Grief & Gardening: 20 Years

Written spontaneously as a Twitter thread, and transcribed to this blog post.

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I'm avoiding the news today. As well as the retraumatizing snuff porn documentaries. I've written about all of it before. I don't feel the need to day to write any more. I wrote this 15 years ago about Anniversaries, my first "Grief & Gardening" post:

The ways we observe anniversaries is arbitrary. For example, I was shocked to tears for weeks by the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, which killed 100 times more people than Katrina [1st Anniversary]. The earthquake which precipitated it left the entire planet ringing like a bell. The observation of "25 Years of AIDS" at this year's World AIDS Congress is pinned only to the first official report of a cluster of unusual deaths by the Centers for Disease Control in June of 1981. The timelines of epidemics don't follow our categorizations of them.
Grief & Gardening #1: 1, 5 and 25, 2006-09-04

Grief and Gardening: Ashes (Remembrance Day for Lost Species)

My alarm wakes me Saturday morning. I go downstairs to the kitchen, nuke myself a cup of coffee, and get a fresh batch going. I didn’t sleep well. Today is the Remembrance Day for Lost Species.

An Elegy for Biophilia

I was moved to write this by a short missive from Reverend Billy:

When I go to pray, which is sometimes difficult being so without any god, I think of that time in my life, because the natural world was overwhelming the god that my family insisted was all-powerful and all-knowing. Creation was overwhelming the Creator and it came in the form of undulating prairie grasses.

Post by Reverend Billy And The Stop Shopping Gospel Choir.

I was raised in temperate and tropical suburbia. Even in those landscapes, the woods in the backyard, or the palmetto swamp at the end of the road or the canal, drew me to them. They were my expanse. Yet, compared to what existed before the forests were razed and the swamps drained, the landscapes of my childhood were impoverished.

The shifting baseline degrades further. More than half the world now lives in cities, with less ready access to nature than ever before in the history of our species. Biodiversity is an environmental justice issue.

I've chosen to live my adult live in a city. Even here, those childhood experiences guide me. I garden because it connects me to nature, it nourishes me. The beauty I invite is not of my making, but larger, deeper, and older than I can comprehend.

I believe it everyone's right to have that connection for themselves. Not only a right, but necessary. Not only for our own health, but to have some hope for the future health of our planet.

That hope, however impoverished, is what keeps me going.

Off-topic: 20 Years

Today is the 20th anniversary of my sobriety. Sobriety, abstinence, and recovery are often conflated. They're not the same things.



I got sober because drinking was interfering with my recovery. I say "I got sober," not just "I stopped drinking." Abstinence was as necessary for my sobriety as sobriety was for my recovery, but I don't equate sobriety with abstinence. Today, I have the occasional glass of beer or wine with dinner. I am still sober.

Grief & Gardening: Nine Years

Let's get the usual question out of the way. This is where I was the morning of September 11, 2001.

This is Skytop Tower at Mohonk Mountain House at sunset the previous night. Blog Widow and I had planned a week-long vacation upstate, starting at Mohonk. The morning of September 11, we hiked up to Skytop. A rustic retreat, Mohonk had no televisions or radios in the rooms. As we left the massive wooden structure to go out hiking, I noticed people huddled around the few televisions in some of the common rooms. I thought nothing of it at the time. I later realized we left just after the first attack.

Blessing of the Animals, Chelsea Community Church

Update 2009-10-12: Added story about Smokey.

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Blog Widow and Annie, the new kitten, at the Blessing of the Animals service at Chelsea Community Church earlier today.


An off-topic, i.e. non-gardening, post.

In some recognition of National Coming Out Day, some non-gardening factoids about me:

• I'm an atheist.
  
• My partner, known as Blog Widow, is an ordained minister, among many other talents.
  
• People who've known me a long time think that's hysterical.
  

It takes some enticement to get me into church. Filling the pews with dogs and other companion animals kinda does it for me.

This is also an opportunity to introduce Annie.


Annie is a six-month old kitten we adopted two weeks ago from Sean Casey Animal Rescue in Kensington. We've been wanting to adopt a second cat, thinking that Ripley, the old soul, would do better with some companionship when we're out during the day. Ummm, yeah. That'll work. Eventually.

Today was Annie's "coming out," as we took her to the Blessing of the Animals service at Blog Widow's church, Chelsea Community Church. Mostly dogs were present; Annie was one of four cats, by my count, in attendance. She even made an appearance on stage when Blog Widow introduced her to the congregation for his general blessing over those assembled, human and otherwise.

Apollo: a personal/biographical perspective

40 years ago, we watched the landing on television like much of the rest of the world. Days before, my father had packed our little family into the car and drove to the causeway overlooking the Kennedy Space Center to watch, and feel, Apollo 11 send men to land on the moon for the first time. My father worked for Grumman, which had the contract to develop the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), later dubbed simply the Lunar Module (LM), for the Apollo space program. He worked on the LEM's telemetry systems. Part of my father is on the moon.

My Dad at work, circa 1960s


My family moved twice while I was growing up. Until I moved to New York City, I didn't live anywhere longer than six years. In the winter of 1964-1965, we moved from Long Island, east of new York City, to Merritt Island, Florida. As you can see from this map, our home was just a little over 10 miles from the Apollo 11 launchpad. I used to watch rockets launch from my bedroom window. On most launches, our windows shook.


View Apollo in a larger map

The Apollo program had an enormous economic and human toll, an important part of the story which I've yet to read anywhere else. Shortly after we moved to Florida, my father began working 60-80 hours a week, a pace which didn't let up until nearly the end of the development program. Once it became routine to send men to the moon, the development program ended abruptly. Hundreds of thousands lost their jobs simultaneously in a region whose development was triggered by this one program. My dad was able to find another job within Grumman, but it required moving back to Long Island. With no buyers, we were only able to sell our home at a greatly reduced price, losing all our equity, and having nothing with which to buy a new home.

