the distant past

or the distant past on it, I felt

the wordless, dry, crying ghost of my

parents’ marriage there, somewhere

in the echoing space—perhaps one of the

plummeting flies, bouncing slightly

as it hit forsaking all others, then was brushed

away. I felt as if I had come

to claim a promise—the sweetness I’d inferred

from their sourness, and at the same time that I

had come, congenitally unworthy, to beg.

And yet, I had been working toward this hour

all my life. And then it was time

to speak—he was offering me, no matter

what, his life. That is all I had to

do, that evening, to accept the gift

I had longed for—to say I had accepted it,

as if being asked if I breathe. Do I take?

I do. I take as he takes—we have been

practicing this. Do you bear this pleasure? I do.

Wonder as Wander

BY SHARON OLDS

At dusk, on those evenings she does not go out,

my mother potters around her house.

Her daily helpers are gone, there is no one

there, no one to tell what to do,

she wanders, sometimes she talks to herself,

fondly scolding, sometimes she suddenly

throws out her arms and screams—high notes

lying here and there on the carpets

like bodies touched by a downed wire,

she journeys, she quests, she marco-polos through

the gilded gleamy loot-rooms, who is she.

I feel, now, that I do not know her,

and for all my staring, I have not seen her

—like the song she sang, when we were small,

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,

how Jesus, the Savior, was born for, to die,
for poor lonely people, like you, and like I

—on the slow evenings alone, when she delays

and delays her supper, walking the familiar

halls past the mirrors and night windows,

I wonder if my mother is tasting a life

beyond this life—not heaven, her late

beloved is absent, her father absent,

and her staff is absent, maybe this is earth

alone, as she had not experienced it,

as if she is one of the poor lonely people,

as if she is born to die. I hold fast

to the thought of her, wandering in her house,

a luna moth in a chambered cage.

Fifty years ago, I’d squat in her

garden, with her Red Queens, and try

to sense the flyways of the fairies as they kept

the pollen flowing on its local paths,

and our breaths on their course of puffs—they kept

our eyes wide with seeing what we

could see, and not seeing what we could not see.

Nine Mile

2008-07-20T06:46:00.000-04:00

Nine Mile: Around the Charles, Government Center and Back Bay
Find more Runs in Brighton, Massachusetts

Think About Land

2008-06-05T10:29:00.001-04:00

THINK ABOUT LAND
By Dr. E. F. Schumacher A talk originally published by The Catholic Housing Aid Society Our thanks go to Ted Power, whose efforts have helped us to ensure that this article is an accurate reproduction of Schumacher's original essay.
That there should be a massive housing problem in an affluent society is surely an immense and intolerable paradox. Many years ago, as we all remember, we were told by the highest political authority that we had never had it so good. And since then, according to all the statistics, we have had substantial further economic growth. But the prob1em of housing, indeed the problem of homelessness, has grown rather than diminished. Now all this is very strange. Today it takes less labour than ever before to build a house and it can be built faster than ever before. Is it shortage of land that holds us back? Assuredly not. Is it shortage of cash? There is more money knocking about now than ever before, and it is always becoming more abundant. We are told that the national income is currently rising at the rate of 5% in one year.Now 5% additional national income is two thousand million pounds. Well, this should be enough to buy a lot of houses; but it doesn’t happen that way. All the money that is generated by so-called progress is already bespoken; and it doesn’t go into housing. It goes into - well, you know where it goes- into all sorts of things such as motoring, more air travel, more Channel crossings. But the housing shortage remains. We can and did build Concorde. It has cost us immensely more than anyone had originally thought it would, but we’ve done it. And there’s Maplin, there’s the Channel tunnel. Of course we can do it. What is a mere thousand million pounds? Why should we be able to do all these things and yet be unable to solve the housing problem?We are doing all these other things because there is a demand. A demand? How do we know? Maplin is many years ahead, the Channel tunnel is many years ahead. How do we know of a demand for these services? Ah! It has all been worked out. It has all been ascertained, don’t you know? It has been calculated. The trend shows that the number of people going to or coming from the continent over the Channel will rise remorselessly from 23.7 million in 1970 to 49.7 million in 1980 and to 97.7 million in 1990. Didn’t you know this?I can also tell you the number of passengers with vehicles that will cross the Channel: 4.1 million in 1970, 9.6 million in 1980, 20.1 million in 1990, and on these figures of course the only rational thing to do is to provide these facilities. Because we pretend to know all these things, we have to build Maplin, and we have to build the Channel tunnel. But somehow we don’t have to build houses. Who has drawn the curve to tell us how many people will be homeless in 1980 or in 1990?How many people will be homeless when all these tourists come and go again? Surely there is a demand for houses, for homes; but much of this demand is not what we call effective, because the people who need accommodation, as we all know, cannot afford it.So we might say: well, society does not care enough to meet a demand that is not effective. But is this quite fair? A lot of people in society certainly care; and look at the legislation that has been passed during recent decades. Any number of laws have been passed to help the homeless and to help the slum dweller but they have never solved the problem. They have almost invariably helped the rich to become richer and left the poor in an even more hopeless situation - although the number of the poor may have shrunk. In fact, all the solutions have turned out to be a part of the problem; and it has emerged quite clearly that there is a root to this problem and until this root is tackled nothing will be of much avail.But where is the root of this problem? Well I don’t claim to be an expert on housing but I have given a lot of thought to this; I have used a lot of these innumerable reports that have been written; and I believe that the root lies in the private ownership of land.Of course, this is no original conclusion at all. Over the ages, people have pleaded for the abolition of the private ownership of land - and not Karl Marx only- but nothing has happened. Why has nothing happened? Because the only answer has seemed to lie in nationalisation.There is the theory that in order to nationalise, in a decent democratic society, you must buy out the private owner. But how could anyone successfully advocate such a buying-out policy? Of course there are others who say: ‘Don’t buyout, instead upset all existing arrangements and confiscate’.But how could anyone seriously advocate confiscation? If it is a matter of buying out, how could any Government even find the required amount of money? On this point in the debate on the public ownership of land we have got stuck. There is really a double point. First of all public ownership, it is thought, can be achieved only by buying out the private owner and this would cost an enormous amount of money which no one is prepared to raise; but second, and even more importantly, it is thought that public ownership of land will automatically and inevitably mean some type of central administration; and both these prospects are indeed daunting and unacceptable.The question, however, is this. Why precisely do we want to change land ownership? And the answer seems to me to be quite clear: to inhibit land speculation, to inhibit the private exploitation of the scarcity-value of land, to inhibit as we might say the ‘cornering’ of land, You know what cornering means - for instance, someone buying up (and this has often happened) the total crop of a commodity which others must have in order to live and the supply of which cannot be increased as prices rise. That is called cornering; and land is the ideal article for cornering. No one can exist without some land base. With growing numbers - growing mobility, growing production, growing trade - there’s no doubt that (quite apart from inflation) land values move on a one-way street. Anyone who corners land only has to wait to grow rich. I suggest it follows that the type of private ownership that may be appropriate for many man-made goods - the supply of which can be increased by human work and invention - cannot possibly be appropriate for land.
What then are the alternatives if nationalisation, as commonly conceived, is not an acceptable answer? Let’s look for a middle way, a new type of arrangement which avoids the pitfalls of simple private ownership and equally those of simple nationalisation. Can we find an ownership model with respect to land (and perhaps even with respect to some of the structures on land) which first of all eliminates private land speculation; which secondly eliminates the private windfall gains that inevitably arise and that accrue to anyone who corners the land; which thirdly does not call for compensation payments to those owning the land now; and which fourthly causes the minimum of disturbance to those who now manage and utilise the land in any manner whatsoever provided it is permitted by law?Now you may say, this is a tall order; but let’s think about it. And I would invite you to consider the following train of thought. Every piece of land in the United Kingdom has a certain value or price as of now. If the owner wanted to sell it he would have some sort of idea, perhaps after taking professional advice, of what it would fetch. Let us say this value would be ascertained for every piece of land in the United Kingdom - no doubt quite a big job but by no means an impossible one. Of course this value would reflect the current zoning arrangements and many other price-determining factors. Now this value or price I shall call the registered value as of July 1973, expressed in pounds sterling of present purchasing power. To take care of inflation the Government could publish an index showing what the pound sterling of July 1973 will be worth in pounds sterling of any later date. The registered value can thereby be easily adjusted for inflation when occasion for such adjustment arises. I suggest that if an owner wants to sell land he should not obtain more for it than the registered value as up-graded in terms of sterling for inflation. The sale of his land has to be effected via the local authority - which, however, plays a totally passive role unless it, itself, wishes to purchase the land. If it does not wish to buy, the private purchaser can pay the private vendor only the registered value, adjusted of course for inflation; and not a penny more.But what if, through re-zoning or some other change, the land has become much more valuable? If this is so, there will be many people wishing to buy the land and the highest bidder will get it; but the vendor will receive only the registered value and the surplus will accrue to what I shall call the local authority land fund. And what becomes of the registered value then? If a higher price has in fact been paid in the manner described then this becomes the new registered value. But what happens if a piece of land is for sale but no buyer can be found to pay the registered value? A transaction between vendor and purchaser may then take place at the lower price, which then becomes the registered value.In short, the current owner and any subsequent buyer is deprived of the chance of making any windfall profits through land ownership; all such profits go automatically into the public hand, what I call the local authority land fund. In those exceptional cases where a particular piece of land declines in value he may indeed not recover his purchase price; but that is the risk he takes in buying land; or, if you like, the price he pays for the immense privilege of land ownership.I commend this scheme to you for further thought. I claim that it would produce a genuine middle-way solution to the problem of land ownership. It would not in any way impair the freedom of existing landowners to continue in their legitimate activities. Their situation remains exactly as at present, without the slightest disturbance. The new dispensation becomes active only as and when the landowner wishes to get rid of his land - in other words, wishes to cease being a landowner.I suggest that such a scheme would greatly increase the ability of local authorities to obtain land for public needs at fair prices and would certainly siphon into the public hand all windfall gains arising from the growing scarcity of land; but only as and when there is a sale from willing seller to willing buyer. In short, market forces are allowed to operate as regards land transactions between private individuals, seller and buyer; but they do not lead to the acquisition of private fortunes; and the public hand - the local authority- is fully protected against private profiteering.
I shall not go into any further details here; they can all be settled once the principle has been adopted. Nor am I saying that. if the land problem is resolved in this way, all housing problems will be solved automatically. But I do feel that everything would become a lot easier.Now let me move on to another line of thinking. For quite some time I have been particularly interested in the question of the proper scale of things. This question seems to me to be the most neglected subject in modern society. “To the size of states,” said Aristotle two thousand three hundred years ago, “there is a limit as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature or are spoilt.” It’s hard to equal the language of the ancients. Imagine a small island, a small island community of two thousand people. One day a boat arrives and unloads a man who has just been released from prison on the mainland. The discharged prisoner returns home. Will this community have any difficulty in looking after this one man, giving him a bit of human contact, finding him work and re-integrating him into society? Hardly. And now imagine an island community twenty-five thousand times as big, of some fifty million people, and every year twenty-five thousand discharged prisoners return home. It is then the task of various ministries to get them back into normal life together with a number of harassed and over-worked probation officers. What a problem! In fact a problem that has never yet been satisfactorily dealt with.Now it seems to me that somehow, somewhere, there is a very big lesson to be learnt here. Or imagine that instead of one solitary discharged prisoner presenting his problem to a small island community of 2,000 people, a homeless family of five people appeared - or even two such families of ten people in all. Surely the community would find ways and means to ensure adequate shelter for these two families. But multiply the scale of the situation by twenty-five thousand a community of fifty million people trying to cope with two hundred and fifty thousand homeless people. What a problem! Ministries, officials, rules, regulations, financial arrangements, immense efforts to cope with immense difficulties, and (going by experience) never an adequate solution.I have just published a book with the title ‘Small is Beautiful’ and I received a letter which explains this strange and challenging problem of scale from a mathematical point of view. I quote:
“The crucial point is that as a monolithic organisation increases in size, the problems of communicating between its components go up exponentially. It is generally reckoned that the maximum size of a productive scientific research team is twelve; over that size everyone spends all his time finding out what everyone else is doing.”
Some twenty years ago, working for the National Coal Board, I became interested in the problem of accidents in the pits. At that time we had two hundred and fifty thousand accidents a year. Someone drew my attention to a mine outside the National Coal Board, which did not actually produce coal but some other mineral by exactly the same methods of extraction as we applied in the coal mines. The accident rate at that mine was much the same as in the coal pits. One day the management in charge of this one single mine decided to do something about these accidents and virtually abolished them. So we studied their methods, which were perfectly straightforward, and said to ourselves: “What they can do, we can do”. They had one mine, we had six hundred; but then our resources, staffs, etc. were certainly in proportion the same as theirs. So the National Coal Board said, “When it is a matter of people getting hurt or killed, we cannot afford to lose any time. Let us apply these proven methods of accident prevention in all six hundred collieries right away.” We did not succeed - although of course, in the twenty years since then, the safety record of the coal mines has improved beyond recognition. But at that time, I repeat, we did not succeed the way this outside firm with only one mine to worry about had, in fact, succeeded.It took me a long time to understand this strange and paradoxical thing. If one able safety engineer with his team can succeed in one mine, why can’t six hundred able safety engineers with their teams succeed in six hundred mines? The answer is that one man requires no administrative superstructure to do his work; he himself, as team leader, is the superstructure; but six hundred team leaders do require (or everybody appears to think they do) an administrative superstructure.And now let me make this point: administration to be well done is a very difficult job which requires a very high level of intelligence. It is much more difficult than accident prevention underground. It follows that only the best talent is good enough for administration; and if you need an administrative superstructure because of the scale of the operation (six hundred mines instead of one) then you simply cannot avoid your best people being sucked into administrative posts; and then only the second or third rate people remain to do the job itself.I am making this point very seriously against the people who say, “Yes, we set up a big structure, but of course it must not be bureaucratic.” If it is not to be bureaucratic it will absorb all the best talents you have at your disposal. And this is not all. Once you need an elaborate administrative superstructure, the people who actually do the work cannot give the best that is in them because they are being administered (and this is nobody’s fault) by people far away whom they have probably never met except at impersonal briefing meetings.This experience, reinforced by many similar ones in the last twenty odd years, has led me to the conviction that small is beautiful - where small, of course, does not mean infinitely or absurdly small but the order of size, or scale, which the mind can fully encompass, - so that large administrative superstructures can be dispensed with.Good administration, let me repeat, demands superlative talents and intelligence; and bad administration is the worst of all evils. So this whole question of scale I consider to be absolutely central and one of the most neglected questions in the modern debate. I quoted Aristotle and repeat: “When things become too large or too small they either wholly lose their nature or are spoilt”, or as my grandmother used to say “Everything too is of evil”.Finally, let me put to you yet another train of thought. I started by saying that it was very strange indeed that we, an affluent society, should have failed to solve the housing problem; and indeed that failure is quite inexcusable considering that it makes a mockery of all talk about social justice. It also makes a mockery of all pretensions to economic rationality, because the social costs of inadequate housing, the costs in terms of delinquency, crime, ill-health, mental break-downs, unemployability - all these social costs are beyond computation; and I have no doubt whatever that they immensely outweigh the real costs of adequate housing.But be this as it may, I do not wish to leave you with the impression that the current affluence of Britain, or indeed of Western Europe, is an achievement unlikely to be challenged or disturbed. This so-called achievement is based on certain specific and temporary practices and constellations which are, to put it crudely, on the way out. When I say practices, I mean living on capital instead of income. A vital part of our capital today is oil: a non-renewable product over the provision of which we, in Western Europe, have virtually no control at all. And the constellation is a moment in history during which we can still obtain this oil, a constellation of power which is rapidly changing. The world economy (and this means primarily the affluent twenty per cent of mankind) is demanding an increase of oil supplies of 7% every year, while a growing number of oil-producing countries, to secure their own longer-term future, have already decided not to let their oil output rise beyond the 1971 level, The countries which have already taken this decision are Venezuela, Libya and Kuwait; and they, between them, account for more than one third - thirty-five per cent to be exact- of all the oil that flows into international trade. Are we prepared for an oil crunch? How vulnerable is our affluence in case of an oil supply crunch? What is the meaning of those projects which I quoted (of the number of Channel travellers with cars, or without cars) in the event of real difficulties, in terms of price or quantity, with oil?If we continue to think that we can live it up today because our children are bound to be richer, more affluent than ourselves, then I suggest we are making our calculations without asking the people who are, in effect, making this affluence possible. Therefore, does not all this point towards the need for a fundamental reorientation of what has been called our life-style? And this includes some of what my political friends call ‘the system’, a reorientation towards a much more decentralised pattern, a much greater autonomy and self-reliance of small communities and, above all, a much more flexible, just and rational use of land - apart from very many other things.

