Anderson, South Carolina
A great legacy travel provides me is the collection of visual images in my memories of magnificent places visited. Images of tropical turquoise water washing up on white powered beaches are high on my list. My good fortune working on a cruise ship as a photographer ‘collecting’ images of many bucolic tropical isles with their sugar sand beaches was one of my favorite experiences. Journeys by submarine and semi-submersible vessels allowed for multi-sensory experiences of teeming diverse colorful life below those turquoise waters. Our blue planet has a nearly impossible array of spectacular life forms to enjoy.
On Tortola in the British Virgin Islands climbing Sage Mountain and standing in the shade of grand mahogany trees while taking in a platinum view of an expansive archipelago of small islands is a peak life experience. Each island encloses perfect crescent-shaped beaches filled with fine sand, textured by assorted birds and sea life scampering across their pristine surfaces.
In Grand Cayman powerboats take visitors out to a submerged sand bar, about five feet below the surface. There one can don diving gear, even free dive, to cavort in company with a large colony of sting rays. Solitary by nature, this is the only location known where these splendid creatures socialize and keep company with each other. Certainly, there are few locations on earth where humans can interact with them.
Off beaches at St Croix, scuba tanks allow amateur explorers to visit the eastern-most park in the American National Park System. Buck Island Reef affords views of some of the most glorious of salt water life, framed in magnificent reefs. Aerial images of these shallow reefs are stunning beyond articulation.
At Roatan in Honduras divers can visit the St. Peter’s Basilica of the diving world. Clarity of aquamarine waters is stunning, allowing unencumbered viewing of schools of impossibility, creatures more colorful than creative tee-shirts just silk-screened in kiosks on nearby beaches. Brain coral adds curious dissonance to one’s experience of this sublime eco-system. Eventually one has to come up for air and rely on indelible images printed into one’s memory.
Recently, very different images of Caribbean paradise have been emerging, ominous images of reckless destruction and catastrophic ruin of some of the grandest places on earth. Because of our reckless addiction to fossil fuels, to our gas guzzling Armadas, Hummers, Expeditions, and Explorers, some of our great joys in life are at imminent risk of being lost. Unbounded craving of America for fossil fuel has pushed demand for crude oil and its extraction to new levels. In the frenzy to bring production quotas to ever higher levels, offshore drilling has resulted in catastrophic accidents and environmental fouling.
Most ‘celebrated’ of these events was grounding of the Exxon Valdez in 1989, in which 10.8 million gallons of viscous crude oil were discharged into Prince Edward Sound, fouling 1,300 square miles of ocean. It was often reported the captain of this oil tanker was drunk and left his bridge in the hands of others who had not received required time off from duty before assuming twelve-hour shifts.
In 1998 Transocean Industries ordered construction of a deep water drilling rig with capability of drilling oil wells 30,000 feet. The Deepwater Horizon semi-submersible rig was put in service in 2001 and leased to British Petroleum until 2013. In September 2009 this rig reached a depth of 32,055 feet in the Tiber oilfield, yielding the deepest oil and gas well ever tapped in any oilfield.
On April 20th, the rig was being used to cement casing into a deep well forty one miles southeast of the Louisiana delta. A violent explosion killed eleven workers, injured others, and set the rig on fire. It burned and sank to the ocean floor a mile below, coming to rest about 1,400 feet from the wellhead. In ten days, by some estimates, more oil was released by the ruptured well than by the Valdez. The well is estimated to be releasing 200,000 gallons of crude oil per day, perhaps far more. More ominously, some observers say collapse of the well casing could make control of the gusher impossible. BP states a worst case scenario includes 6.8 million gallons a day flowing from an uncontrolled blow-out.
Others suggest the entire gulf coast shoreline and its ecosystems could be lost. True economic, environmental, and aesthetic costs are matters of speculation. Potential consequences of this blow-out may soon dwarf any other natural disaster in American experience. We have in a week’s time become a nation of environmental voyeurs. Fishermen and individuals who depend on the Gulf of Mexico for their livelihoods are soon to be economic casualties. Those dependent on tourism may experience the true environmental cost of doing business in ways unfathomed. This blowout is at one end of the Gulf Stream. If the oil slick gets into the Gulf Stream, the fouling destruction could take out East Florida beaches and move further north. As one perceptive fisherman in Louisiana said, “This is worse than an atomic bomb.” Realtors are saying out loud this may not be a good time to own coastal property.
The greatest fear in the oil industry is an uncontrolled blow-out. In days ahead we will all become expert at why this is a justified fear. Perhaps just as deadly is our uncontrolled appetite for everything from plastic plates and cups we throw away at parties to the billions of plastic water bottles we discard each year; to our cars; all made from crude oil. British Petroleum and Transocean are only doing what we ask them to do – give us the raw materials for the stuff we throw away in abundance.
In Greek mythology Pandora opened her jar, releasing all manner of evil upon mankind. The only thing remaining inside when she got the lid back on was Hope. The dense viscous oil released by Deepwater Horizon is considered the most problematic form of oil to be released from a blown-out well. Have our consumer appetites opened a jar that contains the harsh stuff of reality, not the safe musings of ancient writings? Do we have the right to force other creatures of our world to make the ultimate sacrifice? Is there hope remaining that we might become wiser in our reckless ways?
Members of my former church have a real problem with my efforts to recycle those very plastics made from the same form of crude spewing out of the ocean floor off Louisiana. Two days after the Deepwater Horizon blow-out I asked members of my prayer group to leave their plastic cups and plates on the table for recycling, as I always do. I had to fish them out of the trash cans, as I always do. I can only hope my environmental eccentricities which ‘freak out’ people will become main stream – for the life of all of us.
“Father, forgive them they know not what they do.”
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Solomon’s Gift 4-22-10
Connellsville, Pennsylvania
When asked what one single gift he would most treasure in the world, King Solomon asked for wisdom, not a plasma screen TV, not a palm pilot, not even an unlimited free line of credit at Circuit City or Best Buy. He simply wanted to know how to judge information and to act appropriately on those things he learned and was told. He wanted to live his life well. You might say he wanted to live Christmas all year long.
Today in early spring the Magi appeared again to give me knowledge and wisdom that would save me from certain death. I was suddenly put in the same league as Solomon, even if for but a short season, yet long enough to keep from dying in the mountains. Wisdom is certainly a gift that keeps on giving. As Solomon said, “seek this one with all your heart”. It might just save your life.
In my travels I’ve often been disquieted by seeing impossibly steep truck escape ramps constructed for that frightening possibility of brake failure in eighteen-wheelers traversing steep mountain passes. Some of these ramps look like they were designed by civil engineers who hate their jobs, insuring tractor–trailer rigs achieve maximum altitude just before plunging into a high mountain abyss. I’ve often wondered what the terror would be like for a truck driver in the mountains finding himself sucked into this steep uncertainty following a brake failure
Being of the attitude that getting there is just as important as being there, I often take slow back roads to places, avoiding Interstates filled with everyone else in a big hurry. So it today I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway rather than several oppressively frenetic interstates, taking Joanne to Pennsylvania for one of her semi-annual family pilgrimages. The Blue Ridge Parkway must be one of the most beautiful roads in the world, if you have good brakes and a reliable vehicle.
The region of the Parkway east of Asheville on which I found myself this morning is the highest public road in eastern North America. I was at nearly 6,000 feet, near Mount Mitchell, occasionally stopping to take picture of incredible vistas and to have small bits of conversation with other sojourners gawking at the same wondrous views. It was up this serpentine pathway to heaven that I first smelled it, that distinctive odor that comes from nothing in the world but burning brake pads.
Having always had an intellectual disdain for people foolish enough to ride their brakes in the mountains rather than using their gears and downshifting, letting the engine do the work of fighting gravity, I have always been compulsive about avoiding the use of brakes in the mountains, especially when any kind of equilibrium is some thousands of feet straight down, inches from my right tire. I happily figured the whiff of burning asbestos was from someone else flirting with death, not me. I knew better that to flirt unnecessarily with the grim reaper. I refocused on the wondrous emerald realm around me. Anyway, Joanne doesn’t like it when I focus on the dark side of life on the third planet.
