I rode my bicycle by the Chua Van Hanh Temple just after a rain shower this morning, and I couldn't resist stopping and taking some more pictures. Some of the pictures should be seen bigger, so click on them.
IF YOU HAVEN'T READ OR HEARD THEM LATELY, take a look a some of the sayings of Gautama Siddharta, the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.

He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings, and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an impartial eye.

You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection.

Even death is not to be feared by one who has lived wisely.






The large Buddha statue in front of the Chua Van Hanh Temple.

Quan Yin is the Goddess of Mercy or the Goddess of Compassion.

There are days when my daily journal writing cannot be matched in any way to my photographs for the day. Both writing and photography are as critical to my well-being as food and sleep. Sometime the writing is prompted by something or someone I have photographed, and there are times when I go out looking for a photograph to match something I have written. Sometimes, like today, my writing for the day is something build on a fragment of an idea that I have jotted on a scrap of paper; and it may have absolutely no relation to the pictures I've managed to take. Today, I took three pictures; and I don't feel like throwing any of them away; but I can see clearly that there is no way I can stretch an explanation to connect them to the writing. From a discussion with friends about the second chapter of Harvey Cox's new book, The Future of Faith, I managed to get only three lines in what I hope will eventually be a longer poem. If it materializes, I'll post the rest of it. Here's the start:

Here I am watching you watching me watching you
wondering can you help me know for sure that I am
not just a factor in someone else’s dream?

The thing about the lily that caught my attention was the single water drop. You should click on the image to see the water drop larger. There were at least a dozen more perfectly formed lily blossoms, but they didn't have at the tip a perfect, clear, water pearl that will not ever evaporate now that I've captured it in a picture.
I liked this classical ivory (now illegal material that I should probably be embarrassed to own) carving of a Chinese scholar from the moment I saw it in a shop forty years ago in Singapore. As I looked for subjects to photograph on this rainy day in San Diego, I settled on the ivory scholar and the much older jade horse below.

Everybody else has had something to say about it, so I’ve decided to weigh in on Tiger Wood’s fall from grace. His situation fits into something I’ve been thinking about since a coffee date with a friend one day last week. Columnists, sports writers, and social commentators have been quick with their responses to the world's most famous athlete’s private misbehaviors and his painful public reemergence into the glare of media’s rude spotlights. Some treat him like a god fallen. Others proclaim that he has always been as much a jerk as he is now. On the same day that I met with my friend in the morning, Tiger Wood’s confession was a lead story on evening television newscasts. As I watched his scripted performance before a small invited audience and a cluster of TV cameras, I was struck by the fact that he was acting out the process Ben and I had discussed over coffee. He serially screwed up. He got caught. He experienced public exposure, humiliation and shame. He said he was sorry and apologized. But it’s obviously not enough.

As far as I know he didn’t break any laws. Reports indicate his sex with women other than his wife was consensual. His wife knows. Sports companies that have paid him for the use of his name now have some business decisions to make; they are business decisions, not decisions that have anything to do with the corporate world’s “feeling” for him or his wife or for anyone else. If corporations decide to stop paying him for the use of his name, that’s their business; it’s business, not moral judgment. A few days ago when the Dalai Lama was asked by a reporter what he thought about the Tiger Wood situation, he answered, “What is tiger wood?” Good answer. The Dalai Lama doesn’t live in a cave, so he probably knows very well who Tiger Wood is; his was the right answer. It is a private, civil matter which has nothing to do with me.

My friend and I didn’t discuss Tiger Wood or any other specific person. We are both retired from professions that kept each of us for many years deeply involved with the lives of other people. Our jobs allowed us sometimes to participate with people in their happiest experiences, and we talked about how wonderful it is to be invited to celebrate other people’s joy. We talked also about the times when we had been pulled into other people’s horrific experiences, devastating events that left them and us deeply troubled. My friend had been a priest and I had been a school master: both are professions that require practitioners to make judgements about the behaviors of others, to advise when it is appropriate or necessary, and sometimes to suggest courses of action for people who have done sometimes small and sometimes great wrong to others. We talked about regret and repentance and remorse, about how it is possible to regret without repentance or remorse... how repentance expressed with words but without changes in behavior or attempts at recompense is meaningless.

As I write this, I can’t remember now how or why Ben and I got into such deep talk; but I remembered afterwards what Aldous Huxley said in his foreword to the novel, Brave New World, and I went home and looked it up to be sure I had remembered it correctly.

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”

So what does America want from Tiger Wood... and from John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford? After Wood went before the cameras to publicly confess his wrongdoing and to apologize, the debate turned to whether or not he seemed to be sorry. The people in broadcast and print media needed something from him that would keep the story going. They were determined not to allow him off the hook with simple regret or even repentance. They insist that we should want to see remorse, gut-wrenching remorse, remorse that envelopes him and his wife and his children... not a quick flicker of temporary remorse but chronic remorse.

It’s time to leave these people alone, to let them recover, to let them get on with their lives without judgment or interference from me. As the Dalai Lama said, “What is tiger wood?

So I'll get back to looking at DANDELIONS and PELICANS...