Trees and the Nature of Work

2008-06-05T09:24:00.000-04:00

"A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has his mind precisely against what is wrong with us. . . . What I am saying is that if we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce." - Wendell Berry

I was recalling last night a story narrated by a good friend of both Tolkien and the Lewis Brothers, who would often accompany these three on walks across the English countryside. The Lewis Brothers would set the pace with an eye more toward exercise while Tolkien would wander rather behind looking at all the flora and fauna they passed. The friend, whose name escapes me, would serve as an insight, holding the two paces together by encouraging Tolkien to catch up and the Lewis Brothers to slow down. Once when he was heading back to accompany Tolkien he heard a chainsaw start up in the distance and Tolkien mutter under his breath, "Orcs!" At the time the friend had no idea what that term meant, as this was well before the Trilogy or the Hobbit graced this earth.

Given that context, it may not surprise you that as I walked to work today I was struck by an avenue of trees some 150-200 feet high, verdant with spring life, dripping rain down on me as I walked underneath their canopy and dark boughs. It wasn't quite the experience on ents that I have had, but they encompassed the silence and ancientness of many of the scenes in Fangorn and Lothlorien. I've been blessed with the opportunity on many occasions of hiking in old-growth forests in the Cascades: clambering over windfall cedars some ten feet in diameter, trail-running the soft beds of leaves and needles devoid of underbrush past living towers three hundred feet tall, and counting the brief years of humankind back several centuries in growth rings. There is something beyond the ken of us humans in these trees.

Wells of memory, life-forms radically different from yet intrinsically necessary to our own.

Schumacher in his wonderful little essay, Buddhist Economics mentions that,

The teaching of the Buddha, on the other hand, enjoins a reverent
and non-violent attitude not only to all sentient beings but also, with
great emphasis, to trees. Every follower of the Buddha ought to plant a
tree every few years and look after it until it is safely established, and
the Buddhist economist can demonstrate without difficulty that the
universal observation of this rule would result in a high rate of genuine
economic development independent of any foreign aid. Much of the
economic decay of southeast Asia (as of many other parts of the world)
is undoubtedly due to a heedless and shameful neglect of trees.

I tend to agree with this... Fr. Josef had me keep a garden as a teenager because he said it was good for a young adult to be close to the earth, to remember where he came from and where he was going. We're too hasty nowadays and many wise ones bemoan the fact.

As Treebeard says,
I can see and hear (and smell and feel) a great deal from this, from this, from this a-lalla-lalla-rumba-kamanda-lind-or-burume. Excuse me: that is a part of my name for it; I do not know what the word is in the outside languages: you know, the thing we are on, where I stand and look out on fine mornings, and think about the Sun, and the grass beyond the wood, and the horses, and the clouds, and the unfolding of the world. ... Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.

Lonergan says that being hasty and not considering all the further pertinent questions is what has caused every civilization from the beginning of the world to eventually collapse.

