En route from Marion, Massachuestts, to Crystal City, Virginia

450 miles
Wind: SW 10 knots
66°F

Another adventure today, another flight across at least some ocean, and south, always farther south, to someplace warmer where cherries and bradford pear are blossoming. I'm here for a conference for American Schools and Hospitals Abroad, a USAID organization.

In middle school and high school, in boarding school, I flew back and forth between Bangkok and Manila four times a year by myself, so getting on a plane, walking through the airport, resting at gates--it feels like coming home in so many ways. There's no rush better than a plane gathering force beneath my body. It's better when I'm going someplace completely new solely for the joy of it, but even with the stress of having to impress DC insiders, being here gives me a feeling of freedom, of release. Travel gives me a little frisson of existential angst, making everything sharper, everything have more color.

Maybe travel is my drug of choice. The hotel I chose was based completely on online research, and when I arrived I discovered it nestled beneath an overpass in a posh district blocks from the Pentagon, so I wandered the streets with hipster urbanites and yuppie joggers, retiree tourists and traveling businessman, and found, immediately, a Thai restaurant where I ate overpriced and inauthentic, but fantastically delicious, duck rolls and salmon curry. I'm going to see how many continents' worth of ethnic cuisine I can stuff into three days. The Cherry Blossom Festival is also starting this week, and I'm wishing I had budgeted extra time for the free Smithsonian museums, or at least a tour of the Capital building. I have to pack in as much culture as possible while I'm away from the Maine woods.

And always I carry with me the guilt. I have friends who have given up travel altogether as a concession to their fossil-fuel consumption, and since those long ago flights from Bangkok to Manila, I still find the view from the skies toxic, somehow--all of the scars we've made on the surface of the perfect earth. It's beautiful from the ground--bike paths and waterfalls and landscaped gardens and soaring skyscrapers--but from heaven it looks like a crawling cancer. More accurately, it's like those possibly benign growths I find on the undersides of leaves. Arcane heiroglyphics carved out by unknowing parasites. The view from the sky, the intricate tracings we've left on the earth, are the same, I suppose. We don't know the damage we're doing. Or if we're doing damage.

It's the yin and yang of all of life's choices, I suppose. I'm here so I can do something to help people across the world, but in traveling here, in taking up my single spot in this hotel room, using this electricity, I'm carving out my own path on the surface of the earth, scarring it.

So again I'm traveling, and I'm going to enjoy being in the moment, being in a place where there isn't a foot of ice on the ground, someplace where I can walk on the actual earth.

Good day tonight

I found another Lenten blog today, which made me feel better about this foolishness that I'm pursuing. He agreed with me, that the primary purpose of the practice is simply following through, that unforeseeable things take place. I'd have to agree, although I'm still not sure what it is this year. But, like my favorite yoga teacher says--repetition is magic. Consistency equals results.

It's about simply coming to the page every day, or to the mat, or to the easel, or the kindergarten classroom, whatever your vocation happens to be. Whatever practice is yours. Of course, as with everything, this is easier said than done. It's so much easier to pull back the sheets and close my eyes and say--maybe tomorrow. Especially at 1:36 am, which is when I tend to be writing. Or when I tend to procrastinate the important parts of my life until.

I've been thinking about the specific practice of relationships. The practice of love, I guess it is. It's such a delicate balance. And the most difficult practice we encounter. I feel the need to quote Thomas Merton wholesale at this moment:

"The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else."

En route from Aroostook County, Maine, to Marion, Massachusetts

436 statute miles
38° F
Winds light and variable

Drove down this afternoon to Massachusetts, where it's supposed to be in the sixties all week. Already I can make do in the house without my down vest on, although Shadow is sporting his stress bump already. Sometimes I try to see the drive through his eyes--all the confusing lights as we zoom by Boston, the tunnels where everything goes bright, and then the lights in the distance, and then the strange curves as we exit on-ramps and off-ramps. I may not belong in Aroostook County, but he's a Mainer born and bred. He doesn't even know what the lights of Presque Isle look like, let alone a city like Boston.

On the drive we listened to The Hunger Games, an audiobook that I'm halfway through for a second time, and which is plotted so brilliantly as to make me quail. It's such a brilliant conception, a sort-of The Lottery meets American Idol, and the force of the concept alone keeps the story moving forward inexorably. If you haven't read it already, you should now, if only to keep the ubiquitous movie trailer from stealing your own Katniss Everdeen from you. But maybe I'm just dazed from the road. If it's this year's frigging Twilight, as everyone seems to be saying, then it won't take long before the snipers start taking potshots, pointing out all the flaws.

Sometimes I just love the thrill of an exhilarating plot, carrying me forward, creating an unheretoforeseen universe and its attendant characters, and all the more if those characters are heroic and three-dimensional, but of course more good than bad. Maybe I have some lessons to learn. It's these dark literary novels that haunt me, but the ones that keep me up reading into the night are young-adult fantasy thrillers. What does that say?

I don't know. I'm musing. Hoping Shadow doesn't die of heatstroke in a house where the heat is set above 57 degrees. Or worse yet, in a coastal zone where it's supposed to hit 66 degrees this week. About time to be getting spinach into the ground. Maybe, by the time I get back, all of the ice on our cold frames will have melted.

Your body may be gone

St. John's River

Be here now

Today's snow

Since it's been brought up in the comments, I've been thinking about original sin--total depravity, in Calvin's words. It's such a difficult thing to wrap one's brain around, Adam and Eve taking a bite from that apple. When I dive down into the intricacies of that moment, it seems like their failure was one of love, of failing to love God, of not trusting him.

