HinesSight

Some writing-related snippets

Orblogs: Community of Oregon Weblogs—This is a great service to the Oregon weblogging world. I’ve learned about some interesting weblogs and met, cyberspacely, some equally interesting webloggers. The first few lines of postings pop up here almost as soon as they are posted. I love to troll down the listings and see the wonderfully wide variety of subjects people are writing about.

Child Safety 101—I talked today with a friend, Benny Mares, who wrote this book and told me that this Child Safety 101 website is up. Click on “Book” and you’ll find a nice blurb from Laurel. Benny has had an interesting career as a bodyguard, plus other security-related jobs, and now has turned his attention to keeping kids safer. I recommended Unlimited Publishing to Benny and am happy that his book ended up in such good hands. Marc Klass of the Klass Kids Foundation has praised the book, which is helping Benny’s promotional efforts get off to a good start.

Dan Poynter’s Para Publishing—If you’re a writer or a small/new publisher, here’s an excellent source of information and advice that covers every stage of the writing and publishing process. I recently forked out some $$$ to download Poynter’s 35 page piece on “Book Reviews: From Pre-publication Galleys Through a Continuing Review Program.” A lot of stuff on the Internet is just fluff, but this had lots of substantial practical tips about getting a book reviewed.

Using Poynter’s publication, yesterday I came up with a list of pre-publication reviewers I’d like Unlimited Publishing to send an advance copy or bound galley of “Return to the One” to. It was sort of dismaying to read on most of the reviewer websites (Publisher’s Weekly, Library Journal, The New York Times Book Review, etc.) about how many books they receive, and how few they can review.

Kirkus Reviews, for example, says they get over 200 titles a day. Wow. Their paper recycler must be ecstatic to have that account. But, hey, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And there is something strangely satisfying about the thought of having my book end up in a New York Times Book Review recycling bin. I sent my first book to the New Yorker, knowing full well that it wouldn’t be reviewed, just to be able to have the satisfaction of knowing that the book ended up in the hallowed halls of the New Yorker editorial offices, if only briefly. Well, maybe it just made it to the mail room. But still…I can say that my book was in the New Yorker (building).

On finding a quarter and forgetting a towel

“Find a quarter. Forget a towel. Marvel at the mystery!” OK, it’s not exactly a haiku. Which isn’t surprising, since I can never remember the rules for making a haiku. Still, a haiku is just a pointer. Words gesturing toward what is outside the reach of words. That’s all I’m trying to do, as are we all, aren’t we? Trying to grasp the ungraspable via glimpses of the unseen.

On my way to get a slice of pizza Saturday I saw a man sitting on the bench outside the Court Street Starbucks. He was holding a guitar case. Walking by him, I noticed something shiny on the sidewalk. A quarter! My lucky day. Bending to pick it up a casually-connected thought skitters across my mind. “Street musician…guitar case…quarter on the sidewalk…bad toss…mine or his or nobody’s?” Faint twinge of guilt, nowhere near enough to stop me from putting the quarter in the change pocket of my hip bag.

On my way to the meeting of my meditation group Sunday I realize that I’ve forgotten to put a towel in my exercise bag. No time to drive home. Bummer! I hate to pay the Courthouse Athletic Club for something I can bring myself for free. Sitting in my car at the club parking lot I rummage through my change pocket. Fingering every corner, a handful of coins emerges. “25, 30, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50!” Just enough. On to the front desk. “I forgot a towel; managed to scrape together 50 cents to rent one.”

“No, don’t worry about it. Here’s a towel.” “Well, thank you.” Hmmmmm. That’s interesting. Have only forgotten a towel a handful of times all the years I’ve been a member of the club, but have always had to pay 50 cents for the privilege of not putting my clothes on over a wet body. Oh, well. On to the stairmaster and the weight machines. Sweat…sweat…sweat. All done. Look out the window. Great, still a warm sunny day. Which reminds me: got to mow and edge the lawn before it rains again—otherwise will get back from vacation to find foot-tall grass. No need to shower, will just get all sweaty again after I get home.

“Here’s the towel back. Never used it.” The front desk girl puts it back on the stack of clean white folded towels she had picked it up from a hour or so ago. I walk back to my car feeling that nothing special just happened. Also, that something special had just happened. And what was most special was that I had no idea whether I had just experienced anything special.

Isn’t the greatest miracle the fact that miracles are so miraculous? That life is so well-ordered, the laws of nature so dependable, the exceptions to the rule so difficult to discern. Whatever is going on here, it is spectacularly produced, directed, and casted. The Cosmic Playwright has fashioned a drama that is so seamless you can’t distinguish the actors from the audience, the script from the improvisations, the auditorium from the lobby. And yet…I can’t help but feel that there is more to the role that I’m playing than I’m aware of. And the same is true for each of us.

Finding a quarter that gives me just enough loose change to rent a towel that I end up not having to pay for and which I never really needed. Who can fathom the twists and turns in the plot of this complexly-scripted production called “Life”? I’m still enjoying the new Fox series “Wonderfalls” because it tackles head-on that ever-so-intriguing question.

In the last episode Jaye encounters a nun trying to leave her convent and to avoid the priest aiming to bring her back into the fold. Sitting down at a table with the nun and the priest, one of Jaye’s animal figurine companions speaks to her. “Bring her back to him. Bring her back to him.” Jaye has learned to listen when a figurine speaks. The problem, though, is understanding what she hears. First idea: “Oh, you want me to bring her back to Him—God.” Second idea: “Oh, you want me to bring her back to him—the priest.” Good ideas. Both wrong.

But right and wrong don’t matter in “Wonderfalls.” And neither do they matter in life, I’m beginning to strongly suspect. Whatever hidden mysteries lie under the surface obviousness of life, I’ll bet they don’t come with labels of “right” and “wrong.” These are human inventions, not the way the cosmos has operated for at least the past fourteen billion years (and likely much longer).

By the end of the episode we see the priest reunited with the daughter he never met, fathered before he became a priest. “Ah, bring her back to him,” Jaye muses, as she watches the priest hold the girl in his arms. He is the one who ends up leaving the church, while the nun returns to the convent. Go figure. All’s well that ends well. And I believe all truly does end well, every time. We just don’t have the ability to comprehend the cosmic equations that continuously calculate what is to happen next, and why.

Found quarters. Forgotten towels. Marvel at the mystery.

Most dangerous Greek philosophy author?

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I just finished a grueling three-hour black belt test, and for some reason what pops into my mind is…Could I now be one of the most dangerous authors who write about Greek philosophy? Here’s a hot-off-the-digital-camera photo of Mike, me, and Dave, trying to hold each other up after the testing was over and belts awarded.

It’s been a long, hard, grind. About nine years in traditional Shotokan karate, where I made it up to a brown belt rank, and now over three years in a mixed-style school of Wu Shu Tao, which we translate as “way of the water warrior.” Right now I don’t feel so much like a water warrior as a wrung-out warrior. A hot bath awaits.

I’m too tired to fully appreciate what earning this black belt means. And maybe I never will. My old sensei (instructor) was fond of saying, “Black belt means not a beginner.” How true. That’s just what I said to Master Allen today, as I was about to leave the dojo: “I feel like I’m just beginning to learn martial arts.” He replied, “That’s good. This is the way you should feel.”

Like life itself, the martial arts aren’t something that can be grasped as an object, a technique, a packaged solution. The deeper you go into all this, the more you realize that the only person you really ever are fighting is yourself. We are our own worst enemies, and also our own best friends. The trick, as Master Allen likes to say, is to get out of your own way.

May we all become black belts in doing that, which is much more important than being able to defend yourself against someone else. What we all need to learn is true self-defense—defending ourselves against our own self. Not our true self, but our shadow ego-self that gets between us and who we really are. Relax, accept yourself, trust your instincts. This works as well in everyday life as in the martial arts dojo.

Surreal mattress selecting at Sleep Country

The big moment finally arrived for Laurel yesterday—our Sleep Country 30 day try-the-mattress-and-see-if-you-like-it period ended. Laurel knew that she didn’t like the Spring Air mattress after the second night, but Sleep Country wanted us to live with it for a full month, just to be sure that we weren’t having some sort of slumber time spat that would blow over after a while. Well, it didn’t, so there we were back at the Sleep Country store on (ugh!) Lancaster Drive, sales slip in hand, ready and eager to exercise our mattress exchange rights.

The salesman from whom we had bought the mattress wasn’t hugely thrilled to see us. The store was empty, except for Laurel and me, and he said that he needed to get back to work setting up seven mattress sets that had to be in place before the regional manager arrived. So we were pretty much left to ourselves. Just Laurel, me, dozens of mattresses lined up in tidy rows, and a distracted salesman who clearly cared more about pleasing his regional manager than two dissatisfied customers.