Again, moments later, my nostrils caught the distinctive aroma. Both feet were well away from the brake pedals. No one else was on the road. Perhaps the odor was just hanging in the very still air from a now-invisible car. The odor seemed to go away. Denial can be an effective life coping skill, or so we like to think
Sometimes ignorance of the future is truly a gift. Ignorance can be sweet bliss. Yet, as always, denial provides only a deferral of interest charges, and eventually one will have to pay back. Yet payback can be wondrous. Once in a while the debt is forgiven. And so it was for me today.
For some five miles, driving across the sky, I thought that ominous odor merely a fading reminder of the inferiority of those who didn’t know better about mountain driving. They had asked for TVs rather than knowledge or common sense. And then it recurred. Sniff. Denial was starting to fray around the edges, especially up in this very thin atmosphere. And then the clincher. Joanne said, “I need to go to the bathroom.” Guys behind the wheel know the world comes to a halt at that statement.
Divine providence is an amazing thing. Those who have traveled the Parkway know bathrooms are not a dime a dozen. It may be fifty very circuitous miles or more between them. As Joanne was uttering those words every driving man dreads hearing, a ranger station/gift shop came into view. I knew it would have toilets. I didn’t know it would have Magi, or that I would even need one.
After pulling in, I put my hand down on the left front wheel – warm but not too hot. Good. It was another idiot after all. I went around the passenger side to get Joanne out and saw about five tendrils of blue and gray smoke wafting up into the rarified atmosphere of the Blue Ridge from the front right wheel. You already know exactly what that smoke smelled like. The machined wheel was so hot it had turned blue. For those of you that don’t know, when an ironsmith is working metal to make it really strong, he anneals it by getting it really hot in a stoked furnace and then dumping it into cold water. It turns blue. I knew if I put my hand on that wheel it was going to be medium-well done at a minimum when I pulled it back. I suddenly had that same kind of feeling one has when a doctor says, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this.”
Moving slowly, no longer wondering about the magic of rhododendron and mountain laurel in the Blue Ridge, I wandered into the shop wondering how many days it was going to take and how much it was going to cost to get down off the mountain and to Pennsylvania. Inside, I asked if anyone had any mechanical inclinations. The young woman inside immediately denied having any but said she would ask the guy in the back room. I thought only car dealers had back rooms. He came out and denied any knowledge of such things but suggested it might be a good idea to take a bucket of cold mountain water and dump it on that smoking wheel.
Mechanically gifted readers will instantly know that’s a fine plan for annealing hot horseshoes, but it’s clearly not the optimum plan for burnt brakes on a heavy van at 6,000 feet. A bucket of cold water on that white-hot metal would have destroyed everything in that region of the van and would have done severe damage of the highest order to my credit card at payback time.
Then it happened, in the emerald mountains at 6,000 feet. The Magi appeared, wearing a brown work shirt. No robes or camels. A fellow in a gray pick-up truck wandered up to the small group watching the last fading tendrils of blue-gray ascend towards Heaven. He gave the gift that keeps on giving – wisdom. Still uncertain if I was watching brake fluid burning from a line failure or the burning of the brake pads, he suggested that the brake caliper may well have failed and seized. He then offered a pearl of knowledge, unknown to my vast experience. “Drive the van backwards and hit the brakes fairly hard. Do this several times. It might make the caliper release, if this is indeed the problem.” I knew nothing about brake calipers seizing.
With the most inspiring tool in the van being a pair of toe-nail clippers and having visions of the nearest tow truck being 255 miles away, I gave it a try. Something told me this guy came from a reliable Source. What did I have to lose but my life? I am certain the other high-altitude souvenir buyers in the parking lot must have thought I was short on fluids myself or experiencing altitude sickness.
The Magi provided me with another essential piece of information about an unknown land. Eight miles along the Parkway was an exit and just outside that exit was a Wal-Mart super center with a garage and three miles further on was a Ford dealership. Here? How could there be a Wal-Mart here on the highest place in Eastern North America? There wasn’t. I asked what those eight miles of Parkway were like. “All downhill.” How could it be otherwise? I was already at the highest place on this part of the planet.
God protects the foolhardy. Joanne has already faced down death once and won. She was game. After my little reverse display in the parking lot for the tourists I crept forward, hazard lights on, not knowing if the brake had released, if there was any brake fluid anywhere in the system, or if I had any brakes other than the parking brake. For forty five minutes as I descended those “all-downhill” miles from the high place where Magi come to earth, my blood pressure ascended. No talking, no radio. Using the engine and the gears, we traversed those eight miles at breath-taking speeds approaching seventeen miles an hour. The only talking allowed was my indicating success at another mile descended.
At about mile six, I had the horrid realization that Blue Ridge Parkway exits tend to be tight little clover leafs with stop signs leading onto often-busy state roads. I was already far into the coast of a life-time so could only hope that the specified exit might be a little more forgiving than most. As it turns out, this exit was newly reconstructed and led into a huge very busy four lane state road. I had no idea if I had any brakes whatever. As it was the Magi must have called ahead. I was able to coast around the wide exit ramp and roll the stop sign, having been given a clear view of the highway and seeing a long gap in the traffic. I found myself on a four-lane road, going up a very slight incline with a Wal-Mart super center in front of me. This was better than gold, frankincense and myrrh any day of the week, or eternity for that matter.
The Magi must have called one of his buds. All the while in that time-altering descent, during forty-five minutes that seemed like forever, a very large white pick-up truck appeared on the Parkway and held way back to give me space for a survivable descent. Most people want to get to the next place. Magi are patient with those limping along in life. He even held back and followed me around that exit ramp and rolled the stop sign with me. At the Wal-Mart, seeing I was safely down to 5 mph limping to the garage, he went on to another High Place. I never knew a Wal-Mart could look better than 6,000-foot vistas of oceans of cloud in mountain valleys. Standing on still ground at the garage, the fellow there said, “We don’t do brakes.” He then said, “There’s a Ford dealership three miles ‘up’ the road. ‘Up’ sounded infinitely better than ‘down’.
Gravity was gentle and we made it the three miles to the Ford dealership along that very busy highway filled with every logging truck and eighteen wheeler in the region. The service garage had a large sign on the door, which stated, “No appointments necessary.” The Magi was right. The caliper was destroyed after its piston had failed, and the Magi’s trick had allowed it to release so I could descend a total of eleven miles without immolating the front end of the van. The wheel was stone cold when I got back down to earth. And He provided a place without an appointment.
No Christmas dinner has anything on the picnic lunch we ate in that Ford showroom while we waited three hours for the burnt brakes to be replaced. The price was right and the people were unusually friendly.
When asked what one single gift he would most treasure in the world, King Solomon asked for wisdom, not a plasma screen TV, not a palm pilot, not even an unlimited free line of credit at Circuit City or Best Buy. He simply wanted to know how to judge information and to act appropriately on those things he learned and was told. He wanted to live his life well. You might say he wanted to live Christmas all year long.
Today in early spring the Magi appeared again to give me knowledge and wisdom that would save me from certain death. I was suddenly put in the same league as Solomon, even if for but a short season, yet long enough to keep from dying in the mountains. Wisdom is certainly a gift that keeps on giving. As Solomon said, “seek this one with all your heart”. It might just save your life.
In my travels I’ve often been disquieted by seeing impossibly steep truck escape ramps constructed for that frightening possibility of brake failure in eighteen-wheelers traversing steep mountain passes. Some of these ramps look like they were designed by civil engineers who hate their jobs, insuring tractor–trailer rigs achieve maximum altitude just before plunging into a high mountain abyss. I’ve often wondered what the terror would be like for a truck driver in the mountains finding himself sucked into this steep uncertainty following a brake failure
Being of the attitude that getting there is just as important as being there, I often take slow back roads to places, avoiding Interstates filled with everyone else in a big hurry. So it today I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway rather than several oppressively frenetic interstates, taking Joanne to Pennsylvania for one of her semi-annual family pilgrimages. The Blue Ridge Parkway must be one of the most beautiful roads in the world, if you have good brakes and a reliable vehicle.
The region of the Parkway east of Asheville on which I found myself this morning is the highest public road in eastern North America. I was at nearly 6,000 feet, near Mount Mitchell, occasionally stopping to take picture of incredible vistas and to have small bits of conversation with other sojourners gawking at the same wondrous views. It was up this serpentine pathway to heaven that I first smelled it, that distinctive odor that comes from nothing in the world but burning brake pads.