We moved back to Long Island in the fall of 1970, just in time for me to start the school year, though just one week late.

[bit.ly]

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On Activism

Following is the text, edited slightly, of my contribution to a keynote address to hundreds of attendees at a conference in October of 2000. The occasion was the Fourth Annual Breaking Walls, Building Bridges (BWBB), an annual conference by, for and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth. 

From 1999 to 2002, I was a member of the steering committee of a recovery (chemical dependence and other) advocacy group called SpeakOUT. Among the opportunities that offered me was participation in the planning committee for BWBB. 

The 2000 conference theme was Activism. Rather than bring in an outside, expert "activist" speaker, the planning committee chose to hold a group keynote of the conference planners themselves. 

With my increasing involvement in advocating for and organizing around issues of greenspace, sustainability, and community through gardening, I think this is on-topic for this blog. For me, it's a timely reflection on where I've been and what I've done to guide me in my current and future efforts.

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I am not an activist. 

This is not modesty. I just don’t think of myself that way. I don’t think of what I do as activism. Activists do things I won’t do, or can’t do, or would never think of doing. Activists are heroic, even mythic, beings. What they do is beyond my reach. 

When I was a boy I would fantasize about being a hero. I could be walking along a bridge, and hear someone calling for help from the water below, and jump in and save their life. I could know I’d done something good and important. I could know that I mattered, that I could make a difference. 

In elementary school the best I could do was read to younger kids at the public library, and organize a fund-raising drive for the local animal shelter. When I was 14 the best I could do was tell my parents one Easter morning that I wasn’t going to church with them because I was an atheist. In high school the best I could do was refuse to recite or stand for the “pledge of allegiance” during morning home room because I didn’t believe in “one nation under God” or that there really was “liberty and justice for all.” In college the best I could do was organize a gay student rap group so I wouldn’t be the only gay person I knew at school. 

In each case I never felt that I was doing anything special. I did what I felt I must do. It never felt like a choice to me. I never felt courageous doing any of these things. 

These examples predate “gay cancer,” GRID (Gay-Related Immunodeficiency Disease), AIDS. I’ve lost countless scores, probably hundreds, of lovers, friends, neighbors – and heroes – to meaningless deaths from AIDS, as well as suicide and drug overdose. I have to ask: Why am I still alive? 

Since there’s no life after this one, and no divine purpose, how can my life have any meaning? I’ve concluded that the only meaning to be found in life is that which we give it. The best I can do is try to leave the world a better place than I found it, through my words, my actions, my spirit. I have no choice. It’s what I must do. 

Some say “The end justifies the means.” Don’t believe it. Those who say so would only take credit, and none of the responsibility, for changing the world. So much unjustifiable violence is done in the name of Family, Nation and God. The end is nothing. The means is everything. How we do things is more important than whether we succeed or fail. How we live our lives is heroic. 

Victor Frankl, a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, wrote “What is to give light must endure burning.” Light doesn’t justify burning. Light transcends burning. How we celebrate ourselves transcends what we must endure and survive. It serves only our enemies – and serves us least of all – to be polite, nice, and “normal,” to be unassuming and inoffensive, to be silent and invisible. 

Every one of you, by being here today, whatever it took, is a hero to me. Shine on.

American Dream

A post on Bay Ridge Blog reminded me of an incident I haven't thought of in many years. Any romance street explosives might once have held left me on the afternoon of a hot, sunny 4th of July.

In 1980, within nine months of moving to New York, I had my own apartment, a fifth floor walkup in a tenement building in the East Village. The rent was cheap.

Across the street was - still is, for all I know - the NYC headquarters of the Hell's Angels. My apartment faced the street. Every 4th of July, they closed off the street and had their block party. Fireworks and firecrackers were always part of the activities. After the first few years, the novelty wore off, then transformed into endurance trauma.

Back in the Day

2008.03.10: Welcome - I guess - New York magazine Intelligencer readers. I encourage you to read my post about the BlogFest itself, which inspired this "hyperniche nostalgia," as NY characterizes it. (Shouldn't that be hypo-niche? sub-niche? micro-niche?)

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Crazy Diamond, aka Flatbush Gardener, circa 1980s.


I wrote the following as part of my Brooklyn Blogfest coverage. I now find myself in the position of being one of the coordinators of the first Brooklyn Blogade Roadshow, which it is hoped will take the spirit and energy of the Brooklyn Blogfest on the road to different neighborhoods in Brooklyn. I hope to provide details of the inaugural event later tonight or this week.

I'm highlighting this bit of autobiography and technology history in its own post here because it expresses what I'm trying to bring of myself to this first event.

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[Written 2007.05.11]

Back in the Day

Gather round me, children. Close your eyes, and try to imagine it. It was long before the Web, when the Internet existed only in military and select academic settings. It was the time before GUIs, before mice and color monitors, when MS-DOS and 1200bps dial-up modems roamed the Earth.

There were these things called computer bulletin board services, BBS for short. Your computer told your modem the phone number of the BBS. Your modem dialed, their modem answered, and both modems connected with each other. Then your computer could talk to their computer. Directly. No Web, no Internet. Machino a machino. You could leave messages for other BBS members; the precursor of email. You could even chat with someone else who was also logged in; the precursor of IM today.

