all lines
in the universe
all
if space bends
come together
finally

why can’t
we
i wonder

camelias
seem
to
want it

IF HONEST CONFESSION IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL... then I need to say that this morning I tuned the TV to MSNBC looking for news and found instead the live news report of the Whitney Houston funeral in New Jersey. I wasn’t interested in attending a funeral, certainly not a broadcast funeral. I switched quickly to CNN, and damn, the funeral was going there, too; so I left the TV at CNN for a minute and went back to some writing that I had started yesterday. But I let the funeral go on and watched for what I thought would be one minute before I’d go on and find a news network channel. Here’s the confession part:

I don’t particularly like funerals. I dread them, but I go when a funeral is for a close relative or a close friend or when it’s a duty and I am expected to be there. I don’t go to TV funerals. I wasn’t looking for a way to spend the morning and if I had been looking for something to watch on TV, it wouldn’t have been a funeral; but I stayed with Whitney Houston’s funeral for one minute, then two, then three, and then I couldn’t turn away. I had thought it would be a staged event. I thought the Baptist Church would be one of those massive, showy mega-churches with seats for thousands. It wasn’t. It was a regular Baptist church. I thought it would be decked out with banks of bright flowers. It wasn’t. The flowers were much more elaborate last Sunday in the Methodist where I worship. I expected the coffin to be something fit for a Twentieth Century Cleopatra. It was a simple, ordinary coffin that might have come from the same factory where the caskets for my parents were made. I expected the volunteer regular choir to be in an audition mode hoping to be noticed and perhaps picked up later for TV or movie work. No doubt about it: those volunteer regular singers did exactly what that choir does every Sunday.

Like everybody else, I had liked Whitney Houston’s voice. It was obviously a gift... to the singer and to all of us who heard her sing... but there are lots of great voices out there. I thought the funeral would be a showcase for performers. It wasn’t. I thought the eulogies would be platitudes. They weren’t. The few maudlin remarks and readings during the more than three-hour service weren’t distracting. They are easy to forget. As Kevin Costner walked up to the pulpit, I thought to myself that now I would see the real glossy, Hollywood veneer paint over the service. I was very, very wrong. His words moved me. They weren’t from a script somebody prepared for him. His eulogy was more than a tribute to Whitney Houston, someone he obviously loved and respected. It was a sermon that I don’t want to forget. He ended his remarks with advice that I’ll try hard to remember: “Guard the precious gift of your own life.”

Searching for the photograph for a day in the month of February in San Diego is a process of sorting, a sifting... The weather in February can bring snow to the mountain communities a few miles to the east and warm beach weather along the coast. A snug sweater comes in handy in the morning, and a swim suit can be a comfortable choice in the afternoon.

I came across some Monarch butterflies this afternoon. They’re the first ones I’ve seen this year. The monarchs are heading back up north to wherever it is they were born, the place where they will lay eggs on milkweed plants before dying. The eggs they lay will hatch into caterpillars after only a couple of weeks. Those caterpillars will munch on milkweed, growing fat for a couple of weeks until they harden and enter a 10-day stage which from the outside looks as if nothing is happening. In that ten days a metamorphosis occurs that seems like magic. In each chrysalis the caterpillar body parts change into a beautiful butterfly which breaks out of the chrysalis and flies around eating flowers. That generation of monarchs will lay eggs and die and another generation will emerge in May or June and that generation will lay eggs and die and a third generation will be born in July and August which will lay eggs and die and those eggs will emerge as a generation which has a much longer life span. The difference is that it doesn’t die after two to six weeks. That generation of butterflies, the great-great-great grandchildren of the butterflies we see heading north now, will make their way back to a place they’ve never seen in a warmer climate where they will live for six to eight months until it’s time to start the whole process over again. The butterfly in my picture for today is definitely a little less brilliant than it would have seemed to me had I seen it on its way to Mexico last fall. I appreciate its determination to do what it’s supposed to do.

The University of San Diego across the valley from Presidio Park.

I came across a guy with six month-old puppies... trying to find good homes for them.

The Presidio Museum designed by William Templeton Johnson on the hill above Old Town.

I came out of the San Diego Photographic Museum this afternoon after my weekly volunteer stint, and the bird rescue people and parrots were in their usual place. One of the birds was barking like a dog, and another was whistling. The orange beauty that’s the subject of my picture for the day was much too dignified to bark or whistle or perform in any way at all. He (Yep, I asked about the sex of the parrot... I asked the rescue guy, not the parrot, making sure, of course, he [the rescue guy] knew I was asking about the parrot ) knew he was fantastic and didn’t need to do tricks to draw attention to himself. As a matter of fact, that parrot gave me a look... more than one look... and it was clear he was looking at me and not someone else in the crowd... seeming a bit annoyed that I kept snapping pictures... or perhaps he was just letting me know that he knows he is beautiful.

I considered telling him about the hundreds of blue and gold macaws I once saw swooping around some clay cliffs deep in the Amazon Basin, but I decided against it. I didn’t want him to think I was trying to say I think they were more terrific than he is. The rescue guy must have sensed that the orange parrot and I had something going. He came over and told me the orange parrot was a hybrid. The bird looked away. I wanted him to know it didn’t matter a bit to me that he was the result of a breeding experiment...