Not that he could have helped us much anyway. Selecting a new mattress isn’t like choosing a TV, or evaluating a car. For one thing, mattresses don’t do anything. They simply sit there, mattressing. Plus, you can’t check out the input and output connections, or look under the hood, of a mattress. All the important innards are hidden under coverings that are sewn as tight as, well, as a mattress.

That leaves only one thing to do: lie down. And, for Laurel at least, not just in one position, but in every sleeping position she uses throughout the night. On back, on left side, on right side. Three positions, many mattresses, lots of combinations to evaluate. Fortunately, we had plenty of time, and the salesman was only too happy to leave us alone. It was a surreal Zen shopping experience. Very little movement. Much inward introspection. Man and woman, communing silently with mattresses, listening for that small inner voice that whispers, “I am the one you will be happy with; take me home.”

It took quite a while for Laurel to hear that voice. I can sleep on just about anything, with the possible exception of a bed of nails, so I kept saying, “It’s your decision; you’re the one with a bad back.” However I did provide some persuasive male logic at a point in our Sleep Country shopping when I began to visualize us getting to know the regional manager more intimately than I had any desire to know him, and, worse, becoming expert in the procedures for locking up the store at closing time in about five hours.

“It would be easier to make a too-firm mattress softer, as opposed to making a too-soft mattress firmer,” I observed, immediately feeling that this bedroom-related conversation was beginning to tread too closely to a middle-aged man’s self-esteem danger zone. Laurel recognized the deep wisdom of this comment, which, thankfully, got us up off the mattresses and over to the cash register. We ended up paying just a little bit more, since once again we were talked into buying some stain-resistant coating (got to plan ahead for senile night-time accidents, I guess) that supposedly also is an impermeable barrier to mites (yeah, sure). So next Monday we adopt a cute new Sealy Posturepedic and get rid of that unlikable Spring Air. I’ll let you know how the three of us end up getting along.

“Return to the One” revealed

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Here’s the cyberspace unveiling of the cover of my soon-to-be-published book, “Return to the One—Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.” This afternoon I sent the laboriously-compiled index (see posting below) off to the book designer, Charles King, which means that I’m done! Done with the book, that is. Soon come the practicalities of helping to sell and publicize the book. Which I guess I’ve already started doing in this low-key fashion.

You can be sure that I’ll let HinesSight readers know, via the weblogging equivalent of a trumpet chorus, when the book is published and possible to be purchased (you’ll get a wealth of spiritual inspiration and Greek philosophy for $16.99).

I like the cover. Charles of Cox-King Multimedia did a fine job. About all I told Charles was that I wanted a modern feel for the cover, rather than the Classic Greek Look favored by most scholars who write about Greek philosophy, because I wrote this book in an informal, popular style, with a healthy dose of 21st century scientific facts and attitude mixed in with Plotinus’s ageless mystic wisdom.

Charles copy-edited the manuscript, so he has a good understanding of Plotinus’s teachings. The One, or “God” if you like, is far beyond human the bounds of human reason, utterly ineffable, without any qualities that we can begin to comprehend. So I like how Charles reflects some central elements of Plotinus’s philosophy on the cover.

The One is the source from which the cosmos emanates, the light from which all lesser lights draw their radiance. This includes the light of each person’s consciousness, which we may call “soul.” Plotinus’s message can be summarized simply: self is the soul is spirit is the source, the One. To know God is to know our true self. So returning to the One also is returning to our own self.

I have to admit that I like how Charles made the circular light “rays” line up directly from the central shining radiance to the corner of my photo. Sounds a bit egotistical, but Plotinus says that everyone, me, you, and everybody else, has a direct connection with the One. The trick is finding it, and tracing it back to our source.
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Oh, the joys of writing

I’ve just finished the index for my book about the Greek philosopher Plotinus: “Return to the One—Plotinus’s Guide to God-Realization.” There are various ways to prepare an index. The approach I used must be the hardest on the back and the knees, but fortunately I don’t have any back/knee problems—until now, at least. I scattered 18 pages with index entries in a semi-circle around me on the floor. Then I leaned over and jotted down the page number(s) that had entries for various subjects, working from the galleys that the book designer had sent me.

It took me three days, much stretching to get the kinks out, and many cups of coffee to get the cobwebs out. The next time you casually consult an index, murmur a little “thank you” to the indexer, one of those unsung heroes who do boring jobs that make life easier for other people, but who nobody ever thinks about.

Given the rather noxious authorial task I had to endure today, this wasn’t the ideal moment for a friend to send me a link to a Salon article called “The Confessions of a Semi-Successful Author.” Anonymously written by one Jane Austen Doe (for obvious reasons), the piece starts out on just the note I wanted to hear, what with my back so sore and my knees so achy: “I’ve published several books, won adoring reviews, and even sold a few copies. But I’ve made almost no money and had my heart broken. Here’s everything you don’t want to know about how publishing really works.”

Well, the article confirmed for me the wisdom of my setting up a publishing company, Adrasteia Publishing, with which I am co-publishing “Return to the One” with Unlimited Publishing. Sure, it’s great if a writer can find a big-time publisher willing to pay him or her big-time advances/royalties, and devote big-time resources to big-time promotion/publicity efforts. But most writers, like Jane Doe, are medium-time (or midlist) at best, and often farther down the publishing food chain than that.

My first book sold 10,000 copies. My second book, admittedly published non-commercially in India and sold dirt-cheap, has sold at least 25,000 copies, maybe more. So if I stretch things a bit, this sort of makes me midlist, at least in my own mind (where it counts). But I had a frustrating experience trying to find a publisher for “Return to the One,” just as Jane Doe did for her various books—and she is much better known and better reviewed than I am.

So, in addition to thanking indexers, the next time you read a midlist book (written, that is, by a good but little-known writer) thank the author—who probably is making much less than minimum wage for all the months and years he or she put into that labor of love (I am referring, of course, to the minimum wage in China, not the United States).

I get myself thinking (and also, not-thinking)

This morning I kept hearing echoes of what I wrote in yesterday’s posting, “One thing the world desperately needs now is less religion and more spirituality.” I’m part of the world, so I’m talking about me. Before my habitual morning meditation-time I walked to a bookcase, searching for some spiritual inspiration.

My eyes scanned the shelves holding the many books I’ve accumulated over the past thirty-five years or so: I’ve got several feet of Zen Buddhism, about the same of Rumi/Sufism, a yard of Sant Mat teachings in various guises, lesser but still substantial shelf space for mystical Christianity, Judaism, and Taoism, gobs of hard-to-classify New Agey titles, some belonging to me, others brought into our household by Laurel.

After thumbing through a few well-thumbed books, a small still inward voice spoke: “You won’t find what you’re looking for here.” Yes. I already knew that. I just had to hear myself say it. I went back into my meditation chamber, an unused tiled shower that I’ve modified for consciousness cleansing, and picked up Brian Greene’s “The Fabric of the Cosmos.” (see "Books I Like" to the left) I wanted facts, not supposition; singular scientific truth, not multiple metaphysical theories.

Religions are to God as physics departments are to the laws of nature. Anyone who believes that the means of knowing is equivalent to the knowledge being sought is mistaking the road for the destination. Just as it is said that all roads used to lead to Rome, maybe all religions lead to God—if you travel far enough on them. But Rome isn’t the road, and God isn’t any particular religion. I’ll bet my soul on that.

We live in a fourteen billion year-old universe. Every religion, every spiritual path, every philosophy, is just a few thousand years old, at most. What was the word of God before there was human language? What was the experience of God before there was human experience? Physics knows that the laws of nature preceded, and are independent of, what this peculiar species Homo sapiens understands of those laws. Similarly, whatever religions can tell us about God is far removed from the creative power that led to the evolution of religiosity.

The Hubble space telescope is able to look far back into time, ever closer to the moment of the big bang (at least it will for a few more years, since the idiotic Bush administration has cut funding for the greatest scientific instrument ever made). No earth can be found there. No people. No human cognition. No concepts. Just reality, pure and simple.

Many mystics much wiser than myself say that our consciousness is capable of doing much the same thing: look back, or within, and have a vision of what lies far beyond the time and space with which we are familiar now. That’s what I try to do in my meditation every day, with decidedly mixed-success. However, the attempts are always interesting, the most fascinating part of my day. Maybe I will never reach the land of Ultimate Reality. But the lure of what lies beyond the horizon of my everyday awareness is so strong, I don’t see myself ever giving up on the search for that inner Shangri-la.