I was a member of a BBS based in New York City called The BackRoom. It was, as one might guess from the name, a gay BBS. It was an online community of gay men, mostly, living in NYC, mostly. We had handles, like CB radio users (1970s technology). My CB handle in the 1970s, 30+ years ago, was Green Thumb. My BackRoom handle was Crazy Diamond, after the Pink Floyd song, "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond."

Donor Recognition plaque on the wall of the second floor landing of the center staircase of the NYC Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center.


We were an online community. A community of humpy nerds, of which I was one. We were not only virtual. We also met, face-to-face, at a periodic event called the Backroom Bash. Sometimes we met at a bar, sometimes at the home of a member or the Backroom founder and sysop, Art Kohn. We built community online, with handles and anonymity. We met in person, still with our handles, and less anonymity, and built community there as well. Our virtual community was enriched by our interactions in 3D, and vice versa.

Last night [the Blogfest] reminded me of that.

Happy Tercentenary Birthday, Carolus Linnaeus

Reproduction of a painting by Alexander Roslin in 1775. The original painting can be viewed at the Royal Science Academy of Sweden (Kungliga vetenskapsakademin).

Carolus Linnaeus, also known after his ennoblement as Carl von Linné, (May 23, 1707 – January 10, 1778), was a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of nomenclature. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy." He is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology (see History of ecology).

Taxonomists, in almost any biological field, have heard of Carolus Linnaeus. His prime contribution was to establish conventions for the naming of living organisms that became universally accepted in the scientific world--the work of Linnaeus represents the starting point of binomial nomenclature. In addition Linnaeus developed, during the great 18th century expansion of natural history knowledge, what became known as the Linnaean taxonomy; the system of scientific classification now widely used in the biological sciences.

The Linnaean system classified nature within a hierarchy, starting with three kingdoms. Kingdoms were divided into Classes and they, in turn, into Orders, which were divided into Genera (singular: genus), which were divided into Species (singular: species). Below the rank of species he sometimes recognized taxa of a lower (unnamed) rank (for plants these are now called "varieties").

... While the underlying details concerning what are considered to be scientifically valid 'observable characteristics' has changed with expanding knowledge (for example, DNA sequencing, unavailable in Linnaeus' time, has proven to be a tool of considerable utility for classifying living organisms and establishing their relationships to each other), the fundamental principle remains sound.

Of course, any tool can be used against others.

Linnaeus was also a pioneer in defining the concept of race as applied to humans. Within Homo sapiens he proposed four taxa of a lower (unnamed) rank. These categories were Americanus, Asiaticus, Africanus and Europeanus. They were based on place of origin at first, and later on skin colour. Each race had certain characteristics that he considered endemic to individuals belonging to it. Native Americans were reddish, stubborn and easily angered. Africans were black, relaxed and negligent. Asians were sallow, avaricious and easily distracted. Europeans were white, gentle and inventive. Linnaeus's races were clearly skewed in favour of Europeans. Over time, this classification led to a racial hierarchy, in which Europeans were at the top. Members of many European countries used the classification scheme to validate their conquering or subjugation of members of the "lower" races.

Guest Post: The Man From B.R.O.O.K.L.Y.N.

I received the following from my Dad this afternoon. I asked him for permission to share it here.

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APOLOGIA: YOU WILL FIND “I” AND “ME” IN HERE OFTEN. That’s because my wife, who is also from Brooklyn does not agree with my outlook. These are MY opinions and do not mean I am insulting my wife or son or other Brooklynites and THEIR opinions.

I AM FROM BROOKLYN AND PROUD AS PUNCH !

(Nope, that’s not right. How about)

I AM FROM BROOKLYN AND PLEASED AS PUNCH !

(I’m still not getting my point across. Lessee)

I AM FROM BROOKLYN AND HAPPY ABOUT THAT !

I’m gone, by-bye, far away, moved. It took 65 years but no more $500 annual parking ticket budget, sky rats, strange people sleeping in the streets, passersby arguing with themselves and losing. No more rush hour, subway, shoulder to shoulder bustle and bump, “cleaning” windshields, strange green gobs of mucous on the sidewalk.

I was a Great Depression baby, born at home near the intersection of Myrtle and Decatur in Ridgewood. We moved to Queens early in my life but, same thing. Brooklyn was The City, just like Manhattan.

If you were a baseball fan, you had died and gone to Heaven early. A ten cent subway ride took you to the Wonderlands of Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. I was not a fan.

No sense belaboring it: it was a nasty Era and life stunk. My Mom made me wear knickers and a beret !

Our electric was more off than on. Fridays were always cod fish cakes and spaghetti (Franco-American) night.

During WWII we also had Meatless Tuesdays. Not that we could afford meat anyway but it makes a good bitching point.

When I was married we managed to move out on “The Island”, first to Nassau county and then Suffolk.

From that point on I tried very hard to protect my kids from the Big Bad City. I didn’t want them to endure what

I had gone through. I was still too much a Dad to realize or even conceive that my kids could think for themselves and make decisions. Wrong again, and not for the first or last time.

My son moved first to Manhattan and eventually to Brooklyn where he has a 100 year old Victorian home.

The daughter is very happy with her family in New Jersey.

The son writes a well received and popular “Blog” about life in Brooklyn, especially gardening.

They’re happy, I’m happy. I miss them but not Brooklyn.

Here is a partial list of things I do miss: American Museum of Natural History; Coney Island Aquarium; MOMA; the Bronx Zoo; hot chestnut vendors; Horn and Hardart’s Automat; Charlotte Russe; Loew’s Valencia Theatre; Tony the Ice Man; Macy’s Christmas windows; Rockefeller Center at Christmas; more. BUT, I could always visit. Oh my: swimming at the St. George hotel with its’ salt water pool and the mirrored ceiling; the Thanksgiving and St. Patrick’s Day parades; Times Square on New Year’s Eve (just once);……..