We need to keep something of the memory that calls to us from trees. Tolkien notes this so well in his description of Treebeard's eyes,

"One felt as if there was an enormous well behind them, filled up with ages of memory and long, slow, steady thinking; but their surface was sparkling with the present: like sun shimmering on the outer leaves of a vast tree, or on the ripples of a very deep lake. I don't know but it felt as if something that grew in the ground — asleep, you might say, or just feeling itself as something between root-tip and leaf-tip, between deep earth and sky had suddenly waked up, and was considering you with the same slow care that it had given to its own inside affairs for endless years." - Two Towers, Treebeard

So, go out and plant a tree, clamber around in one, ponder one, and revel in their memory and life.

I Won't Forget You My Friend

2008-05-22T23:55:00.000-04:00

As I was driving to work a few days ago I heard a song by Pink (yes, one of my long-time favorites) and it reminded me of several friends with whom I've lost contact... usually for no particular reason. It's so easy to just drift apart you know? You can spend some of the best hours of your life with a person and three years later not know them at all. Anyway, I think Pink's song really speaks to that, though she is talking particularly about a boyfriend she ostensibly had I see it as a song about the loss of friendship.

I'll just quote a few lines:

Remember when we were such fools
And so convinced and just too cool
I wish I could touch you again
I wish I could still call you friend
I'd give anything
When someone said count your blessings now
For they're long gone
I guess I just didn't know how
I was all wrong
They knew better

I'll keep you locked in my head
Until we meet again
Until we
Until we meet again
And I won't forget you my friend
What happened?

It's hard. There is a fellow named Bryan Steele whom I was awesome friends with even though we just spent a week together in 2001 we kept up for several years via email and phone... but then just lost contact. I'll think about him occasionally and wonder where he is, what he's doing...

There have been a few people I was really good friends with that have become just friends... we don't talk as much, we've drifted away in distance and life. But I miss them. Sometimes a lot. Friendship is an amazing thing that way. Here's another song that speaks to that by Sugar Ray (kudos Stashu, wherever you are)

Now this is somethin' from back in the day
I'll always remember Run DMC
And all the good times
That we had on the beach
Stealing sips from a paper cup
And making out in the sand
Maybe I'm dreaming
Can you tell me

[Chorus]Do you remember
The summers that lasted so long
June til September
Was our time to sing our songs
Do you remember
All of us together
As we grew up under the sun

I'll always remember everything we do
Rockin' the eighties blastin' KROQ
I remember Culture Club
The Clash, and Men Without Hats
Seems kind of funny right now
But it's taking me back
We'd always sing along
And laugh out loud at ourselves
Don't want to stop dreaming
Can you tell me

[Chorus]Do you remember
The summers that lasted so long
June til September
Was our time to sing our songs
Do you remember
All of us together
As we grew up under the sun

I want to rewind every time'
Cause the words have so much meaning
They were there when nobody cared
Always knew what I was feeling
Stay tonight don't leave me reminiscing
All I do is wind up missing you
And you missing
Are you missing me
na na na

[Chorus]Do you remember
The summers that lasted so long
June til September
Was our time to sing all the songs
Do you remember
All of us together
As we grew up under the sun

So, here's to all our friends: past, present, and future. You're the best, I love you, I miss you, and I hope all is well. I Won't Forget You My Friend.

Riding the Bus and Subjectivity

2008-04-13T14:36:00.000-04:00

So, I just finished an excellent essay by my good friend Paul on Personalist Thomism, a movement that I see as solving in a great part many of the abuses against the human person that the 20th Century has spawned. Maybe I'll upload his essay once/if I obtain his permission. In the meanwhile I highly recommend anything by Fr. Norris Clarke of Fordham University or JPII of the World ;-)

Anyway, the main drive of the paper as I see it is the irreducibility of the person to an object. Persons are ALWAYS inherently subjects. Now, by subject is meant someone who does the same kinds of things you do: think, will, participate in an interior life, love, dream. Everyone you meet is like this, whether you take the time to notice it or not.

I have a thought though... see, when we interact with other human beings, unless we can really befriend them they tend to just interact on the level of objects in our world... not in a necessarily dehumanizing way, just in a friendship of utility way. I find that when I "people watch" in some place like a bus or coffee shop (not anything like Hitchcock's Rear Window, that is just weird, thanks Paul), it is very easy to see them as subjects. Why? Because of the silence. They are participating in their interior life, a life that I will never participate in, a life that, if I am lucky, I will be able to catch glimpses of by spending my entire life getting to know one person.

There is a phrase I can't recall the origin of but speaks to this in a very Lewisian sense, "The only response to the presence/face of the infinite is silence." Here you are sitting in a group of strangers (it happens a lot) and it overwhelms you... all these little infinities off in their own - not little, never little - vast worlds. Can't you just sit back and glory in the wonders all around you?

That, my friends, is why I like riding the bus.

Random Memories

2008-03-22T11:07:00.000-04:00

You know how you're wandering around listening to music and all of a sudden you're taken back? Your history washes over you like a wave, the good, the bad, and mostly the absurd.

Here are a few memories that I recalled recently:

When we lived on our five-acre property out in May Valley we used to have huge gatherings for Mother's Day, Birthday Parties, and a lot of different events. E, A, G and I used to hide in the thorn bushes at the end of our driveway and attack the cars that came with bows, arrows, and spears... just to make sure they knew what driveway was ours.

There was this huge, 200 foot cedar tree in our big field that I used to climb during windstorms and be tossed about like a doll... it was wild. Rain, wind, thunder... ahh.

One Sunday School our teacher gave us little cherry tomato plants to take home for Mother's Day. I planted mine on a little hillock and Dad mowed it over. I cried. I think it was dead already but... mowing is a hard way to go. :-)

Oh, speaking of mowing... I did most of the mowing because E and Dad have allergies. Our big field took exactly 2 hours (a lot of rosaries) to mow on our riding mower. I could do it with my eyes closed. We used to soup up our mower and drive around like wild banshees with a huge trail of smoke behind us. We also used to take it off jumps and drag stumps out and go though alder groves with it. It was an amazing mower. They don't make them like they used to.

We used to jump the fence running around the landfill and play in the mile buffer zone between us and the landfill. There was this creek that we would build boats for and sail them... with our GI Joes and Legos. A lot of our games involved those. We would run fishing line from treetops to our bedroom window and use those little green berry baskets to carry messages back and forth.

I used to save a lot of my money for Radio Shack and I'd pick up wire and buzzers and motors and lights. I made this contraption out of foil, and wire and put it under the front doormat so that it would make a buzzer go off in my room when someone stepped on it (completing the circuit). I always wanted to make something with this used washer machine motor I found but I couldn't come up with sufficient electricity to power it. I stayed away from wall sockets because I had shocked myself so often. I made an anti-burgle device for my upper bunk by running wires from the socket to various wires on my ladder. It didn't work.

I remember we had this huge cathedral ceiling and we put a crucifix up in the middle above the alcove and had lamps on either side that made it look like the crucifix had wings when we had both of them on. It was cool.

I had a teddy bear named berry and made him clothes... usually out of felt and staples because while I could sew it took too long. He had a bed right by mine in the very corner of the ceiling sloping down.

I had this "study" underneath the house in the dirt 4 foot ceiling basement. I had a desk, ran electricty, had an olllllldd computer and a little lamp.

E and I used to climb these huge trees by taking pieces of 2X4 and 2X2 and nailing them all the way up the tree. We would get 50 feet up no problem and then build a fort. We made the first 2-3 steps pivot on one nail so the little kids couldn't climb up. We would fall out of our forts on occasion. But mostly we shot arrows from them and read books.

I remember I fell in love with Huckleberry Finn and went without shoes whenever i could and jumped out of windows and made a hut like his raft. We had this amazing tree formation that we called Jumping fort because these trees had bent over and were covered in moss and we could climb and jump and hide underneath and use them as elevators going maybe 5-6 feet up. It was sweet.

We used to pretend we were Barsarks too where we would run through the forest with our shirts off and not feel the thorns and branches cutting us. AH Vikings!

I used to make maps all the time too... crosscut, aerial, topographical... it was fun.

"Ah me! Ah Life!"

A Meditation on Gift

2008-02-26T11:48:00.000-05:00

I was pondering gift today... in a similar manner to an earlier post (circa 2005). And the idea of gift really is essential to getting through life in an worthwhile way. Realizing that your left hand, your nose, your pair of shoes, your hair, the food you eat, your taste buds, the fact that food tastes good in addition to keeping you alive, your eyes, your sight, the beautiful and ugly things you get to see, waking up, being able to dream, meeting friends, smiling at other people, that there are other people, that you can read, that you can understand what you read, that you can pray, that you can stub your toe, that you can burn your tongue... all is a gift from God and need not be that way at all.

If I can really appropriate that awareness and deep sense of gratitude that stems from such an awareness... I really cannot be unhappy ever again. I can be awed at the breath coming through my nose and the fact that there is a floor beneath my feet that I can walk on. I can wonder at the fact that I don't fall right through the earth and that I can communicate with other people. The radical givenness or conntingency of existence is a means for joy and hope... because it could be so many other worse ways... but it isn't. Yay for Puddleglum and Chesterton!