The Triplets of Belleville

Wow. Last night we saw “The Triplets of Belleville” at Salem’s one and only “art house,” Salem Cinema—an Italian soda/truffle oasis in the Coke/popcorn desert of our local movie-going options. I loved the song from this animated movie that was nominated for an Oscar, but the snippet from “The Triplets of Belleville” that was shown at the Academy Awards doesn’t begin to do justice to the amazing originality of this artistic creation.

As Ebert notes in the linked review above, this is a movie that you can’t neatly categorize in the usual “X meets Y” fashion, as in horror flick meets teen comedy, or whatever. No, I kept saying to myself, “I’ve never seen anything like this, and I never will again. How could a human mind create this story and these images? And how could I get such a mind?”

Back in college I wrote a major term paper on Arthur Koestler’s classic book, “The Act of Creation.” His central thesis, inasmuch as I can remember it, is that creativity is a melding of seemingly disparate dimensions, discovering heretofore hidden connections between subjects (whether of material, mental, or spiritual nature) that normally are considered separate and distinct. True enough, yet this doesn’t take us beyond the “X meets Y” creative act. Who came up with X, with Y? What is the ultimate source from which creativity springs?

It isn’t hard to take this and that, and make something new from them. We applaud artists, writers, politicians, actors, architects, businesspeople, athletes, everyone who makes us say, “That’s really creative.” But I give a standing ovation to those who make me say, “That’s unbelievable.” Unbelievable, because it doesn’t seem to have been fashioned from anything familiar. It is utterly fresh, utterly original, utterly unique, utterly one of a kind.

And this is what “The Triplets of Belleville” made me say. Yes, there is a familiar world in this movie. The Tour de France. Mafia. Controlling mothers. Performers beyond their prime. Overweight dogs whose purpose in life is to bark at passing trains. However, the eyes through which we see this world, and the details of the world itself, take us into a place we’ve never been—a great gift for a mere $8.

It might seem strange that I was so inspired by a movie laced with such crude humor—catching frogs with explosives, a mother who gives her son a truly weird massage after bicycling training, hugely fat women with male hangers-on literally hanging from their butt.

Yet, in addition to the pure entertainment value of “The Triplets of Belleville” I was entranced by the notion that this movie sprang from a human mind closely akin to my own in process and structure, if not in content and experience. This mind of the creator of “The Triplets of Belleville” was able to tap into a creative source that, I’m confident, is accessible to all of us. We just need to learn how to find it, the key to which may very well be unlearning what has caused us to forget it.

Thank heavens: there is a God!

News item I just noticed…“'Dawn of the Dead' debuts with $27.3 million, dethroning 'Passion'” And, no, I haven’t seen “The Passion of the Christ.” My distaste for the movie is based on utterly sound philosophical grounds, discussed previously in my “Plotinus and the Passion of the Christ” posting. Since my book about Plotinus, a marvelous 3rd century Greek mystic philosopher, is about to be published, you will find me shamelessly using every opportunity to work, and rework, Plotinus into this weblog. My (probably vain) hope is that these humble meme-seeds somehow will cause interest in Plotinus’s admirably non-religious approach to spirituality to propagate through cyberspace. One thing the world desperately needs now is less religion and more spirituality.

Paris Hilton and I become more intimate

A belated public thank you to Isaac (I’ve already thanked him via an email) for giving me some genealogy education—and, most importantly, for increasing the intimacy between me and Paris Hilton. As noted in a comment on a posting a while back, Isaac assures me that Paris and I are second cousins, not third cousins.

Where I had gotten confused—and you have to admit that this genealogy stuff is indeed confusing—is that Conrad Hilton’s parents are my great-grandparents, whereas they are Paris Hilton’s great-great-grandparents. So I was looking at things from Paris’ perspective, kind of a scary thought, rather than my own.

But Isaac says that a relationship between two people is ruled, so to speak, by the more senior person. Thus, if I find that Paris is my second cousin, while she finds that I am her third cousin, the perspective of the 55 year old philosophically-inclined writer takes precedence over that of the beautiful twenty-something party girl/actress/model. As it should, of course.

However, after watching a VH1 program about Paris and Nicky earlier in the week while I was on a stairmaster at our exercise club, I started to see Paris in a fresh light. Her shameless self-promotion and seemingly non-stop partying actually can be viewed as the implementation of a savvy business plan.

She is bringing in big bucks through sales of her clothing and accessory line, plus her acting and modeling career. A music CD also is in the works, and who knows what else. Paris has had much more than her fifteen minutes of fame, which takes skill and smarts to pull off. I’m beginning to think there is quite a bit more to Paris than meets the eye (though that alone certainly is pleasant enough to observe).

“Wonderfalls” is wonderful

Here’s a Friday evening TV watching tip: the second episode of “Wonderfalls” on Fox. I wasn’t expecting much last night. But Laurel had noticed that the pilot episode was being repeated, and the show got a positive mention in the newspaper’s television section yesterday. Both of us liked it a lot. Original, quirky, honest, philosophical. A recurring theme in the first episode was “embrace your destiny.” And also, “what is real?”

Can animal figurines talk? Are you crazy if you can hear them? Are you crazy if you can’t hear them? Why do things happen the way they do? Is it better to be (1) certifiably sane, yet blind to the (usually) hidden connections between everyone and everything, or (2) walking on the edge of Wacko, yet able to perceive what is unseen to others?

At the end of our first “Wonderfalls,” as I was saying how much I liked it, Laurel observed, “But it is so negative, and you’re such a positive person.” “True,” I replied. “However, I like negativity with depth more than shallow positivity.”

Jaye, the twenty-something main character, is a philosophy major who finds herself working in a Niagara Falls gift shop after graduating from college. She looks at life at it is, which can be encapsulated in the bumper sticker slogan, “shit happens.” But why does it happen? And is it really shit, or is something else happening? Great questions. So far, a great TV series. We’ll see if Fox screws it up, or, as so often happens, cancels it.

Newspaper likes Laurel more than me

Yes, yesterday the Salem Statesman-Journal published a letter to the editor from Laurel about land use issues, putting it smack dab in the middle of the main Opinion page, so the signature “Laurel Hines” leapt out at you. By contrast, ten days ago my own letter about gay marriage was relegated to the bottom of the second Opinion page. Oh, well. I get to use this weblog to trumpet my own horn, so it is fair that the newspaper gave a more prominent position to Laurel.

All this recent letter-writing got me to thinking about how we’ve become more active activists, a.k.a. rabble-rousers, over the past few years. Instead of sitting around quietly incensed about a problem, now we often actually try to do something about it. Don’t know why. Maybe becoming middle-aged is making us realize that we don’t have a lot of time left to make a difference.

On the whole, we’re happy being gadflies. But when you buzz around, reminding people about problems that they would just as soon ignore or sweep under the rug, you have to expect that you will get swatted at. Those who yell, “the emperor has no clothes!,” shouldn’t expect an embossed invitation to dine at the royal court. But we’d rather eat dry bread with Plato than cake with sycophants: Plato said, “But a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and therefore I will speak out.”

Truth. What a great word. So hard to define, so easy to recognize. In our activist world, it seems transparently true that killing coyotes doesn’t effectively solve supposed coyote problems, that over-development threatens groundwater, that “sustainability” means much more than purely technical environmental fixes. Indeed, we really don’t hear cogent arguments from our neighbors in Spring Lake Estates, or Marion County Planning Commission members, or investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates, who disagree with us on these issues.

Instead, they are more disturbed that we’re speaking out and creating waves, upsetting the tidy calm pool of everything-is-fine-just-as-I-think-it-is in which they currently are floating. Activists like us stir up the pot. We believe that’s a good thing. It keeps life fresher, preventing intellectual and ethical spoilage from setting in. So it surprises us when someone returns a letter unopened, fails to respond to an email message or phone call, or replies to a question at a meeting with stony silence.

Silence, of course, speaks loudly. It is the refuge of those who don’t want to face the truth of what they are being told. But those who rely on such defenses end up imprisoned behind barriers of their own making. Stony silence is a lifeless tomb. So long as we are alive, why not interact in a lively fashion with our fellow humans?—both those who agree with us and, even more importantly, those who do not. I’m reminded of this anecdote.

I used to work with Ralph Crawshaw, a Portland psychiatrist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. Ralph was (I hope “is,” but I haven't seen him in years) an amazing guy—a true visionary and social change agent.

One day I took a woman to meet Ralph. She had recently moved to Oregon from New York City, and was active in health policy affairs, like Ralph and I were. We went into his office and they began by exchanging pleasantries, noting that they had a common love of New York. Then, almost immediately, they got into a heated discussion about various health care topics. I watched from my chair with increasing alarm, wondering what the heck I had done, getting Ralph and this woman together.

