Paella Mandala

Wolfgang Puck has said, “Don’t worry about making mistakes in the kitchen. The biggest mistake you can make when you entertain is not spending enough time with your friends.” Ain’t it the truth? I just had one of the best times entertaining with dinner and it was because so much of the preparation was done in advance. But there is something about hard preparation that also makes the time enjoyable. The cook gets to show off, the guests get to feel like they are valued enough to “go all out for” and there’s nothing better than enjoying the delicious fruits of one’s labor.

This most recent event started with cornbread. I was trying a new recipe of cranberry almond cornbread and thought I would use it for the dinner if it turned out to be good. Something Spanish seemed like it would go well: tapas (in this case potato/egg frittata cut in cubes), sangria, white gazpacho, paella (all from Great Gatherings) and, for dessert, fresh fruit from a place called Edible Arrangements.

I made four trips to various stores looking for ingredients (saffron is hard to find and in NJ the grocery stores do not have wine or liquor) and I like to meander and take my time when I am shopping for a special meal. I find chopping fresh vegetables and herbs to be therapeutic. I feel powerful doing battle with flames and oils. When cooking I feel creative and a bit like an orchestra conductor even though there is no one in the kitchen but me. The paella especially has so many steps to create that it almost feels like sweeping away a mandala as I watch it being served.

All told, I ended up putting in about 8 hours of preparation for this most recent meal and I don’t begrudge any of that time spent. The evening glowed and I got to spend every minute of it with my friends. Oh, and the cornbread? It was swapped for cheese biscuits.

Float For Me

Isn’t it remarkable how self-recrimination, or the lack of it, can make such a difference in our ability to cope and succeed in life? Think of Disney’s Dumbo buying into the recrimination of his peers who saw his ears as freakish. And think again of his soaring accomplishments once he discarded those views and perceived himself as capriciously capable.

What if, rather than having huge ears Dumbo was subject to hearing voices? Would he have had any hope of freeing himself from the recriminations that convinced him that he was crazy? Could there be any magic feather that he could grasp onto that would allow him accept the voices and even use them for his advantage?

Years ago, a friend of mine, who was highly intelligent and a vice president in a global corporation, confessed to me that she was under constant pressure to ignore the never-ending chatter in her head making it hard for her to hear the voices of flesh-and-blood people around her. I came upon her once in a walkway between the train station and the office. She was facing a window, going through her brief case. I stopped to say ‘hi’ and got a very vague response that left me thinking as I walked away that she really hadn’t recognized me.

I was convinced that she was so distracted as to not be able to switch from her voices to our present situation. I believe she was able to succeed in life because she came to accept the voices as something that “were there” and she moved on. Had she had less strength of character, I am sure she would have dissolved in helplessness, convinced that she was crazy. I am sure, too, that had she sought professional help she would have been diagnosed as schizophrenic and herculean, but futile, attempts would have been made to rid her of her voices, driving her even further into helplessness.

Recent studies have begun to show that there may be a significant number of persons who hear voices who are not “crazy” and that there are a significant number of schizophrenics that could benefit by being taught to live with their voices while treating other of their more debilitating symptoms. Perhaps if we gave such feathers to these voice-hearers we would find that they are muses and poets and oracles with a place in our society.

In her book Visits From The Seventh, the poet Sarah Arvio says of in a dialogue with her voices ’We’ve got you to stand for us.’ And I have you, I said, to float for me.

Coal Shed

It probably was never painted. A rough, vertical plank structure, five feet square and eight feet high, including the foot of clearance it had from the ground, it probably was golden at one time but now was weathered to the shade that, had you been driving by would have appeared to be gray. Standing next to it, though, you could see that each plank was rich walnut brown highlighted with deep shadowed grooves between every swollen fiber of its grain. The upper ridges of those fibers were lit by the afternoon sun but still provided enough contrast to show off the motes of dust stirred into the sunlight by her approach. The afternoon warmth radiated from its surface to her outstretched palm. It had the kind of texture you could not refuse to touch but, if you dared brush your hand across it, it would lift large fat slivers away in the grooves of your own skin. It was so softened with age it would dent with the pressure of a fingernail. The open spaces between the planks and next to the floorboards were coated with coal dust. Coal grit and coal fragments lay around the foundation like a sort of mulch for weeds. It was a great place to stop in the middle of a meandering walk.