Architect of Spears by GKC

2008-02-22T14:10:00.001-05:00

The other day, in the town of Lincoln, I suffered an optical illusion
which accidentally revealed to me the strange greatness of the Gothic
architecture. Its secret is not, I think, satisfactorily explained in
most of the discussions on the subject. It is said that the Gothic
eclipses the classical by a certain richness and complexity, at once
lively and mysterious. This is true; but Oriental decoration is equally
rich and complex, yet it awakens a widely different sentiment. No man
ever got out of a Turkey carpet the emotions that he got from a cathedral
tower. Over all the exquisite ornament of Arabia and India there is the
presence of something stiff and heartless, of something tortured and
silent. Dwarfed trees and crooked serpents, heavy flowers and hunchbacked
birds accentuate by the very splendour and contrast of their colour the
servility and monotony of their shapes. It is like the vision of a
sneering sage, who sees the whole universe as a pattern. Certainly no one
ever felt like this about Gothic, even if he happens to dislike it. Or,
again, some will say that it is the liberty of the Middle Ages in the use
of the comic or even the coarse that makes the Gothic more interesting
than the Greek. There is more truth in this; indeed, there is real truth
in it. Few of the old Christian cathedrals would have passed the Censor
of Plays. We talk of the inimitable grandeur of the old cathedrals; but
indeed it is rather their gaiety that we do not dare to imitate. We
should be rather surprised if a chorister suddenly began singing "Bill
Bailey" in church. Yet that would be only doing in music what the
mediaevals did in sculpture. They put into a Miserere seat the very
scenes that we put into a music hall song: comic domestic scenes similar to
the spilling of the beer and the hanging out of the washing. But though
the gaiety of Gothic is one of its features, it also is not the secret of
its unique effect. We see a domestic topsy-turvydom in many Japanese
sketches. But delightful as these are, with their fairy tree-tops, paper
houses, and toddling, infantile inhabitants, the pleasure they give is of
a kind quite different from the joy and energy of the gargoyles. Some
have even been so shallow and illiterate as to maintain that our pleasure
in medieval building is a mere pleasure in what is barbaric, in what is
rough, shapeless, or crumbling like the rocks. This can be dismissed
after the same fashion; South Sea idols, with painted eyes and radiating
bristles, are a delight to the eye; but they do not affect it in at all
the same way as Westminster Abbey. Some again (going to another and
almost equally foolish extreme) ignore the coarse and comic in
mediaevalism; and praise the pointed arch only for its utter purity and
simplicity, as of a saint with his hands joined in prayer. Here, again,
the uniqueness is missed. There are Renaissance things (such as the
ethereal silvery drawings of Raphael), there are even pagan things (such
as the Praying Boy) which express as fresh and austere a piety. None of
these explanations explain. And I never saw what was the real point about
Gothic till I came into the town of Lincoln, and saw it behind a row of
furniture-vans.

I did not know they were furniture-vans; at the first glance and in the
smoky distance I thought they were a row of cottages. A low stone wall
cut off the wheels, and the vans were somewhat of the same colour as the
yellowish clay or stone of the buildings around them. I had come across
that interminable Eastern plain which is like the open sea, and all the
more so because the one small hill and tower of Lincoln stands up in it
like a light-house. I had climbed the sharp, crooked streets up to this
ecclesiastical citadel; just in front of me was a flourishing and richly
coloured kitchen garden; beyond that was the low stone wall; beyond that
the row of vans that looked like houses; and beyond and above that,
straight and swift and dark, light as a flight of birds, and terrible as
the Tower of Babel, Lincoln Cathedral seemed to rise out of human sight.

As I looked at it I asked myself the questions that I have asked here;
what was the soul in all those stones? They were varied, but it was not
variety; they were solemn, but it was not solemnity; they were farcical,
but it was not farce. What is it in them that thrills and soothes a man
of our blood and history, that is not there in an Egyptian pyramid or an
Indian temple or a Chinese pagoda? All of a sudden the vans I had
mistaken for cottages began to move away to the left. In the start this
gave to my eye and mind I really fancied that the Cathedral was moving
towards the right. The two huge towers seemed to start striding across
the plain like the two legs of some giant whose body was covered with the
clouds. Then I saw what it was.

The truth about Gothic is, first, that it is alive, and second, that it is
on the march. It is the Church Militant; it is the only fighting
architecture. All its spires are spears at rest; and all its stones are
stones asleep in a catapult. In that instant of illusion, I could hear the
arches clash like swords as they crossed each other. The mighty and
numberless columns seemed to go swinging by like the huge feet of imperial
elephants. The graven foliage wreathed and blew like banners going into
battle; the silence was deafening with ail the mingled noises of a
military march; the great bell shook down, as the organ shook up its
thunder. The thirsty-throated gargoyles shouted like trumpets from all
the roofs and pinnacles as they passed; and from the lectern in the core
of the cathedral the eagle of the awful evangelist clashed his wings of
brass,

And amid all the noises I seemed to hear the voice of a man shouting in
the midst like one ordering regiments hither and thither in the fight; the
voice of the great half-military master-builder; the architect of spears.
I could almost fancy he wore armour while he made that church; and I knew
indeed that, under a scriptural figure, he had borne in either hand the
trowel and the sword.

I could imagine for the moment that the whole of that house of life had
marched out of the sacred East, alive and interlocked, like an army.
Some Eastern nomad had found it solid and silent in the red circle of the
desert. He had slept by it as by a world-forgotten pyramid; and been woke
at midnight by the wings of stone and brass, the tramping of the tall
pillars, the trumpets of the waterspouts. On such a night every snake or
sea-beast must have turned and twisted in every crypt or corner of the
architecture. And the fiercely coloured saints marching eternally in the
flamboyant windows would have carried their glorioles like torches across
dark lands and distant seas; till the whole mountain of music and darkness
and lights descended roaring on the lonely Lincoln hill. So for some
hundred and sixty seconds I saw the battle-beauty of the Gothic; then the
last furniture-van shifted itself away; and I saw only a church tower in a
quiet English town, round which the English birds were floating.

'Unprotected'

2008-01-21T11:10:00.000-05:00

'Unprotected'
Sexual freedom is damaging to students. But health officials must not judge.

by DANIELLE CRITTENDEN
Thursday, December 14, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

"My patients were hurting, they looked to me and what could I do?" So confesses an anonymous campus physician in the beginning of her startling memoir. Over the course of 200 pages, she tells story after story about suffering young women. If these women were ailing from eating disorders, or substance abuse, or almost any other medical or psychological problem, their university health departments would spring to their aid. "Cardiologists hound patients about fatty diets and insufficient exercise. Pediatricians encourage healthy snacks, helmets and discussion of drugs and alcohol. Everyone condemns smoking and tanning beds."

Unfortunately, the young women described in "Unprotected" have fallen victim to one of the few personal troubles that our caring professions refuse to treat or even acknowledge: They have been made miserable by their "sexual choices." And on that subject, few modern doctors dare express a word of judgment.

Thus the danger of sexually transmitted diseases is too often overlooked in the lifestyle choices of the young women at the unnamed college where the author works. But the dangers go far beyond the biological. A girl named Heather, for instance, has succumbed to an intense bout of depression. The doctor presses her to think of possible causes. She can't think of anything. Then she says: "Well, I can think of one thing: since Thanksgiving, I've had a 'friend with benefits.' And actually I'm kind of confused about that."

Heather continues: "I want to spend more time with him, and do stuff like go shopping or see a movie. That would make it a friendship for me. But he says no, because if we do those things, then in his opinion we'd have a relationship--and that's more than he wants. And I'm confused, because it seems like I don't get the 'friend' part, but he still gets the 'benefits.'" It finally dawns on her: "I'm really unhappy about that. It's hard to be with him and then go home and be alone."

Heather is not an unrepresentative case. The author meets patients who cannot sleep, who mutilate themselves, who exhibit every symptom of psychic distress. Often they don't even know why they feel the way they do. As these girls see it, they are acting like sensible, responsible adults: They practice "safe sex" and limit their partners to a mere two or three per year.

They are following the best advice that modern psychology can offer. They are enjoying their sexual freedom, experimenting, discovering themselves. They can't understand what might be wrong. And yet something is wrong. As the author observes, surveys have found that "sexually active teenage girls were more than three times as likely to be depressed, and nearly three times as likely to have had a suicide attempt, than girls who were not sexually active."

And should all this joyous experimentation end in externally verifiable effects--should girls find themselves afflicted with a disease or an unwanted pregnancy--then (and only then) do their campus "women's health" departments go to work for them. They will book the abortion, hand out a condom or prescribe a course of antibiotic treatment. And then they will pat their young patients on the shoulder and send them back into the world, without an admonishing word about the conduct that got them into trouble in the first place.

"Look at how different health decisions are valued," the author advises. "When Stacey avoids fatty foods she is being health conscious. . . . When she stays away from alcohol, she is being responsible and resisting her impulses. For all these she is endorsed for keeping long-term goals in mind instead of giving in to peer pressure and immediate gratification. But if she makes a conscious decision to delay sexual activity, she's simply 'not sexually active'--given no praise or endorsement."

If anything, the more "transgressive" the behavior, the greater the reluctance to judge. On a University of Michigan Web site, "'external water sports' is described as a type of 'safer sex.'" (The phrase has nothing to do with a swimming pool.) At Virginia Commonwealth University, "cross-dressing is called a 'recreational activity.' " The sexual advice blog "Go Ask Alice," sponsored by Columbia University, provides helpful hints to students on ménages à trois ("Nothing wrong with giving it a try, so long as you're all practicing safer sex"), swing-club etiquette and phone sex ("Getting Started").

When the author treats Brian, a young homosexual man who is engaged in "high-risk behavior with multiple people," she discovers that, by policy, she cannot insist that he be tested for HIV. And if he were to submit to voluntary testing, and the tests were to prove positive, she would not be allowed to report this information to the local department of health--although of course she would be required to do so if he had contracted any other communicable disease. Isn't promoting health, even saving lives, "worth the risk of feeling judged?" Apparently not.

And yet, not all judgments are to be avoided. The author of this vivid and urgent book has published it anonymously precisely because she fears that if her employers and colleagues heard her unwelcome views, they would judge her negatively--and punish her, personally and professionally. The anonymity, however understandable, is a shame: Her cause could use a visible and vocal crusader.

Ms. Crittenden is the author of "What our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes The Modern Woman." "Unprotected" is available for sale at the OpinionJournal bookstore here.