They called each other names. They insulted each other’s knowledge of the health system. They interrupted each other and tried to talk over each other. This nightmare of an argument went on for about half an hour. Then they wound down, and settled back into their seats. “Thank you,” Ralph said. “That was a great conversation. I haven't had a talk like that since I left New York city. People in Oregon don't know how to talk with each other.” The woman smiled. She had enjoyed herself too.

It's true. We Oregonians tend to avoid frank conversations. We talk around problems, rather than facing them head on. There’s a lot not to like about New York, but we could benefit a lot by embracing how New Yorkers talk.

14th anniversary--take that, Dr. Laura!

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It's our 14th anniversary today. We had the smarts to get married on St. Patrick's Day in 1990, which means that as soon as I start seeing mention of green beer in the newspaper or on TV a small still voice in my head starts speaking... “Anniversary, anniversary, anniversary.”

The photo above shows two people who had known each other for about eight months before they got married. And I proposed to Laurel after only about three or four months. The exact date is lost to my memory, probably in part for psychic protection reasons, because the proposal was embarrassingly unromantic and incoherent, being more a spontaneous outflowing than a carefully-planned event. About all I remember now is that when I was through speaking what I thought was a proposal to Laurel she looked at me and said, “Did you just propose to me? I'm not sure.” Poor girl. After forty years of being single, she deserved better.

Back in 1990 I listened now and then to Dr. Laura Schlesinger on the radio, she who would “solve” complex personal problems phoned in by desperate listeners with a few glib, preachy commandments. One of her oft-heard Relationship Tenets was that no one, absolutely no one, should commit to a serious relationship, not to speak of getting married, until some ridiculously long time had passed after a divorce—a year, I believe, maybe more. The notion seemed to be that a person can't think straight, or trust their feelings, until some sort of lengthy psychic cleansing/healing process has taken place, which can't be rushed.

When I met Laurel in July 1990, some five months after my separation and subsequent divorce from my first wife, Sue, I was thrilled to learn that she had a master's degree in social work, and was a counselor for an educational service district. I too had an MSW! Never really used, admittedly, because somehow it took me two years in a school of social work to realize that I didn't like talking to people about their problems. But still, I had the degree, and she had hers. So between us we had the credentials to take Dr. Laura's advice and stuff it where it belongs—underneath all the other pseudo-scientific claptrap that purports to provide guidance about how people need to live their lives.

There are no rules in love. Laurel and I have proved that. Almost as soon as I met Laurel I knew that she was the woman I had been wanting all my life. And she still is, fourteen and a half years later. How long does it take to recognize the One? No time at all. That's why she, he, or it is the One. Everyone or everything else is a pale imitation, shadows without much substance.

So here's my advice: if you happen to be reading this, and you're confused about where to go with a personal relationship, don't listen to supposed experts. Well, you can listen to them, just as you can listen to friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers you meet on the street. But don't trust them. Listen to your heart (note: the heart is above the sex organs, and speaks to you in a different language, that of love, not lust). You might make a mistake, but at least it will be your mistake, not someone else's. If you're going to be a fool in love, be your own fool, not Dr. Laura's fool, or some counselor's fool.

Happy St. Patrick's Day. Have a green beer and toast rushing recklessly into marriage for us. We'll feel you as we lift our cranberry juice-filled glasses to each other tonight before we dig into our tofu-turkey dinner.

Seriously seeking special setting

Before I leave my Sustainable Fairview subject for a while (see posting below), I want to share some P.S.’s. Yesterday I heard from a fellow SFA investor who sympathized with my frustrations, but said that he still hoped to live at Fairview one day and form a community with like-minded people. Well, that’s great. I hope that his dream comes true.

However, special settings that attract special people require a special mindset for their creation. The soul of Walt Disney still is felt in Disneyland. The soul of John Bogle still is felt in Vanguard. The soul of Conrad Hilton still is felt in Hilton hotels. By contrast, conventional people create conventional settings that attract other conventional people. When I say “conventional” I don’t mean untalented or unsuccessful. I mean something that is hard to put into words, but is apparent to anyone who visits a special place.

In downtown Salem, less than a block separates a Starbucks from the Coffee House café. The former is conventional; the latter is special. I don’t go to Starbucks unless I’m dying for a latte and there are no other options. I love to go to the Coffee House café and sit for an hour talking with friends, enjoying the unconventional atmosphere.

Sustainable Fairview Associates had an opportunity to create a world-class sustainable community here in Salem that would have been a truly special place. It would have drawn people from all over the country, and even the world, who wanted to live and work at Fairview. Some places people seek out. Other places—Aspen, Sedona, Carmel, Ashland—draw people like a magnet. And they are interesting people, unconventional people, special people. Whenever we go to visit friends in Ashland I realize that there are more artistic and creative souls in this southern Oregon home of the Shakespeare festival than there are in Salem, which has five times more people.

So, some sort of sustainable community probably will evolve at Fairview. But likely it will be a local or regional draw for potential residents and businesses, as evidenced by the early concern of SFA to have a marketing study conducted that analyzed the demand for housing in the Salem area. This was so short-sighted and uncreative, I couldn’t believe it. To start off by limiting your vision to a local market is like Walt Disney beginning by thinking, “What kind of an amusement park will attract people from Los Angeles?”

Thinking big, thinking “outside the box,” thinking creatively—the lack of such thinking is what frustrates Laurel and me as investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates. If we had wanted to invest in something conventional we would have left our money in index mutual funds. Instead, we were seriously seeking to help create a special setting that both we and the world could enjoy. Maybe it still will come to be. I doubt it, unless some special people with a special vision take over the management of SFA, and create a development that matches their sensibilities.

Sustainable Fairview Associates—a cautionary tale

Tonight, once again, I’m going to enjoy not being at a meeting of the investors in Sustainable Fairview Associates (SFA), the group that is trying to convert 275 acres in Salem into a sustainable, aka “Green,” development. Back in January I wrote about why I don’t like to attend the SFA meetings. I just re-read that posting, and was pleased to see that I predicted Howard Dean’s demise and John Kerry’s/John Edward’s rise on the basis of a single criterion: With whom would I like to remain in a room?

Last Saturday, at noon, a bunch of guys and me hung around after our martial arts class, shooting the breeze, enjoying each other’s company. We didn’t want to leave the room (or dojo). Last Saturday, in the evening, a bunch of friends and Laurel and me spent three enjoyable hours at our monthly Salon discussion group, enjoying each other’s company. So what is it that makes me, or anyone else, gravitate toward this collection of fellow human beings, and be propelled away from another collection? Why do we want to linger here, and can’t wait to escape from there?

I don’t have the answer to these questions. If I did, I’d bottle the essence of here and make jillions of dollars (maybe more!) selling it to resorts, supermarkets, restaurants, hotels, coffee houses, amusement parks, political parties, matchmaking programs, and anybody else—which means almost everybody—who is concerned with bringing people into their orbit and keeping them pleasantly occupied there.

But here’s my best guess, based on my own experience: I enjoy places that let me be myself, and also let me commune with other people who are similarly being themselves. If I just wanted to be in touch with me I’d sit at home alone. Yet going out and losing touch with who I really am is unappealing, as is communing with others who keep themselves hidden behind a façade of fakeness.

Thoreau puts it so well: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. I sat at a table where were rich food and wine in abundance and obsequious attendance, but sincerity and truth were not; and I went away hungry from the inhospitable board.” What truly sustains us? Not water, not air, not food, not shelter. These are all for the body, not the “us” that is our soul, spirit, consciousness, original nature, true self—whatever you want to call it.

A so-called “sustainable development” that doesn’t sustain this part of us, the most important part of us, the part of us that finds meaning in life beyond bare existence, it isn’t sustainable at all. Man (and woman) does not live by solar collectors, living system wastewater treatment, permeable roads, and fuel cells alone. A life absent genuine community—where I can commune both with myself and with my fellow human beings—is a life absent what makes life worth living.

Several years ago, when I was still enthusiastic about what SFA could accomplish with the Sustainable Fairview property, I got to know Christopher Alexander, a noted architect and author of a series of books about The Nature of Order (plus other books about his influential “pattern language” approach to design). I haven’t read any of Chris’s books, but I have had the pleasure of talking with him in person and on the phone, and of exchanging many emails with him.

What Christopher Alexander understands, and what the management and most investors in SFA don’t, is that people yearn for so much more than wood, glass, bricks, mortar, and such in the so-called “built environment,” no matter how elegantly and skillfully these materials are designed and assembled. We are feeling beings. We yearn to experience real life in a real community of real human beings.