Had to stop, starting to choke up. Take a deep breath.

OK. I now live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, selected as my retirement spot after years of study. Been here 15 years. I do very well, thank you. We eat out several times a week. I love it. We have a backyard about 100 feet deep and two football fields long. A stream runs through it at the rear boundary.

We live at the foot of a mountain.

The backyard is visited by a variety of wildlife: squirrels, flying squirrels, several species of rabbit, red foxes, muskrat, wild turkeys, deer, gray fox, ducks, geese and an amazing variety of birds including several hawk species. (They tend to harvest the mourning doves.)

Just a couple of healthy stones throws away is a herd of elk and a pack of red wolves. The gray wolves have not yet been re-released to the wild. The cougars/panthers/mountain lions are gone but you can still find feral pigs, some mixed with European Boars. They hunt them on foot, with spears!

What about bears? They are all around us but have never been seen on our property. Sightings have been made within a half mile. Usually a daily incident in the local papers.

We gotcher streams, creeks, rivers, ponds, lakes and hundreds of waterfalls. Local fishing waters hold all species of trout; bass species include largemouth, smallmouth, spotted, peacock, striped, hybrid.

The North Carolina state record for Bluegill sunfish (2 ¾ pounds) was caught in our home county.

Culturally, we miss major league sports. However we have seen Itzaak Perlman, the Lippizaner Stallions, David Copperfield, many operas. We have musical and stage shows, lots of Celtic music and dancing and, as you might expect, tons of Blue Grass. The circus, pow-wows, gem mines. We’re not lacking.

Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina are within a half hour’s drive.

City lovers would miss the 24 hour lifestyle. We tend to roll up the sidewalks around 9:30 PM.

So, all-in-all, it was a great move. We still visit the son in Flatbush and the daughter in Brick, NJ. We absolutely avoid Long Island at all costs.

There are a few other ties to The City. I still have a plot in Calvary Cemetary. It will go unused.

So, my dear son: revel in your Brooklyn home with your partner. You have chosen, and wisely for you. My plan to protect you was a flop and thank goodness for that.

I am still happy to be FROM Brooklyn. But I have a friend there whom I can visit whenever possible. He opens my eyes to the things I overlooked and broadens my knowledge base and horizons, even at the age of 75.

I am blessed in all things.

Blog Against Theocracy #3: Adolescence

Easter 1911, St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York.
Credit: Shorpy: The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog.


My partner and I went to church today. More accurately, he went to church and I tagged along. He's a minister and works every Sunday. Easter being a big day, and him even preaching today and all, I went for moral support.

When I attend religious services, I stand and sit appropriately, out of respect. Other than that, I feel like a dog in church. There are interesting sensations: frankincense lingering from the morning service, the smell and feel of old wood, vivid colors from the sun shining through stained glass, music and the song of human voices. When it's my choice to do so, I enjoy such experiences in my own way, without feeling that I betray myself, or disrespect those around me.

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I don't remember how old I was - 13 or 14. My parents were getting ready to goto church. I wasn't. They asked why I wasn't getting ready.

I'm not going to church.
Why not?
Because I don't believe in God.

I came out to my parents as an atheist that Easter morning 35 years ago. I didn't go to church that day, nor for many years after that. It was a moral choice for me. I did not want to act out something I did not believe.

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Throughout my school years, "home room" was the first classroom assembly of the day, before classes began. Attendance was taken and announcements were made. And we recited the Pledge of Allegiance:

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I became increasingly uncomfortable with following this ritual. In 1975, my senior year of high school, I decided to stop standing for the recitation of the Pledge. When challenged, I gave my reasons: I didn't believe it. I didn't believe in God. I didn't believe that there was "liberty and justice for all."

This precipitated intimidation and harassment to get me to comply. Other faculty and administrative staff came to home room to question me, and stand and glare at me while I sat during the pledge. Other students in the classroom shoved my desk and called me "godless, commie fag" (though they could not have known how technically accurate that was, since I wasn't out yet). Word got out. I was physically threatened in the hallways between classes.

I knew it was my right to refuse to stand. I never discussed the First Amendment. I wasn't refusing to stand just to make a point. I simply did not want to be compelled to act in hypocrisy to my beliefs and feelings. I didn't think it was right.

Faculty and staff gradually relented. Harassment from other students continued sporadically. I don't remember how long this went on before another student, a friend of mine, also refused to stand. She was also challenged, but she was not physically harassed or threatened as far as I know. Another day, another student refused to stand. By the end of the school year, the morning Pledge had been abandoned in my home room class. I assume it continued in others.

I didn't learn until much later that the phrase "under God" was added just four years before I was born.

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Related posts:

• Blog Against Theocracy, March 28
• Poem: Speak for Yourself (Blog Against Theocracy #1)
  
• Blog Against Theocracy #2: Childhood
  

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Links:

• Blog Against Theocracy
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State
  
• First Freedom First
  

Technorati Tags: blog against theocracy

Blog Against Theocracy #2: Childhood

Credit: I Speak of Dreams

I'm an atheist. I was raised Catholic, but it didn't take.

A Secular Education

I went to public schools. I was usually the "smartest" kid in the class. (I now know there are many kinds of intelligence, not all of which enjoy conventional rewards.) I was a teacher's pet, a favorite of my peers (not).

