those birds

I’m so glad everyone is safe. And I wonder if those birds were communicating with us, like their canary ancestors in the mines.

shechacha b’olamo!

Some years ago I found Marcia Prager’s gem “The Path of Blessing” which entered into the simple six opening words of Hebrew prayer and called forth an astonishing creative cosmos of breathtaking wonder. And when we feel so deeply the source, we can be amazed and grateful at everything that appears. As a special treat, I appreciated learning what to pray when a person of exquisite presence enters my life, whether for a moment or a journey. Thank you, who brings forth one such as this into the world!

I feel playful around this because I don’t know if I will ever actually meet this one. We live far away. But I’m grateful for the sweet feeling of fresh aliveness. And in the playfulness I got inspired to review old blog entries and remember the simple pleasures of writing about life.

Thirty months ago a wormhole appeared and I moved from small town life (with my usual 3 month respite at sangha house) to perhaps the oldest and densest urban neighborhood on the west coast. While in the wormhole I finished my dissertation and the next day was invited to participate in yet another creative adventure in adult graduate learning and healing. In two days I’ll have a three week break from a busy semester, and after some good family time, I will go walkabout in this place of beauty, the bay and delta region, where I have lived most of my adult life.

Pilgrimage is one of my most satisfying spiritual practices. I have walked back my blood ancestry across the oceans, and visited places of immense power on continents and islands, and it’s just as good to go for a day or two not so far from home, when my intention is to honor and to learn, to pay attention to small things, to pray and write and draw in a journal. The mystery, as Reb Gershon points out, is always in front of us. I want to see and feel that mountain Tamalpais more deeply than ever before; visit neighborhoods in Oakland that I have never seen.

And maybe when I get home I will blog about what I find.

In the beginning again

One of my favorite experiences in israel, in september/october nine years ago, was the celebration of simchat torah in a camp in the negev desert. Forty of us stood in a circle under a large open tent and unrolled an entire torah scroll around the circle, so that the end and the beginning met. This is a major point of the ceremony, that the final words of devarim and the first words of genesis are connected, and so we begin the cycle of the new year reading torah once again (and may it be one level deeper or higher, a spiral.) Then we rolled up the scroll and danced with it under the stars!

Simchat torah was last week, and with the beginning of the new cycle i feel encouraged to begin again the practice of weblogging. Facebook has been my online home this past cycle, and i’m gratified at its breadth, to feel some connection or alignment with 185 friends, nearly all of whom i have met in person. And, as I exchanged with Christy the other day, the blog world enables a depth of written conversation that is also (or more) necessary and gratifying.

So hello to the three or four of you! What riches, challenges, depths may this cycle bring?

orchestrating collaboration; highway home

global weirding and peak everything

I can always count on Steve to forward a cheery observation by James Kunstler:

A catastrophe for Iowa farmers will not be just a catastrophe for Midwestern Americans. In the Iowa floods, we’ll see more evidence of how the problems of weird weather (climate change) combine and ramify the problems associated with peak oil. In this particular case they lead to an inflection point sometime around the 2008 harvest season, which will also be our time of political harvest.
These are not your daddy’s or granddaddy’s floods. These are 500-year floods, events not seen before non-Indian people starting living out on that stretch of the North American prairie.

There is much to blog about, and talk with neighbors, if I can keep my nose out of facebook…

“same-sex ‘I do’s’ heard around the state”

While committed couples now have June weddings in California that they have dreamed about for years, it’s again time to ask why some people justify homophobia because of a desire to be good Christians. What is the Biblical source of this misunderstanding?

For the second time this year, I offer Rabbi Gershon’s response to those who fear that homosexuality is a sin according to the Bible. From his website (see under “Pumbedissa”):

(M)ost Jews today know their scriptures mainly through the out-of-context renditions by the Church or as innocently misrepresented to them by well-meaning Christians… 

The Jewish scriptural prohibition against homosexuality appears in the context of laws concerning cultic rites performed by seven specific nations whose religious worship rites we were instructed not to emulate in our own worship (Leviticus 18:3 and 22; 20:13 and 23; Deuteronomy 23:18). Therefore the wording is: “to lay with a man as with a woman,” something a true homosexual man does not do.

The prohibition is against a horny heterosexual man using another man for sex, which ritually occurred in ancient religious worship among some of those seven nations our ancestors were warned against emulating. To translate that prohibition, therefore, as applying to any homosexual relationship context is to translate it in such a way that it leaves the realm of any divine ordination and enters instead the realm of subjective mortal homophobia.

The ancient rabbis must have had some sense of this problem when they ruled 2100 years ago that any homosexual sex short of anal intercourse was NOT included in the biblical prohibition (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 54a-56a; Sotah 26b; Nidah 13a; see Maimonides’ Perush L’Mishnayot on Sanhedrin 54a). Why did they bother to offer that qualification if it was so clear to them that homosexuality was forbidden?