Every once in a while I go to Chris’s website and click on a marvelous series of pages he and his staff designed that show how Sustainable Fairview could be developed in a genuinely sustainable fashion—one that would blow the world away, that would be a cutting-edge model of how all three legs of sustainability, environmental, economic, social, could support the development of a community that would be a place where people loved to live, work, and play. Right now SFA would have to be beating potential buyers off with a stick if we had listened to Christopher Alexander’s advice—which I, Russ and Delana Beaton, and other members of SFA echoed and tried to amplify, but with no success.

I’m frustrated. In every person’s life there are only a few opportunities to be part of something that truly can make a difference. This world, this country, this state, this town, on every level, there are so many differences that need making. After ten thousand years of human “civilization” (using that term loosely, as it should be) we haven’t yet learned how to live harmoniously with nature, with each other, or even with ourselves. Once I was tremendously excited about the prospect of Sustainable Fairview being a laboratory where a real experiment in sustainable living could take place.

However, I don’t see this happening now. For me, at least, the soul has departed the body of the project—assuming it ever was present. SFA has a zoning code, developer agreements, loads of bank debt, a partial master plan, a land use appeal law suit, and unhappy investors. In short, Sustainable Fairview is right on track to becoming a traditional mixed-use development, with an overlay of green building approaches. Whoopee.

Well, a friend is fond of saying, “No one’s life is every completely wasted. You can always serve as a horrible example to others.” I don’t see Sustainable Fairview Associates as being “horrible,” but certainly there is much to learn from this cautionary tale of great potential being frittered away through lack of attention to the spirit that invests life with more than mechanical existence. Absent that spirit, that zest, that passion, that feeling of community, a place is just a place, not somewhere you wish you could stay forever.

Larry David would be proud of me

Tonight is this season’s last episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” a must-see for Laurel and me ever since a friend, Randy, recommended this HBO show to us. Randy, quite reasonably, told me once that he is Larry David, personality-wise. However, I, starting from a lower rung on the in-your-face-take-me-as-I-am ladder, am only now—after several seasons—finally starting to feel that I am becoming Larry David.

One could argue, of course, whether this is a good thing. If you don’t watch “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” or if your home is a cultural HBO wasteland bereft of this show, the “Sopranos,” and “Six Feet Under” (how sad I feel for you), I wish I could encapsulate the persona of Larry David, who plays Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” But I can’t. Larry David is an entirely original character, which helps explain why I and so many others find him so appealing. Also appalling. Appealing and appalling, maybe that’s the best way to describe him.

I don’t consciously try to emulate Larry David, but perhaps watching so many episodes of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is having some kind of subliminal effect on me, amplifying my inherent Larry David tendencies. Last night we had dinner at a Thai restaurant in Silverton with four friends. So it was two vegetarians, Laurel and me, sitting down to dine with four meat-eaters.

Picking up our menus, my vegetarian radar immediately started picking up some nascent danger signals in the casual pre-ordering conversation. “How about if we go family style? Everybody pick a dish and we’ll share.” “Great, that’s a good idea.” “I’m thinking of this beef curry.” “Noodles and chicken, that sounds good.” My future started flashing before me, and it wasn’t pretty, given how hungry I was. Laurel and I were going to order two vegetarian dishes. The other four people would order four meat dishes. So we would get to eat part of two dishes, and everyone else would get to eat part of six dishes.

The Larry David side of Brian began talking, and even worse, out loud, along the lines of, “OK, we vegetarians can go along with family style, just so long as the rest of the family keeps their meat-eating hands out of our tofu dishes. That’s fine, order what you want, dead cows, dead chickens, whatever you want. We’ll make do. I don’t eat eggs, but maybe I can scrape off the proto-chickens from a few lettuce leaves in the egg salad.” And so on in that vein.

After that I pretty much lost track of what people were ordering, since it was by number, not by name. Amazingly, my Larry David schtick paid off. When the waiter brought all the Thai dishes to our table, every single bowl was vegetarian-friendly. A tofu-bonanza, with not a piece of beef, chicken, or fish in sight. I ate like a (vegetarian) pig. I didn’t feel guilty. Am I a bad person? Is Larry David? These are profound questions, not easily answered in a Sunday evening posting, especially since a pre-dinner nap is calling me.

My short answer is that honesty combined with humor is almost always a good thing. With this caveat: those who give must be prepared to get. If I say what I feel—“hey, family style eating screws the vegetarian minority!”—then I have to be prepared to feel the pricks of some psychological skewers from the carnivores. There is nothing worse than a joker who can’t take a joke.

And even when I’m in my Larry David tell-it-like-you-see-it frame of mind, I try to keep a portion of my psyche attuned to how I’m coming across to others—something Larry David doesn’t do on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” very often, which is why the show is so funny (you can see the train wreck coming, but the engineer has the throttle wide open).

Bottom line: given a choice between spending an evening exchanging superficial pleasantries with shallow acquaintances and sharing edgy honesties with deep friends, I’ll take the latter. Hey, this is the truth: Vegetarian friends concerned with preventing karmic consequences don’t let carnivorous friends eat meat—at least, when it is served family style and everyone is splitting the check.

Plumbing the depths of groundwater

Laurel’s environmental activism was instrumental in placing two stories about Marion county groundwater problems on the front page of the Statesman-Journal yesterday and today. Laurel talked a lot with the reporter who wrote both stories, the first being “Problems with wells run deep in the mid-Valley” and the second, “Groundwater-zone ruling not far away.”

Laurel stimulated the Statesman-Journal’s interest in this issue by mailing the newspaper a copy of a critical letter she had sent to the Marion County Planning Commission, in which she berated the Commission for ignoring the advice of professional land use planners and hydrologists who recognize that the county ordinance that protects areas at risk of groundwater depletion (like where we live) needs to be strengthened.

One county. One environmental problem. This may not seem like a big deal. And in a sense, it isn’t. But in another sense, it is. Because when you plumb the depths of this local groundwater protection issue, you find that here in our Marion county microcosm are all the macrocosm dynamics of state, national, and global environmental problems.

On the most basic level it comes down to balancing private and public interests. Denny and Laurie Nielsen, the people who wanted to partition their lot here in Spring Lake Estates—and who we successfully stopped from doing so by appealing an initial approval of their application to the county—have every right to pursue their private financial interest. But they don’t have a right to make money in a manner that harms the broader public interest of the people who already live around the lot they wanted to partition into two lots.

With the help of our hydrologists, Malia and Greg Kupillas, we proved that allowing the Nielsens to put another house (and well) on their property likely would over-tax an already depleted groundwater aquifer. In this case, the public interest won out, as it should. But our observations of the Marion County Board of Commissioners and the Planning Commission make plain that some members on each board don’t understand that private property rights have to be balanced against the rights of the overall public.

This isn’t an abstraction. If you dig a well that causes my well to go dry, we have a problem. Yet at Board of Commissioners and Planning Commission meetings Laurel and I hear talk about people like the Nielsens being “victimized” when they can’t do just what they want with their property—regardless of how it harms the environment and other landowners. It’s hard to believe that people still can hold such attitudes, after all the evidence that our one and only planet Earth is suffering mightily from all the destructive waste we pour into it, and all the irreplaceable resources we wastefully suck out of it.

A big reason why so little progress is made in solving these problems is that the environmental chicken house ends up being guarded by the self-interest foxes. This was one of the points in Laurel’s letter that went to the Statesman-Journal. Why is a realtor, George Grabenhorst, chairman of the Marion County Planning Commission? Why is a well-driller, Gary Monders, another member of the Commission?

By what stretch of the imagination are these guys qualified to be making decisions about protecting groundwater? Realtors want more houses built and sold. Well-drillers want more wells dug and deepened. Why isn’t the Planning Commission made up of people who have a balanced view, who understand that protecting natural resources has to go hand-in-hand with developing private property?

Laurel is still asking these questions, which echo those being asked of decision-makers on state and national levels. She, along with me, started our protect-the-groundwater crusade with a naïve belief that government was transparent, fair, and dedicated to enhancing the broad public interest. But the more we come to learn of how environmental policies are made, the more we realize that all too often those with money, influence, and political power do their best to make decisions to feather their own nest, and leave the rest of us with the droppings.

The Housekeeper

When Laurel glanced at the cover of the DVD movie, “The Housekeeper,” that I brought home recently she said, “I can see why you want to watch this.” I was offended. True, the cover shows a beautiful curvaceous young woman, wearing every man’s fantasy of a “cleaning uniform,” posed provocatively on her side, smiling sensually. But the reason I chose this French sub-titled movie went far beyond the cover image.