BIG BANG

The astronomers came bearing news
about the oldest structures in the universe;
in their paper the word universe isn’t capitalized
but Live Oak, California, population twenty-seven hundred is...
anyway, these immense whispy clouds rippling across time and space,
fifty-nine billion trillion miles, give or take a few trillion,
and we’re not talking square miles here,
are leftovers from the beginning of time
which is thought to have been fifteen billion years ago
when, as the chief astronomer himself said in this year of our Lord
twenty hundred and ten just before noon on a Friday,
something went BANG in the universe,
not little bang but big BANG,
out of what or because of what he didn’t say
because all we really know for sure
is that we are here on this green world of life and death
looking out among the galaxies and stars amazed.

There Is a Child Alive in Me

There is in me alive a child who tugs
and sets my face toward the rising sun
on days when clouds obscure the sky
and I am turned to look the other way...
He is that part of me that I can trust,
who asks questions instead of bluffing
with an answer when it’s clear I haven’t
got a clue... and when I die it will be he
who leads me into darkness wondering.

On my ride along the south side of the river on my way out to the ocean, I came upon five snowy egrets that I thought might make the cut for my photo du jour, but later over on Shelter Island I met up with three pelicans who seemed to like my company well enough to let me photograph them up close. I think you’ll like them as much as I do.

FOR CHELSEA KING


WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE?

What are the guarantees?
If you don’t know what you’ve got coming to you,
How are you going to know if you’ve been short changed?
If you can’t have a full moon on Valentine’s Day,
What can you get instead?
Or is bargaining not appropriate?
Or not allowed?

Chelsea King died horribly last Thursday
at the wonderful age of seventeen,
Almost certainly not expecting it at all.
Where’s the fairness here
When I continue to live
and smile and dream?

As I was getting onto my bike for my morning ride, my good neighbor, Jim Fudge, was on his way to clean his grill with some high powered stuff that I won't try to describe here, and he agreed to be my picture for the day. Having just read in the newspaper the details of a plan by Citizens for California Reform to solve our problems in Sacramento, I concluded that Jim, in apron and wearing gloves, would be a good candidate for the State Assembly or the State Senate or perhaps the governorship, another state office that will be open soon. On second thought, there is no way he will be willing to give up retirement and cleaning his grill for a job in government, and I like him far too much to want him to get into such a thankless occupation.
























Some California Statistics

Population in 2008: 36,756,666 (comparison... Canada 2009: 33,212 )

Area: 159,955 square miles (comparison... Canada 3,855,103 square miles)

Economy: California estimated to be between the 7th and 10th largest economy in the world when compared with nations and individual states.

I COULD GO ON WITH DEMOGRAPHICS, ECONOMIC STATISTICS, AND FACTS AND COMPARISONS OF EDUCATION SYSTEMS WITH OTHER STATES AND COUNTRIES, but that would probably do little to convince the Tea Party people and other benighted citizens that their ignorance coupled with magical thinking could destroy the state and nation that they believe they are trying to save. The latest absurd proposal getting considerable air time on conservative talk radio and placard space at Tea Party protest rallies is a plan to reduce the California Legislature to part-time. According to the newspapers, Gabriella Holt, President of Citizens for California Reform, explained why she and her group think the State of California needs to move to a part-time legislature: “Citizen legislators versus professional politicians is what it boils down to.” Boils down to! What kind of conclusion is that from what sort of understanding of politics and government? Do these people think running California is comparable to running a school system? ...elect a few people: maybe a couple of doctors who are willing to take time out from their practice; a few housewives and househusbands who are fortunate enough to be in single income households so they can take time out from cleaning floors, washing and ironing clothes, trimming the lawn, taking kids to and from school; perhaps a school teacher who would be given time off every now and then to study legislative matters; how about a fireman or two, and yeah, a policeman (He or she could do double duty as sergeant-at-arms and senator.); throw in a butcher, a baker and a candle-stick maker and you’ve got a legislature. What the hell are these people thinking! With their obvious lack of understanding of what a “job” in the real world requires, I can only imagine how effectively members of the Citizens for California Reform perform as employees.

California is in terrible shape financially. The states infrastructure problems have not been addressed for decades and are likely to deteriorate further. Schools have drastically cut academic and arts programs. In the fifties and sixties the high school in Yuba City where I was a fledgeling teacher offered Latin, German, French and Spanish. Complete automobile, woodshop (including cabinetmaking and house building), art, drama, and music programs were offered to all students. The music program in the school of eighteen hundred students in that farming community included orchestra, band, at least three choral groups, and individual instruction. We will be decades getting those programs back into schools even if we could start today.

Presenting themselves as people of integrity insisting on fiscal responsibility, Citizens for California Reform are willing to further cripple public service programs. We have been the most affluent nation in the world. Government is providing less and less service because citizens are too easily convinced that all government is bad. The Citizen Legislature Act which the CCR organization is planning would require the Legislature to convene in January for no more than 30 days and then in May for no more than 60 days. The legislature could reconvene for five days in the fall to consider vetoes by the governor. The initiative would cut legislators’ pay in half. The obvious result would to cripple California’s already lame legislature and empower special interest groups. Legislative staff who “run” government would be easy prey for lobbyists.

Believing the state with the seventh largest economy in the world can be managed by people working part-time, the Citizens for California Reform are collecting money and signatures to get their proposal on the ballot. My greatest fear is that if the initiative does get on the ballot, it might pass into law because of basic ignorance of voters and the high level of frustration with the legislators now in Sacramento. Be aware.

























The high tide and wild surf tossed the little boat up onto Mission Beach yesterday. It reminds me of what voters have done to California with their initiative blunders.