Category Personal Reflections

 It was one of those Moments. The daylight waning, the sky a magnificent stew of cirrus wisps both vertical and horizontal to the west and south, stratus puff balls north and east, the trending-toward-full moon already up and peeking from behind the latter.

At that still-point dusky moment transitioning from day to early eve, with the world perfectly poised between its in- and out-breath, the color palette of pale oranges, golds, purples, pinks, magentas and more seemed both fathomless and intoxicating.

And then came the geese.

They were in their classic extended V formation, winging southwest towards their home in the Laguna de Santa Rosa after their usual daytrip to the cozy confines of Spring Lake Park, where I assume they came across plentiful tasty creatures to slide down their impressive gullets. (“Oh, to have a neck like that,” I hear every model and ballerina in the world sighing…)

And mere ...

“In God’s wildness is the hope of the world,”
wrote John Muir while tramping through Alaska on
a long mission to meet that hope on its own terms.
Not to snub the majesty of perfect sunsets,
Muir might hasten to add, but is there a
nobler expression of divine engagement,
of a super-charged world ripe and
overflowing with portent and awe,
than a severely blackened sky followed by
lightning cascading across its canvas?

Or even in suburbia, biking in a hot howling wind,
when one forsakes actually getting anywhere, but
instead peddles slowly, mouth agape at neighborhood
trees gone horizontal under relentless gusts.

One is given to laughter in these moments,
marveling at the audacity of us humans,
all puffed up with self-importance,
Charlie Chaplin characters marching up to
Brawny Nature and proclaiming our freedom
from its transgressions with the bulwarks of
our houses and stores, bricks and concrete.

Is ...

It seems to me our wounded planet is a perfect and inevitable reflection of our own woundedness as human beings. As goes the inner, so goes the outer.

We are flawed and confused, we want conflicting things. In the developed world, we want to drive our fossil-fueled cars to the protest against fossil fuels. Even the most conscientious of us, living by the most modest means, outdo all the kings and queens of history, consuming massive amounts of natural resources compared to our ancestors and the entire third world today.

Yes, we are all part of the problem. All that messiness with Adam and Eve, banished from their perfect garden into a world of conflict, fallenness and self-destruction? That is us—the Christian myth has it exactly right.

Now: Let us all take ourselves a deep breath...

It’s almost impossible not to talk about Paris, isn’t it? The imagery so stark, the evil so dark and unmitigated. We have a sense of our world upended, our way of life and broadly agreed-upon civilizational values suddenly all a-jumble.

It doesn’t add up in any readily, rationally explainable way that people—people with legs and arms and smiles and parents and probably siblings and their own recent memories of enjoying cafe dinners with friends and loved ones—would hatch a plot to come shoot us dead. Us, whom they don’t even know, who are good people, who would be kind and gracious to them if they’d walked in with a mutual friend that night to shake our hand and make pleasant small talk before heading to their table.

But they weren’t going to any table. They had instead made their own private reservation to kill us in hot spurting blood without ever having said a word to us in this life.

We t...

So I woke up yesterday morning and all the data on my IPhone had been erased, wiped clean.

“Hello!” it said as I gazed at the screen after leaving it the previous evening performing what was purported to be a standard update of my operating system.

That “Hello” (in umpteen languages!) had an eerie chill to it, as if if I had just removed a new phone from the box. All my contacts, apps, photos, recent messages, emails, notes and audio memos to myself from my walks—gone, emptied, pffft…

Catastrophe, of course. Or at least a modern, pampered, affluenza-infected version of one.

Hours later, those hours having been spent on tech support with helpful but only half-clued in reps from our better phone companies and smartphone manufacturers, I managed to get all my data back from the cloud, lose it all again when launching iTunes a bit later, then regained about 70 percent of it once more, though all th...