Five ways of looking at a lily...

Sometimes a sailboat on San Diego Bay is just a sailboat. Sometimes its whatever I want it to be, and today the one I saw from a great distance was old enough to be a barque... you know, one of those smaller three masted sailing boats... not square rigged but sloop rigged to go long distances fast with cargo; so I got a few pictures and went right home and played with that sailboat. I remember going out to play with a sailboat my dad got for me somewhere... I don’t know where he got it, and I don’t know whatever happened to it; but I remember the day I got it as if it were yesterday.

An old man can still play with a gift of sailboats. How fortunate I am to be old in the time of digital cameras and computers and "Photoshop."  Wow!  (Back there a couple of sentences ago I had the impulse to change old to older, but I changed my mind... and like playing with sailboats, that kind of decision can feel good.  If that doesn't make sense to you, it's because you aren't old enough yet.)

The other day when I was trying to decide if I should post a photograph of a John Marin painting from the San Diego Museum of Art, I went on to use a statement by John Muir that I’d had on my mind all day... and absent mindedly credited the American Impressionist Artist with Muir’s comment about the connectedness of all things in the universe. My penance is to include today something said by Marshall McLuhan in 1965. It doesn’t have anything to do with lemons or orchids, both pictures I got today, and nothing to do with John Muir; but here McLuhan’s statement anyway... along with John Marin’s painting.

“There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”

The stuff
we pick up along the way
some people call a collection
but
it's not
anything more
than a comforting connection
between then and now.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe." --John Marin

Dogs and flowers and lizards and butterflies
all together on this earth
trying to get by
anyway
they
can

No Words are necessary for this Blog post.

If my Mother were still available to give me advice, she’d suggest that I should not begin the season of Lent harboring impious thoughts... I’d say to her that impious isn’t the exactly right word anyway... that I’d checked my thesaurus for near-synonyms of impious (ungodly, unholy, irreligious, sinful, wicked, immoral, unrighteous, sacrilegious, heretical, profane, blasphemous, irreverent) and none of them even come close to my thoughts and feelings about the muddle, or should I say puddle, into which presidential hopefuls Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum have haplessly wandered. Those guys go from silly to sillier. They’ve spent the past couple of days talking about President Obama’s faith, or his lack of it, and whether or not America should believe him when he says he is not a Muslim. Romney’s comment on the issue is that Obama is anti-religious, that he has “fought against religion.” He and Gingrich, who says Obama “has been relentlessly hostile to traditional religions,” finally agree on something. Not to be left out of the discussion, Santorum has accused President Obama of “systematically trying to crush the traditional Judeo-Christian principles.”

Apparently they haven’t heard what the President said when he spoke last week at the National Prayer Breakfast describing how his faith as a Christian informs his thinking as a leader. The President said, “We can’t leave our values at the door. If we leave our values at the door, we abandon much of the moral glue that has held our nation together for centuries, and allowed us to become somewhat more perfect a union. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel -- the majority of great reformers in American history did their work not just because it was sound policy, or they had done good analysis, or understood how to exercise good politics, but because their faith and their values dictated it, and called for bold action -- sometimes in the face of indifference, sometimes in the face of resistance.”

Today is Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, Marti Gras. Shrove is a word we don’t use much in English any more. It’s an old English word of Germanic origin, the past tense of shrive which was the word used (to shrive oneself) to say one had presented himself/herself to a priest for confession, penance, and absolution. Marti Gras is French for Fat Tuesday. Fat Tuesday needs no etymological explanation. So what did I do on Fat Tuesday? I ate... too much... at lunch with friends at La Gran Terraza, the really good restaurant at the University of San Diego.

This is the birthday cake that Patrick made for Jeremy's and Michael's birthday... an appropriate image for Fat Tuesday.

I try to get in at least a short bike ride every day, but three or four times a week I head out from where I live on a hill without knowing exactly where I will go. I have to decide as I ride down Ulric Street if I will go east or west on Friar’s Road, or if I will cross the valley and ride up the Bachman Street hill behind UCSD Hospital to get to Hillcrest and then Downtown. This morning I decided to go that way so I could ride along San Diego Bay to see what has changed in the couple of months since I’ve ridden there. The day was perfect. This afternoon our grand-dog Cali came over for visit, so she's the featured image on today's BLOG.