Having always had an intellectual disdain for people foolish enough to ride their brakes in the mountains rather than using their gears and downshifting, letting the engine do the work of fighting gravity, I have always been compulsive about avoiding the use of brakes in the mountains, especially when any kind of equilibrium is some thousands of feet straight down, inches from my right tire. I happily figured the whiff of burning asbestos was from someone else flirting with death, not me. I knew better that to flirt unnecessarily with the grim reaper. I refocused on the wondrous emerald realm around me. Anyway, Joanne doesn’t like it when I focus on the dark side of life on the third planet.
Again, moments later, my nostrils caught the distinctive aroma. Both feet were well away from the brake pedals. No one else was on the road. Perhaps the odor was just hanging in the very still air from a now-invisible car. The odor seemed to go away. Denial can be an effective life coping skill, or so we like to think
Sometimes ignorance of the future is truly a gift. Ignorance can be sweet bliss. Yet, as always, denial provides only a deferral of interest charges, and eventually one will have to pay back. Yet payback can be wondrous. Once in a while the debt is forgiven. And so it was for me today.
For some five miles, driving across the sky, I thought that ominous odor merely a fading reminder of the inferiority of those who didn’t know better about mountain driving. They had asked for TVs rather than knowledge or common sense. And then it recurred. Sniff. Denial was starting to fray around the edges, especially up in this very thin atmosphere. And then the clincher. Joanne said, “I need to go to the bathroom.” Guys behind the wheel know the world comes to a halt at that statement.
Divine providence is an amazing thing. Those who have traveled the Parkway know bathrooms are not a dime a dozen. It may be fifty very circuitous miles or more between them. As Joanne was uttering those words every driving man dreads hearing, a ranger station/gift shop came into view. I knew it would have toilets. I didn’t know it would have Magi, or that I would even need one.
After pulling in, I put my hand down on the left front wheel – warm but not too hot. Good. It was another idiot after all. I went around the passenger side to get Joanne out and saw about five tendrils of blue and gray smoke wafting up into the rarified atmosphere of the Blue Ridge from the front right wheel. You already know exactly what that smoke smelled like. The machined wheel was so hot it had turned blue. For those of you that don’t know, when an ironsmith is working metal to make it really strong, he anneals it by getting it really hot in a stoked furnace and then dumping it into cold water. It turns blue. I knew if I put my hand on that wheel it was going to be medium-well done at a minimum when I pulled it back. I suddenly had that same kind of feeling one has when a doctor says, “I’m sorry to have to tell you this.”
Moving slowly, no longer wondering about the magic of rhododendron and mountain laurel in the Blue Ridge, I wandered into the shop wondering how many days it was going to take and how much it was going to cost to get down off the mountain and to Pennsylvania. Inside, I asked if anyone had any mechanical inclinations. The young woman inside immediately denied having any but said she would ask the guy in the back room. I thought only car dealers had back rooms. He came out and denied any knowledge of such things but suggested it might be a good idea to take a bucket of cold mountain water and dump it on that smoking wheel.
Mechanically gifted readers will instantly know that’s a fine plan for annealing hot horseshoes, but it’s clearly not the optimum plan for burnt brakes on a heavy van at 6,000 feet. A bucket of cold water on that white-hot metal would have destroyed everything in that region of the van and would have done severe damage of the highest order to my credit card at payback time.
Then it happened, in the emerald mountains at 6,000 feet. The Magi appeared, wearing a brown work shirt. No robes or camels. A fellow in a gray pick-up truck wandered up to the small group watching the last fading tendrils of blue-gray ascend towards Heaven. He gave the gift that keeps on giving – wisdom. Still uncertain if I was watching brake fluid burning from a line failure or the burning of the brake pads, he suggested that the brake caliper may well have failed and seized. He then offered a pearl of knowledge, unknown to my vast experience. “Drive the van backwards and hit the brakes fairly hard. Do this several times. It might make the caliper release, if this is indeed the problem.” I knew nothing about brake calipers seizing.
With the most inspiring tool in the van being a pair of toe-nail clippers and having visions of the nearest tow truck being 255 miles away, I gave it a try. Something told me this guy came from a reliable Source. What did I have to lose but my life? I am certain the other high-altitude souvenir buyers in the parking lot must have thought I was short on fluids myself or experiencing altitude sickness.
The Magi provided me with another essential piece of information about an unknown land. Eight miles along the Parkway was an exit and just outside that exit was a Wal-Mart super center with a garage and three miles further on was a Ford dealership. Here? How could there be a Wal-Mart here on the highest place in Eastern North America? There wasn’t. I asked what those eight miles of Parkway were like. “All downhill.” How could it be otherwise? I was already at the highest place on this part of the planet.
God protects the foolhardy. Joanne has already faced down death once and won. She was game. After my little reverse display in the parking lot for the tourists I crept forward, hazard lights on, not knowing if the brake had released, if there was any brake fluid anywhere in the system, or if I had any brakes other than the parking brake. For forty five minutes as I descended those “all-downhill” miles from the high place where Magi come to earth, my blood pressure ascended. No talking, no radio. Using the engine and the gears, we traversed those eight miles at breath-taking speeds approaching seventeen miles an hour. The only talking allowed was my indicating success at another mile descended.
At about mile six, I had the horrid realization that Blue Ridge Parkway exits tend to be tight little clover leafs with stop signs leading onto often-busy state roads. I was already far into the coast of a life-time so could only hope that the specified exit might be a little more forgiving than most. As it turns out, this exit was newly reconstructed and led into a huge very busy four lane state road. I had no idea if I had any brakes whatever. As it was the Magi must have called ahead. I was able to coast around the wide exit ramp and roll the stop sign, having been given a clear view of the highway and seeing a long gap in the traffic. I found myself on a four-lane road, going up a very slight incline with a Wal-Mart super center in front of me. This was better than gold, frankincense and myrrh any day of the week, or eternity for that matter.
The Magi must have called one of his buds. All the while in that time-altering descent, during forty-five minutes that seemed like forever, a very large white pick-up truck appeared on the Parkway and held way back to give me space for a survivable descent. Most people want to get to the next place. Magi are patient with those limping along in life. He even held back and followed me around that exit ramp and rolled the stop sign with me. At the Wal-Mart, seeing I was safely down to 5 mph limping to the garage, he went on to another High Place. I never knew a Wal-Mart could look better than 6,000-foot vistas of oceans of cloud in mountain valleys. Standing on still ground at the garage, the fellow there said, “We don’t do brakes.” He then said, “There’s a Ford dealership three miles ‘up’ the road. ‘Up’ sounded infinitely better than ‘down’.
Gravity was gentle and we made it the three miles to the Ford dealership along that very busy highway filled with every logging truck and eighteen wheeler in the region. The service garage had a large sign on the door, which stated, “No appointments necessary.” The Magi was right. The caliper was destroyed after its piston had failed, and the Magi’s trick had allowed it to release so I could descend a total of eleven miles without immolating the front end of the van. The wheel was stone cold when I got back down to earth. And He provided a place without an appointment.
No Christmas dinner has anything on the picnic lunch we ate in that Ford showroom while we waited three hours for the burnt brakes to be replaced. The price was right and the people were unusually friendly.
Let It All Come In 4-15-10
Anderson, South Carolina
A great challenge of exercising in public gyms is the ubiquitous presence of televisions screens in lockers rooms, assorted group exercise rooms, and on fitness floors. Recently my gym installed flat screen televisions on virtually all treadmills, climbers and cross-trainers. It’s not possible to exercise without direct view of at least a dozen screens. Fortunately, machines I routinely use were never retro-fitted with video screens so I don’t have one eighteen inches in front of my face.
It’s become common for many members to insulate themselves from each other with ear buds plugged into these screens. Many more are isolating themselves with video streaming picked up from smart phones. Others not yet habituated to constant video input settle for various forms of audio input from IPODs and MP3 players.
Today while suiting up I noticed a rapid succession of faces come across the large screen above my locker, many of them rather sinister and aggressive. Curious, I stood still, waiting to see what the ad was about. It proved to be an advertisement from a large cable subscription service with only one phrase in the ad, “Let it all come in, call us.”