Sheet In The Breeze

It is passed by,
passed over,
passed under,
its cool dampness caressed by the wind.
It is pushed
and filled by the wind
but, unlike a sail, does not contain it. It billows,
dragging its corners through the air
until they overrun the body
and, in an instant,
reverse its concavity with a snap and a “thwop”.
In the briefest of moments the sheet
passes from resistance to acceptance,
in a flip, from distance to embrace.
It vainly attempts to hold the wind but
at the next turn
learns
not to care.

Historical "Facts"

I think historical truth is kind of like our economic system: both are very much based on confidence and consensus. Once a slide in confidence or a loss of consensus occurs in the underpinnings of our economy, we enter economic deflation. When the same happens on historical facts, discussions devolve into exchanged salvoes of lies, conspiracies and mistakes.

Wikipedia, in it's discussion of holocaust deniers, says: “According to researchers Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, there is a "convergence of evidence" that proves that the Holocaust happened. This evidence includes:[22]
1. Written documents—hundreds of thousands of letters, memos, blueprints, orders, bills, speeches, articles, memoirs, and confessions.
2. Eyewitness testimony—accounts from survivors, Jewish Sonderkommandos (who were forced to help load bodies from the gas chambers into the crematoria in exchange for the promise of survival), SS guards, commandants, local townspeople, and even high-ranking Nazis who spoke openly about the mass murder of the Jews
3. Photographs—including official military and press photographs, civilian photographs, secret photographs taken by survivors, aerial photographs, German and Allied film footage, unofficial photographs taken by the German military.
4. The camps themselves—concentration camps, work camps, and extermination camps that still exist in varying degrees of originality and reconstruction
5. Inferential evidence—population demographics, reconstructed from the pre-World War II era; if six million Jews were not killed, what happened to them all? “

This is enough to convince me and most people but we are convinced because we have confidence that when we see such statements numerous times over many years without credible refutation they are true and because there is a huge consensus on that view. There are no first-hand empirical tests we can perform to demonstrate the truth of our convictions. When confidence in historical facts is eroded by one’s bigotries and biases and when the consensus of those with whom you associate supports different conclusions, unfortunately there are no objective facts or empirical tests that will override the lack of confidence or alternate consensus. We all should be careful to consider how convictions on historical truth are shaped by our sentiments, temperaments and biases - - - and by those with whom we associate.

Evolved Emancipation

April 14, 1832. “I may mention one very trifling anecdote, which at the time struck me more forcibly than any story of cruelty. I was crossing a ferry with a negro, who was uncommonly stupid. In endeavoring to make him understand, I talked loud, and made signs, in doing which I passed my hand near his face. He, I suppose, thought I was in a passion, and was going to strike him; for instantly, with a frightened look and half-shut eyes, he dropped his hands. I shall never forget my feelings of surprise, disgust, and shame, at seeing a great powerful man afraid even to ward off a blow, directed, as he thought, at his face. This man had been trained to degradation lower than the slavery of the most helpless animal. “

This is not a quote from Abraham Lincoln or from an observer in America’s antebellum South. It is from Charles Darwin. He was in Brazil when he had this experience. The quote is only one of many expressing Darwin’s life-long outrage at slavery. When I came across it as I was reading The Voyage of the Beagle, it struck me by its personal and vulnerable perspective.

Upon reading it, maybe I should not have been surprised to learn that he and Abraham Lincoln, The Great Emancipator, were born on the same day 200 years ago. However, beyond shared views on slavery (and their preference to go unshaven), the similarities between Lincoln and Darwin would seem to be few. Lincoln was melancholy, ambitious, focused and fiercely protective of the American experiment in democracy. Darwin was curious, observant, adventuresome and often euphoric in his love of nature and its wonders; he had circled the globe before he was thirty. And, yet, they each had an incalculable influence on our world and I wonder what they would think of it today.