First United Methodist Church was temporary home today and tonight and will be again tomorrow night for twelve adults and one adolescent boy who have had the misfortune to lose whatever place they called home. They will be permitted to come back for supper and a night’s sleep and breakfast again tomorrow night... and every night for two weeks. Then they will move to another facility in another church... I am trying to realize fully how fortunate I am.

Today is Valentine’s Day and I should post pictures of red flowers on the BLOG; but, as the saying goes, “been there, done that.” I have been thinking about color, especially red; and if you’ve seen the pictures on the Blog for the past couple of days, you’ll know I’m a sucker for red. Red draws me in... or out into the world to find a way to photograph it.

Today it wasn’t something red that got my attention. Against a clearing sky after the rain we had last night and this morning, something that had no color at all caught my eye. I suppose I’m wrong about “no color at all.” Apparently, whether or not black is a color depends on whom you ask. A physicist would say, “In terms of color as light, black is the absence of color, while white is a mixture of all colors.” An artist would say, “In terms of pigment, white is the absence of color, while black is a mixture of all colors.” If you ask a child, he will say black is a color because his box of crayons has a black one in it.

So... I went off on a tangent and took my camera with me. There is something lyrical about the bare black branches curling against the blue sky with it’s wispy whitish clouds. That’s my picture for the day. Just for the heck of it, I’ve included in the BLOG a painting from the San Diego Museum of Art done by American Artist Janet Sobel sometime between 1946 and 1948. The piece is untitled, so I don’t know what she was trying to say. Red and black were definitely on her mind.

Whenever I think of black and white in the natural world, I usually think of zebras; so I went to the zoo to take a closer look. When you look at zebras closely, it’s clear that they aren’t just black with white stripes or white with black stripes. The wonderful design scheme for these animals includes some other colors subtly applied. So... I played around with the zebra images and included them on today’s posting on the BLOG.

And because It’s Valentine’s Day, I’ve included one bright red hyacinth. The dictionary says about hyacinths what everybody already knows: “the hyacinth is a bulbous plant of the lily family, with straplike leaves and a compact spike of bell-shaped fragrant flowers. Native to western Asia, hyacinths are cultivated outdoors and as houseplants.” The dictionary also reminded me that hyacinth is a color itself... and as a color it isn’t a shade of red.

This morning I went out hunting for a special tree that was mentioned and pictured in Kathy Puplava’s and Paul Sirois’ book Trees and Gardens of Balboa Park. I found a couple of Brazilian coral trees near the Marsden House Museum. The trees are blossoming ahead of time again this year. They are very much like the African Coral Tree, which makes me wonder at what point in their evolutionary development the trees in Africa and the Trees in South America developed in slightly different ways. They look as if they started out as one kind of tree once upon a time. I wonder if differentiation began when the African continent and the South American continent parted ways 200 million years ago.

I particularly like the Coral Trees. The South American trees’ blossoms usually pop out March through May, and here they are completely bloomed out in February... Perhaps the trees are all trying to tell us something.

The African Coral Tree is past its peak blooming period, but it remains one of the most spectacular sights in Balboa Park’s winter. The coral tree is native to East and South Africa where it’s known as a sacred tree which can be easily worked into religion and art. Its wheel-like, brilliant red blossoms seem obviously to have cosmic significance. In Africa the Coral Tree is said to be a dwelling place of gods.

Every now and then something comes up in my conversations with trusted friends that demands exploration. Trusted friends are those with whom it’s O.K. to disagree and challenge and to whom it is sometimes fair to admit that they are right and I am biased and too narrowly focused and in need of readjusting my ideas and my arguments. They are the friends who will concede when it becomes clear that their ideas are the ones that are biased and too narrowly focused.

After a discussion with a friend about whether Bradley Manning, the American soldier who gave Wikileaks classified information, should be considered a patriot or a traitor, the conversation turned to definitions of terms like dictatorship and democracy. Although I am not a Greek scholar, I did actually slog through four semesters of Greek once-upon-a-time, so I used that bit of my academic history to try to gain a point in the argument. My friend implied that a democracy is no better than a dictatorship if a person like Manning doesn’t have the right to “expose” what he, as a citizen, considers critical tyrannical policies and actions of his government. I hemmed and hawed at that point in the argument mainly because I didn’t have the facts about Manning’s alleged crimes; and for hours after the discussion with my friend, I wasn’t able to get the problem out of my mind. This writing is premature because I’m doing it before I’ve finished thinking through the issues; but because this is my journal writing for today and I usually post the journal writing on my BLOG, I’m forging ahead as if I know what I’m talking about. If you’ve read this far today, you may want to stop. I may or may not take up the subject again tomorrow.