Incredulous, it occurred to me that millions of people actually pay substantial amounts to get a flood of non-stop serenity-robbing video input into their lives. They actually do “let it all come in.” A number of families I know have screens in every room of their houses, including the bathrooms. One arm-chair athlete admitted out loud that he spends $130 a month for cable just so he can see Monday Night Football. Others are spending $250 a month or more for a pallet of hundreds of premium channels. A family here in town has forgone access to hot water for showers for three years because paying for premium cable is more important that paying the natural gas bill. An eighty-five year old mother has long forgotten the pleasures of a warm shower. A recent estimate suggests more than 100 million Americans are paying for cable subscription services, to “let it all come in,” often to every room.
The large screen on the wall in front of my stair climber has split imaging video feed to it. I’m not able to turn this screen off. There are no less that six sources of information displayed at any one time, except when paid commercials are running. From the steps of the climber I can see three news feeds, a finance ticker tape, closed captioning from the main video feed, and at times three additional video inserts on the right side of the screen. Sometimes a stopwatch counter indicates hours, minutes, and seconds remaining until some noteworthy interview or event is expected to occur.
While climbing today, I learned from the main video feed that my travel plans next week face disruption because of a volcanic eruption taking place in Iceland beneath the Eyjafjallajokull glacier. The airports I want to use have been closed because dangerous clouds of powdered rock are wafting eleven miles up into the sky. How bizarre to learn that volcanic explosions might dump on my life, while in the local gym getting exercise. It is becoming progressively harder to be focused on one’s immediate place and experience, to be present to those people around me. How can I be listening to or encouraging those around me if they are insulated by their own video inputs and I am wondering if volcanic grit is going to destroy the jet turbines keeping me at 40,000 feet. Geologists indicate that volcanic plume is spewing ash up to 55,000 feet and that a far greater eruption from another nearby volcano is likely.
Some of the greatest wisdom in the great religious traditions speaks of the need to be still, to be quiet, to find peace by eliminating outside input. Masters of meditation have learned how to find ‘filling’ silence that allows them to attain serenity and mindfulness unachievable with any number of mood altering drugs. The anxiety and restlessness of an over-stimulated people is inconceivable to those few remaining cultures yet disconnected from the world’s video feed. For certain, I did not go to the Y today to explore the effects of putting powdered rock into the intakes of fan jets. I went to find a bit of equanimity and tranquility that comes from exercise-induced endorphins and pleasant community that derives from being with others who want to do the same thing.
Do we really want to submit to stressful commutes to go perform jobs that stress us even more just to make more money so that we can pay the cable company “To let it all come in” and wipe out any chance of getting a good night’s sleep?
For years I’ve been viewed as eccentric, because I don’t have any kind of television or cable service in my house. Every time I go to the gym, I am reminded that being eccentric can be a very good thing. A whole lot of lemmings have died because they followed the leader.
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.
A great challenge of exercising in public gyms is the ubiquitous presence of televisions screens in lockers rooms, assorted group exercise rooms, and on fitness floors. Recently my gym installed flat screen televisions on virtually all treadmills, climbers and cross-trainers. It’s not possible to exercise without direct view of at least a dozen screens. Fortunately, machines I routinely use were never retro-fitted with video screens so I don’t have one eighteen inches in front of my face.
It’s become common for many members to insulate themselves from each other with ear buds plugged into these screens. Many more are isolating themselves with video streaming picked up from smart phones. Others not yet habituated to constant video input settle for various forms of audio input from IPODs and MP3 players.
Today while suiting up I noticed a rapid succession of faces come across the large screen above my locker, many of them rather sinister and aggressive. Curious, I stood still, waiting to see what the ad was about. It proved to be an advertisement from a large cable subscription service with only one phrase in the ad, “Let it all come in, call us.”
Incredulous, it occurred to me that millions of people actually pay substantial amounts to get a flood of non-stop serenity-robbing video input into their lives. They actually do “let it all come in.” A number of families I know have screens in every room of their houses, including the bathrooms. One arm-chair athlete admitted out loud that he spends $130 a month for cable just so he can see Monday Night Football. Others are spending $250 a month or more for a pallet of hundreds of premium channels. A family here in town has forgone access to hot water for showers for three years because paying for premium cable is more important that paying the natural gas bill. An eighty-five year old mother has long forgotten the pleasures of a warm shower. A recent estimate suggests more than 100 million Americans are paying for cable subscription services, to “let it all come in,” often to every room.
The large screen on the wall in front of my stair climber has split imaging video feed to it. I’m not able to turn this screen off. There are no less that six sources of information displayed at any one time, except when paid commercials are running. From the steps of the climber I can see three news feeds, a finance ticker tape, closed captioning from the main video feed, and at times three additional video inserts on the right side of the screen. Sometimes a stopwatch counter indicates hours, minutes, and seconds remaining until some noteworthy interview or event is expected to occur.
While climbing today, I learned from the main video feed that my travel plans next week face disruption because of a volcanic eruption taking place in Iceland beneath the Eyjafjallajokull glacier. The airports I want to use have been closed because dangerous clouds of powdered rock are wafting eleven miles up into the sky. How bizarre to learn that volcanic explosions might dump on my life, while in the local gym getting exercise. It is becoming progressively harder to be focused on one’s immediate place and experience, to be present to those people around me. How can I be listening to or encouraging those around me if they are insulated by their own video inputs and I am wondering if volcanic grit is going to destroy the jet turbines keeping me at 40,000 feet. Geologists indicate that volcanic plume is spewing ash up to 55,000 feet and that a far greater eruption from another nearby volcano is likely.
Some of the greatest wisdom in the great religious traditions speaks of the need to be still, to be quiet, to find peace by eliminating outside input. Masters of meditation have learned how to find ‘filling’ silence that allows them to attain serenity and mindfulness unachievable with any number of mood altering drugs. The anxiety and restlessness of an over-stimulated people is inconceivable to those few remaining cultures yet disconnected from the world’s video feed. For certain, I did not go to the Y today to explore the effects of putting powdered rock into the intakes of fan jets. I went to find a bit of equanimity and tranquility that comes from exercise-induced endorphins and pleasant community that derives from being with others who want to do the same thing.
Do we really want to submit to stressful commutes to go perform jobs that stress us even more just to make more money so that we can pay the cable company “To let it all come in” and wipe out any chance of getting a good night’s sleep?
For years I’ve been viewed as eccentric, because I don’t have any kind of television or cable service in my house. Every time I go to the gym, I am reminded that being eccentric can be a very good thing. A whole lot of lemmings have died because they followed the leader.
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things. Those things, which ye have both learned, and received, and heard, and seen in me, do: and the God of peace shall be with you.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Just Where Should We Go? 4-6-10
Birmingham, Alabama
It is rather interesting to return to a city I lived in for many years, after a lapse of twenty years, not even visiting here in a decade. In the intervening epoch the city has changed radically. To the south, regions that were once pristine unbroken rural vistas have become victims of urban sprawl. Infected with the fungus of commercial blight with its attendant chaos of billboards, LED message boards, and unremitting traffic, memories of verdant countryside fade a bit further into obscurity. I see no evidence of working farms or ranches. Myriad little housing developments are excreted onto former pastureland.
While helping friends look for another house, I had reason to visit a lot of these little urban metastases. They were devoid of people and had a powerful sense of being shop-worn, despite being built in the time since I moved from here twenty years ago. Houses were open to the weather and rotting. Even high end developments feel empty and barren. I wonder what it is people are looking for in these places. It certainly doesn’t seem to be community. They all seem to be looking for something somewhere else. It’s all for sale. Garage doors were closed and no one was out walking in the afternoon or evening on cerulean spring days.
So very strange is the city itself. From the time I first moved to Birmingham in 1979, I was struck by how afraid people were of the downtown region, evidenced by a sense of desertion even on weekdays at lunch time. I was downtown on Sunday night and was appalled at the utter absence of people. It was as if the city had been evacuated, miles of it. Returning there on Monday at mid day on a brilliant spring day, the imagery was even more startling. There simply were no people out and about. No hot dog vendors, no guys dispensing therapy with their coffees, no sidewalk kiosks. Apparently, fear has only increased during the past decade. Imagery of vibrant European cities with their millions of pedestrians could not be further from this present reality.