To keep me interested, I was given more challenging assignments, advanced reading. Dr. Seuss replaced Dick and Jane, then science fiction and non-fiction replaced Dr. Seuss. When I finished my assignments early, I got to read or study topics of my choosing. I taught myself origami from books. I studied oceanography and marine biology. I read a book about Alfred Wegener and his theory of continental drift, and the then-new (in the mid-1960s) discovery of the mid-oceanic ridges and plate tectonics. I studied botany - flower structures and pollinators - on my own. I developed multimedia presentations on these topics and presented them to my class, and to whole class assemblies in the cafeteria.

I was a nerd. I was inquisitive. I was hungry for knowledge. I was encouraged to question.

So when I began to go to Sunday school, catechism class, I approached it the same way. It was just something else to learn, another course of study, another body of knowledge to master. I didn't know I wasn't supposed to question.

I was 10 years old, an atheist in formation.

What I Learned in Sunday School

There were three specific questions I remember asking, for which the answers were inadequate and unsatisfactory. In fact, this was when I learned they were wrong, no matter the authority to which they laid claim. My atheism was forged in Sunday school.

Our catechism textbooks had the same style as the Dick and Jane readers, a watercolor romanticization and idealization of some notion of childhood (a very, very white childhood). One of the paintings in the book showed a boy playing with a toy boat in the water. He was using a stick to push the boat, leaning out to reach, clearly in danger of falling in. Standing behind him was a guardian angel. You could tell it was an angel because you could see through it and it had wings. The angel was half reaching out toward him, but not reaching him.

Question: Will the guardian angel save the boy?
Answer: No.
Q: Will the angel warn the boy?
A: No.
Q: Then what good is it?! (Not my exact words, but to that effect.)
A: The guardian angel is there to take the boy's soul to heaven.

Now this made no sense, on so many levels. Wasn't the boy going to go to heaven anyway? Wouldn't the boy's soul go to heaven without the guardian angel? Was it going to get lost after he died? Was there some kind of spectral devil-wolf that was going to come out of the dark woods of the afterlife and consume the soul unless the angel was there to guard it?

That was Strike #1.

Then there was the whole baptism thing. For the uninitiated, Catholic doctrine of the time (I've heard rumors of revisionism, but frankly, there's no point in me keeping up on current events in the Catholic Church) stated that, because of Original Sin, you had to be baptised to go to heaven. Which led to the following exchange:

Q: Do unbaptised babies go to heaven?
A: No.
Q: Why not? It's not their fault.
A: Original Sin.
Q: Why are they being punished for something they didn't do?
A: They're not being punished.
Q: But they don't get to be with God. (Okay, not really a question.)
Q: So where do they go?
A: They go to limbo.
Q: But that's not heaven.
A: It's not hell, either.

As a child I understood that denying reward was punishment. Neglect is abuse, no matter who your daddy is. The innocent were being punished for something they did not do. This destroyed any moral authority the church had in my mind. This was Strike #2.

Finally, the coup de grace, Strike #3:

Q: When I die and go to heaven, will my dog Smokey be there?
A: No.
Q: Why not?
A: Animals don't have souls.

Whoa. I knew my dog Smokey loved me. He was the clearest, purest source of unconditional love in my life. He expected nothing of me. He didn't care what grades I got in school. He wanted nothing more than to run in the yard with me, chase me, pull off my sneakers, and wrestle with me on the ground. He was my protector, powerful, strong, and devoted. If I had a soul, then so did he.

And I didn't want any part of their heaven. An eternity without animals was hell, not heaven. Just like the Twilight Zone episode.

So that was it. I knew they were wrong: logical and morally wrong. They were lying to me. I didn't understand why, but I knew they were. They were not to believed. Everything they had claimed to be true was open to question.

So I did.

[Continued]

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Related posts:

• Blog Against Theocracy, March 28
• Poem: Speak for Yourself (Blog Against Theocracy #1)
  
• Blog Against Theocracy #3: Adolescence
  

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Links:

• Blog Against Theocracy
• Americans United for Separation of Church and State
  
• First Freedom First
  

Technorati Tags: blog against theocracy

On Garden Photography

[Updated 2006.09.05 10:39 EDT: Reduced image sizes to fit displays with 1024x768 resolution.]
[Updated 2006.08.22 16:10 EDT: Added examples for each "consideration."]

Susan Harris just posted Tenets of Garden Photography over on Garden Rant, in which she asks some provocative (to me) questions:

... let's see how they [tips on improving vacation pictures] translate to our world.

The first advice is to not cut off people's feet, which makes me wonder: is there a plant part that, if cut off, spoils the photo? And the admonition to avoid telephone poles coming out of your subject applies equally well to plant subjects as to human. But really, there's lots more useful stuff here, like the fact that we usually see the subject, not the whole frame, and we should always "check the borders." And my favorite - a discussion of qualities of light that goes beyond the avoid-harsh-sun advice we see everywhere to describe "sweet light" and suggest that flash be only during the day, never at night. I just love that counterintuitive stuff!!

Specific to travel, photographers are reminded to catch these elements: people, scenics, details, food, movement, action, and nightlife. So what do you suppose the must-shoot elements would be in gardening photography? Maybe entrances, whole borders, close-ups, small plant combinations, animals, and such hardscape as seating, stone, wood, and statuary. What else?

I started leaving a comment there, but after my comment started getting longer than her blog entry, I thought I should write my own in response!

I've been "a photographer" since before the age of five, almost more decades than you can count on the fingers of one hand. The way I've photographed, and how I share my photography, has changed a lot over my lifetime. It continues to evolve, not only in response to the huge technological changes, but also to changes in me and my life and interests.

I don't remember the last time I used a "real" (film) camera. The time lag for feedback between what I thought I shot and what I got made me try to make every shot count. Without access to a darkroom, or the skills to take advantage of it, I learned to compose my shots "in camera": to carefully frame each shot in the viewfinder to get exactly the picture I wanted to eventually see.