Also, lesbianism, according to Jewish law, was never prohibited. And though a single third century rabbi attempted to legislate against it, he was overruled by the majority of the sages (Babylonian Talmud, Yevamot 76a). Writing about lesbianism, Maimonides rules: “It is neither a biblical nor a rabbinic prohibition” (Perush L’Mishnayot on Sanhedrin 54a).

thirty days learning journey

chris invited his readers into a thirty day learning journey this month. tho i make the public commitment today, i began the journey over the weekend, and in some ways a few weeks ago when i completed the Personal Compass workbook by Grove consulting here in the city.

i am thinking of maybe 10 friends or acquaintances with whom i’ve felt mutual support and a broad shared vision, and i’m curious what new spark of creative expression might emerge in each of these relationships when i meet with them carrying a box of matches and a large fan. it’s a huge stretch for me (and yet the easiest thing in the world) to extend myself into conversations for possibility and generativity.

the friends are tarra, howie, catherine, michael, maki, shirley, steve, edina, monty, and adriana. i don’t know that i’ll meet with all of them this month, but at least five and over time all. i’m most curious about what i learn about the process of extension, generativity, and manifestation.

tarra and i had a fabulous meeting and committed to reconnect in a week. her dissertation is and will be amazing. she seeks an existing project in social transformation with whom to work for a year.

howie and i are birthing two projects: a conceptual art piece (i bought spray paint on sunday) and an interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary open space event at our alma mater. the latter may involve shirley as well.

catherine and i are going to collaborate around the author evening and perhaps fan a spark around diversity in higher education.

i sent an email to monty promising a quick bit of research toward a generative notion, and completed the research today.

fb

The online energy that was devoted to blogging more often is now more devoted to facebook. I’m fascinated by the possibilities and limitations of the site. every new friend introduces me to new features and some features get old quickly while others open new worlds.

Sharing youtube videos of musical performances has me delving deeper into archived memories (like joni mitchell’s “shadows and light” tour, with pat metheny and jaco pastorius) as well as wonderful and weird gems like terence mckenna’s cosmic rants of symbiosis with the vegetable mind of the planet, and dave chappelle’s hilarious standup set in the basement of a london club, and the entire “big mind” process led by dennis genpo roshi.

I get that high school and college students dump their class email lists into fb and start with a couple hundred friends. this makes it so much easier to stay connected in post-school years if the will remains to do so. for those of us way past school, fb helps us find old friends from different chapters of life; and my friends who work with youth use it to enhance their work (“wow, ms. emden’s here, how cool!”) and i was touched when christy told me her son won’t be her fb friend, him telling her there are some things that are private.

may these sites enhance the connectivity that enables planetary mind and heart.

the end game continued

There are other factors besides US public opinion, and the views and powers of US politicians, to influence the end date of the US occupation. Juan Cole at Salon:

Now that al-Maliki’s campaign has gone so badly, it raises the question of whether there will be a sympathy vote for al-Sadr in October. The Iraqis, a majority of whom say they want a short timetable for U.S. withdrawal, may well have an opportunity to elect provincial governments that, practically speaking, want the same thing, in October. If that happens, it is hard to see how the U.S. presence can last, since the U.S. needs bases in Shiite provinces like Baghdad so as to function.

Using the Moyer model of social movement stages, the “end game process” of this seventh stage of the successful social movement to end the occupation has been slow attrition, rather than rapid policy change (despite the mandate of 2006.) Cheney/Bush seem to have figured out how to make their policy last until they leave office.

We don’t need large public demonstrations to awaken the public to the problem; that already happened. The moral case for withdrawal is the last step. The Iraq and US elections in October and November may represent the final necessary public statements on the matter.

feeling the turn

Easter was very early this year and I feel the quickening, blood rising at this seasonal turn, equinox of spring, sun in Aries. At school’s spring break I find myself enjoying solitude, gathering energy, but not expressing thru movement quite yet. For Passover is that time, the next full moon, and Beltane follows soon after. Baseball is starting but I just looked at the Giants’ schedule for the first time yesterday, and have not turned my body toward the park downtown, nor taken Dave up on a few his season tickets. April is the Masters golf tournament among the blooming magnolias of Georgia. The coming month will be time.

From Rabbi Lerner’s email about Passover:

A note on Passover preparation and observance for those into the ritual practice: many traditional families spend lots of time getting their homes kosher, switching to a new set of dishes, and ridding their house of all chametz (wheat, spelt, oats, barley and things made from chametz like wheat in vinegar, soy, mayonnaise, cookies and crackers, etc.)

Unfortunately, this often occupies so much time that the far more important spiritual preparation is forgotten: getting ourselves ready to liberate ourselves from the self-inflated egos and the stuck places in our lives that make it hard for us to fully commit to the struggle for human liberation that Passover teaches us is possible and necessary. So this year, plan in advance how to give that spiritual preparation a bigger time commitment.

I feel another life change coming.