All the way to the back cover, which summarized the plot. The aforementioned housekeeper, Laura, is hired by a balding man in his 50s, Jacques, who has separated from his wife and is having a lot of trouble keeping his apartment clean. The twenty-something Laura naturally falls in love with the middle-aged Jacques, a plot development that made perfect sense to me and slotted neatly into my own housekeeper fantasies.

And fantasies they will remain, so long as our own housecleaner is Jim, a hefty Mr. Clean look-alike who used to practice Tae Kwon Do and currently is an avid bow-hunter and dirt-bike racer. Jim is a terrific, highly dependable housecleaner, and if you have a problem with a macho guy doing that sort of work, I would recommend that you keep your opinion to yourself, around Jim at least (though normally gentle, he also has a wild side).

Laurel and I have used Jim for many years, ever since Laurel fired me from my “job” as a Hines household cleaner. My cleaning technique centered around Spiffits, disposable cloths optimized for every cleaning need in the house. There was a bathroom Spiffit, a kitchen Spiffit, a dusting Spiffit, and perhaps other Spiffits I have forgotten. Armed with my boxes of Spiffits, I was able to spiffily clean our house in fifteen minutes. However, after Laurel and I got married we discovered that her definition of “spiffily” was far removed from mine. So I was fired and Jim was hired.

Since Jim is at the opposite end of the yin-yang housecleaning spectrum from Laura, it was a pleasure to pop in the DVD, sit back, let the subtitles and images flow into my mind, and imagine myself single, mid-50ish (that part was easy), and the employer of a sexy young housekeeper who wears short skirts and low-cut tops while she cleans (Jim often wears shorts and tanktops, but believe me, the effect is quite different).

My reveries frequently were interrupted, though, with Laurel’s all-too-sensible comments. “Why would she clean wearing those sorts of clothes?” “A girl that attractive wouldn’t have any trouble finding a boyfriend her own age.” “She doesn’t really love Jacques; she’s just using him.” Without giving away the movie’s ending, I will simply admit, reluctantly, that Laurel made some good points. Not enough to totally obliterate my male housecleaner fantasies (note: “male” modifies “my,” not “housecleaner.”), but enough to partially erase them.

The Roger Ebert review at the above link echoed some of Laurel’s practical observations. Laurel likes to ask me, “What would you do with a sexy 23 year-old woman anyway?” I start to stammer out a reply, then Laurel mercifully interrupts: “No, I don’t mean that. You can’t do that all the time [at 55, that’s for sure]. What would you do with her otherwise?” This same question lies at the heart of “The Housekeeper.”

Ebert notes, “Young girls want to stay out very late and dance endlessly to barbaric music. Mature men are amused to spend a little time on the dance floor [in my case, let’s make that a very little time]—but not hours and hours and hours, surrounded by inexhaustible youth, the music so loud they can make no use of their treasured conversational abilities.”

Ah, how reality slices and dices our fantasies. Yet, really, I’d rather live a real life. I’m so much happier being married to Laurel than I would be to someone half my age. What we share, I couldn’t have with anyone else. This applies to the big as well as the small things. For example, what would it be like to say, “That reminds me so much of when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show,” and have your spouse look at you with a blank expression and ask, “Who is Ed Sullivan?”

To some degree or another we all have fantasies of being someone we are not, and of being with someone other than who we are with now. We think that a happier reality lies somewhere just over the horizon. But once we get there, the horizon shifts, requiring more traveling. The futility of such happiness-seeking is evident in movies such as “The Housekeeper.” The wonder is why it is so difficult to discern in the private cinematic productions that are our own lives.

Homosexual marriage letter printed (barely)

For the benefit of local residents who didn’t notice my letter to the editor that was printed in the Statesman-Journal today way down there at the very bottom of the second page of the “Opinion” section, here’s a link to my profound musings about the economic benefits to Oregon of making this state a “heaven” for homosexual marriage (in case that link disappears from the S-J web site, here’s the letter as I submitted it.)

Perhaps the humble placement of my letter was karmically produced, since I stole Laurel’s ideas, wrote them up, and signed my name to them. Late last week Laurel commented to me that gay and lesbian marriage could be an economic boon to Oregon. That made so much sense to me, I conducted two minutes worth of Internet research on the buying potential of homosexual households, whipped up a letter to the editor, and emailed it off.

It may well be a blessing, though, for the letter to have such a low opinion page profile. On the Channel 2 news last night we saw a story about a man who has been making telephoned death threats to a Multnomah County commissioner who authorized the issuing of marriage licenses to homosexual couples. Some TV crews went to the man’s house (he actually left his name on the recorded phone messages), whereupon he grabbed a camera out of a guy’s hand and tried to kick him. One of those morally upright defenders of traditional marriage, clearly, who show their ethical superiority by threatening to kill you if you don’t agree with them.

Panic setting in…can’t breathe…

Oh, my God! I couldn’t believe it! I thought I’d become inured to all of the horrible news in the world. But when I saw the headline on the CNN web site, I knew that Laurel and I now had to face something that would catapult us into a new category of fear and trembling: loss of Comedy Central on our Dish Network receiver, which means…NO “DAILY SHOW”! The only bright side in this nightmare is that the Portland CBS station is still on the air, not being owned by Viacom—with whom Dish Network is having a pissing match. So “Survivor” is still on our Thursday night viewing schedule.

Still, the Comedy Central blackout alone is serious stuff, really serious. All that appears on the Comedy Central channel now is an infuriating message from Dish Network telling me to call Viacom at such and such a number to complain about Viacom’s supposed price-gouging. Yeah, right, as if my job as a Dish Network subscriber is to do their negotiating for them. All I want is my MTV! (which also is off the air, along with Comedy Central).

The DishNetwork and EchoStar web sites are, not surprisingly, overloaded by angry subscribers. But I managed to find EchoStar Communication’s fax number: 1-303-723-1399. If you are a frustrated Dish customer, I invite you to vent your rage via a fax to the EchoStar executives. I just did this and it made me feel better. EchoStar needs to know that they are toying with the core of people’s lives here, what keeps them going when the Darkness creeps in under the door sill. I spoke the truth in my fax: “Life without the Daily Show isn’t worth living” (perhaps a call from EchoStar headquarters to the Salem suicide prevention hot line is being made at this moment—if so, it can be called off…for a few days at least).

P.S. I just located the DishNetwork email address: [email protected]. So this is an even easier option for rage-venting.

Just what we don’t need

Thanks to Randy Smith for sending me a link to a New York Times online story that is exactly what Laurel and I feel central Oregon doesn’t need right now: a glowing description in a widely read national newspaper of the Sisters/Camp Sherman area. We love our (shared) cabin on national forest land bordering the Metolius river in Camp Sherman. We also love going to Sisters, about fifteen miles away, whenever we visit the cabin.

About the only thing we don’t love about the area is how fast central Oregon is growing. So hopefully readers of the New York Times will remember Oregon Governor Tom McCall’s adage from the 1970s: “Visit but don’t stay.” Of course, Laurel and I visited back in that era, and we both ended up staying.

But that was us, and that was then. We’re perfectly comfortable with our admitted hypocrisy, wanting to keep people out of Oregon now that we’re here. If you’re not a resident, you should know that it rains all the time west of the Cascades, while east of the Cascades it is either hellishly hot or chillingly cold. Portland traffic is a nightmare. You have to wait and wait for someone to fill your tank, because you can’t pump your own gas.

Lastly, you’ve got a choice between two wussy college team mascots, a beaver or a duck, while on the pro level there’s just the unlikable Jailblazers (a team that has, though, jettisoned some of its most deviant players, who, unfortunately, also were their best players).

“I” for an “eye”

Last night we watched an hour and a half Oregon Public Broadcasting fundraising program about the photographer Jim Brandenburg, blissfully shortened through the magic of our PVR (personal video recorder), which took out all the fundraising moments. Brandenburg is a highly successful nature photographer who felt burnt-out after twenty years of traveling the world and working for National Geographic and other magazines.

Searching for a way to rekindle his passion for photography (and, we must presume, life), he decided to do something amazing—for a professional photographer, at least. Rather than taking hundreds or thousands of photos a day and culling through them for the best shots, he decided to take one frame a day for ninety days and publish the results. Time: from the beginning of fall to the beginning of winter. Place: the wilds of northern Minnesota, where he lives.

Laurel saw a mention of this program in the OPB guide (we’re members, which allowed us to fast forward through all the dreadful fundraising pitches with no qualms). I reluctantly passed up my traditional Sunday evening taping of “60 Minutes” for what I thought would be a typical nature show. But “Chased by the Light” was anything but. Brandenburg brings a Zen sensibility to his photographic artistry, and limiting himself to a single photograph a day meant that whatever moment he chose to capture had to be just the right moment.

