Pre-Spring Ruminations

Dragon figure on the Nankunshen Daitian Temple in Tainan, ancient capital of Taiwan

I got a note on Friday from my local food co-op newsletter that old Phil in Punxsutawni PA hadn't seen his shadow when he emerged from his comfy den, so we may not have to suffer through a prolonged winter. This is good news, even if of dubious folkloric origin, but we've recently enjoyed a few balmy days before having to huddle through another bleak stretch, so the prospect of not slogging through a continuous cycle that lasts beyond the solstice is welcome.

I generally spend February 2 remembering my father, who was born on that day in 1921. Despite his carrying some of the same genes I do (the worst of mine came from my mother's side of the family), he managed to survive two separate coronary bypass operations and several years of thyroid cancer (probably an artifact of his service in the South Pacific during WWII) before he died of that not long after his 83rd birthday. My daughter and I flew out to Porterville, California for a Valentine's Day visit in 2004, and my son drove down from Seattle so we could spend some time with him together, and I made a vast lasagna for dinner one night--which he managed to enjoy a bit of. My Dad was a terrific guy, and these last twenty years have afforded many bittersweet moments. But I never stop remembering how much he helped to steer me towards becoming a more generous and appreciative person than I might have been, and I've never stopped being grateful. One of his final directives was to "write at the end of your stint." So my long rants on this blog are actually a response to my Father's orders.

Four years ago in mid-February, Texans experienced the direst bout of nasty winter weather in modern memory during what we called "Snowmageddon," from the 11th to the 21st or so. The worst day was probably the 14th, during which we had no power for the better part of 24 hours. (I wrote about it in a post called In A Bleaker Midwinter). As I've mentioned recently, we've spent the time between then and now providing ourselves with alternate sources of power and heat. But the state has also been trying to clean up its act, thanks in no small part to the efforts of renewable providers, and the grid held through a spell of sub-freezing weather last month. We did, however, take multi-day advantage of our ceramic-clad cast-iron wood-burner, so we actually enjoyed a few cozy mornings when our house thermostat was registering in the low 50s. Closing off the living room, pulling down shades and drawing curtains all through the house, and using an electric heater in the upstairs bathroom (we don't have a heat source up there, so this was to keep the water from freezing), kept us comfortable until the spell finally broke, with the weather returning to its usual cycle for this time of year. 

As I was writing this (on Monday the 5th) the temperature reached into the mid-60s, which meant that The Beloved Spouse was able to get some tennis practice in, and I managed to do some more garden prep. My usual Phenology 101 exercise this spring (see my 2018 post here) will probably be compromised by the 65-70-degree days we've enjoyed on and off for the last couple of weeks, and which fooled the daffodils into thinking that it's time to start popping up. But we had one brief freezing night that nipped the tips of their leaves, and those of the Byzantine gladioli and the alliums that managed to survive under blankets during the hard freezes and seem to want to get their mojo going. 

Overly eager daffodil

The Lunar New Year begins on Saturday, and this is a special one in our family because it marks the Year of the Dragon. My son was born in 1976, also a Year of the Dragon--a most appropriate zodiac sign for an avid fan of fantasy and gaming. So on Friday night we'll bid farewell to the Year of the Bunny (well, Rabbit to most folks) and hope that the good fortune attached to the Dragon figure will see us through a problematic election. 

Not much sky drama (not much sky, actually) has been visible for the last couple of weeks, but bright blue and puffy white are still worth looking at between grey spells; here are a few that provide a glimpse of the range of possibility, including a bit of yesterday's lovely sunrise:

Happy Skywatch Friday, Folks, and Happy Year of the Dragon!

Photo credit: The shot of that lovely dragon (one of many, but I thought that this photo perfect for Skywatch Friday), "Dragon Roof Sculpture of the Jade Emperor Shrine, Taiwan," was posted on Wikimedia Commons by Malcolm Koo (MK2010). I thought of it when I was looking for an appropriate Year of the Dragon evocation, since I visited this temple as a child and remembered its many wonderful dragons, but haven't yet found a photo among my mother's voluminous archive of negatives.

Welcome, Year of the Bunny!

One might have expected, given this sunrise on the last day of the Gregorian year 2022, that the new year might bring dramatic events. And in view of current news, it seems already to have done so. But since many of my formative years were spent in Asia, I developed a particular fondness for the Lunar New Year as celebrated in Taiwan and Japan. I tend to save any resolutions and reflections involving new beginnings until Chinese New Year, and this one has brought my favorite: the Year of the Rabbit, beginning on January 22. 

What I hope for in this new year might better be suggested by this view:

Or this:

When I was ten, we lived in Taipei, and I was pretty much a free-range child--allowed to go about the city with my friends, walking or using public transport and pedicabs to get around. We lived on Chung Shan Pei Lu, one of the main drags then, not far from a club frequented by GIs from various US services.  I passed it with a friend on my way home, just as a young serviceman and his pal came out. At the same time, a local fellow selling pets from a bicycle stopped to let us admire his wares. One of these was a small white rabbit, and I asked to hold it. The GI, who was maybe eighteen, said I reminded him of his sister, and asked if he could buy the rabbit for me. Being a trusting sort of person, and inordinately fond of small, furry creatures, I let him. My friend and I took the rabbit home, where he was promptly accepted by my family and named "Harry"--after the rabbit in Jerry Lewis's best film ever, Geisha Boy.