What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us
Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman

By DANIELLE CRITTENDEN

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/crittenden-mothers.html

The Effects of Traveling

2008-01-05T12:07:00.000-05:00

Now, I am a huge fan of traveling and seeing the world, despite my limited travels. I have many friends whom I both respect and admire who also swear by traveling and seeing the world.

But two great men whom I hold in high regard say things to the contrary: GK Chesterton and Adam Smith.

"I have never managed to lose my conviction that travel narrows the mind." - What I Saw in America CW 21:37 GK Chesterton

Adam Smith mentions in the Wealth of Nations that parents send their children to study abroad when "they become tired of watching them deteriorate before their eyes and send them to deteriorate before someone else's"

I'm still pondering this disjunct. What are your thoughts?

Here are some further reflections on the topic that may answer the question, I think they do to my mind.

Two thoughts that might serve as an answer:

1) In Chesterton's essay "On certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family" he warns against travel as a means of escaping real life and the richnesses therein. I quote, "[the escapist traveler] can visit Venice because to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men. He can stare at the Chinese because for him the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares at the old lady in the next garden she becomes active. He is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals - of free men, perverse, personal, and deliberately different from himself... They do not seek to destroy his principles and assert their own; the stranger monsters of the suburban street do seek to do this." Thus, it seems as long as one is grappling with reality and the harshness on one's neighbor, travelling would merely help in the pursuit of that task. But you have to be careful that it is not an escape from the duty of living.

2) When in doubt refer to Hobbits; they are an everlasting wellspring of commonsense and wisdom. Most Hobbits did not see the need/reason/desire for travelling further than the bounds of their own Shire. Even Bree was a distance that only few Hobbits breached. However, that was one extreme in the story. The other extreme was Gandalf, the Wandering Wizard and while he is arguably the best character in the trilogy, Frodo, Sam, Merry, and Pippin feel almost sorry for him as he "has no place to rest his head." Indeed, one of the major differences between Saruman and Gandalf is their respect for the homely lifestyle of the Hobbits. I think the exemplar of the middle route (as well as many other elements in the story) is Sam. He loves home, deeply, and it is only love that can bring him to part with it. He is grounded in the domestic: gardening, beer, old men. At the same time he has a deep wonder of the outside world. He is not escaping from something at home; he (for love of Frodo) is exploring the wonders of the world in wonder while pursuing a specific task of great import. He learns to love the outside world as well, but only in juxtaposition to the inside world of the Shire that remains his deepest love. This, to me, is the real focus of travel, not only to have a sense of wonder in seeking out the richness and beauty of the world, but also to appreciate the home and the domestic that much more in contrast.

Mary Ann Glendon on Today's Youth

2007-12-24T13:56:00.000-05:00

Hello Peoples!

As I am sure many of you know Mary Ann Glendon is awesome. She was recently installed as the US Ambassador to the Holy See. Here is an excellent speech she gave in 2004:

MARY ANN GLENDON ON TODAY'S UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

"Generation Y Bears Unusual Burdens"

ROME, APRIL 5, 2004 (Zenit.org).- Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon prepared this address for the Pontifical Council for the Laity's 8th International Youth Forum, held near Rome this week. Glendon was recently named president of the Pontifical Academy for Social Sciences. The text was slightly adapted here.

* * *

University Students Today: Portrait of a Generation Searching

By Mary Ann Glendon

Since most of you are students, I'm sure you know what it is like to be assigned to write a paper in a field where you are not an expert. So I think you can imagine my reaction when the Council for the Laity asked me to give a talk titled "University Students Today: Portrait of a New Generation." I was honored, but a bit daunted.

I. What the Social Scientists Say

I began my assignment the way you probably would. I went to the library to find out what the social scientists tell us. There I found that there is an enormous literature about the young men and women who were born after 1979, who came of age with the new century, and who for that reason are sometimes called the Millennials. In fact, no generation has been more studied than the cohort sometimes also known as Generation Y.

The social science data tells us that you are blessed in many ways. We are told that you are the best-educated generation in history. More young people from more diverse backgrounds are attending universities than ever before (although large gaps still exist between affluent and developing countries, and between rich and poor within the more affluent countries). Girls in particular have never had more opportunities to develop their full human potential.

A circumstance that has given a decisive stamp to your age group is that you and the personal computer grew up together. The first computers for homes, offices and schools were introduced by IBM in 1981, and you are skilled with them in a way that few of your elders will ever be. Another blessing many of you enjoy is that -- thanks to improved longevity -- no generation has ever had the opportunity to know their grandparents for so long a time.

In certain other respects, however, Generation Y bears unusual burdens. Probably nothing has had more profound influence on the hopes and fears of your generation than the social revolution that took place between the mid-1960s (when most of your parents were the age you are now) and the 1980s when most of you were born. Beginning in the 1960s, birth rates and marriage rates plummeted in the affluent nations of North America, Europe, Japan and Australia. At the same time, divorce rates rose steeply, as did the rates of births outside marriage, and the incidence of non-marital cohabitation.

The scale and speed of these phenomena were unprecedented -- with increases or decreases of more than 50% in less than 20 years. When these rates finally stabilized at their new, high levels toward the end of the 1980s, we found ourselves on a social landscape that was utterly and completely transformed. Customary understandings that had governed human sexual behavior for millennia were not only widely disregarded, but openly rejected.

With hindsight, we can see that the changes in behavior and ideas that took place in those years amounted to nothing less than a massive social experiment. Though few realized it at the time, it was an experiment that was conducted largely at the expense of children. We now understand what should have been obvious all along -- that when the behavior of adults changes, the environments in which children grow up are changed as well.

By giving priority to adults' quest for personal fulfillment, society changed the whole experience of childhood: More children than ever before grew up in households without fathers. More were left in non-parental care at younger ages. Little thought was given to what these changes might mean for children, or for the future of the societies most affected.

Some of you may have heard reflections on that subject by Father Tony Anatrella, the psychoanalyst who addressed this gathering last year. According to him, the changing experience of childhood has had an adverse effect on the ability of many young people to have trust in others, and even on their ability to have hope for the future. He was rather harsh in his criticism of the generation that came of age in the 1960s. He claimed that while they, like all parents, wanted their children to be happy, many failed to teach their children "the basic rules of social life, the customs that are the treasures of a people, and the Christian life that has been the matrix of diverse civilizations."

The story in the developing world is different, but changes in family life there have been equally rapid and profound. Industrialization, urbanization and globalization have accelerated the disruption of age-old customs and patterns of family organization. In many countries, the process of industrialization that had been spread out over a century in the West was accomplished in little more than a decade. In some parts of the world, children have been robbed both of their childhood and their parents by the ravages of AIDS -- or by violent ethnic and political strife.

That is the sort of information I found when I looked to see what social scientists tell us about Generation Y. But as a university teacher, a mother and a grandmother, I felt that something was missing. I wanted to know more about what young people themselves make of their situations as they prepare to assume responsible positions in an era of turbulent changes wrought by globalization, conflict and widespread disruption of family life. And I wanted to know more about how Catholic university students, in particular, see themselves.

II. Some Voices of Young Catholics

So, to try to get a sense of your own hopes and fears for the future, I asked some colleagues and friends who deal with young Catholics in universities and youth organizations to circulate a little questionnaire for me. Here are two of the questions I asked: What social developments do you most hope for in your lifetime, and what do you fear the most? What developments do you most hope for in your personal life, and what do you fear the most?

What was most striking about the replies I received from Catholic students all over the world was the similarity in the way these young men and women expressed their personal hopes and fears.

From the Philippines to Kenya, from Europe to North and South America, the students mainly spoke of hopes for three things: hope to find the right person to marry and found a family with; hope for work that is satisfying as well as rewarding; and the hope to be able to help to bring about positive changes in society, which many express as building the civilization of love. Their chief anxieties concerned their ability to realize these hopes.

Thus, one young Spaniard wrote, "I look forward to marriage and the birth of each one of my sons and daughters, and I hope to find the kind of job that will enable me to better society. What I fear are the same things, because these are the most important decisions in my life and I fear choosing in the wrong way." Along the same lines, a German student wrote, "I hope for a great family life and for the kind of work that will enable me to return some of what God has given me, but I fear not finding the right person to spend the rest of my life with."

Anna Halpine, a remarkable Catholic activist who founded the World Youth Alliance five years ago when she was still in her 20s, summed up the reaction of her co-workers to my questions this way: "Our experience is that all young people are searching for meaning and purpose to their lives. Once this has been established, once they recognize the profound dignity that they possess, they are in a position to extend this to others. Before this cornerstone has been laid, they are unable to give any proposal to the world and any rationale to their own existence."

Last year, the director of the European branch of the World Youth Alliance, Gudrun Lang, gave a speech to the European Parliament where she described her contemporaries this way: "It is my generation that is the first to experience what it means to live in a more or less 'value-free' continent. It is we who witness a society of broken families -- you are aware of what that entails for the individual, the spouses, the children and all the people around them. It is we who witness a society of convenience at all costs: killing our own children when they are still unborn; killing our older relatives because we don't want to give them the care, the time and the friendship that they need."

She went to say, "Many young people I work with have experienced this loss of respect for the inviolable dignity of every member of the human family. Our own families are broken, our own relatives are lonely, and many do not see a meaning in life." But at the same time, she noted the emergence of a determination to change things for the better. Her generation, she said, has "experienced the ideologies of the second half of the past century put into legislation -- and we are not happy with them."

III. The Quest for Meaning in the Postmodern University

What emerges from these data and impressions, it seems to me, is a portrait of a generation that is searching -- a generation of young men and women who want something better for themselves and their future children than what has been handed on to them; a generation that is exploring uncharted territory and finding little guidance from its elders. It is only to be expected that, for many members of Generation Y, the search for meaning takes on special urgency when they enter the university, a place traditionally dedicated to the unrestricted quest for knowledge and truth.