You can see his 90 photographs on his website. Last night we heard him describe how many of the shots transpired, which gave them much more meaning. His philosophical observations were equally intriguing. Consider the photo of Day 5, “Raven Feather.” Brandenburg said that on this day he had two choices (I seem to recall him saying that the sun was setting, so a decision had to be made quickly about that day’s shot). There was a beautiful rainbow over a lake, what he called “a calendar shot.” Safe, grand, familiar. And then there was the raven feather that had fallen on a rock. Brandenburg chose the risky, quirky, unique shot. He didn’t regret it. The road less traveled...

Brandenburg is an artist with a tremendous eye. Yet it is his “I” that makes possible his remarkable vision of nature and animals. He doesn’t imitate. Brandenburg is an original. As I watched the 90 days unfold I kept thinking, “What if I could see one ‘frame’ of life every day with the same freshness and passion that this photographer brought to his quest? What is my eye, outer or inner, not seeing because my ‘I’ is occupied with second-hand visions?”

This morning I got out “The Spiritual Emerson” and re-read Emerson’s essay on “Self-Reliance” along with a related essay, “The Divinity School Address.” Here are two excerpts from the essay on Self-Reliance that reminded me of Brandenburg’s central message: be your own “I,” and see with your own “eye.”

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty…Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today.”

This is the gift of Jim Brandenburg who, like Emerson and Thoreau, finds the hand of God in the tapestry of nature. Most of us can’t see what Brandenburg sees, though we all have eyes like him. What is different about Jim is that he doesn’t have a borrowed “I” as most of us do.

May we all become originals rather than copies. Life is so much clearer and sharper when we aren’t trying to see through someone else’s lenses.

Return of the King (mattress)

It’s nice to know that after fourteen years of marriage Laurel can still get me breathing heavily in our bedroom. Also, on the stairs leading down from our bedroom…in the living room…and in the guest bedroom way at the other end of the house. Yes, that was quite an encounter between Laurel and me after we torn off the sheets and got all sweaty with a mattress. Next time, though, I’m hoping that we encounter each other on a mattress, rather than on other sides of a mattress.

For we have begun the quadrennial (approximately) ritual of finding a better mattress for my beloved Princess, she who clearly is related to the fabled royalty described by Hans Christian Andersen in his “Princess and the Pea.” That princess was so sensitive she couldn’t sleep with a pea under twenty mattresses and twenty eider-down beds on top of the mattresses. We have not conducted this experiment with Laurel, but she clearly is far more acutely aware of mattressly imperfections than her bed partner, who could be featured in a “Prince and the Anvil” complement to Andersen’s story.

I can sleep comfortably on almost anything. I also don’t have a bad back, as Laurel does. But my slumbering ability isn’t entirely due to nature, for I also nurture my inherent sleeping talent through regular napping practice. On the days that I am able, I find 45 minutes or so to hone my sleeping skills on another playing field—a couch, futon, even the floor.

Laurel doesn’t like to take naps, since she has this strange female compulsion to perform as many productive tasks as possible during every 24 hours. My goal, pretty much, is just the opposite. To put it somewhat technically (which helps make me sound less lazy), I seek to optimize my life satisfaction by deriving the maximum happiness-inducing inputs via a minimal expenditure of mental and physical outputs. In other words, I want to sit in my highchair and have Mother Happiness feed me with a spoon.

At times, though, I get backed into a corner and have to actually accomplish something on Laurel’s “honeydo” list. Which, recently, has involved new mattress-searching. The quest began in an experimental fashion, with us laboriously hauling our current king mattress into the guest bedroom, and laboriously hauling back the old king mattress that I had brought with me into our marriage. Since the old mattress is firmer than the new mattress, and after a few nights Laurel was convinced that she felt fewer peas under it, this led to the dreaded (for me) Even Newer Mattress Search—which I have endured three or four times in our fourteen years of wedded bliss (subtracting the time spent searching for mattresses, let’s make that more like 13.95 years).

Laurel began her campaign for a new mattress somewhere around Valentine’s Day. I’m pretty sure of that date, because I remember her showing me jewelry store advertising inserts in the newspaper and saying, “You sure are lucky that I’m not one of those women who wants her husband to buy her an expensive ring every year. Can you believe that this small diamond ring costs X?” (X, I came to learn, being the price of the king mattress in the store that she had surreptitiously visited that day). After a few days of this I had been softened up sufficiently for Laurel to hit me with the closer. After we woke one morning on my old mattress, she turned to me and said, “Do you realize that lots of your ex-wife’s dried skin cells are permeating this mattress?” OK, that did it. I started mattress shopping immediately.

Over the Internet, naturally. Laurel did the scout work in actual stores, as I have a serious aversion (1) to shopping in stores in general, and (2) to mattress shopping in stores in particular. I was pleased to see that the author of a Slate article, “Going to the Mattresses,” asks “Is there a more maddening industry?” We soon realized the truth of what he spake: “Mattress manufacturers rename identical products for each different retail store. Different labels, exact same guts. Why? Obfuscation. It’s hard to shop for the lowest price when you can’t compare apples to apples.”

Understand, we like Commercial Street’s Furniture Row Outlet. We even bought a mattress there a few weeks ago. And then we unbought it the next day, which is a story for another posting. But, really… We picked up a brochure at this store describing two kinds of Simmons Beautyrest mattresses. The “World Class” Noorderkerk line, and the “Ultra Premium” Westerkerk line. When I got home and consulted Google I learned that Noorderkerk and Westerkerk are indeed names, of places in Amsterdam, but not of mattresses. These are made-up monikers that the Furniture Row Outlet uses to make it difficult to determine which Simmons mattress you are buying, or thinking of buying. The names have a nice European flair, but no reality beyond the brochure.

Well, this is only part of the Hines’ mattress story, but the rest will have to be told another day. I sure hope it has a happy ending. At the moment the Princess is feeling peas under the 10 day-old Spring Air mattress that we ended up buying at Sleep Country. Sleep Country must have not a little experience with sensitive Princesses, as they require that a mattress be kept for 30 days before it is exchanged. So Princess Laurel is waiting out the next 20 days, after which I suspect there will be some more heavy breathing going on in our bedroom. But, thankfully, this will be not from us, but from the Sleep Country moving men.

Google hath forsaken me

Oh, Google, why hath thou forsaken me? I worship daily at your throne, www.google.com, and praise you far and wide. Soon after I set up this new home for HinesSight I entered your good graces, and you indexed me (Google be praised) at http://hinessight.blogs.com. Now I have fallen from your favor, and my heart is sorely troubled. What must I do to please you, oh Great Google?

Well, I think I’ve already answered my own question through a visit to the Google web site. Apparently Google doesn’t like “mirror” sites in which several URLs point to the same content. Since I was reposting my previous postings here before I deleted them from the old weblog, I suspect that Google noticed the similarity between the old and the new weblog, and decided HinesSight new didn’t have to be indexed.

The Great Google’s advice on how to get indexed bears a disturbingly close resemblance to getting into an exclusive nightclub: it doesn’t do any good to beg, plead, or cajole—the doorman decides who gets in, and he can’t be influenced; it’s who you know that counts—the more important friends (links) you have, the more likely it is that Google will notice you.

So if you have a website or a weblog, you can help assure that HinesSight is redeemed by putting a link to this page on your own site. Google loves interconnections, mutual cyberspace backscratchings, I’ll-show-yours-if-you’ll-show-mine. Email me if you add my link, and I’ll return the favor through a new “Links I Like” section. Together we will kneel at the altar of the Great Google and shamelessly seek her blessings.

Heresy is heretical

Last night Serena and I took a walk in the dark on a (rare) rainless Oregon night. Down the trail, across the creek, through the woods, around the lake, and back home. One mile. Many inspirations.

The moon was almost full. Not a cloud in the sky. Sparkling stars. Symphonies of frogs croaking in the distance. Few signs of humanity: me, of course; Serena’s red flashing LED collar; some house lights; occasional sounds of a passing car. Mostly, Serena and I experienced nature as it is now, absent people, and as it must have been, then, before Homo sapiens evolved onto the world’s stage.

I felt a sense of cosmic rightness, that regardless of all the crap that humans produce inside and outside themselves the universe always has been, still is, and will continue to be perfectly fine. I also was struck by the fact that this sense had not a trace of religiosity associated with it. I didn’t feel the presence of Jesus, Buddha, or any other supposed mediator between us and the divine. I wasn’t thinking any profound (or even non-profound) religious thoughts, nor did I feel the need to tell God what a fine job he’d done with the creation this beautiful night.