Rabbits, in the Chinese Zodiac, symbolize many traits I admire: peace, tranquility, empathy, rest, intellect, reserve. This year's element is water, which lends a Taoist/Heraclitian sense of process, flow, and reflection. The last Water Rabbit year I actually celebrated, 1963, occurred during my first full year back in the US, and was spent mostly with my Grandmother, who was the calmest, wisest woman I have ever known. But because I was fifteen, the year was characterized more by self-absorption than self-reflection; still, it was also a watershed year for a newly repatriated child on a new path toward womanhood.

In the sixty years between then and now, I've grown up, raised two children, outlived almost everyone in my immediate genetic family, survived numerous life-threatening events, and have finally learned to appreciate rest.

Several years ago, I discovered the quirky, smart, amusing, and informative British journal, The Idler. I subscribed for a while, but only resumed regular readership after I retired. Editor Tom Hodgkinson and his gang espouse a life of enjoyable work tempered by repose. The bi-monthly journal promotes philosophical thinking, artful leisure, and eschews soul-destroying capitalist ideas like constant, unrelenting work. Meaningful work, like husbandry, craft, writing, learning, teaching, music-making, and the like lie at the core of genuine idleness. Resting because you're exhausted by 9 to 5 life is not being idle--it's trying to stay alive.

I suppose that one reason I originally wanted to become a teacher was that it would allow me to read and write, with time off to pursue interesting projects. And so it did, to some extent. But it was still exhausting and, in the end, much less satisfying than it had been in the beginning. When the opportunity came to retire with a nice severance package and a bonus, I took it. Within a couple of years The Beloved Spouse followed me out into the Happy Land of Idleness, where we (mostly) toil not, but reap peace and quiet. We made it through the Plague without catching it, and have kept enjoying our hermetic existence ever since.

As read through the New York Times these days, I notice articles focused on "laziness." The most beautiful of these is Elliot Kukla's "The Most Valuable Thing I Can Teach My Child is How to be Lazy" (Jan. 2022), a paean to quietude, warmth, and parental love. But the numbers of essays on "quiet quitting," resignation, laziness, work as a false idol, four-day (and fewer) work weeks, and the existential price of the American "work ethic" are piling up. They're also pretty compelling, after three years of hearing how well some people adapted to working at home, at their own pace, and accomplishing more.

This certainly hasn't happened for everyone, but I do hear frequently about people who, after the lockdown experience, have learned that they can make do on much less income, have become better, more frugal cooks because of inflation, and don't feel the need to go out to dinner, visit bars, go to theaters, or take expensive vacations. 

I've argued for many years, here and in other venues, that in order to save our planet for future generations, we really must learn to do with much less. My own life has become a long-term experiment in frugality, wastelessness, energy management, and designing a revised vision of political economy, and we have both been thriving in the effort.

Despite all of the bad news that has occurred in the first month of the Gregorian year, my only resolution stems from the character of "rabbitness" that flows out of the notion of the water rabbit.  If we could only slow down, stop striving for monetary wealth, become more empathic and tolerant, learn to want less and to place need before desire, perhaps we can effect more positive changes. I'm not convinced that doing so will change anybody's mind that's already mired in modernity, but becoming more bunny-esque seems a laudable--and attainable--goal for a newly-minted seventy-five year-old. 

I haven't seen our own resident rabbits this year, but expect to come upon them, emerging from the habitats we've been fostering for them. If we get the real snow (not just sleet) the weather-folk keep promising us, I expect to see a few bunny tracks when next I venture out into the Accidental Garden.

Happy New Year(s) everyone! 

Things Are Looking Up in the Year of the Rat

My students often accuse me of being “cynical” (which most of them think means “negative” or “pessimistic”) in my outlook on the world. I somehow doubt, however, that a person with a fundamentally negative or pessimistic world view would spend ten years writing about how it could be better. Anyway, cynical literally means “dog-like”–essentially suspicious, rather than merely “negative.” I will admit to focusing very often on what’s going wrong, if only to articulate my own perceptions about the modern (or post-modern) world and provide suggestions for improvement. A blog about how happy and cute the world is (like the rather precious lai shi, or red packets in the photo) would not only be out of character, but probably really boring as well.

Nonetheless, in honor of the Lunar New Year, I thought I’d point out a couple of heartening events brought to my attention by the local news-rag, The Dallas Morning News. Both involve religion (an appropriate focus for an essentially religious holiday), a topic I tend to avoid because it has a tendency to raise my blood pressure to dangerous levels; but both offer me some hope that all is not lost and we’re not all going to eventually fall into tiger-traps dug by well-meaning but narrow-minded folk who think their way is the only way.