What better place than a university, one might think, to pursue one's quest for meaning. What better place to learn how to make measured and informed judgments. What better place to acquire skill in distinguishing between what is important and what is trivial. What better place to learn to identify what is harmful even it if seems attractive, and to discern what is true even if defending it may cost you friends or worldly esteem.

But if those are your hopes, you are apt to be disappointed in many of today's universities. For universities themselves seem to be losing their sense of purpose and meaning. As a young woman from the United States put it in her answer to my questionnaire: "If I could sum up what has been drilled into my generation's minds in one word, that word would be 'tolerance.' While this has resulted in us being pretty nice people, it has also produced in my opinion a generation that has little concept of objective morality or truth. We are equipped with few guidelines for judging right and wrong."

A young woman who teaches in Kenya wrote that university students there "need role models and something to believe in and they search for these desperately. There is a constant clash between how their parents brought them up and what society is offering them." Sad to say, the postmodern university seems even to be losing its vaunted regard for tolerance of diverse opinions -- at least where religiously grounded moral viewpoints are concerned, and especially if those viewpoints are Christian.

Thus we find ourselves in a curious situation where all too many of the most highly educated men and women in history have a religious formation that remains at a rather primitive level. Have you noticed how many well-educated Catholics seem to be going through life with a kindergarten level apprehension of their own faith? How many of us, for example, have spent as much time deepening our knowledge of the faith as we have on learning to use computers!

I must admit that when I read in the Holy Father's letters to the laity that we are supposed to fearlessly "put out into the deep," I can't help thinking there should be a footnote to the effect that: "Be not afraid" doesn't mean "Be not prepared." When Our Lord told the apostles to put out into the deep, he surely didn't expect them to set out in leaky boats. When he told them to put down their nets, he didn't expect those nets to be full of holes!

This brings me to the most important point I wish to make today: I want to suggest to you that poor formation represents a special danger in a society like ours where education in other areas is so advanced. In contemporary society, if religious formation does not come up to the general level of secular education, we are going to run into trouble defending our beliefs -- even to ourselves. We are going to feel helpless when we come up against the secularism and relativism that are so pervasive in our culture and in the university. We are going to be tongue-tied when our faith comes under unjust attack.

When that happens, many young Catholics drift away from the faith. Countless young men and women today have had an experience in the university comparable to that which caused the great social theorist Alexis de Tocqueville to lose his faith 200 years ago at the height of the Enlightenment. All through his childhood, Tocqueville had been tutored by a pious old priest who had been trained in a simpler era. Then, at the age of 16, he came upon the works of Descartes, Rousseau and Voltaire. Here is how he described that encounter in a letter to a friend many years later:

"I don't know if I've ever told you about an incident in my youth that marked me deeply for the rest of my life; how I was prey to an insatiable curiosity whose only available satisfaction was a large library of books. ... Until that time my life had passed enveloped in a faith that hadn't even allowed doubt to enter. ... Then doubt ... hurt led in with an incredible violence. ... All of a sudden I experienced the sensation people talk about who have been through an earthquake when the ground shakes under their feet, as do the walls around them, the ceilings over their heads, the furniture beneath their hand, all of nature before their eyes. I was seized by the blackest melancholy and then by an extreme disgust with life, though I knew nothing of life. And I was almost prostrated by agitation and terror at the sight of the road that remained for me to travel in this world."

What drew him out of that state, he told his friend, were worldly pleasures to which he abandoned himself for a time. But his letters testify to a lifelong sadness at his incapacity for belief. How many young Catholics have fallen into those same pitfalls when they had to make the difficult transition from their childhood faith to a mature Christianity. Tocqueville at least was confounded by some of the greatest minds in the Western tradition. But many of our contemporaries are not even equipped to deal with simplistic versions of relativism and skepticism!

Some young men and women, like Tocqueville, may spend their whole lives in a kind of melancholy yearning. Others may start to keep their spiritual lives completely private, in a separate compartment sealed off from the rest of their lives. Still others imitate the chameleon, that little lizard who changes his color to blend in with his surroundings. When parts of their Christian heritage don't fit with the spirit of the age, the chameleon just erases them.

How many of these lost searchers, I wonder, might have held their heads high as unapologetic Catholics if somewhere along the way they had become acquainted with our Church's great intellectual tradition and her rich treasure house of social teachings?

Today, in the age of John Paul II, there are really no good excuses for ignoring the intellectual heritage that provides us with resources to meet the challenges of modernity. No Catholic who takes the trouble to tap into that heritage has to stand tongue-tied in the face of alleged conflicts between faith and reason or religion and science.

In "Novo Millennio Ineunte," the Holy Father has a message that is highly relevant to the topic of this conference on "Witnessing to Christ in the University."

"For Christian witness to be effective," he writes, "it is important that special efforts be made to explain properly the reasons for the Church's position, stressing that it is not a case of imposing on non-believers a vision based on faith, but of interpreting and defending the values rooted in the very nature of the human person" (51).

Three implications of those wise words need to be spelled out:

First, those of us who live in pluralistic societies have to be able to give our reasons in terms that are intelligible to all men and women of good will, just as St. Paul had to be "a Jew to the Jews, and a Greek to the [pagan] Greeks." Fortunately, we have great models of how to do that in Catholic social teaching, and in the writings of John Paul II.

Second, we who labor in the intellectual apostolate need to keep our intellectual tradition abreast of the best human and natural science of our times, just as St. Thomas Aquinas did in his day.

And third, because we live in a time when our Church is under relentless attack, we need to be equipped to defend her. That does not mean we have to react to every insult no matter how slight. But we do need to learn to have and to show a decent amount of pride in who we are.

There is nothing wrong with taking pride in our Church's intellectual tradition -- a tradition that predates and outshines the impoverished secularism that is stifling thought in many leading universities. There is nothing wrong with taking pride in our Church's record as the world's foremost institutional voice opposing aggressive population control, abortion, euthanasia, and draconian measures against migrants and the poor.

At a time, and in a culture, where Christianity is under assault from many directions, Catholics do a great disservice when they do not contest the myth that the history of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular is a history of patriarchy, worldliness, persecution, or exclusion of people or ideas.

As a university teacher and a parent myself, I am acutely aware of how difficult it is to "witness to Christ in the university." Thus, I was delighted to read last month of the Holy Father's proposal to the bishops of Paris for the creation of "schools of faith" at the university level. After all, why should religious education cease just at the point when faith is apt to be faced with its most serious challenges -- and just when many young men and women are for the first time away from home?

It seems to me that the Church needs to follow her sons and daughters to the university. She needs to find ways to accompany them on that dangerous journey toward a mature Christianity. There are many ways this could be accomplished. In many places, the great lay organizations are already present to university students -- they have done wonderful work, showing that formation and fellowship go hand in hand. But much more can and must be done along these lines. I would also like to mention two wonderful recent books that have appeared just in time to serve as "travel companions" to members of Generation Y: "Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions About God," by Michael and Jana Novak, and "Letters to a Young Catholic" by papal biographer George Weigel.

IV. Conclusion: The Answer to the Question that is Every Human Life

To sum up, then: I would suggest that the "Y" in Generation Y might stand for yearning -- yearning, questioning, searching, and refusing to be satisfied with easy answers. No one has understood this better than Pope John Paul II -- and that, I suspect, one of the reasons why young people love him so much and why the World Youth Days have been such a transformative experience for so many.

As he wrote in "Tertio Millennio Adveniente," "Christ expects great things from young people. ... Young people, in every situation, in every region of the world do not cease to put questions to Christ: they meet him and they keep searching for him in order to question him further. If they succeed in following the road which he points out to them, they will have the joy of making their own contribution to his presence in the next century and in the centuries to come, until the end of time: 'Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and for ever'"(58). Jesus Christ is the answer to the question that is every human life.

What a difference you Catholic university students are going to make in the world! No one can foresee just how each one of you will respond to your baptismal callings to holiness and evangelization. But one thing is certain: there is no shortage of work to be done in the vineyard. There are families to be founded and nurtured; intellectual frontiers to be explored; young minds to be taught; the sick to be cared for; the poor to be lifted up; and the faith to be handed on to future generations. My wish for you is that the Lord will multiply you, and that each one of you will touch thousands of lives.

Cheers!

Serenity, The Lord of the Rings, and other little reasons to make Heaven

2007-12-24T10:56:00.000-05:00

“A man’s physical hunger does not prove that that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man’s hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where edible substances exist." CS Lewis - The Weight of Glory

I was watching Serenity yesterday and I wished that Joss Whedon had continued on with the story, either with more movies or with several years of a series like Firefly. I've had a similar but much greater experience with the fantasy of JRR Tolkien, where I'll be deep in Middle Earth journeying along with four hobbits, an elf, a dwarf, and three men... and never want to leave. When I do "come back" as it were I feel like the world I inhabit is somehow less "real" than the world I left. Now, I know that Lewis' quote above needs to be taken with a grain of salt, for not all desires speak to the design of the Creator, but this desire of finding the really real, of living in a world that speaks to the soul more easily than the one we currently inhabit, of understanding the beauty of existence more tacitly than the honking, green-back, work-a-day world we become so immune to does seem to point to something inherent to our humanity.

The Mission, a movie about the Jesuits in South America has a insightful dialog dealing directly with this point:

Hontar: We must work in the world, your eminence. The world is thus.
Altamirano: No, Señor Hontar. Thus have we made the world... thus have I made it.

We make the world as much as we are made by the world, it is so easy to write off the sufferings we encounter in daily life as not caused by us but by the society, another person, the president, our boss, God... but when it comes down to it: We are the ones responsible. Fantasy illustrates this point by realizing the desire within us for a beauty, a culture, a reality that is more real than the one we have helped create. Fantasy lets us have a comparison for the reality around us to what it can be in opposition to what it is, either for better or worse. For there are fantasies that let us realize how good we have it, not only how much we miss.

