Explain to me again The Apostles’ Creed

Who’s in charge here, anyway?

Is it God?

If so, he needs to know a thing or two 

about some people I saw yesterday

and the day before…

A child of two or three is living in the park.

It’s not the same as going there to play.

He needs to know that.

Her parents keep their possessions in a shopping cart.

I heard in church His eye is on the sparrow.

I saw birds in the park today and heard them singing,

but this child has no other shelter from the threats of night

than trees and ground where squirrels live.

Who’s watching her?

And has He seen what’s happened to a woman,

an old one whose back is bent

and has eyes filled with despair

hanging all day long around the north end of the park

then sleeps at night behind the bus stop bench?

Earth’s a good place for life

for most of us.

I’m more than happy here,

but I must say if I had power and wisdom

with no limits whatsoever

except for those I set for myself,

I’d have a place for every child to live.

This is probably the last day that I should impose my presence on these beautiful creatures.  I came back from my bike ride, set up my tripod with camera near the nest and stationed myself a few yards away with my remote device for operating the video camera.  I was still wearing a bright yellow-green bicycle shirt that alerts drivers that I am out there when I’m riding.   I saw the little mother hummingbird approach; and I guess she was spooked by the bright shirt, so she perched on a bougainvillea shrub and watched me.  I sat as still as possible, but she didn’t go to the nest; so after awhile I took off the shirt and sat on it to see if that was what was bothering her.  After awhile she flew to the nest and after feeding her babies, she did the usual inspection of the camera and then came to within a couple of feet of my face… she checked me out and flew away.  She and I didn’t reach even a tacit agreement that I could be there, so I’ll be careful not to interfere with her getting her chicks ready to fly.

And across town... Jyla is four months old.

Wow!  Life is good.

PICTURES OF MY YOUNGSTERS

Mother Hummingbird isn't hanging around for a family picture... too busy gathering food for these very hungry tykes.  Their feathers are filling out fast, so I'm expecting to have them for no more than another week.

I may not get this close to them again.  I like to think they know me, but I don't want to take a chance

and alarm them and cause them to try to fly away before they can actually do it.  The Mother is the one who must initiate that leave-taking.  

Don't let the lovely pictures fool you.  I had to temper my mood with nice images.

NOT A RANT… MORE OF A CRY OF ALARM that runs the risk of becoming rant…  I’ll try to tamp down my gut response and keep it to myself… ISIS, ISIL, AL-QAEDA, UNITED METHODISTS, SOUTHERN BAPTISTS, MORMONS, CATHOLICS share some unsettling beliefs rooted in a common heritage.

Many commonly held religious ideas and traditions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam come from the same collection of myths created long before what in Western cultures we call the Common Era…BCE.  It’s not surprising that the leaders of ISIS hold many notions about God, about relationships (God with humans and humans with God) and about human sexuality,  which are held by supreme leaders of mainline Islamist groups and by Orthodox Jews and by leaders of the Roman Catholic Church and by many leaders of Christian denominations which might be labeled “fundamentalist.”  The San Francisco Archbishop, Salvatore J. Cordileone, has made clear in a handbook he is imposing on teachers and other employees of Catholic schools in the archdiocese that he believes civil laws should be brought in line with Catholic doctrine.  In his handbook he declares that  “fundamental demands of justice require that the civil law preserve…,” and he goes on to name the practices which should be restricted by civil law. It’s the Christian version of sharia law. 

The L.A. Times report:  “Cordileone has prompted fresh outrage in the liberal Bay Area by imposing morality clauses on teachers, staff and administrators at the four high schools under his control in San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties.  A newly released handbook asks the nearly 500 school employees to ‘affirm and believe’ that “adultery, masturbation, fornication, and the viewing of pornography and homosexual relations’ are ‘gravely evil.’ Artificial-reproductive technology, contraception and abortion are described similarly.  ‘The fundamental demands of justice,’ it continues, ‘require that the civil law preserve the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.’ 

Timpani

The orchestra under white lights plunges headlong into a frenzy
impossible music floats then rushes then crashes
so many sounds compacted and carried along
while the renegade melody breaks and runs
eyes and ears captured by the percussion section
kettle drums are sent from God to make thunder
boom, ba, ba, ba, boom, boom, boom
BOOM, BA, BA, BA, BOOM, BA, BA, BA, BOOM
boom, boom boom, boom boom
arms and drum sticks flailing
hands and arms dropping quickly to drum heads
stopping the sound is as important as starting it
and I am reminded that silence also is music.

FAVORITE JACKET

Contradictions abound,

at least enough to make prediction

unlikely to be trustworthy

unless, of course, the forecast

calls for what is not expected,

but that’s not what this writing is about

as much as it is about the fact

that I like the unexpected

more than is normal

and confess without apology

that fascination with the possibility 

of adventure around the next corner 

or in the next hour of my life

keeps my eyebrows raised

and my mind racing.