Starting about 1980, I shot slide film exclusively. I "edited" each roll I got back, going through every slide, and selecting the ones which were not only technically perfect (focus, exposure, and so on) but which also captured what I was striving for when I took the picture. At most, I would get two or three "good" shots out of the roll; maybe 1-5% of all the photos I took. These are the only ones which anyone else would ever see. From this population I selected maybe 10% as "candidates" for printing. Again, maybe only 10% of these ever made it to paper. So most folks only saw a tiny percentage, less than 1/1000, of all the shots I took. And yes, I shot thousands of images each year.

Digital photography, blogging, and social networking sites such as flickr are allowing me to share my photography in ways it would have been far too expensive or cumbersome to do in the past. I can experiment more wildly, since I can get immediate feedback on the success of the shot, and the cost of making mistakes is only the time it took me to setup and take the shot. (And delete the mistakes!)

But I've kept my old habits. I still compose in camera, and take the time to setup each shot, even though I could easily crop the image on my computer. I don't dump every photo I take into public view; I still edit the collections. I still go through each image, deleting the ones which are out of focus, or shaky, or under- or over-exposed. Some of these could be corrected digitally, but, unless I have only one image of something, it's not worth it. There are other, better, shots in which I got what I wanted.

And some things are unchanged by the technology. The qualities of light, dimensions of composition, and the sensuality of beauty and nature are, in deep ways, eternal. It's my challenge to capture those eternal qualities in a frozen image.

I've got two basic reasons for my garden photography: beauty and documentation. While they're not mutually exclusive, my goal for any shot is primarily one or the other. Good examples of both, and examples of all of the following considerations, can be found in my recent series of photos of "Baby" at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, as well as the other photographs in this blog.

Some of the things I consider in my photography are:

Balance

This doesn't mean that the top and bottom, or left and right sides, are mirror images of each other. Balanced asymmetry is much more interesting. Think of a larger and smaller person on a seesaw, and how they move along the beam to balance each others weights. A classic photographic example is the horizon line; it looks best above or below the center-line of the image, depending on where the interest lies. In garden photography, to achieve this I either let the primary subject fall to one side or the other, or let the line of the subject follow a diagonal across the frame.

Scale

Related to balance, but especially important for documentation photography, is providing a sense of scale in the image. This usually involves including some familiar artifact, such as a chair, path, building, or other "hardscape" element in the image. People are also good for providing scale!

On the beauty side, some of my best photography plays with and disguises or distorts the sense of scale. Macro-photography is one of my favorites for this. Seeing things close-up, the views we usually never stop to see, allows us to see things in a new way, to see details we would never notice. There is so much beauty in the world which we miss because it is too big or small (or we are too small or big) to see it all at once.

Color

Of utmost importance for me, which is why I shot slide film. Related to this, the best color is achieved by slightly under-exposing the image, by 1/3 or 1/2 stop. This leaves the colors more "saturated" and less washed out, making the image more vivid and natural looking. Subtleties of color and variation in color are themselves often subjects of my photography.

Light

My favorite photographs are able to capture the quality of light which was present when I took the photo. This is a big challenge, but awareness of light - its color, its direction, its qualities - is important to consider when taking the shot. Overcast days are the best for garden photography. With reduced contrast between light and dark, not only can colors be more saturated, but texture and structure don't get lost in the shadows or washed out in sun.

Think of light streaming through the leaves and trunks of trees, or the crepuscular rays of sunlight between clouds. Light becomes visible in these ways when it's scattered by moisture or particles in the air. In other words, the light is making the space visible, giving a three-dimensional quality to the image, and providing the viewer with a palpable sense of the place in which the photo was taken.

Time

Everything is changing all the time. In the garden, some of these changes are obvious, but mostly they are visible only over time. Capturing the different stages of growth of plants and their parts is, again, a way of helping us see the things we would otherwise overlook.

The fronds of a fern just emerging from the ground are incredibly detailed, but we rarely see or observe them then. A bud before it opens, or the dried husks of plants in winter, these are things which are also part of the garden, and also beautiful. They are reminders of how fleeting it all is. How temporary and ephemeral is each moment in the garden, as are we.

Meta-Blog Entry: A Garden Outing

meta-blog entry: a blog entry about blogging

Kati, who hails from Ontario, Canada, and writes the Realmud Garden and Spirit Doors blogs, outed me yesterday by using my real name in her blog. As much as I enjoy seeing my name in "print," I was initially startled. I've intentionally not used my real name for this blog, nor in my blogger profile. Nor have I provided any reference in this blog (other than this sentence) to my personal Web site. 

 But it's not something I expected, or needed, to keep "secret." The links, however indirect, are available (again, intentionally) for anyone who wants to pursue them. In this instance, Kati's curiosity was piqued by my feedback about a formatting problem on her blog which prevented me from reading her profile:

[Xris] who writes about gardening at the Flatbush Gardener blog, kindly pointed out that what I set up on my computer, may not look the same on your computer -- hopefully I have fixed that problem! So I had to satisfy my curiosity as to who [Xris] was, of course, and visited his very interesting and informative blog. It seems many of his concerns are similar to mine, particularly as to how we can live (and garden) without making too much of a detrimental impact on the natural world around us. I was also very interested in [Xris'] website. ...

... which led her to my real name. I'm also naturally curious about the other gardening bloggers (blogging gardeners?) I read. Especially so when non-garden interests and information "leak" into the garden space. The Web in general, and blogging in particular, has a huge capacity for supporting dissociation and fragmentation of our lives, both in viewing and publishing. I've noticed several people whose gardening blogs I read, such as Kati, have multiple blogs. 