Inasmuch as we have a yearning for these "other worlds" I think that, in a sense, we will experience them in Heaven. Just as beauty, music, art, people, sex, good food, exercise, friends, and everything else that acts as a finger pointing to the moon will exist in Heaven inasmuch as it is good, so too I think that I will meet Gandalf, Merry, Pippin, Digory, Mr. Vane, Lilith, and Bombadil. Not necessarily in the sense of meeting the persons themselves but rather, the yearning that I have to meet them will be satisfied as much (and more) as if I had met them. For I will know Gandalf as Tolkien knows him, I will know Digory as Lewis knows him, I will know Lilith as MacDonald knows her, because I will know them better in Heaven than I know anyone here on earth.

If you haven't read Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories" do yourself a favor and look it up; it is pure delight and helps us understand those odd people dressed up with hairy feet, Trekkie uniforms, or glasses and lightning bolts.

In Defense of Humilty by GKC

2007-12-19T12:35:00.000-05:00

A DEFENCE OF HUMILITYThe act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has to-day all theexhilaration of a vice. Moral truisms have been so much disputed thatthey have begun to sparkle like so many brilliant paradoxes. Andespecially (in this age of egoistic idealism) there is about one whodefends humility something inexpressibly rakish.It is no part of my intention to defend humility on practical grounds.Practical grounds are uninteresting, and, moreover, on practical groundsthe case for humility is overwhelming. We all know that the 'divineglory of the ego' is socially a great nuisance; we all do actually valueour friends for modesty, freshness, and simplicity of heart. Whatevermay be the reason, we all do warmly respect humility--in other people.But the matter must go deeper than this. If the grounds of humility arefound only in social convenience, they may be quite trivial andtemporary. The egoists may be the martyrs of a nobler dispensation,agonizing for a more arduous ideal. To judge from the comparative lackof ease in their social manner, this seems a reasonable suggestion.There is one thing that must be seen at the outset of the study ofhumility from an intrinsic and eternal point of view. The new philosophyof self-esteem and self-assertion declares that humility is a vice. Ifit be so, it is quite clear that it is one of those vices which are anintegral part of original sin. It follows with the precision ofclockwork every one of the great joys of life. No one, for example, wasever in love without indulging in a positive debauch of humility. Allfull-blooded and natural people, such as schoolboys, enjoy humility themoment they attain hero-worship. Humility, again, is said both by itsupholders and opponents to be the peculiar growth of Christianity. Thereal and obvious reason of this is often missed. The pagans insistedupon self-assertion because it was the essence of their creed that thegods, though strong and just, were mystic, capricious, and evenindifferent. But the essence of Christianity was in a literal sense theNew Testament--a covenant with God which opened to men a cleardeliverance. They thought themselves secure; they claimed palaces ofpearl and silver under the oath and seal of the Omnipotent; theybelieved themselves rich with an irrevocable benediction which set themabove the stars; and immediately they discovered humility. It was onlyanother example of the same immutable paradox. It is always the securewho are humble.This particular instance survives in the evangelical revivalists of thestreet. They are irritating enough, but no one who has really studiedthem can deny that the irritation is occasioned by these two things, anirritating hilarity and an irritating humility. This combination of joyand self-prostration is a great deal too universal to be ignored. Ifhumility has been discredited as a virtue at the present day, it is notwholly irrelevant to remark that this discredit has arisen at the sametime as a great collapse of joy in current literature and philosophy.Men have revived the splendour of Greek self-assertion at the same timethat they have revived the bitterness of Greek pessimism. A literaturehas arisen which commands us all to arrogate to ourselves the liberty ofself-sufficing deities at the same time that it exhibits us to ourselvesas dingy maniacs who ought to be chained up like dogs. It is certainly acurious state of things altogether. When we are genuinely happy, wethink we are unworthy of happiness. But when we are demanding a divineemancipation we seem to be perfectly certain that we are unworthy ofanything.The only explanation of the matter must be found in the conviction thathumility has infinitely deeper roots than any modern men suppose; thatit is a metaphysical and, one might almost say, a mathematical virtue.Probably this can best be tested by a study of those who franklydisregard humility and assert the supreme duty of perfecting andexpressing one's self. These people tend, by a perfectly naturalprocess, to bring their own great human gifts of culture, intellect, ormoral power to a great perfection, successively shutting out everythingthat they feel to be lower than themselves. Now shutting out things isall very well, but it has one simple corollary--that from everythingthat we shut out we are ourselves shut out. When we shut our door on thewind, it would be equally true to say that the wind shuts its door onus. Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one canreasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from thedoor may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories thebeggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practicallythe claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtainknowledge. A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man--the matterawaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms,the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of whicha man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view,he will scarcely reach it by persistently revelling in the fact that heis not a beetle. The most brilliant exponent of the egoistic school,Nietszche, with deadly and honourable logic, admitted that thephilosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down upon the weak, thecowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightfulexperience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that isreally _seen_ when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the egosees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarified heaven; only he seeseverything foreshortened or deformed.Now if we imagine that a man wished truly, as far as possible, to seeeverything as it was, he would certainly proceed on a differentprinciple. He would seek to divest himself for a time of those personalpeculiarities which tend to divide him from the thing he studies. It isas difficult, for example, for a man to examine a fish withoutdeveloping a certain vanity in possessing a pair of legs, as if theywere the latest article of personal adornment. But if a fish is to beapproximately understood, this physiological dandyism must be overcome.The earnest student of fish morality will, spiritually speaking, chopoff his legs. And similarly the student of birds will eliminate hisarms; the frog-lover will with one stroke of the imagination remove allhis teeth, and the spirit wishing to enter into all the hopes and fearsof jelly-fish will simplify his personal appearance to a really alarmingextent. It would appear, therefore, that this great body of ours and allits natural instincts, of which we are proud, and justly proud, israther an encumbrance at the moment when we attempt to appreciate thingsas they should be appreciated. We do actually go through a process ofmental asceticism, a castration of the entire being, when we wish tofeel the abounding good in all things. It is good for us at certaintimes that ourselves should be like a mere window--as clear, asluminous, and as invisible.In a very entertaining work, over which we have roared in childhood, itis stated that a point has no parts and no magnitude. Humility is theluxurious art of reducing ourselves to a point, not to a small thing ora large one, but to a thing with no size at all, so that to it all thecosmic things are what they really are--of immeasurable stature. Thatthe trees are high and the grasses short is a mere accident of our ownfoot-rules and our own stature. But to the spirit which has stripped offfor a moment its own idle temporal standards the grass is an everlastingforest, with dragons for denizens; the stones of the road are asincredible mountains piled one upon the other; the dandelions are likegigantic bonfires illuminating the lands around; and the heath-bells ontheir stalks are like planets hung in heaven each higher than the other.Between one stake of a paling and another there are new and terriblelandscapes; here a desert, with nothing but one misshapen rock; here amiraculous forest, of which all the trees flower above the head with thehues of sunset; here, again, a sea full of monsters that Dante would nothave dared to dream. These are the visions of him who, like the child inthe fairy tales, is not afraid to become small. Meanwhile, the sagewhose faith is in magnitude and ambition is, like a giant, becominglarger and larger, which only means that the stars are becoming smallerand smaller. World after world falls from him into insignificance; thewhole passionate and intricate life of common things becomes as lost tohim as is the life of the infusoria to a man without a microscope. Herises always through desolate eternities. He may find new systems, andforget them; he may discover fresh universes, and learn to despise them.But the towering and tropical vision of things as they really are--thegigantic daisies, the heaven-consuming dandelions, the great Odyssey ofstrange-coloured oceans and strange-shaped trees, of dust like the wreckof temples, and thistledown like the ruin of stars--all this colossalvision shall perish with the last of the humble.

In Defense of Baby-Worship also by GKC

2007-12-19T12:24:00.001-05:00

A DEFENCE OF BABY-WORSHIPThe two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are,first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are inconsequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which ispossible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schoolsand sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes ofa baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at theuniverse, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but atranscendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this:that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is putagain upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us thosedelightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which markthese human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that withinevery one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was onthe seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new systemof stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.There is always in the healthy mind an obscure prompting that religionteaches us rather to dig than to climb; that if we could once understandthe common clay of earth we should understand everything. Similarly, wehave the sentiment that if we could destroy custom at a blow and see thestars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse. This isthe great truth which has always lain at the back of baby-worship, andwhich will support it to the end. Maturity, with its endless energiesand aspirations, may easily be convinced that it will find new things toappreciate; but it will never be convinced, at bottom, that it hasproperly appreciated what it has got. We may scale the heavens and findnew stars innumerable, but there is still the new star we have notfound--that on which we were born.But the influence of children goes further than its first triflingeffort of remaking heaven and earth. It forces us actually to remodelour conduct in accordance with this revolutionary theory of themarvellousness of all things. We do (even when we are perfectly simpleor ignorant)--we do actually treat talking in children as marvellous,walking in children as marvellous, common intelligence in children asmarvellous. The cynical philosopher fancies he has a victory in thismatter--that he can laugh when he shows that the words or antics of thechild, so much admired by its worshippers, are common enough. The factis that this is precisely where baby-worship is so profoundly right. Anywords and any antics in a lump of clay are wonderful, the child's wordsand antics are wonderful, and it is only fair to say that thephilosopher's words and antics are equally wonderful.The truth is that it is our attitude towards children that is right, andour attitude towards grown-up people that is wrong. Our attitude towardsour equals in age consists in a servile solemnity, overlying aconsiderable degree of indifference or disdain. Our attitude towardschildren consists in a condescending indulgence, overlying anunfathomable respect. We bow to grown people, take off our hats to them,refrain from contradicting them flatly, but we do not appreciate themproperly. We make puppets of children, lecture them, pull their hair,and reverence, love, and fear them. When we reverence anything in themature, it is their virtues or their wisdom, and this is an easymatter. But we reverence the faults and follies of children.We should probably come considerably nearer to the true conception ofthings if we treated all grown-up persons, of all titles and types, withprecisely that dark affection and dazed respect with which we treat theinfantile limitations. A child has a difficulty in achieving the miracleof speech, consequently we find his blunders almost as marvellous as hisaccuracy. If we only adopted the same attitude towards Premiers andChancellors of the Exchequer, if we genially encouraged their stammeringand delightful attempts at human speech, we should be in a far more wiseand tolerant temper. A child has a knack of making experiments in life,generally healthy in motive, but often intolerable in a domesticcommonwealth. If we only treated all commercial buccaneers and bumptioustyrants on the same terms, if we gently chided their brutalities asrather quaint mistakes in the conduct of life, if we simply told themthat they would 'understand when they were older,' we should probably beadopting the best and most crushing attitude towards the weaknesses ofhumanity. In our relations to children we prove that the paradox isentirely true, that it is possible to combine an amnesty that verges oncontempt with a worship that verges upon terror. We forgive childrenwith the same kind of blasphemous gentleness with which Omar Khayyamforgave the Omnipotent.The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that wefeel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysteriousreason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. Thevery smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels;we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through amicroscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can seethe hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful tothink of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is likeimagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or theleaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, wefeel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness ofstature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that adeity might feel if he had created something that he could notunderstand.But the humorous look of children is perhaps the most endearing of allthe bonds that hold the Cosmos together. Their top-heavy dignity ismore touching than any humility; their solemnity gives us more hope forall things than a thousand carnivals of optimism; their large andlustrous eyes seem to hold all the stars in their astonishment; theirfascinating absence of nose seems to give to us the most perfect hint ofthe humour that awaits us in the kingdom of heaven.