I've been diving down into the meanings of these words, or trying to, meditating on them. What it actually means to love another person, to love God—to trust him. To trust that he really has good things in store for you, not bad. How a parent can claim to love a child and then go on and hurt that child. And it happens every day, in subtle ways, even with parents who don't put their cigarettes out on their children's faces. How it feels like it happens, even with God.

So we all bite the apple every day. We all fail to love. And God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love. Love is what he gives us as fear's opposite. When I wrap my brain around these words, I get lost inside of them, but it's like Thomas Merton said—it all twines back to love, like a flame circling its own center.

Like Merton, like the heretic Bell, I say—love wins. Love is what we lost in the garden, what we regain with Christ. Love is what I lose hold of every minute, every minute that I try to hold onto. Here's my hymn for today, by the poet Mason Jennings:

Be here now
No other place to be
Or just sit there dreaming
Of how life could be
If we were somewhere better
Somewhere far
Away from all our worries
Well, here we are

You are the love of my life
Be here now
No other place to be
All the doubts that linger
Just set them free
And let good things happen
Let the future come
Into each moment
Like a rising sun

Sun comes up and we start again
Sun comes up and we start again
Sun comes up and we start again

Be here now
No other place to be
This whole world keeps changing
Come change with me
Everything that's happened
All that's yet to come
Is here inside this moment
It's the only one

--Mason Jennings, Boneclouds

We'll ride

Solitary nature

Today's Moby Dick quote of the day:

"Almost universally, a lone whale--as a solitary Leviathan is called--proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Daniel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature herself; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets."

The good times are killing me

Where are the coyotes?

"Animals are changing, and I cannot tell you why."—Inusiq Nasalik, 88-year-old inuit elder, September 6, 2004

And then this article: The Violence of the Lambs.

Never mind that I was linked to it from an article talking about how facts are stupid—even just a cursory search reveals that he's not lying about the facts: dolphins are coming after us.

Here's the essential quote:

“A question that lately has been getting knocked around a lot in the better biology departments is this: As we intrude on, clear-cut, burn, pollute, occupy, cause to become too hot or too dry, or otherwise render unsuitable to wildlife a larger and larger percentage of the planet, what will be involved in terms of the inevitable increased human exposure to remnant populations of truly wild fauna? Not for us but for them. What sort of changes, adaptations, and responses might we look for in the animals themselves as the pressures of this global-biological endgame begin to make themselves felt at the level of the individual organism? We have in mind here not microevolutionary changes to existing species but stress-related behavior modification, so-called "phenotypic plasticity," the sort of thing we know numerous animal groups to be capable of, though it is rarely witnessed.”

And here's a quote from the Tampa Bay Times, after a stingray stabbed a second human through the heart:

“'It was a freak accident,' said Lighthouse Point acting fire Chief David Donzella. 'We still can't believe it.'
Serious stingray attacks like this one and the one that killed "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin last month are rare, marine experts say.”

Really. You don't say. And they're not the only animals acting weird. Dolphins are downing swimmers in Cancun, and sea lions are attacking Shakira. My favorite story from the article is the monkeys versus humans battle that was staged outside of four water tankers in central Africa. They're after us. They, and the whales have finally figured out that not only are we killing them, but we're killing everything else, too, and something must be done. Animals are shifting as we shift.

Another reference, my documentary of the day: The Cove.

No wonder they're after us. Everything is echoing itself—dolphins popping up in documentaries, dolphins and whales, both of the order cetacea, both marine mammals. Dolphins are just mini-whales, and all I've been reading about are the whales. Whales, whose tails Melville describes thus:

“The more I consider this mighty tail, the more I do deplore my inability to express it. At times, there are gestures in it, which, though they would well grace the hand of man, remain wholly inexplicable. In an extensive herd, so remarkable, occasionally, are these mystic gestures, that I have heard hunters who have declared that the whale, indeed, by these methods intelligently conversed with the world. Nor are there wanting other motions of the whale in his general body, full of strangeness, and unaccountable to his most experienced assailant. Dissect him how I may, then, I go but skin deep; I know him not, and never will.”

So we're slaughtering them, the animals that possess a mystic language. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Can't we all just feel it? At a fundamental level? There's something wrong. We've lost our connection to the earth, to the sea, to each other. We can't stop puffing toxins into the air, and everything else breathing them in. There are too many of us. Unless we stop, and soon, there will be hell to pay, from someone, whether it's more wars for oil or, more karmically elegant, a planet of the apes.

Now that your rose is in bloom

“Capitalism is an inherently unstable system.... Capitalism is notorious for its ups and downs. We have a whole vocabulary to refer to them: booms and busts; recessions and depressions; upturns and downturns....”

“You would expect that we would know this about capitalism's history and therefore not believe that we could somehow manage to escape instability. But over the last thirty to forty years we, as a society, have been unwilling to think critically about capitalism. And it shows. We thought we weren't going to have another crisis like the one we had in the 1930s, or like the one the Japanese have had since 1990. We imagined that these problems were no longer relevant to modern life. So we were unprepared for the mess we're in.”

“So another reason this crisis is so different is that it's coming at the end of a long period of denial. Let me give you an example: When I began my work as a PhD student in economics, the typical curriculum had a course about the business cycle, to introduce students to the history of economic ups and downs in their own country and others. In 2007 the vast majority of graduate programs in economics had no course on the business cycle at all. We thought we had overcome it, outgrown it. We had come to believe that we were in a new economic system, a mature capitalism, and that we had all the mechanisms to control it.”

--Richard Wolff, “Capitalism and Its Discontents,” The Sun, February 2012.