Just about everybody knows our word democracy (Greek, δημοκρατία) is a combination of two Greek words: demos (δῆμος, which means “people”) and kratos (κράτος, which means “power” or “force”). My friend is no academic slouch, so he pointed out that in Roman times the word dictator (dictat- from the Latin verb dictare) didn’t necessarily have the negative meaning that it has today. Originally a dictator was a person who had sole, usually absolute, power that was conferred, usually in an emergency, by whatever system was accepted as the appropriate system of government. In modern usage, a dictator is someone with total power over a country, usually someone who got the power by force.

So... At what point and in what kinds of activities and expressions is it appropriate for the ruling power structure to censure and imprison an individual person (δῆμοs) to restrict his/her freedom in the effort to safeguard democracy? Is it appropriate for “the government” to take away my tube of toothpaste when I forget and put it in my carry-on luggage at the airport? My answer to that question is “yes.” I am willing for the government to place some limits on my behavior if doing so makes the general population safer. My friend’s answer isn't an unqualified “no,” but it's nonetheless "No."

Of course, this will be a good launching point for another journal writing... a discussion of the confusion resulting from swearing allegiance to contradicting ideas which have inherent in them the possibility for gross hypocrisy. Examples abound of people who don’t seem to be bothered by the contradictions in their ethical, religious and political commitments. It seems not to be a problem for them to want government to forbid two male or two female citizens to marry each other but to insist that “the government” stay out of people’s lives when it comes to matters like regulation of health services, regulation of business, and regulating where and when corporations may drill for oil and what they may not do to polute the environment. The “keep government out of business” folks are also the ones who insisted that corporations are individuals and got the Supreme Court to agree with them.

I go almost every day on my bicycle the half-mile down the hill from where I live to the banks of the San Diego River. California has some impressive rivers, but the San Diego River isn’t one of them. It is so small that in most other parts of the world it wouldn’t be called a river... probably a creek or branch or run; but here it’s a river... The tides lazily push the water back into Mission Valley and for a few hours each day, it even looks like a river for a few hundred yards before it spills into the Pacific Ocean. Periodically a big enough rain comes to the area to swell the river and even push it over its banks for four or five miles east of the sea.

Water birds and flowers along the banks of the river have begun to show signs of spring. Today the blue lupins are blooming and willow trees are showing off their catkins. Life is good.

I came home from my Thursday afternoon volunteer job at the Museum of Photograph Arts; and as hard as it might be to believe, I hadn’t taken a single photograph all day. Sometimes you just do the best you can with what’s at hand. I took a picture of the cheesecake we’re having for dessert tonight. The cheesecake was yesterday’s project. Retirement is good. To those of you who still work in the real world at real jobs and don’t have time to make cheesecakes in the middle of the afternoon... Hang in there. Your day will come.

By the way, don’t believe that b.s. about the Social Security program being a Ponzi scheme* that the Governor of Texas was slinging before he tucked tail and retreated from his comical attempt to become the Republican presidential candidate. Forbes Magazine said Rick Perry’s story ranks right up there with the alligators-in-the-sewer fable. It’s a major problem that most people, both Democrats and Republicans, don’t know that there is bipartisan Social Security Trustees oversight of the Social Security Program. Ask any of them, even those who served during George W. Bush’s administration, and you’ll find that Perry’s fanciful tale doesn't fit the facts. It's true that the program is underfunded and must be modernized; but even if Washington does nothing, which is unlikely whichever party is in power, the young people who are now teenagers that Perry was talking about will get three-quarters of promised benefits when they reach age 65. The key information to know is that this good program must be funded adequately, and it must be appropriately modernized. The program has served Americans for many decades and it works even today remarkably well, especially considering that it has not been modernized for decades. You can probably imagine what kind of shape some of the “old people” you know in your own family would be in today if the Social Security Program had not existed for them.

You can check out the Social Security Trustees report on the WEB:
http://www.ssa.gov/oact/TR/TR07/index.html

*A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent operation that pays returns to its investors from their own money or the money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned by the individual or organization running the operation. The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering higher returns than other investments, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent.

While a friend and I were talking today, our conversation turned to politics and then to religion. He knows that I attend church, so he asked, “Why do you suppose it is that often the least forgiving and most bigoted people, including some politicians, claim that they are “born again?” What in the world are they talking about? What do they mean when they say they are born again?

I could have tried to dredge up from my memory the Bible verses that use the born again language, but I didn’t try because I’d probably have got it wrong. Instead I told him something that I’d read earlier today... not in the Christian Bible but in a book that my daughter Nancy gave me a few months ago. I’ve been taking my time reading through the verses compiled by Jack Kornfield in Buddha’s Little Instruction Book. My morning routine includes reading one verse before I settle down to three quarters of an hour of yoga and meditation. The meditation part of the morning ritual is just a matter of sitting quietly and breathing correctly after the yoga. I try to focus my attention for a moment on the verse from the Buddha teachings. Yesterday’s verse: “As you walk and eat and travel, be where you are. Otherwise you will miss most of your life.” Today’s verse: “Each morning we are born again. What we do today is what matters most.”

Kornfield says these are saying from the sermons of The Buddha. The Supreme Buddha was Siddhartha Gautama, regarded as “the awakened one” or “the enlightened one,” who lived and taught five hundred years before the time of Jesus’ ministry. I think Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus were on the same track.