That’s the name of the author of a book I’m reading — Ursula Goodenough.
I usually don’t read non-fiction, but this book was recommended in an article by one of my favorite atheists, Natalie Angiers.
In the Introduction to The Sacred Depths of Nature, Goodenough writes:
My agenda for this book is to outline the foundations for…a plantetary…ethic that would make no claim to supplant existing traditions but would seek to coexist with them, informing our global concerns while we continue to orient our daily lives in our cultural and religious contexts….
…..It is therefore the goal of this book to present an accessible account of our scientific understanding of Nature and then suggest ways that this account can call forth appealing and abiding religious responses — an approach that can be called religious naturalism. If religious emotions can be elicited by natural reaity — and I believe that they can — then the story of Nature has the potential to serve as the cosmos for the global ethos that we need to articulate.
Religious Naturalism. I like the sound of that because Nature does inspire me in ways that others are inspired by the notion of “god.”
The drawings of nature in Goodenough’s book, done by Ippy Patterson of North Carolina, are inspiring in themselves. This is my favorite:
punica granatum.

Every religious fundamentalist should read this book — as well as evey atheist who yearns for a sense of the sacred.

Yup, that’s him as depicted by George Pfromm II, who did the illustration to accompany an article in the Portland Mercury that gave a rundown on the cyber-attack on b!X by a Portland PR flak.
b!X posts about being memorialized suchly here.
I have to admit, that when I saw the cartoon in the Mercury, I wondered if it could be him because of the hat. Then I figured, naw, he’s not important enough yet to be cartoonized. And then I thought, heh, why not! And, sure enough.
Cool, huh?

The pope also blessed the sick, then waved to the crowd as he took a spin through the square in an opened-topped vehicle, after delivering a homily that offered “fear of God” as an antidote to the world’s ills.
Benedict also warned against a secular view of history in his homily based on biblical texts.
“History is not in the hands of dark powers, of chance or mere human choices,” Benedict said.
Rather, he said, “the Lord is the supreme arbitrator of history.”
In an off-the-cuff remark, Benedict recommended “fear of God” as a way to deal with the difficulties of the world.
“It is through the fear of God that we are not afraid of the world and its problems, we are not afraid of men because God is stronger,” Benedict said.
Read it all here.
Oh man. Why would anyone want to be Catholic under those dark-age paternalistic circumstances?
Turning my back on Catholicism years ago was one of the smartest things I ever did.
My nemesis (Rage Boy who blogs more frequently as Chief Blogging Officer) adds fuel to my fiery attitude about the subject.
I’ve been meaning to post about RB/Chris Locke’s latest transformation, in which he walks the talk in showing how you can use your blog to sustain your writing life. Underwrittn by High Beam research, Chris uses that research capacity to continue drafting his “book-in-progress,” while also following strands of related topics as he picks them up through his research. And then he blogs it all and links to the High Beam articles that inform his writing. Everybody wins. He should be getting more visibility for what he’s doing and what he’s writing.
While I’m not a big fan of RB/Chris Locke, it seems to me he deserves lots of credit for this one.

long day
short night
no play
just fight
can’t care
can’t sleep
not fair
bleep
bleep