I often imagine bringing some historical figure forward in time to experience our world with all of its technology. In the case of Lincoln and Darwin I think I would forego bedazzling them with technology and would choose to bring them instead to Yosemite Park, a place I hold in reverence. Standing in grassy meadows surrounded by granite domes that were cut by water and glaciers over millions of years, I think Darwin would be enraptured by the immensity of time and its effects while Lincoln would see a metaphor of the strength of the Union that stretched from where he stood in California to the eastern seaboard. Both would see a country free of the degradation of slavery but I don’t imagine either would be satisfied with the status quo. They would both expect us to evolve.

Crows (II)

The crows tell me the body is there.
It is hidden by the lower brush and grasses, but
I know.

There is a carcass there. I can tell
that some unseen thing has sent the crows protesting
to upper branches.
I believe

their indignancy, as they dive
and swoop, creating a racket
they intend as menacing and fierce.

How dare the intruder take
what is rightfully theirs - -
this body
still warm, recently abandoned

by what was there,
what once was hidden but now is gone.
But the crows, they know.

Leaving Campus Crusade

I hate meeting strangers and striking up conversations and I hate asking for money. Not a good combination for a Campus Crusade for Christ staffer but there I was - - a missionary to college students I didn’t know and a fund raiser for the cause. Both aspects led to a break between me and CCC.

These days, though, when I look back, I see a much more telling episode that says a lot about who I was then, why I left and who I am now. It was a Spring day at Rutgers on one of the wide open lawns where students hung out on nice days. I ran into a female student lying on the grass studying. I approached her and was amazed that she welcomed me and asked me to sit down.

I went through the niceties - - you know, be friendly so you can get to the real goal: sharing God’s love. But as I started to share the Four Laws and explain God’s plan she started to tell me her beliefs. I was amazed. So much so that I later went back to my apartment and told my CCC roommates what a bizarre person I had met. I told them how genuinely crazy she was and couldn’t understand how someone like her could even be in college.

Here’s what she told me. She believed in an ancient Egyptian religion that worshipped frogs. I thought she couldn’t possibly be serious but she was so earnest. She seemed to have really thought this out. These days, I don’t remember the details but it was something like frogs were the symbol of change and flexibility. As amphibians they lived in two worlds and served as a guide for us. She believed that God was essentially amphibian in nature. Her religion included baptism, of course, water being all important.

Since she was serious and since I wanted to enter into a dialogue that I could direct to the Christian God, I asked her questions about afterlife, and prayer and communion. She had answers to it all. She was completely unpersuaded that there was anything about Christianity that had anything to offer over her own beliefs.

This is what I reported back to my friends, shaking my head in amazement that there were wackos out there like her.

These days, of course, I now realize she was playing me. I was so serious about my proselytizing that she decided, why fight it; she would just make up something just as ridiculous. She must have been amazed at how gullible I was. I wonder what she told her friends when she went home.

Now I think, what difference really is there between a person who believes in a celestial frog or the one who believes in an anthropomorphic one? Why is one any better of an explanation than the other?

I Had A Teacher

Caught in the middle,
caught in the view,
our perspective is limited.
Billions of galaxies above,
each with billions of stars within,
are apprehended by minds
freshly emerged,
fueled by stardust.




I had a teacher, Mrs. Wimer, for 1st and 2nd grade who was missing her lower right forearm. In spite of this she taught two grades at once in a one-room school house. She was teacher, principal, cafeteria staff and maintenance crew all in one. She kept the coal stove in the center of the room stoked in the winter, played fly-to-the-moon with us on our imaginary rocket (an old log) in the playground and made school work papers by some sort of primitive "copier" that consisted of hard gel in a cake pan inked with a roller and covered with a typed stencil.

I don’t remember much of the formal lessons Mrs. Wimer taught but I remember her taking us to do rubbings from the tombstones in the cemetery that bordered the school yard and wondering, “Just how old are these graves, anyway? How long ago, exactly, was the Revolution?” I remember collecting elderberries from which we squeezed juice to create a red ink to use with a quill and wondering, “If this comes from berries, where does blue ink come from?” I remember crushing sandstones and sifting the result through a screen and wondering, “Is the difference between rock and earth really just size? How small can a rock get before it’s no longer rock?”

