"Death alone is certain"

Here is an excerpt from an On Being. Krista Tippett is interviewing Stephen Batchelor

Ms. Tippett: “Since death alone is certain, and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?” You wrote, “Over time, such meditation penetrates our primary sense of being in the world at all.” And I wondered if you would speak, as we close, just about — in a very concrete way, whatever that means, yesterday or today, about how this observation, this questioning, penetrates ordinary life, an ordinary day in the world, your primary sense of being in the world at all.

Mr. Batchelor: Well, the meditation on death that you’ve just read out is actually an adaptation of a Tibetan reflection on mortality.

Ms. Tippett: Mm-hm

Mr. Batchelor: As a young man, I did this practice daily. I found, of all the Tibetan practices I did, it was the one that was most life-changing, to the extent that today, I find that my sense of being in the world is deeply infused with an awareness of how this may be my last day on Earth. And these reflections on death are not in the remotest sense morbid or gloomy.

Shameless Fairy Tales

Did you know the NRA has a website call NRA Family? There you can find fabulous classics such as “Little Red Riding Hood (Has a Gun)” and “Hansel and Gretel (Have Guns)."

Cheaper than a Prius

Here's an interesting and money-saving way to help the environment. 

Around 80 percent of the protein we consume comes from animals, he says, in the form of meat, eggs, or dairy. And those creatures need a lot of resources to become food. A third a pound of hamburger requires 660 gallons of water to produce, if you include the irrigation needed for the feed. Raising animals for people contributes to a bevy of environmental plagues, including deforestation, water contamination, loss of biodiversity, and desertification. Of the more than 25 percent of all greenhouse gases attributed to the food system, 80 percent come from producing livestock. (Maddie Oatman, Mother Jones)

This comes from a longer article that explains that most of us consume more protein that needed. Changing your diet--it's cheaper than a Prius or a windmill.

Happy Easter.

Managing the Paradox

Today I came across this article from 2012, written shortly after Sandy Hook by Dr. Ginny Whitelaw. Unfortunately it's even more relevant today.

For we’re dealing with a paradox here, and one that is core to the American psyche: that pits individual freedoms on the one hand and social safety on the other. Both are good and right and valuable things and, as we know from integral theory, both are facets of our humanity: we are both individual agents and social animals. We affect others through our actions AND we are affected by social context. Little wonder that if we ignore one side of our human equation and go to extremes on the other side, we get into trouble….
 Both individual freedom and social safety are valuable and, if we go too far in either direction, problematic. Too much focus on social safety and we get a police state that violates individual rights. We don’t want to go that far. But too much individual freedom, and we get nutcases wiping out swaths of society. And that, I submit, is where we are right now. We are not managing this paradox well.

To manage it better, we have to move beyond one-sided arguments and embrace what’s right and good about BOTH individual freedom and social safety, and use the tension between them to reach a higher level goal: a society in which we are more free because we’re safe, and more safe because we’re free. The process of managing this paradox would have us set some limits – what’s free enough? Or safe enough? And what are some thresholds below which we don’t want to sink? We might be able to largely agree, for example, that police confiscation of ordinary, non-automatic weapons would be going too far on the social safety side. And that two rampages in one year crosses the threshold on the side of overprotecting the individual freedom to bear arms.

This entire article can be read here, but for those not versed in "integral theory," it may be confusing.

A few days ago, I read Grant Park, a novel by Leonard Pitts (reading some of it in a hotel room in Chicago across the street from Grant Park). The book was gripping, but when I finished, I didn't know what to say about it. I liked it, but it seemed a bit preachy. The story begins in 2008 when Malcom Toussaint, an African-American columnist for a fictional Chicago newspaper, sneaks into the paper an offensive column about how tired he is of trying to explain racism to white people—“tired of white folks bullsh--.” 

After Toussaint's late night sabotage of the newspaper's front page, he leaves the office only to be kidnapped by two crazy white supremacists. Since I couldn't find easy words to say how I felt about the book, I turned to Google. Vinson Cunningham of the New York Times says it nicely. “Pitts never manages to avoid didacticism” he says, but

Despite too many wince-worthy lines, the novel’s plot — jump-started by Toussaint’s unwilling inclusion in a white supremacist scheme to ruin Obama’s election night — is nicely wrought, and sometimes manages to surprise. Toussaint’s two-pronged story is placed contrapuntally against that of his white ­editor — fired as a scapegoat in the wake of The Column — whose life was also altered irrevocably by the ’68 strike. The resulting parallel lays bare the extent to which Americans, black and white, still struggle to articulate the basic elements of our shared past.

With these caveats, I recommend Grant Park.

Chicago Trees in March

 

Maybe I'm getting eccentric.

Gun Safety, the Missing Data

By some estimates...about 3,000 children are unintentionally shot every year in the U.S. — eight every day. About 124 of those children will die. That’s according to data from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. 

 However, 

No comprehensive statistics exist to tell us how many children are shot accidentally every year. The lack of data is thanks to the efforts of the NRA and other gun lobbyists. They promote a line of denial, blocking government funding for research into these shootings on the argument that they are rare.

Read the whole article by Mary Sanchez.

“Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers”

Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

Here is a link to the veggie burger formula.

Be a Tree

Ann, the teacher of my yoga class, said something like this today: “When you just don't know what to do, try doing the tree pose.” Here's how.  I'm going to try it the next time I feel crazy.

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“What [w]ould happen if I heeded the admonitions of beauty? “

From “Opinion” by Baron Wormser

Awe, Awe, and More Awe

This is a sign, from one of the walking paths at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, stopped me in my tracks. Yet, maybe there is this awesome history for every path we take.

"Renew Your Spirit"

From Peter Morales

We need to remember...when we find ourselves becoming bitter, we need to remind ourselves of our most treasured experiences. Actually, we need to do more than remember. We need to experience life’s gifts and possibilities once more. Renewing contact with what is most precious in life is really a spiritual practice. It is an essential practice. If we do not feed our spirits, they will wither. Even the good deeds we strive to do will become acts of anger and joyless obligation rather than efforts to share and to heal.

We all need to ask ourselves, “What does my spirit need right now?” Perhaps it is quiet time in nature. Maybe a visit to a new exhibition in a museum. How about some time in the garden? Why not attend a concert by a favorite artist, or take a walk with an old friend? The possibilities go on and on.

Desert

I just returned from a six day visit with my sister in Tucson, Arizona. She lives in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains and a mile or so away from Sabino Canyon, a great park for hiking in the desert and mountains of the area. I spend a lot of this trip moved and awed by this beauty.

Interesting contrast between sunlight and shadow.

 From brown to bright green.

 Full creeks in certain seasons

 And the famous saguaro cactus, found almost exclusively in southern Arizona and western Sonora, Mexico--a few strays in SE California.  It doesn't get those arms until it is around 75 years old.