This caregiving thing is really wearing me down, tiring me out — especially now that she’s recovering from cataract surgery and it means putting three different eye drops in her eyes every four hours or so. It takes a half-hour to go through the series. Then I have to put out her breakfast and lunch or she forgets to eat. Then I have to make dinner — well, I have to eat dinner anyway. And then there’s making sure she takes her medication three times a day. In between, I do food shopping, mend her clothes (which are getting too big for her), and still spend hours helping her look for items she “lost” somewhere in her apartment. Somewhere in there I sneak in time to blog.
I’ve decided to “pay” myself out of the money that’s set aside for her care — nothing like an actual home health care aid would make (which is $20 an hour during the week and $23 an hour on weekends), but just enough every once in a while to help me not feel like a victim of circumstance.
My mom, like so many other very elderly, doesn’t want to go into nursing homes, even though, financially, it’s cheaper than full-time home health care. According the the article linked to above,
Choosing to stay at home is the easy decision. Paying for it is another question altogether. Home health care costs an absolute fortune, especially if you need an aide 24-hours a day. According to the MetLife Market Survey on Nursing Home and Home Care Costs, the average nursing home costs $66,153 a year (for a private room). Fees are considerably higher in metropolitan areas or for premium care, but either way, your loved one is getting full-time attention from a staff that includes nurses, social workers and other professionals.
Full-time home health care can cost more than twice as much and most agencies don’t even recommend it. That means you’re on the hook for the hours when your parents have no aide. Phyllis Mensh Brostoff, a social worker and president of Stowell Associates and SelectStaff Services in Milwaukee, says her agency charges clients $20 an hour during the week and $23 an hour during the weekend. Brostoff admits her fees are a bit high. She justifies it by offering “an enriched service” that includes a care manager who keeps track of your loved one with unannounced visits. SelectStaff will also ensure there is someone always on call.
The fee, however, is just the beginning. Don’t forget that if your parents live in their own home, you’ve still got to pay to take care of it. And tipping is considered part of the compensation. “This is just expected within the industry,” Ramsey says. For example, she tips her aide every time her incontinent parent has an accident. In addition to money, she also provides gifts and lets her parents’ caregiver go home a little early whenever she can
I’m a relatively good person, but I have to say that being rewarded, financially, for some of what I do feels a lot better than just feeling very virtuous.
I recognize a time might come when I just can’t handle the stress any more. If/when that time comes, I know a good nursing home where I’m sure she can get in. That’s where the rest of her money will go, but by that time, getting back my life will be worth every penny that I will no longer be able to pay myself.
Whoever tries to tell you that virtue is its own reward has never been a caregiver for an increasingly befuddled elderly parent.

American energy policy – written by Beavis and Butthead.
Good Golly. Miss Molly has it right, again:
The energy bill just passed by the House is a classic example of frittering away precious time and resources by doing exactly nothing that needs to be done about energy. The bill gives $8.1 billion in new tax breaks to the oil companies, which are already swimming in cash.
ExxonMobil’s profits are up 44 percent, Royal Dutch/Shell up 42 percent, etc. According to the business pages, the biggest problem oil executives face is what to do with all their cash. So why give more tax breaks to the oil companies? Makes as much sense as anything else in this energy bill. Nothing about conservation, higher fuel efficiency standards or putting money into renewable energy sources. It’s so stupid, it’s painful.
I’m too tired to think today, so I’m leaving the thinking to Molly Ivins.

I wonder what the founding mothers of Mother’s Day would make of it all. Those 19th-century women who organized “Mothers’ Work Days” to improve sanitation. Those post-Civil War mothers who tried to bridge the gap between North and South. And that pacifist, Julia Ward Howe, who organized the first Mothers’ Day for Peace.
What would they make of a holiday that began with feminism and pacifism and ended up with perfume and flowers? What would they make of a day to change the world that became a day to get breakfast in bed?
So begins Ellen Goodman’s Mothers Day rant, in which she also reports:
Today the scariest part of Social Security privatization is the effect it could have on survivors’ benefits for mothers and children. But it’s much easier to argue about whether a 13-year-old in Florida should be forced into motherhood. There’s no law requiring paid sick leave for private employees in Texas, but the state House of Representatives just passed a law that “empowers parents” by prohibiting suggestive cheerleading.
Our country is one of only five in the world without paid maternity leave, but we are focused on runaway brides. We are in a national state of overwork, but the welfare debate now hinges on getting the poorest mothers of young children to work longer hours.
I’m one of the lucky ones, who, as a single mother, had the education necessary to get a good job to help support my kids. I’m one of the lucky ones who has a pension and could manage to pay my bills even without Social Security.
My mom is one of the lucky ones, who married a man who supported her in the style to which she enjoyed becoming accustomed.
Sometimes my mother asks me if I’m her mother. Sometimes she talks to me as though I’m one of her siblings and remember those years before WWII when they lived in Poland with their mother.
Today is Mothers Day. I put on the Polish music that airs locally every Sunday morning and I let her lead me around her living room. We have bagels and cream cheese for breakfast.
My daughter sends me two encouraging Mothers Day e-cards and calls. She tells me sweet stories about my grandson.
[This added in after I posted because Oregon’s morning begins three hours after New York’s: my one-true-son, the One True b!X also made his Mother’s Day call. Of course, we talked about the extensive conversation going on over at his Communique about the elements of journalism and weblog ethics as pertain to what he writes on his weblog.]
Motherhood. I got it coming and going. The bad and the good.
Meanwhile, my mom unearths this old photo of my two kids that I think their dad made when he used to fool around with photography.
Ah, these are the good in motherhood.

AND, in case you’d like to read one of my better Mothers Day rants, check out this post of two years ago.

