Monthly Archives February 2015

The more deeply one looks into the life and times of Joan Baez, the less she seems to resemble so many historical figures whose portraits frequently emerge as complicated and contradictory, with tentacles sprawling across light, dark, and the liminal shadows.

Often, the only way to make ultimate sense of many lives is to acknowledge their disparate parts, to admit that they don’t always make sense, that there’s frequently a notable split between people’s inner and outer lives. MLK, JFK, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez, Steven Jobs—all people that Baez admired deeply—were also flawed characters, leaving a trail of greatness but also pain in their wake.

Say what you want about Baez—and many people have—but the salient aspect or characteristic of her 74 years on this earth, it seems to me, is how all of a piece it appears to be, how singular the thread is that weaves it together.

It is as if she emerged from...

The fallen hero Lance Armstrong wrote a book years ago, It’s Not About the Bike, which I read with great satisfaction. The headline above is a take-off on that title and a lead-in to rectifying what appears to have been a misleading impression I may have left with some readers of my most recent post, Sex As Worship.

It seems some people took that post to mean I’d perhaps been having great sex recently as a single person in the wake of a marital separation. So I am here to say, “Oh no no no—it really was about the bike!”

Perhaps I should elaborate.

As I’d stated in the post, my Unitarian Universalist bloggers’ group had decided to take up the subject of sex in observance of Valentine’s Day, as a way of lifting up a topic that is usually verboten in mixed or any kind of company, whether strangers or friends. (Prurient and exploitative media a significant exception.)

Sex: so fundamental to life and love, so...

My Unitarian Universalist bloggers group invited us to write about sex in observance of Valentine’s Day. Recently separated and still tumbling along through that black hole, it didn’t strike me personally as a capital idea. Too much potential for sounding desperate, dark and demented, the kind of thing I’d come across a few years hence and cry out, “My God, what could I have been thinking?”

But then I climbed on my bike.

That’s not a metaphor for some random carnal encounter—it really was my wholly inanimate bike I was climbing on, made of cold aluminum alloys and the like. But it was Friday mid-afternoon, and I had ditched work early as the temp hit close to 80 degrees on Valentine’s Eve, the sky a lovely cobalt blue, the leaves through the shady park paths still musty from last week’s rains. Ah, this world…

I don’t believe in God, but I believe in this bike, this body, this breath.

And ...

Two kinds of people don’t go to church. One is the modern secularist, for whom the whole idea sounds, if not faintly ridiculous, at least outdated, conjuring images of the 19th century, when pioneer women would walk in their bonnets next to the wagon train, ready to help tame the prairie and produce progeny for their men, who would then build nice little country churches in which they could sing hymns of praise and eventually invite a parson to preach the Word.

The second is the “spiritual but not religious” type who regards spiritual matters as a strictly internal, privatized affair, to be accessible and enjoyed on ecstatic walks along the beach, or at a yoga retreat, or during meditation at an altar they’ve set up in a corner of their den, complete with incense and a laughing fat Buddha.

But church? Too much dogma, too many oleaginous pastors trying to separate you from your money.

And then there’s...