Why is it, then,

that there is such comfort

in a twenty-five-year-old jacket

with frays and tears at the collar

and needs mending at the pocket…

and the white shirt with blue stripes

bought in Andover, Massachusetts,

isn’t even the kind of shirt I prefer

when it is new and crisp,

but now the soft, gentle material

has become part of the fabric of my life

that, like a good friend,

I hope to keep forever.

I looked for myself behind mirrors 

and in windows along busy streets 

then discovered me in Shakespeare

and marveled how he knew

my soul would be like Hamlet’s

and need to know…to know..

to know what my flesh is heir to

…and why.

I will not make my quietus

with bodkin bare or poison rare 

and cut short my search for me.

An owner's manual would be helpful.

In the meantime:  Baby Pictures

I've got to take the picture before the chicks get so large that I might inferrer with their development... or my closeness might cause them to try to leave the nest before they can fly.  Yesterday's and today's photographs show how much they grow in just 24 hours.

  

I'm learning... with a great sense of wonder, and appreciation for the inborn sense of what it means for a creature to carry a species related task.  These little hummingbirds emerged from small eggs in a tiny nest... ready to participate as living beings in whatever ways the evolutionary process going back millions of years had prepared them to participate.  Fewer than two weeks ago they were hairless, featherless little gray things with beaks ready to receive food from a little mother who began to do what she was supposed to do as soon as they had hatched...  Now their feathers are coming in.  I stationed my camera on a tripod near the nest again... and hid a dozen feet away where I could watch the nest and control the shutter release.  I am in awe of her.  I am reassured. She wasn't taught how to make the nest, mate with a male, lay her eggs and sit on them until they hatched, but she obviously does what she should do.  I struggle to keep myself from saying "she knows" what she is supposed to do, but it's not a knowing, it's something that was born in her... and now day after day she diligently gathers food (much of it from a hummingbird feeder I hung nearby) enough for herself and for the two chicks, and she flies back to the nest and regurgitates some it into the waiting beaks of the chicks.  What I'm getting at is that if evolution has prepared these little creatures to do what they must do to survive, then it stands to reason that I have in me a lot of inborn "stuff"...stuff that I didn't learn but was there at the time I was born. Awesome.  It's important not to screw it up.

Sorry about the noise.  My neighbor is building something in his garage.  The little Mother hummer seems not to be deterred by it.  She does what she has to do.  I like the way she flew right up to the lens of the camera at the end... as if to say, "What the hell is this contraption?"

This afternoon I went out to take some pictures of the pear trees in full bloom around our neighborhood.  Amazing, they are… I had been reading some pretty heavy stuff before I went out with my cameras.   I won’t even try to explain, but let’s just say it had something to do with Carl Jung’s theories that there is a hell of a lot more to everybody than meets the eye; so when I got back to my computer with the images of blooming pear trees,  I dropped back into a pattern I like of making a mirror double of everything… and giving the lie to the old saying, “What you see is what you get.”

This last bit is what a little computer editing can do to a single little red rose...

I went out today with my buddy Tom Fagan... I with my mini-bicycle and camera; Tom with his easel and paints.  We talked about painting and photography, drawing with light...

 Paying attention to light with oils and canvas and camera.  

We were in Coronado. 

It was an especially good time. 

I came back home and found a poem I wrote a back in 1992 after coming home with Margaret from the theater... it's about light.

DUSK

The exact moment when the curtain drops
is as important as any bit of dialogue in the play.
Dusk has to happen; it can't be postponed, 
which is, if I were a playwright, and I'm not,
is what I'd want the audience to feel.
Let this thing be done with, I'd want them to think.
And as for that, I'd insist on a thing or two
different from the things I've seen.  
The curtain should not drop at all,
but very gradually, like the coming night,
quiet darkness would envelop second by second
everything and everyone with just a hint of dread.

With my camera I painted this scene

while Tom painted it with oil on canvas.

With my camera I sketched him with light.

...and with my camera he got me in black and white...

...and color.

David was born on February 5th, 1958

Wonderful Then!

Wonderful Now!

I looked for and found beauty at home while chaos and madness seemed to be the order of the day elsewhere in the world. I fixed a camera to a tripod and waited for my hummingbird mother to come with food for her chicks.  I still had time for something short of an actual rant

NPR broadcast a report on research done partly to determine why so many people who had declined/refused to vaccinate their children before the current outbreak of measles are still reluctant to do so even when they are presented with research data "proving" that vaccines do not cause autism or any other problem for developing children. Preexisting conditions which require specific medication may lead physicians to recommend not getting the vaccine; but for normally healthy individuals, research shows that vaccines pose no threat whatsoever.   The research indicates that people in all cultures tend to hold onto previous biases and ideologically based behaviors even after they have learned that those beliefs and behaviors have no basis in fact.  The best guess is that through many thousands of years of human evolution, individuals who conformed to the biases and beliefs of a group or tribe stood the best chance of survival. Conforming gave them significant protection. We have a built in propensity to believe what the group believes. We continue to hang on to behaviors and responses to signal our membership in tribes and communities even after our basic knowledge and intellectual development have changed our understanding of reality.  