While attending a rather splendid service in the Advent Cathedral it was unsettling that uniformed armed policemen were hovering around the church entrance and the worship hall for the whole of our time there. I have no recollection of previously being protected in a church by police, not even in Papa Doc’s Haiti or post-Sukarno Indonesia. The police officers were well known to those present and obviously this was regular duty for them. Happily, these men were well trained and most polite to all of us. But somehow having men wearing 9 mm Glocks and tazers does something to the equanimity of one’s worship experience.
On Saturday on one of those first glorious days of spring when winter’s frustration are relieved by flowering plants and trees in bountiful colorful fashion, we went to a vast state park fifteen minutes south of the city. Amazingly, it was essentially deserted. What are all of the million plus people living here doing on a glorious Saturday? A friend of mine here did not want to see me. She described sleeping through the entirety of a magnificent Saturday. Lots of people are on anti-depressants. The chicken and egg scenario comes to mind. Do urban dwellers stay inside because they are depressed or do they get depressed because they stay inside?
Perhaps it stems from living in a very small semi-rural context for twenty years, but there is a powerful absence of spatial focus to this place. All these small housing developments and commercial strip malls along country roads seem so visually and physically disconnected and unfocused. I am reminded of David Kunstler’s thought provoking Geography of Nowhere, a poignant look at American city life and the complete lack of scale and context in which to live meaningful connected lives with each other. Here in the city one can be completely anonymous without effort. I think of the context I am presently living in, how I can hardly go anywhere at all and not encounter countless people I know; many of them very dear, how even going for a morning bike ride at sunrise will often yield a fine companion. Where I exercise, worship, read, volunteer, learn, play, work, get entertained; all are walking distance from where I sleep. Perhaps it really is true – there is no place like home. Perhaps more of us need to think about what home really is. Suddenly, I wonder why I have embarked on this journey that is going to take me over eight time zones, perhaps a couple of credit limits, and a few months.
I am reminded of the inspiration motivational story called “Acres of Diamonds”, depicting an African diamond miner who spends decades rutting in the mud and rock of South Africa, hunting for those brilliant orbs that promise liberation from his misery. Exhausted, penniless, and without hope, he go backs to his little hut on the river, only to see a glint in the morning light. There he finds underfoot that which he had ranged far and wide to find.
Perhaps it is time to go home.
It is rather interesting to return to a city I lived in for many years, after a lapse of twenty years, not even visiting here in a decade. In the intervening epoch the city has changed radically. To the south, regions that were once pristine unbroken rural vistas have become victims of urban sprawl. Infected with the fungus of commercial blight with its attendant chaos of billboards, LED message boards, and unremitting traffic, memories of verdant countryside fade a bit further into obscurity. I see no evidence of working farms or ranches. Myriad little housing developments are excreted onto former pastureland.
While helping friends look for another house, I had reason to visit a lot of these little urban metastases. They were devoid of people and had a powerful sense of being shop-worn, despite being built in the time since I moved from here twenty years ago. Houses were open to the weather and rotting. Even high end developments feel empty and barren. I wonder what it is people are looking for in these places. It certainly doesn’t seem to be community. They all seem to be looking for something somewhere else. It’s all for sale. Garage doors were closed and no one was out walking in the afternoon or evening on cerulean spring days.
So very strange is the city itself. From the time I first moved to Birmingham in 1979, I was struck by how afraid people were of the downtown region, evidenced by a sense of desertion even on weekdays at lunch time. I was downtown on Sunday night and was appalled at the utter absence of people. It was as if the city had been evacuated, miles of it. Returning there on Monday at mid day on a brilliant spring day, the imagery was even more startling. There simply were no people out and about. No hot dog vendors, no guys dispensing therapy with their coffees, no sidewalk kiosks. Apparently, fear has only increased during the past decade. Imagery of vibrant European cities with their millions of pedestrians could not be further from this present reality.
While attending a rather splendid service in the Advent Cathedral it was unsettling that uniformed armed policemen were hovering around the church entrance and the worship hall for the whole of our time there. I have no recollection of previously being protected in a church by police, not even in Papa Doc’s Haiti or post-Sukarno Indonesia. The police officers were well known to those present and obviously this was regular duty for them. Happily, these men were well trained and most polite to all of us. But somehow having men wearing 9 mm Glocks and tazers does something to the equanimity of one’s worship experience.
On Saturday on one of those first glorious days of spring when winter’s frustration are relieved by flowering plants and trees in bountiful colorful fashion, we went to a vast state park fifteen minutes south of the city. Amazingly, it was essentially deserted. What are all of the million plus people living here doing on a glorious Saturday? A friend of mine here did not want to see me. She described sleeping through the entirety of a magnificent Saturday. Lots of people are on anti-depressants. The chicken and egg scenario comes to mind. Do urban dwellers stay inside because they are depressed or do they get depressed because they stay inside?
Perhaps it stems from living in a very small semi-rural context for twenty years, but there is a powerful absence of spatial focus to this place. All these small housing developments and commercial strip malls along country roads seem so visually and physically disconnected and unfocused. I am reminded of David Kunstler’s thought provoking Geography of Nowhere, a poignant look at American city life and the complete lack of scale and context in which to live meaningful connected lives with each other. Here in the city one can be completely anonymous without effort. I think of the context I am presently living in, how I can hardly go anywhere at all and not encounter countless people I know; many of them very dear, how even going for a morning bike ride at sunrise will often yield a fine companion. Where I exercise, worship, read, volunteer, learn, play, work, get entertained; all are walking distance from where I sleep. Perhaps it really is true – there is no place like home. Perhaps more of us need to think about what home really is. Suddenly, I wonder why I have embarked on this journey that is going to take me over eight time zones, perhaps a couple of credit limits, and a few months.
I am reminded of the inspiration motivational story called “Acres of Diamonds”, depicting an African diamond miner who spends decades rutting in the mud and rock of South Africa, hunting for those brilliant orbs that promise liberation from his misery. Exhausted, penniless, and without hope, he go backs to his little hut on the river, only to see a glint in the morning light. There he finds underfoot that which he had ranged far and wide to find.
Perhaps it is time to go home.
The Scrapping of America 4-4-10
Riverchase, Alabama
An important painting from the mid-nineteenth century is “The Gleaners” by Jean-Francois Millet, unveiled at the Salon in Paris in 1857. It depicts three peasant women gleaning grains of wheat from a harvested field. The women are shown picking up nearly invisible grains while sunlit mountains of wheat are in the background. The painting almost immediately came under derision by the middle and upper classes in France. “The bit dog hollers.” The upper classes did not want to be reminded of what happened in the French Revolution a decade earlier. That revolution was fueled in part by gross inequities of wealth distribution.
As one observer put it, “Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker. To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism and the dangerous voices of Karl Marx and Émile Zola.”
The Old Testament Book of Ruth presents a profoundly emotive image of compassion and endearment with its image of gleaning. Boaz, a wealthy landholder instructed his field workers to deliberately leave an extra amount of grain for the homeless and stateless Ruth to glean. He also gave instruction that would insure her safety from restive young men working the fields. The story of Ruth and Boaz is the most endearing romance in all of Christian scripture.
Millet’s painting was considered a strong statement on the harsh realities of rural poverty in France rather than a new interpretation of the endearing image of the Moabite woman being taken under wing by Boaz. “The Gleaners” received little attention in Millet’s lifetime, having been sold by him for a pittance to an Englishmen who would not budge from his counter offer. Fourteen years after his death, the painting sold for nearly a king’s ransom, 300,000 francs. It eventually was given to the Louvre by Champagne heiress Jeanne-Alexandrine Pommery. I last saw it in the splendid Musee D’Orsay in Paris, where it presently hangs.
About three miles south of here in a long-neglected part of town is a scrap yard that looks akin to something out of Dante’s inferno. A lifeless barren landscape contains mountains of the rusting detritus of a consumer culture gone amok. Occasionally, in the distant past I went there and sold small accretions of metals that found their way into my life, never waiting to pull up to the scales and get paid for my small lode. A journey to the yard now can consume hours. On a typical day three hundred and fifty trucks show up at the yard to sell an avalanche of anything metallic. The small side street giving access to the yard becomes grid-locked daily.