However, I did find myself pondering a phrase that popped into my head some days back, and keeps coming back into consciousness: “Heresy is heretical.” I haven’t fully grokked what this means, but it has the ring of truth. “Heresy” means adhering to a controversial or unorthodox view. This implies that there are non-controversial or orthodox views to which the majority adhere.

Usually we think of heretics in the realm of religion, not of science. Someone who disagrees with a well-accepted scientific “truth” (using this word advisably, since all scientific truth is open to refutation) usually is considered to be wrong, not heretical. And if a truth, or law of nature, isn’t well-accepted because it hasn’t been scientifically proven, then heresy is unthinkable; when there is no orthodoxy, there can be no heresy.

Last night I saw unmistakable markings of electromagnetism and gravity, photons of light reflected from a moon caught in a groove of the space/time continuum. And these universal principles were evident to everyone with the eye to see what I was seeing. But I didn’t see any sign of God, Allah, Buddha-nature, Tao, Jesus, or any other purported divinity, personal or impersonal. Neither could anyone else, for such does not exist in the world out there, the natural physical world. Religious concepts and beliefs exist only in the world in here, the unnatural mental world.

God, deliver us from “God,” says Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic. Deliver us, that is, from all the ideas about God that prevent us from seeing reality as it is. Re-reading my previous posting, a part of me was concerned that I spoke too harshly about Christianity. But my nighttime walk epiphany reassured me, the larger part of me, that if anything I was too gentle. I need to emphasize that it isn’t Christians who bother me; it is Christian dogma—or any religious dogma—that claims to be uniquely attuned to the reality of God or spiritual truth. This is akin to a scientist saying that only graduates of the Harvard Physics Department are able to understand quantum mechanics or relativity theory.

There is no, zero, zilch, nada, outward evidence that any particular religion or spiritual path is more true than any other. Any evidence to this effect must come with within, not without. So this is why heresy is heretical—the very notion that heresy is possible assumes that God can be reduced to something observable, something physical, something that can be written down in a book or spoken in a sermon.

Show me the proof that this is so, and I’ll admit that heresy is possible. Until then, it is the sacred duty of every seeker of spiritual truth to challenge any religion that stakes a special claim on universal verities. I couldn’t agree more with this quotation from A.H. Armstrong, a classics scholar, included in my book, “Return to the One”:

When claims to possess an exclusive revelation of God or to speak his word are made by human beings (and it is always human beings who make them), they must be examined particularly fiercely and hypercritically for the honor of God, to avoid the blasphemy and sacrilege of deifying a human opinion. Or, to put it less ferociously, the Hellenic (and, as it seems to me, still proper) answer to “Thus saith the Lord” is “Does he?,” asked in a distinctly skeptical tone, followed by a courteous but drastic “testing to destruction” of the claims and credentials of the person or persons making this enormous statement.

So it isn’t those who question religious pronouncements and religious leaders who are being disrespectful to divinity. Rather, it is those who accept religious or spiritual claims uncritically. What is truly heretical is believing that there is such a thing as “heresy.” A connoisseur of diamonds loves these precious gems so much, he wants to be sure that what he is holding in his hand in the real thing and not a fake. Similarly, the skeptical thought, “Is this really true about God?,” and the actions needed to answer this question, are marks of a genuine seeker of spirituality. Unquestioning obedience and blind faith are signs that a person is content with metaphysical cubic zirconium, godly glitter without spiritual substance.

Along these lines, the debunker of paranormal claims, Randi, has a standing offer of a million dollars for anyone who can “show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power.” No one has claimed the prize. I doubt very much that anyone ever will. There is a good reason why miracles are miraculous—or, more likely, non-existent.

Plotinus and “The Passion of the Christ”

This is the first time I’ve commented on a movie without having seen it. But I’m pretty sure that Laurel and I won’t ever see “The Passion of the Christ,” so I might as well throw in my two cents now rather than later. We’d probably see the movie if either (1) we were Christians, (2) the film had a significant spiritual message, or (3) we relished watching people get tortured. Since none of these things is true, Mel Gibson will have to get along without our $16, or whatever outrageous amount Regal Cinemas is demanding for entry these days.

I have, however, read lots of reviews and articles about “The Passion of the Christ,” the best being David Denby’s “Nailed” in the March 1 issue of The New Yorker. I’d much rather that you read this brilliant review directly rather than any summary I could attempt of it. I’ll simply quote Denby’s last paragraph:

“What is most depressing about ‘The Passion’ is the thought that people will take their children to see it. Jesus said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me,’ not ‘Let the little children watch me suffer.’ How will parents deal with the pain, terror, and anger that children will doubtless feel as they watch a man flayed and pierced until dead? The despair of the movie is hard to shrug off, and Gibson’s timing couldn’t be more unfortunate: another dose of death-haunted religious fanaticism is the last thing we need.”

Amen! At its best, Christianity is strangely weird. At its worst, Christianity is insanely bizarre. If Christianity wasn’t a worldwide mainstream religion, but rather was limited to a few villages in some backwater African nation, most of the world would look upon the Christian totems and idols—crown of thorns, nails through palms and feet, ritual eating of a man’s flesh and drinking his blood—as truly freaky. Which is the way Laurel and I see these aspects of Christianity, the aspects Gibson has chosen to focus on in “The Passion of the Christ.”

Having written a book about the spiritual teachings of Plotinus, the Neoplatonist Greek philosopher (“Return to the One,” to be published soon), I’ll share some brief excerpts from the book on how the teachings of Plato and Plotinus had already prefigured Christian theology/metaphysics, leaving out only the person of Christ. Since Greek philosophy emphasized universal truths, rather than individual instances of such verities, the life of one man, Jesus, simply didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. As I say, to 3rd century Neoplatonists, it was the Christians who were putting forth irreligious suppositions that challenged Plotinus’s elevated teachings about God (the One), spirit (nous), and soul (psyche).

After immersing myself in Greek spirituality for several years, I confess that I no longer can even pretend to believe that Christianity is anywhere near to being true, or correct. I don’t mind if a religion doesn’t make perfect sense, as ultimate reality almost certainly lies beyond human logic. But a religion should make some sense, especially its central tenets. Let’s see: Christianity says that God so loved the world he sent his only begotten son, Jesus, to die for our sins. O.K. This is weirdly anthropomorphic, and I find it hard to accept that God has human sons and daughters (since God created the universe fourteen billion years ago, some 13.9999999999 billion years before humans came along). But let’s say it is true.

So God sent Jesus to die, and Jesus died on the cross. God’s will was fulfilled. Hallelujah! Pontius Pilate did God’s will. Judas Iscariot did God’s will. The Roman soldiers did God’s will. The Jewish priests did God’s will. If Jesus hadn’t been killed, the sins of the Christian faithful wouldn’t have been washed away. Why, then, aren’t all of the “bad guys” in Gibson’s movie “good guys”? For if they hadn’t played out their roles as the divine design had written in the script, Christianity would have been stillborn, and sins never would have been absolved.

To Plotinus, as to me, a universal providence guides human affairs. Call it providence, call it karma, call it what you will—the universal prevails over the particular. Similarly, science knows that universal laws of nature guide every niche and cranny of the space/time continuum, from the atoms that make up our bodies to the galaxies billions of light years away. This makes so much more sense than the idea that God intervened personally in human affairs two thousand years ago, after which the course of spiritual evolution changed completely. This is simply superstition, which goes by the name of Christianity.

I had a very bright classmate back in high school, Keith Glentzer, who was fond of saying “Christ was a Jew.” Keith was a good Christian, and back then (circa 1965) this statement sounded shocking. That was because I was ignorant of the fact that Christ was indeed a Jew, as so many articles about “The Passion of the Christ” have been pointing out. Indeed, the March 8 issue of US News and World Report that came in the mail today says this about the early quest for the historical Jesus:

“While of great interest to scholars, the resulting picture of Jesus as a Jewish teacher of his day was troublesome for many Christian theologians, especially in Germany. ‘Scholars said there’s nothing new in Jesus,’ says Susannah Herschel, a professor of Jewish studies at Dartmouth. ‘So then what’s new about Christianity? Where does it differ from Judaism? It touched a sensitive nerve.’”

Christ wasn’t a Christian. Christianity was cobbled together from many sources, and for many reasons. But Christ wasn’t the real source, and Christ wasn’t the real reason. So I don’t think you can be a true follower of Christ and also be a Christian. I’m quite sure that the “pagan” Plotinus was much more in tune with the genuine teachings of Christ than 99% of modern-day Christians are. So I’m proud not to be a Christian, because this is the only way I have a chance to follow Christ.