Politics and religion are probably the clearest examples of hard-to-give-up responses even after we have learned that the ideologies of political and religious institutions are built around notions that don't hold up to reason. Why else do so many people act and even vote against their own interest?  

Catechisms (from Greek: κατηχέω, to teach orally), oaths of allegiance, learned chants and cheers are specifically designed to reinforce what we have a natural tendency to do; and we often continue to express loyalty by participating mindlessly even after we no longer literally believe to be true what we affirm in unison or in concert with others of our group or tribe. 

Republicans in Congress voted again this week to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  They went through the motions again chanting in unison to their political base their disapproval of President Obama and of his administration and repeating exactly what they were saying before the program actually began but proved to offer real help to millions of Americans who didn’t have health insurance before the program began.  Republicans have again taken up their chant against “Obama Care” without offering programs of their own to address the critical need for health care for all Americans, especially for those most at risk and least able to afford basic medical attention when they need it.  Their mantra always includes the idea that "the market" should be left free from governmental interference to create programs to meet the health-care needs of Americans... as if "The Market" were a creature with conscience.

Republicans and Democrats and Socialists and Communists are tribes... and the list goes on: Baptists and Methodists and Mormons and Roman Catholics and Anglican Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims and Jews and Buddhists and many other distinct groups of devotees to some faith-based religion are essentially tribes. Members of any of those tribes are expected to believe and to behave in specific ways approved by the group.  For example, a Methodist kid may grow up not knowing that his denomination's Book of Discipline, against all logic, declares that homosexuals are not pleasing to the Methodist god; but the professional Christians, those who earn a living by working for a Methodist Church, know what the prohibitions are and they know the implications of their religion’s exclusion of LGBT persons from full participation in the rites and sacraments of the religion. Even after they learn that neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality as sexual orientation is chosen by individuals, most are reluctant to take a stand against a doctrine that clearly discriminates against and hurts real people, individuals whom they know and otherwise approve in their communities. The Methodist tribe is made up of communities of various sizes all over the world. The leaders of those groups routinely accept the gifts of time, talent, and money given in service to the religious organization by LGBT individuals; but the leaders manage even in a “faith-based” community to live with an illogical disconnect and go on with their practices of exclusion.  In a world that is dangerously overpopulated, the Roman Catholic Church continues to declare that contraceptive practices are forbidden by the Catholic god.  Southern Baptists continue to teach children that absolutely everything in their Holy Bible is the true word and law of their Baptist god. They claim to believe everything in the Universe was declared into existence by a supreme being approximately six thousand years ago, that the first human beings were a man named Adam and a woman named Eve, that a big fish swallowed Jonah, that the Red Sea parted so a path on the sea floor was exposed to let Moses lead a group of people out of Egypt into the land of Israel, and that Jesus walked on water. 

After hearing that ISIS had killed twenty-six-year-old Jordanian Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh by burning him alive and then distributing a video of the execution on social media, I began trying to find a way to express in writing what I am feeling today about ISIS and al-Qaida and about any violence and brutality done as expressions of religious duty. I can’t do it. No matter how often I turn the details over and over, nothing comes to mind that can express how distraught I am. 

from my 1990 journal (Saturday, July 21)
Margaret and I were in Bangkok, having come up on the train from Singapore.

I WANT JAZZ

Program music is what some people want their lives to be...
or at least a nice waltz, three beats to a measure,
or even a minuet with steps all measured and counted,
but none of those will make me happy.
I want life to be jazz all the way.
Give me the unexpected turns and runs coming when least expected.
I'd rather be lost in the back streets by the river in Bangkok
than safe and secure on a Grayline tour of the city.
I'll take the train with no air-conditioning
winding its way through the rice fields of Southern Thailand
instead of riding a fast airplane to get where I want to be.
Give me a jazz existence.

Birthday supper with David and our neighbors

TOMORROW IS MARGARET’S BIRTHDAY… Number 81.  When we were young, we needed no running start to make celebrations very special events.  These days we begin celebrating at least a week before the day. On the 30th we had an intimate little supper.  Today we went to her favorite restaurant for lunch.  Tomorrow: who knows…  Margaret’s birthday is also Ground Hog Day, and almost every year her birthday and Ground Hog Day happen on Super Bowl Sunday or one or two days on one or the other side of the big game.  In America the Super Bowl game is a religious event… Ground Hog Day... not even close.  Margaret’s Birthday is just one of many special days for me to remind myself how fortunate I am that she was born. I’ve known her since we were students, and we’re still learning how to get the very most out of life.  I’m one lucky son-of-a-gun.