Suddenly, a vivid image emerged of three hundred and fifty gleaners fanning out across our small county every day to ‘harvest’ anything that can be converted to cash. Complaints from contractor friends about air conditioners being stolen out of their new construction, of copper wiring being stripped out of walls, of bronze vases being torn off of grave markers brought stark clarity to our present cultural reality. Catalytic converters are being ripped out of cars for the platinum that sells for nearly $1,700 an ounce. Whole cars are now being sold by the pound for the scrap iron contained in them. A car sold new for $25,000 is fetching about $300 at this yard, about ten cents a pound.
We are in such desperate condition economic condition because of decades of unbounded consumption, much of it financed by unsustainable personal and public debt. Most observers agree that our national and personal financial crises were precipitated by spending and leveraging ourselves into unsustainable circumstances.
As a kid I went around town gleaning soft drink bottles from the roadside where they were tossed from passing cars. This provided a reliable source of funding for the glue, balsa wood, and paint I purchased to build models. It is a very different world we live in where hundreds of grown men are out gleaning along the roadside in order to buy snack food, gasoline, cable TV service, cell phone links, Internet access, cigarettes at $5 a pack, beer, and wine. Others are scrapping in order to buy crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroine, Oxycotin, and tranquilizers to blunt the harsh realities of modern life.
Ruth was gleaning to feed herself. Millet’s peasants were gleaning to feed themselves and their families. Is the metallic gleaning going on all around me nothing more than consumers scrapping our nation’s future to pay for the addictions of the moment? Where but in America would it make any sense to destroy a new $6000 air compressor to glean its copper that will bring a mere $30 at the scrap yard? To keep the cable TV connected while one’s mother takes cold showers because the heat was shut off for non-payment?
Anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge in her profoundly moving account, Ancient Futures, describes the disintegration that occurs when a sustainable cashless culture is exposed to dynamics found in Western industrial consumer monoculture. She describes how in the span of twenty years the Ladakh people in the Himalayan Mountains of Northern Kashmir transitioned from being among the emotionally healthiest and happiest people on earth, to being severely stressed, filled with profound self-doubt; contemptuous of the traditional ways of living which provided an abiding sense of place, belonging and community to being. One now finds loneliness, depression, pollution, violence, and conflict in a place where such was virtually unknown for millennia.
As I watch hundreds of trucks filled with cars, washing machines, closet shelving, bicycles, anything metallic, being weighed, I can’t but wonder if we are not selling our very souls to satisfy some kind of craving that will only leave us wanting. Are we little more than addicts caught up in cravings that are destroying the foundations of our culture? Awash in cash, our culture teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.
An important painting from the mid-nineteenth century is “The Gleaners” by Jean-Francois Millet, unveiled at the Salon in Paris in 1857. It depicts three peasant women gleaning grains of wheat from a harvested field. The women are shown picking up nearly invisible grains while sunlit mountains of wheat are in the background. The painting almost immediately came under derision by the middle and upper classes in France. “The bit dog hollers.” The upper classes did not want to be reminded of what happened in the French Revolution a decade earlier. That revolution was fueled in part by gross inequities of wealth distribution.
As one observer put it, “Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker. To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism and the dangerous voices of Karl Marx and Émile Zola.”
The Old Testament Book of Ruth presents a profoundly emotive image of compassion and endearment with its image of gleaning. Boaz, a wealthy landholder instructed his field workers to deliberately leave an extra amount of grain for the homeless and stateless Ruth to glean. He also gave instruction that would insure her safety from restive young men working the fields. The story of Ruth and Boaz is the most endearing romance in all of Christian scripture.
Millet’s painting was considered a strong statement on the harsh realities of rural poverty in France rather than a new interpretation of the endearing image of the Moabite woman being taken under wing by Boaz. “The Gleaners” received little attention in Millet’s lifetime, having been sold by him for a pittance to an Englishmen who would not budge from his counter offer. Fourteen years after his death, the painting sold for nearly a king’s ransom, 300,000 francs. It eventually was given to the Louvre by Champagne heiress Jeanne-Alexandrine Pommery. I last saw it in the splendid Musee D’Orsay in Paris, where it presently hangs.
About three miles south of here in a long-neglected part of town is a scrap yard that looks akin to something out of Dante’s inferno. A lifeless barren landscape contains mountains of the rusting detritus of a consumer culture gone amok. Occasionally, in the distant past I went there and sold small accretions of metals that found their way into my life, never waiting to pull up to the scales and get paid for my small lode. A journey to the yard now can consume hours. On a typical day three hundred and fifty trucks show up at the yard to sell an avalanche of anything metallic. The small side street giving access to the yard becomes grid-locked daily.
Suddenly, a vivid image emerged of three hundred and fifty gleaners fanning out across our small county every day to ‘harvest’ anything that can be converted to cash. Complaints from contractor friends about air conditioners being stolen out of their new construction, of copper wiring being stripped out of walls, of bronze vases being torn off of grave markers brought stark clarity to our present cultural reality. Catalytic converters are being ripped out of cars for the platinum that sells for nearly $1,700 an ounce. Whole cars are now being sold by the pound for the scrap iron contained in them. A car sold new for $25,000 is fetching about $300 at this yard, about ten cents a pound.
We are in such desperate condition economic condition because of decades of unbounded consumption, much of it financed by unsustainable personal and public debt. Most observers agree that our national and personal financial crises were precipitated by spending and leveraging ourselves into unsustainable circumstances.
As a kid I went around town gleaning soft drink bottles from the roadside where they were tossed from passing cars. This provided a reliable source of funding for the glue, balsa wood, and paint I purchased to build models. It is a very different world we live in where hundreds of grown men are out gleaning along the roadside in order to buy snack food, gasoline, cable TV service, cell phone links, Internet access, cigarettes at $5 a pack, beer, and wine. Others are scrapping in order to buy crack cocaine, methamphetamine, heroine, Oxycotin, and tranquilizers to blunt the harsh realities of modern life.
Ruth was gleaning to feed herself. Millet’s peasants were gleaning to feed themselves and their families. Is the metallic gleaning going on all around me nothing more than consumers scrapping our nation’s future to pay for the addictions of the moment? Where but in America would it make any sense to destroy a new $6000 air compressor to glean its copper that will bring a mere $30 at the scrap yard? To keep the cable TV connected while one’s mother takes cold showers because the heat was shut off for non-payment?
Anthropologist Helena Norberg-Hodge in her profoundly moving account, Ancient Futures, describes the disintegration that occurs when a sustainable cashless culture is exposed to dynamics found in Western industrial consumer monoculture. She describes how in the span of twenty years the Ladakh people in the Himalayan Mountains of Northern Kashmir transitioned from being among the emotionally healthiest and happiest people on earth, to being severely stressed, filled with profound self-doubt; contemptuous of the traditional ways of living which provided an abiding sense of place, belonging and community to being. One now finds loneliness, depression, pollution, violence, and conflict in a place where such was virtually unknown for millennia.
As I watch hundreds of trucks filled with cars, washing machines, closet shelving, bicycles, anything metallic, being weighed, I can’t but wonder if we are not selling our very souls to satisfy some kind of craving that will only leave us wanting. Are we little more than addicts caught up in cravings that are destroying the foundations of our culture? Awash in cash, our culture teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.
Father, forgive them. They know not what they do.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Beauty – Victorious Over Death 4-3-10
Birmingham, Alabama
On journeys to Europe I’ve always been intrigued by magnificent gilded boxes found on high altars in great Gothic cathedrals. Studded with precious stones and images of Jesus, these reliquaries are reputed to contain fragments of the True Cross, bones of our Savior, or other relics of great ecclesiastical value. I have often wondered how large the True Cross must be if all the wood fragments attributed to it were authenticated. Often I have thought about the idea of a sinless being actually being put to death willingly on a couple of Roman beams, on my account.
In the 1950s, Hollywood produced spectacular films depicting sagas of Biblical times. The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis, King of Kings, and The Robe were produced in an era when Americans had great thirst for epic visions of biblical events. Perhaps the most expansive of these was William Wyler’s 1959 rendition of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The chariot race scene is one of the most dramatic pieces of cinematography of all time, contributing to the film’s record eleven academy awards.
In some respects another scene is more compelling. As torrential rains wash down upon Jesus on a splintery Roman cross, his blood is depicted running in crimson rivulets across the earth. Another concurrent scene change depicts Judah Ben Hur’s sister and mother being healed from the disfigurement of leprosy. The portrayal of Jesus’ death bringing immediate healing and beauty to Miriam and Tirzah is evocative in the extreme. Every time I’ve seen this film, this proves a riveting turning point for me.