I regularly think how grateful I am that I was taught to read but I am grateful, too, for having been taught to observe, experiment and wonder.

The Dust of Our Sorrow

The cedar waxwing lit on the hard packed earth under the bayberry bush. It seemed at first that it was the bird’s wing beat that had stirred the dust. The fine powder rose in a puff and slowly rearranged itself along the edges of the dried leaves and around the lichens and mosses but the dust did not rest. It skittered. It shifted. The grains moved. Gaining strength and sentience from an imperceptible vibration, it collected in folds and crevices and then, reaching a tipping point, poured over an edge or down a channel, forming anthill-like mounds and tiny screes. The gathering had begun again. When the dust began to drift around its feet the waxwing took flight, its reflection caught in the river Styx below.

*
There had always been an order and procession to my daily routines. Now those routines were subjected to the overbearance of a pending decision. Its demands had been growing so that it now soaked into my every task and thought. It created an imperceptible vibration, a hum filling all the silent spaces. It demanded resolution. And so, I decided. The vibration resolved to clarity.

Or so it seemed. Powdery small grains of my sanity began to slough away.

*
The waxwing stretched its wings and expanded its breast, flanks and belly, causing each pinion and down feather to stand erect and separate, letting the cool breeze cleanse the flesh underneath. As the bird settled on its perch, the breeze moved on. It created eddies in the powder below. As the wind began to gather momentum, it spun the dust into a vortex. Within that funnel an androgenous shape took form. Charon’s reincarnation had begun. The grains of dust fed him /she inhaled the winds from the other world.

*
For a while I was able to maintain objectivity. I knew I was hovering, obsessing. I could see his amusement in my constant ministrations. I could hear his thoughts: “Okay. Okay, okay. Chill out. What a drama queen!” But even objectivity and rationality eventually slipped. A turbulent vortex was sucking me in, even as I lay there with him, dreaming of making our escape.

*
Tilting its masked face, the waxwing peered at the bayberry, first from the side and then from above. Its tufted head bobbed and sought the best angle at which to snatch the prize. It almost considered too long. The upheaval as Charon arose flushed all the birds in a cacophonous flurry. It was mere instinct that made the Waxwing grab the fruit in the midst of flight but it was fright that loosened its grasp, causing the berry fall. Strengthened by more and more gathering fragments, Charon looked up and began to chant. He tested the rhythm of his stroke to the beat of his heart.

*
I stared up at the sun. It radiated its intense energy from a deep core of pent up power. It had an ominous heart of beating anger. It was indiscriminating in the release of that anger. It was fusion and flare bursting forth. In my head it sounded like a thousand screaming birds.

“It’s coming. It’s coming.” It was unhinging me. More and more fragments of my mind were flying off in the fray. Thoughts were lost and resolve failed. Resignation took its place.

I began to sing, “Everything they whispered in our ear is coming true. You are mostly gone. I am staying right beside you. I will follow you down. I am here right beside you.”

*
The muddy river bank was impressed with the trident markings of the waxwing’s feet as the bird hopped from spot to spot in search of trampled seeds. The few bits of dust that fell as Charon moved to the boat went unnoticed but the cat padding along behind was not disregarded. The bird moved to a near-by branch. Charon picked up the tune from the other world and sang to the cat in her lap telling him of his beauty. She levered the oars against the current.

*
I had reached out and grasped beauty that certainly must be eternal, only to find that it was my reaching that was eternal. He had been taken from me. Hadn’t my reach come up empty in the end? I drifted. My contemplation bobbed aimlessly as if in the wake of a slowly passing boat.

*
The wind blew from across the river, laden with a fine dust that caused the waxwing to close its eyes to slits. Its feathers were tugged and lifted by the gusts as the bird held on to its perch. As the dust dispersed with the wind, the bird shook off the last grains in a frenzied flutter. Folding her wings, she began to sing.

*
I began to sing. “And if a mama bird is seen folding her wings will you remember me?” I felt a deep ponderous sorrow resolving. It was not resolving to clarity, but to “amen.”