It's not that I have anything against religion as a human cultural phenomenon. In fact, I have participated happily in two ancient religious traditions (pre-Vatican II Catholicism and Conservative Judaism) and also admire many aspects of Eastern faiths and Islam. I am grateful for what they all have taught me. I have lots of very religious Christian relatives and Jewish and Muslim friends who are very reasonable people. But modern evangelical Christianity, extreme militant Orthodox Judaism, and radical Islam have all contributed to my current anxiety about the future of the planet. So when I read these two articles this weekend, my Doomsday Blood Pressure Monitor was set back to healthier levels, at least for a while.

The first is local commentator Steve Blow’s column for today’s edition, “Finding room for evolution in the pulpit.” Now, I have never understood why archly conservative Christians and Jews have a problem with Darwin’s description of natural selection and species-change. I have always seen the evolutionary process as a grandly beautiful scheme, profound in its efficiency and complexity. If ever anything were to convince me of the existence of a Supreme Being, in fact, evolution would be a considerable factor. So my consternation about “Creationism” and “Creation Science” has stemmed from a view that their proponents simply lack interpretive skills. It’s okay, it seems, to see the sexual innuendo in the “Song of Songs” as metaphor, but creation itself had to take place in exactly seven days in 4004 BC(E). Not only that, but God planted fake fossils in the layers of the earth to fool us and/or test our faith.

Coincidentally enough, the same edition of the paper, in the main section, carried an Associated Press story, “Anti-evolutionists target Europe,” about how those godless Europeans are now the focus of a campaign by “Answers in Genesis”—a group out of Kentucky that wants to inflict its particular brand of biblical interpretation on folks in England and on the Continent. My hope, of course, is that reason (given to us by God, right?) prevails, as it seems to be among local Methodists, at least those under the guidance of Senior Pastor Timothy McLemore in Kessler Park (in Oak Cliff, an old southern suburb of Dallas). Dr. McLemore is participating today in Evolution Sunday, according to Steve Blow’s column, because he’s concerned about the injection of religion into the teaching of science: “‘I think the Bible gives us a great creation account, and I think it's profoundly true,’ he said. ‘I just don't think it was ever intended to be scientifically true or even historically true.’” Blow notes that Evolution Sunday emerged from The Clergy Letter Project, which is designed “to demonstrate that religion and science can be compatible and to elevate the quality of the debate of this issue,” according to its website.

It was pretty heartening to discover that the Clergy Letter Project has over 11,000 signatories, all of whom believe that “the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist” and that “that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as ‘one theory among others’ is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.” Were I a believin’ man, and a clergyperson, I’d sign it, too.

In Saturday’s Religion section—a shadow, I regret to say, of its former award-winning self (it used to be an entirely separate section, but has dwindled to a single page), special contributor Mary Jacobs interviewed Brian McLaren on the occasion of a conference he’ll be holding in Dallas on February 22 and 23. McLaren is touted everywhere he’s mentioned these days as having been designated by Time Magazine (in 2005) as one of “25 Most Influential Evangelists”—right up there with Rick (Purpose Driven Life) Warren and Douglas (Fellowship Foundation) Coe.

That’s some pretty scary company in my book, but I found myself intrigued by much of what McLaren says in his interview and after having looked through his website and blog posts. His message describes a Christianity much closer to that I was introduced to by Franciscan and Benedictine friends of my mother in Taiwan, and much more closely attuned to contemporary environmental and social realities than that professed by most highly vocal evangelicals. He seems to have little patience for what he calls “fans of Jesus . . . who seek to be adherents to the Christian religion, believers in certain doctrines, consumers of religious products and services, and attenders of religious meetings without being radical disciples of Jesus in their daily lives” (from his “Faith and Action” outline). He puts an entirely new spin on the “what would Jesus do?” conundrum.

What I find most interesting about McLaren’s message as it’s being presented in conjunction with his new book, Everything Must Change and its associated conferences, is that many of his points coincide with aspects of the “conversations” that I work through in More News From Nowhere. Descriptions of the “prosperity” crisis and the “equity” crisis (both of which I’ve talked about in a couple of blogs on being poor and being wealthy) resonate with many of the issues I’m concerned about. He also recommends real-world solutions, such as buying, eating, working, and investing ethically (with practical suggestions on how to go about doing so). If you can get around his somewhat inflammatory buzzwords (“suicide machine” and “covert curriculum” are especially irritating) and suppress suspicion regarding the conferences (they cost $109 to attend, $79 for students, so one can only hope that the proceeds are supporting the mission rather than the missionary), I think much of what he has to say is important to hear, especially for Christians. The fact that he mentions the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam (earth-healing, world-transformation) is also appealing, because it ties his mission in with a longstanding movement among Jews (best articulated in Tikkun magazine).

Maybe all this is a sign of better things to come: a more reasonable, sustainable, year of the Rat. Gonxi facai, everyone—the Chinese equivalent of “Live long, and prosper” (ethically, of course).

Photo credit: “New Year's items being sold at Dihua Market, Taipei, Taiwan” by BCody80, Wikimedia Commons. Note the infiltration of Disney into the traditional “red packets” for sale.