I've been tempted to do the same. There are risks and benefits to both mono-blogging and multi-blogging. One risk of mono-blogging is turning off readers who don't ascribe to the sentiment of some "off-topic" post. 

I recently unsubscribed to an upstate New York gardener's blog when she posted for July 4 with, to my sensibilities, a most vile graphic which combined the images of a waving U.S. flag, two children (white, naturally) gazing vaguely heavenward (or looking up to "Big Daddy"), and the text "God Bless America" emblazoned across the bottom. I just don't have the stomache for soft-core nationalist pornography when I just want to see pictures of pretty flowers. 

 On the other hand, a risk of multi-blogging - or of cropping the mono-blog a little too close to the stem - is missing opportunities for delineating the deep connections, subtle or glaring, among the multiple dimensions of our lives. I've organized my blogrolls by topic, but some blogs challenge that linear, left-brain approach. 

Looking at my own blog entries, would I categorize my blog as gardening, nature or science? The division is often artificial, and purely for my convenience. Then there are the more personal connections, the real reasons why we (I) garden, and perhaps why we (I) blog. 

I've written about, or hinted at, some of my reasons here, here, and here in this blog. I could list an arm's length of descriptive attributes about myself in my profile which have little (but not nothing) to do with my gardening. 

Gardening is a source of healing for me. Does it inform the reader, or distract, to know something about the journey of recovery which comprises most of my adult life, or the lifetime of emotional darkness which preceded it? 

Gardening is a deeply spiritual act for me. Does the reader understand this, or me, better to know that I'm also an atheist? 

 For now, I'm choosing to continue to keep this blog pruned in a naturalistic style, not sheared to crispy geometry. My gardening does connect me to larger considerations, such as invasive species, biodiversity, global warming ... so I will continue to write about those things here, alongside the photos of the bugs and flowers under my care. 

I believe we must all become - we already are - gardeners of the world. I will act, and write, "as if" my work and words matter. It is my hope that the seeds I plant, the weeds I take, the feelings and thoughts I express, help to heal the world.

Without God

Posted on September 11, 2010, the 9th Anniversary of the attacks.

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October 15, 2001

An open letter to Joanna Tipple, pastor of the Craryville and Copake Churches in New York State.

Dear Joanna:

Sorry I missed you when you came to the city to deliver the bears. I've been wanting to write you. I've found it hard to write at all. There are no words.

I want to thank you and the congregations of the Craryville and Copake churches for welcoming me at your services that first Sunday after September 11. While it may have helped to be the preacher's wife, I know there was more to it than that! It was comforting to feel held there, knowing that John and I had to return to our homes in New York City that afternoon. I didn't know what we'd be returning to. I wept during both services. I've wept a lot since.

I work two blocks from where the towers were. I've seen it from the street, from the roof of my office building, from our lunch room twenty-seven floors up. I try to approach my presence in the city at this time as a naturalist, observing and recording changes in the physical environment and the behavior of its inhabitants. I want to remain present without withdrawing, so I can bear witness.

The fires still burn. Smoke still scents the surrounding streets and buildings. While rain has rinsed most of the gutters, ash still coats statues, windows and rooftops. In low and sheltered areas, the rain and ash mixed with shredded documents from the towers to create a gray papier mache. The "Missing Person" posters - and only those closest to them held any hope they would be "found" - and sidewalk memorials of candles and the poetry of anguish, rage, and hope, are slowly eroding.

I've been thinking a lot about something you said during one of your sermons that Sunday. I think it was at the Copake service, while speaking to the shock and terrible loss of the preceding week, you said something like "I don't know how someone could get through this without God." I heard this as a question. I want to respond. I want to give something back to you and the congregations. For myself, once again I must make sense of senseless loss.

The Friday after John and I got back to the city was my first visit back to my office, and downtown. Power had been restored to our buildings and some of us went in to ready our offices and equipment for our colleagues' return that Monday, two weeks after the attacks. My colleagues and I hugged when we saw each other. In a conversation that day with one of our vice presidents, she observed "Nothing is permanent, except God." What struck me was that she seemed to be realizing this for the first time.

Nothing lasts. Not the smoke and ash, not the wreckage of the towers, not even our grief or the memorials we will erect. Everything that is, all we experience, survive, and celebrate, occurs without God. Nothing is always. This makes it all the more mysterious, not less, all the more wonderful, precious and beautiful.

Most of my twenty-three years in New York City I've been surrounded, touched, by death. Death from AIDS. Death from suicide. Death from overdose. The slow deaths of addiction, of abuse. I do not consider death a friend, but it is not my enemy. It is familiar to me. I have grieved, and grieved again, and more, and each new loss touches all the others through me. Through countless repeated uses over the years, my grief has become burnished, polished through use like a favorite tool. Comfortable to hold. Fitting my hand. Perfectly balanced for the task. I can pick it up when I need to. I can set it down when this work is done.

In the past I've described myself as a rabid atheist. John has known me a long time and can attest to the accuracy of this assessment. I've mellowed somewhat over the years, but nothing in my experience has yet to dissuade me from my fundamental disbelief. By the age of ten I realized that what was being taught to me as the Word of God was simply wrong. Not wrong as in incorrect, but immoral, unethical, unjust. The vision of heaven conveyed to me was no place I'd want to be. The God I was supposed to worship was nothing I could respect. Growing up gay in a world rife with homophobic cultures didn't change my disbelief. If I were to believe so-called religious leaders, my love is an abomination, my kind deserving of extermination. There seems little point to believing in any of their hateful Gods.