The most glorious place on earth must be found in a botanical garden beneath a canopy of Yoshina cherry trees in full blossom. A gentle breeze creating a blizzard of pale petals beneath spring’s cerulean sky gives cause for near epiphany. Next best must be the wonder of perfectly manicured gardens containing a universe of every spectral marvel known to botany.
On Good Friday I was strolling in a magnificent Japanese garden, well appointed with a traditional torii gate, formal tea house, sculpted benches, raked meditation garden, several bridges, and reflection ponds filled with koi. In my wanderings an astounding small cherry tree on the far side of a reflection pool came to my attention.
Curious, climbing across rocks carefully to avoid falling in the water, getting close to the tree, my eyes told me I was seeing something impossible. This cherry tree was in radiant bloom, laden down with a canopy of brilliant crimson blooms. Closer inspection revealed its trunk to be completely hollow. Looking down through it gave clear view of the ground. Looking sideways through it gave clear view of the pond. Most of the tree was gone top to bottom. Visual observation revealed no cambium, heartwood, sapwood, or any other possible way for dry splinters of bark-free wood to be providing nutrients or vascular support to that canopy of glorious blooms.
I suddenly thought of Old Testament accounts of the miracle of Aaron’s rod that gave sprout. Here I was looking at the most glorious fragrant cloud of crimson petals around my head, newly bloomed from the driest of splinters. It made no sense to me. To convince myself I was seeing clearly, I carefully photographed the canopy and disintegrated trunk with two cameras. Later evaluation of the images indicated this tree should not be happening.
Is it possible that love and beauty are so powerful that they can erupt out of dry dead splinters? Could God’s love really erupt from a Roman Cross? Could life come forth from death? Was this single oddity of a crimson tree a metaphor for me? Was this scarlet beauty a reminder of the blood running in rivulets that could deliver women from the scourge of leprosy? Does blood running in rivulets from Roman splinters have power to clothe me in a redemption that makes me white as snow? Did a being without fault take upon Himself all death so we could be found without blemish, without fault, white as snow, as fragrant and pure as the cherry blossoms on dozens of trees all around me? To never be victimized by death?
The cherry tree defied death to tell me of another ancient tree, one perhaps enshrined in reliquaries, where death was embraced so that I don’t have to. Perhaps this tree cherry is proclaiming the wonder of the Easter message.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’
On journeys to Europe I’ve always been intrigued by magnificent gilded boxes found on high altars in great Gothic cathedrals. Studded with precious stones and images of Jesus, these reliquaries are reputed to contain fragments of the True Cross, bones of our Savior, or other relics of great ecclesiastical value. I have often wondered how large the True Cross must be if all the wood fragments attributed to it were authenticated. Often I have thought about the idea of a sinless being actually being put to death willingly on a couple of Roman beams, on my account.
In the 1950s, Hollywood produced spectacular films depicting sagas of Biblical times. The Ten Commandments, Quo Vadis, King of Kings, and The Robe were produced in an era when Americans had great thirst for epic visions of biblical events. Perhaps the most expansive of these was William Wyler’s 1959 rendition of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The chariot race scene is one of the most dramatic pieces of cinematography of all time, contributing to the film’s record eleven academy awards.
In some respects another scene is more compelling. As torrential rains wash down upon Jesus on a splintery Roman cross, his blood is depicted running in crimson rivulets across the earth. Another concurrent scene change depicts Judah Ben Hur’s sister and mother being healed from the disfigurement of leprosy. The portrayal of Jesus’ death bringing immediate healing and beauty to Miriam and Tirzah is evocative in the extreme. Every time I’ve seen this film, this proves a riveting turning point for me.
The most glorious place on earth must be found in a botanical garden beneath a canopy of Yoshina cherry trees in full blossom. A gentle breeze creating a blizzard of pale petals beneath spring’s cerulean sky gives cause for near epiphany. Next best must be the wonder of perfectly manicured gardens containing a universe of every spectral marvel known to botany.
On Good Friday I was strolling in a magnificent Japanese garden, well appointed with a traditional torii gate, formal tea house, sculpted benches, raked meditation garden, several bridges, and reflection ponds filled with koi. In my wanderings an astounding small cherry tree on the far side of a reflection pool came to my attention.
Curious, climbing across rocks carefully to avoid falling in the water, getting close to the tree, my eyes told me I was seeing something impossible. This cherry tree was in radiant bloom, laden down with a canopy of brilliant crimson blooms. Closer inspection revealed its trunk to be completely hollow. Looking down through it gave clear view of the ground. Looking sideways through it gave clear view of the pond. Most of the tree was gone top to bottom. Visual observation revealed no cambium, heartwood, sapwood, or any other possible way for dry splinters of bark-free wood to be providing nutrients or vascular support to that canopy of glorious blooms.
I suddenly thought of Old Testament accounts of the miracle of Aaron’s rod that gave sprout. Here I was looking at the most glorious fragrant cloud of crimson petals around my head, newly bloomed from the driest of splinters. It made no sense to me. To convince myself I was seeing clearly, I carefully photographed the canopy and disintegrated trunk with two cameras. Later evaluation of the images indicated this tree should not be happening.
Is it possible that love and beauty are so powerful that they can erupt out of dry dead splinters? Could God’s love really erupt from a Roman Cross? Could life come forth from death? Was this single oddity of a crimson tree a metaphor for me? Was this scarlet beauty a reminder of the blood running in rivulets that could deliver women from the scourge of leprosy? Does blood running in rivulets from Roman splinters have power to clothe me in a redemption that makes me white as snow? Did a being without fault take upon Himself all death so we could be found without blemish, without fault, white as snow, as fragrant and pure as the cherry blossoms on dozens of trees all around me? To never be victimized by death?
The cherry tree defied death to tell me of another ancient tree, one perhaps enshrined in reliquaries, where death was embraced so that I don’t have to. Perhaps this tree cherry is proclaiming the wonder of the Easter message.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples: 'He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’
Input 4-1-10
Anderson, South Carolina
The films “Short Circuit” and “Short Circuit2” describe the playful antics of a highly intelligent robot that is addicted to input. Viewers are filled with laughter as they watch the urbane mechanical capers of this ferrous critter seeking input of all kinds. Alas, we space-age viewers are getting our lives filled with input that does not create happy gales of laughter; rather we are experiencing an angst of a type we have not seen before in human history. Throughout history people really did experience ignorance as bliss. Imagine if hapless villages in northern Europe had been given days and weeks of warning that their small peaceable worlds were about to be destroyed by marauding Goths or Vikings. Imagine if we knew, as Jesus did, the nature and timing of our deaths. The growing horror would be beyond comprehension. The element of surprise has the ability of deferring anxiety and dread, especially in the weak and powerless.
I recall being in the position years ago of having to tell a mother of the death of a child. I followed this happy mother in my car on the Interstate for about sixty miles, knowing that at the other end of our journey I was going to have to provide her a kind of input that would shatter her equanimity. It did. It was hideous to drive along behind her looking at the back of her head knowing that I was the one appointed to shatter her peace. Knowledge can be a horrible thing.
It is in the nature of my life to be on the Internet regularly as I now maintain my correspondence almost exclusively in this manner and manage my investments on-line. A dark side of the Internet is the ability to get more input than even our mechanized friend could have wanted. For the first time in human history we face a geo-political crisis with the ability to watch every development with a level of detail that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. The real time viewing of the destruction of the World Trade Centers made the horrors of the progressive structural collapse of those granite spires more than holographic. I have not been the same since. I was supposed to have been in those towers that fateful week. We were nearly real-time witnesses to the incineration of the Columbia as it fell from the heavens over Texas.
As is my usual practice, I logged on first thing today to check e-mail, hoping to find those touches from dear friends that thicken the veneer of civility just a bit in an ever more hostile world. Amidst birthday greetings I found many group forwards of crass jokes and a couple of spam from bankrupt airlines offering virtually free travel, desperate for any cash flow whatever. The airline industry is under siege of terrorism and much of it has filed for bankruptcy protection.