A Defense of Ugly Things by GK Chesterton

2007-12-19T12:22:00.000-05:00

A DEFENCE OF UGLY THINGSThere are some people who state that the exterior, sex, or physique ofanother person is indifferent to them, that they care only for thecommunion of mind with mind; but these people need not detain us. Thereare some statements that no one ever thinks of believing, however oftenthey are made.But while nothing in this world would persuade us that a great friend ofMr. Forbes Robertson, let us say, would experience no surprise ordiscomfort at seeing him enter the room in the bodily form of Mr.Chaplin, there is a confusion constantly made between being attracted byexterior, which is natural and universal, and being attracted by what iscalled physical beauty, which is not entirely natural and not in theleast universal. Or rather, to speak more strictly, the conception ofphysical beauty has been narrowed to mean a certain kind of physicalbeauty which no more exhausts the possibilities of externalattractiveness than the respectability of a Clapham builder exhauststhe possibilities of moral attractiveness.The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been theGreeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to havewholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin againstthe variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews havelong ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with astringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that theGreeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism--anasceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewishseverity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that menlived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degreesof blood certain consequences might follow. But they did not starvetheir instinct for contrasts and combinations; their prophets gave twowings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim with all theriotous ingenuity of Lewis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their policeregulation into elfland; they vetoed not the actual adulteries of theearth but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the banns of thought.It is extraordinary to watch the gradual emasculation of the monstersof Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. Thechimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would havebeen proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tiea ribbon round its neck and give it a saucer of milk. Who ever feelsthat the giants in Greek art and poetry were really big--big as somefolk-lore giants have been? In some Scandinavian story a hero walks formiles along a mountain ridge, which eventually turns out to be thebridge of the giant's nose. That is what we should call, with a calmconscience, a large giant. But this earthquake fancy terrified theGreeks, and their terror has terrified all mankind out of their naturallove of size, vitality, variety, energy, ugliness. Nature intended everyhuman face, so long as it was forcible, individual, and expressive, tobe regarded as distinct from all others, as a poplar is distinct from anoak, and an apple-tree from a willow. But what the Dutch gardeners didfor trees the Greeks did for the human form; they lopped away its livingand sprawling features to give it a certain academic shape; they hackedoff noses and pared down chins with a ghastly horticultural calm. Andthey have really succeeded so far as to make us call some of the mostpowerful and endearing faces ugly, and some of the most silly andrepulsive faces beautiful. This disgraceful _via media_, this pitifulsense of dignity, has bitten far deeper into the soul of moderncivilization than the external and practical Puritanism of Israel. TheJew at the worst told a man to dance in fetters; the Greek put anexquisite vase upon his head and told him not to move.Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and thesame conception applies to noses. To insist that one type of face isugly because it differs from that of the Venus of Milo is to look at itentirely in a misleading light. It is strange that we should resentpeople differing from ourselves; we should resent much more violentlytheir resembling ourselves. This principle has made a sufficient hash ofliterary criticism, in which it is always the custom to complain of thelack of sound logic in a fairy tale, and the entire absence of trueoratorical power in a three-act farce. But to call another man's faceugly because it powerfully expresses another man's soul is likecomplaining that a cabbage has not two legs. If we did so, the onlycourse for the cabbage would be to point out with severity, but withsome show of truth, that we were not a beautiful green all over.But this frigid theory of the beautiful has not succeeded in conqueringthe art of the world, except in name. In some quarters, indeed, it hasnever held sway. A glance at Chinese dragons or Japanese gods will showhow independent are Orientals of the conventional idea of facial andbodily regularity, and how keen and fiery is their enjoyment of realbeauty, of goggle eyes, of sprawling claws, of gaping mouths andwrithing coils. In the Middle Ages men broke away from the Greekstandard of beauty, and lifted up in adoration to heaven great towers,which seemed alive with dancing apes and devils. In the full summer oftechnical artistic perfection the revolt was carried to its realconsummation in the study of the faces of men. Rembrandt declared thesane and manly gospel that a man was dignified, not when he was like aGreek god, but when he had a strong, square nose like a cudgel, aboldly-blocked head like a helmet, and a jaw like a steel trap.This branch of art is commonly dismissed as the grotesque. We have neverbeen able to understand why it should be humiliating to be laughable,since it is giving an elevated artistic pleasure to others. If agentleman who saw us in the street were suddenly to burst into tears atthe mere thought of our existence, it might be considered disquietingand uncomplimentary; but laughter is not uncomplimentary. In truth,however, the phrase 'grotesque' is a misleading description of uglinessin art. It does not follow that either the Chinese dragons or the Gothicgargoyles or the goblinish old women of Rembrandt were in the leastintended to be comic. Their extravagance was not the extravagance ofsatire, but simply the extravagance of vitality; and here lies the wholekey of the place of ugliness in aesthetics. We like to see a crag jutout in shameless decision from the cliff, we like to see the red pinesstand up hardily upon a high cliff, we like to see a chasm cloven fromend to end of a mountain. With equally noble enthusiasm we like to see anose jut out decisively, we like to see the red hair of a friend standup hardily in bristles upon his head, we like to see his mouth broad andclean cut like the mountain crevasse. At least some of us like all this;it is not a question of humour. We do not burst with amusement at thefirst sight of the pines or the chasm; but we like them because they areexpressive of the dramatic stillness of Nature, her bold experiments,her definite departures, her fearlessness and savage pride in herchildren. The moment we have snapped the spell of conventional beauty,there are a million beautiful faces waiting for us everywhere, just asthere are a million beautiful spirits.

http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Defendant.html

CS Lewis on Masculine and Feminine

2007-12-15T13:09:00.000-05:00

Hello All,

I know it has been awhile since I have had a real post rather than just a bit of someone else's writing but I promise that I shall throw up some on my own ideas soon. Here is an excerpt from Lewis's Perelandra on Masculine and Feminine. I am currently writing a paper on it for Peter Kreeft and plan on posting that, along with an undergraduate paper on Tolkien's idea of Male and Female in the near future.

All the best! May the hair on your toes never fall out,

Taylor

Perelandra is the second of his “Space Trilogy” and occurs on the young planet of Venus where a creation story similar to that of Earth’s is transpiring. Near the end of the volume Ransom, the hero of the trilogy, encounters two angels, or eldils, as they are called in the fantasy,

"Both bodies were naked, and both were free from any sexual characteristics, either primary or secondary. That, one would have expected. But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try – Ransom has tried a hundred times – to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. He thinks that the first held in his hand something like a spear, but the hands of the other were open, with palms toward him. But I don’t know that any of these attempts has helped be much. At all events what Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. Everyone must sometimes have wondered why in nearly all tongues certain inanimate objects are masculine and other feminine. What is masculine about a mountain or feminine about certain trees? Ransom has cured me of believing that this is a purely morphological phenomenon, depending on the form of the word. Still less is gender an imaginative extension of sex. Our ancestors did not make mountains masculine because they projected male characteristics into them. The real process is the reverse. Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, not feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity… Malacandra seemed to him to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance, his eyes ever roaming the earth-ward horizon whence his danger came long ago. “A sailor’s look,” Ransom once said to me; “you know… eyes that are impregnated with distance.” But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings and wandering airs, of life that rocked in winds and splashed on mossy stones and descended as the dew and arose sunward in thin-spun delicacy of mist." (Perelandra 200-1)

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end of month update

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Being Able to Say: "That Was Awesome!"

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A Cupping at Terrior Coffee

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An Update: Law School, Work, and Thoughts

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Manalive

Thoughts on Transition

The Lorica

As You Like It

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The Human Understanding of Death

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Several Poems

A Few Poems around a Common Theme

The Wedding Vow

Wonder as Wander

Nine Mile

Think About Land

Trees and the Nature of Work

I Won't Forget You My Friend

Riding the Bus and Subjectivity

Random Memories

A Meditation on Gift

Architect of Spears by GKC

'Unprotected'

'Unprotected'Sexual freedom is damaging to students. But health officials must not judge.

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Mary Ann Glendon on Today's Youth

MARY ANN GLENDON ON TODAY'S UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Serenity, The Lord of the Rings, and other little reasons to make Heaven

In Defense of Humilty by GKC

In Defense of Baby-Worship also by GKC

A Defense of Ugly Things by GK Chesterton

CS Lewis on Masculine and Feminine

'Unprotected'
Sexual freedom is damaging to students. But health officials must not judge.