Again, and still, horrors are committed in the name of God. A month ago, more than five thousand people lost their lives in a smoking crater, killed in the name of God. It makes no difference to me whether the banner reads "Holy War" or "God Bless America." This crisis has brought out both the best and worst in people. Like any tool, the idea of God is used for evil as well as good. Then what good is God?

A problem with the word "atheist" is that it simply means "without god." The word doesn't summon anything new. It doesn't suggest any alternatives. It doesn't address your question. It's as useless and inadequate as "non-white." There are within me other beliefs, moral convictions, even something I am sometimes willing to call spirituality, which transcend God.

As I tend my garden, I recall how it was a minute, a day, a year ago. That flower was, or was not, blooming yesterday. This plant has grown over the years and now crowds its neighbors. A label in the ground shows where another plant has vanished. Should I replace it, or try something new? I weed. I plant. I water. I sit. The garden asks me to see it as it really is, not just how I remember it, or how I wish it to be. Gardening continues to teach me many lessons. Gardening is my prayer.

So I must be in the world. Remembering what was. Observing what is. Hoping for what can be. Acting to bring it into being. When we struggle to understand, we question what is. Science can ask, and eventually answer, "What?" and "How?" It cannot answer the one question that matters, the question for which Man created God: "Why?" Now, as with each new loss, I ask again: Why am I here? Why am I alive?

The only answer I've come across which satisfies me at all comes from Zen: The purpose of life is to relieve suffering. Not to relieve pain, or grief, or loss. These cannot be avoided. But to relieve suffering, which we ourselves bring into the world. Because death is senseless, the only sense to be found is that which we manifest in our own lives. The only meaning there can be in life is what we impart.

Or, as someone else might say, the kingdom of god is within each of us.

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[bit.ly]

This Week in History

Posted on September 11, 2010, the 9th Anniversary of the attacks. This is the text of an email I sent to all my contacts the week of the attacks.

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September 14, 2001

Some of you've I've already corresponded with, or spoken with, this week. Most of you I have not.

I was not in New York City at the time of the attacks. Monday, September 10, John and I went on the road for a week-long vacation we've been planning for months. As I write this on Friday, we're still on the road, visiting John's mother for two nights. On Sunday, John has two preaching gigs in the area before we return to the City.

Monday we drove to Mohonk Mountain House, a grand and rustic retreat in the Shawangunk Mountains outside of New Paltz. None of the rooms have televisions. Our room had a wood-burning fireplace. Our balcony looked over Mohonk Lake to the surrounding cliffs and mountains. Mostly I said "Wow" a lot.

Across the lake from the lodge a peak, called Sky Top, rises several hundred feet above the lake. On Sky Top is a stone observation tower which looks over the lake, the lodge, and the surrounding cliffs and mountains. Tuesday morning John and I hiked to the peak and climbed to the top of the tower. On the way to the trailhead I overheard one woman saying to another something about a plane being hijacked. I didn't think anything about it at the time. John and I were joyful to be together in such a beautiful setting. We were at peace with each other, and surrounded by nature.

As we climbed down the stairs inside the tower I was singing, "I love to go a-wandering ..." As we turned the third flight of stairs down, we met an old man climbing up. I joked to him "Don't mind me." He looked up at us. His eyes were welled with tears. He said to us "Did you hear what happened?" That's how John and I first learned that both towers of the World Trade Center had been struck by hijacked planes.

By the time we got back to the lodge, the staff had setup several televisions in public rooms. None of these went unattended before we left on Wednesday. Most of the afternoon and evening activities at Mohonk were cancelled. The evening's scheduled film, "Deep Impact," in which the world is struck by an asteroid, destroying the eastern seaboard cities of the United States, was replaced by "City Slickers." By sundown, the flag flying over Mohonk Mountain House's highest tower was at half-mast.

Sometime Tuesday morning the initial denial had broken and I was able to watch one of the large-screen videos setup in one of the rooms. As I watched for the first of many times the South Tower explode and crumble. I was able to send off two e-mails Tuesday afternoon before I was no longer able to get an outside line. I sent one to my family to let them know I was okay. I sent another to my colleagues at work to let them know I was thinking of them. It was surreal to be among all that natural beauty and have the images of destruction flashing through my mind, trying to wrap my mind around two seemingly discordant realities at once.

The week has continued to unfold in slow motion. Driving along the local roads of upstate New York, the reminders are constant. U.S. flags are everywhere, on buildings, along the road, on car antennas, and at half-mast on flagpoles. In Wappingers Falls, yellow ribbons have joined the flags. The commercial street-side signs of replaceable letters have been converted to expressions of national pride and pleas for prayer. In front of firehouses, fire-fighting gear have been set out to commemorate the firefighters lost in the towers' collapse. Churches stand with their doors wide, with signs explaining they are open for prayer.

My first waking thought each morning has been of the images of the fireballs and the progressive collapse of the towers. The buildings where I work are just two and three blocks from ground zero. Until a few hours ago, when I was able to get my e-mail and make some phone calls, I didn't know if the people I work with were okay or not. I don't yet know if I will be going to work on Monday morning, and if so, how I will get there. I'm concerned about the impact of the asbestos-laden fallout blowing across Brooklyn and Queens, and possibly my neighborhood, my home, my garden.

Like an earthquake, the initial shocks have affected each of us differently, and to different degrees. The aftershocks will continue for months. The effects will ripple out for decades. If I believed there was anyone to listen, let alone, answer, I would pray that each of us gets whatever we need to come through healthy and whole. I would pray that, individually and collectively, we respond to this violence with compassion, wisdom, courage and strength.

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[bit.ly]