While connected to the planet I checked on financial markets in thirty countries, only to find that some world markets continue to experience progressive economic collapse, financial metaphors of what happened to the World Trade Center on that fateful Tuesday. I didn’t have the courage to check my own positions. On a daily basis I encounter people who are falling victim to the progressive failure of their life savings and retirements. A neighbor works the cash register at Wal-Mart and tells me she can see business slowing down. The owner of the local BP service station tells me he has seen a big drop off in his commercial accounts. More and more, bus boys and waiters in fast food establishments are silver-haired senior citizens. Japan has seen the complete loss of all the wealth generated in the past generation. Warren Buffet, the greatest investor of all time, once stated publicly that he believes derivatives trading will have the effect of being a weapon of economic mass destruction. It destroyed Orange County, the venerable Barings Bank, and nearly took out the US banking system and currency years ago. We had another bigger near miss in the melt-down of early 2009. One almost feels like he is dodging asteroids.
We live in an era when we have ability to see the six-pound hammer coming down in slow motion on our own personal financial lives and now we have the ability to see holographic images of the latest hi-tech hammers of the military. One is but three clicks away from viewing the wanton destruction of many of the world’s great cities and cultural treasures. The great Buddhas of Afghanistan are now but jpg files in my hard drive. This morning I saw a video clip of an actual blast perpetrated by a suicide bomber in Southern Russia which took out dozens of lives. How strange to be sitting in my basement sending out images of the most beautiful places to find myself receiving live images of annihilation.
For us mere mortals, input of this kind incinerates peace of mind and causes sleep to flee from us. We were never created to handle this kind of thing. We were created to live simple peaceable lives with those we love and care about, to simply enjoy a good meal and conversation within our communities. Less and less this is proving to be the daily reality for uncounted billions.
Quantum physicists have long since determined that time is not really as we think it to be: a straight linear flow. It can be circular, a point, a line, bi-directional, and all at the same time. We simply don’t have the sensory capacity to comprehend this non-Newtonian view of the universe. Fortunately, the One who created the universe does understand and comprehends perfectly the nature of not only the universe but also time/space and human behavior. Being outside the bounds of linear time He knew before we lived it out, that the history of humanity would be tortured and troubled. It is for this reason, that the Creator created the ultimate Input into His-story. It is the Input of the Christmas and Easter message that allows me to sleep at night while others celebrate dropping bombs and yet others wipe out economies with derivatives trading. It is that message that allows a mother to keep getting out of bed after the death of a child. It is that message that allows a dear friend with catastrophic disease to experience God’s grace as “being able to do the next thing.” It is that message that allows a mother to make some sort of sense of the world and to keep a faint flicker of hope alive when she finds out her boys are mentally handicapped and face radical brain surgery just to stay alive.
On that fateful Friday centuries ago the most profound Input of all time was nailed to a Roman cross and erased from the hard drive of humanity, or so the Romans and Jewish leaders thought. On Sunday morning a couple of women arose to find the Creator of it all had another plan – he had an un-erase program that gives little girls in new dresses a reason to celebrate the glory of Easter. The Input had been restored to our troubled world with a promise.
“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
The films “Short Circuit” and “Short Circuit2” describe the playful antics of a highly intelligent robot that is addicted to input. Viewers are filled with laughter as they watch the urbane mechanical capers of this ferrous critter seeking input of all kinds. Alas, we space-age viewers are getting our lives filled with input that does not create happy gales of laughter; rather we are experiencing an angst of a type we have not seen before in human history. Throughout history people really did experience ignorance as bliss. Imagine if hapless villages in northern Europe had been given days and weeks of warning that their small peaceable worlds were about to be destroyed by marauding Goths or Vikings. Imagine if we knew, as Jesus did, the nature and timing of our deaths. The growing horror would be beyond comprehension. The element of surprise has the ability of deferring anxiety and dread, especially in the weak and powerless.
I recall being in the position years ago of having to tell a mother of the death of a child. I followed this happy mother in my car on the Interstate for about sixty miles, knowing that at the other end of our journey I was going to have to provide her a kind of input that would shatter her equanimity. It did. It was hideous to drive along behind her looking at the back of her head knowing that I was the one appointed to shatter her peace. Knowledge can be a horrible thing.
It is in the nature of my life to be on the Internet regularly as I now maintain my correspondence almost exclusively in this manner and manage my investments on-line. A dark side of the Internet is the ability to get more input than even our mechanized friend could have wanted. For the first time in human history we face a geo-political crisis with the ability to watch every development with a level of detail that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. The real time viewing of the destruction of the World Trade Centers made the horrors of the progressive structural collapse of those granite spires more than holographic. I have not been the same since. I was supposed to have been in those towers that fateful week. We were nearly real-time witnesses to the incineration of the Columbia as it fell from the heavens over Texas.
As is my usual practice, I logged on first thing today to check e-mail, hoping to find those touches from dear friends that thicken the veneer of civility just a bit in an ever more hostile world. Amidst birthday greetings I found many group forwards of crass jokes and a couple of spam from bankrupt airlines offering virtually free travel, desperate for any cash flow whatever. The airline industry is under siege of terrorism and much of it has filed for bankruptcy protection.
While connected to the planet I checked on financial markets in thirty countries, only to find that some world markets continue to experience progressive economic collapse, financial metaphors of what happened to the World Trade Center on that fateful Tuesday. I didn’t have the courage to check my own positions. On a daily basis I encounter people who are falling victim to the progressive failure of their life savings and retirements. A neighbor works the cash register at Wal-Mart and tells me she can see business slowing down. The owner of the local BP service station tells me he has seen a big drop off in his commercial accounts. More and more, bus boys and waiters in fast food establishments are silver-haired senior citizens. Japan has seen the complete loss of all the wealth generated in the past generation. Warren Buffet, the greatest investor of all time, once stated publicly that he believes derivatives trading will have the effect of being a weapon of economic mass destruction. It destroyed Orange County, the venerable Barings Bank, and nearly took out the US banking system and currency years ago. We had another bigger near miss in the melt-down of early 2009. One almost feels like he is dodging asteroids.
We live in an era when we have ability to see the six-pound hammer coming down in slow motion on our own personal financial lives and now we have the ability to see holographic images of the latest hi-tech hammers of the military. One is but three clicks away from viewing the wanton destruction of many of the world’s great cities and cultural treasures. The great Buddhas of Afghanistan are now but jpg files in my hard drive. This morning I saw a video clip of an actual blast perpetrated by a suicide bomber in Southern Russia which took out dozens of lives. How strange to be sitting in my basement sending out images of the most beautiful places to find myself receiving live images of annihilation.
For us mere mortals, input of this kind incinerates peace of mind and causes sleep to flee from us. We were never created to handle this kind of thing. We were created to live simple peaceable lives with those we love and care about, to simply enjoy a good meal and conversation within our communities. Less and less this is proving to be the daily reality for uncounted billions.
Quantum physicists have long since determined that time is not really as we think it to be: a straight linear flow. It can be circular, a point, a line, bi-directional, and all at the same time. We simply don’t have the sensory capacity to comprehend this non-Newtonian view of the universe. Fortunately, the One who created the universe does understand and comprehends perfectly the nature of not only the universe but also time/space and human behavior. Being outside the bounds of linear time He knew before we lived it out, that the history of humanity would be tortured and troubled. It is for this reason, that the Creator created the ultimate Input into His-story. It is the Input of the Christmas and Easter message that allows me to sleep at night while others celebrate dropping bombs and yet others wipe out economies with derivatives trading. It is that message that allows a mother to keep getting out of bed after the death of a child. It is that message that allows a dear friend with catastrophic disease to experience God’s grace as “being able to do the next thing.” It is that message that allows a mother to make some sort of sense of the world and to keep a faint flicker of hope alive when she finds out her boys are mentally handicapped and face radical brain surgery just to stay alive.
On that fateful Friday centuries ago the most profound Input of all time was nailed to a Roman cross and erased from the hard drive of humanity, or so the Romans and Jewish leaders thought. On Sunday morning a couple of women arose to find the Creator of it all had another plan – he had an un-erase program that gives little girls in new dresses a reason to celebrate the glory of Easter. The Input had been restored to our troubled world with a promise.
“They will hunger no longer, nor thirst anymore; nor will the sun beat down on them, nor any heat; for the Lamb in the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and will guide them to springs of the water of life; and God will wipe every tear from their eyes.”
Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
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