I’m a fan of mythological metaphors. Hence, Kali–lily.
In a piece that begins, “I love chimeras,” today Maureen Dowd ends her rant about GOP chimeras opening Pandora’s Box with:
The Republican Party is now a chimera, too, a mutant of old guard Republicans, who want government kept out of our lives, and evangelical Christians, who want government to legislate religion into our lives.
But exploiting God for political ends has set off powerful, scary forces in America: a retreat on teaching evolution, most recently in Kansas; fights over sex education, even in the blue states and blue suburbs of Maryland; a demonizing of gays; and a fear of stem cell research, which could lead to more of a “culture of life” than keeping one vegetative woman hooked up to a feeding tube.
Even as scientists issue rules on chimeras in labs, a spine-tingling he-monster with the power to drag us back into the pre-Darwinian dark ages is slouching around Washington. It’s a fire-breathing creature with the head of W., the body of Bill Frist and the serpent tail of Tom DeLay.
And then there are the wonder-full American anarchist Muppets, who have been sucked into Disney’s insatiably blanding maw.
Of course, the possibility of a culture clash between Disney and the Muppets always seemed quite obvious. Until recently, let us not forget, Disney would not employ anyone with a beard at its theme-parks. One look at any picture of Jim Henson and the 1970s creative nebulous of The Muppet Show, on the other hand, reveals a group of hairy hippies, most of whom look like Robinson Crusoe at Day 405 on Treasure Island. The Muppets are essentially joyous and irreverent — their currency is pigs loving frogs, caterpillars smoking hookahs, Dr Teeth and His Electric Mayhem having “bummers”, and a disgruntled Statler and Waldorf trying to assassinate the whole cast. It’s hippies parodying reactionaries, bread-heads, divas and bores. It’s hard to see how they will fit, intact, into Disney’s cleaner-than-clean, carefuller-than-careful corporate world.
We’re surrounded by ’em –the moneyed right-eous. It’s the Crusades all over again, but this time on an even more spiritually destructive and global scale.
(Heh. Were you beginning to think that I was so wrapped up in my Little Picture that I wasn’t interested in the Big One anymore??)

I haven’t posted about b!X lately, but I’m getting a kick out of the current flap over his curtain peeking. (For those of you new to this weblog, b!X is my erstwhile son who stirs up Portland, Oregon politics to force the truth rise to the top.)
The “man behind the curtain” never likes to have the spotlight focus on his handiwork. Meanwhile, b!X makes no effort to hide who he is or what his weblog is for.
I know that there are lots of webloggers who hide behind anonymity. Personally, I tend to see as more credible those who put themselves out there the way traditional newspaper columnists do — a little photo and a little bio. That makes them real to me and makes what they write more believable.
No curtain here. Just a little ol’ grandma raising hell at the keyboard. Well, maybe not so little. And not so old, either. Heh.

That’s what she’s asking as she sits in her recliner the morning after her cataract surgery. Her teeth are chattering; her hands and feet are ice cold. Her whole body hurts, she says.
Why me, she mutters. What did I do to deserve this? Am I such a bad person? Give me something to make me die.
I figure it’s a reaction to whatever anesthesia they had to give her to keep her calm for the eye surgery. We have to be at the eye doctor’s in two hours to get her bandage off and have her eye checked.
But she wants to die. She doesn’t want to get up and dressed.
I put a heating pad between her back and the chair. I cover her with a fleece throw. Make her hot coffee.
Why me, God? Was I such a bad person? She keeps asking.
And so I say, it doesn’t work like that, mom. Were the women and children that Americans killed in Iraq bad people? God has nothing to do with making bad things happen.
This all happened yesterday. We did make it to the doctor’s.
Last night I got onto Tamarika’s blog and found this richly long and wonerfully linked post on “The Atheist.”
One of the links was to a NY Times piece by Natalie Angiers, whom I researched and wrote an introduction to when I did some free-lance writing for a conference on Women and Science that was held at the Emma Willard School some fifteen years ago or so. (I also wrote a speech for Jane Fonda for that event — which, I have to say — she ignored in favor of touting her latest exercise video.)
Back to Natalie Angiers, who says in her essay:
So, I’ll out myself. I’m an Atheist. I don’t believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don’t believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance. I believe that the universe abides by the laws of physics, some of which are known, others of which will surely be discovered, but even if they aren’t, that will simply be a result, as my colleague George Johnson put it, of our brains having evolved for life on this one little planet and thus being inevitably limited. I’m convinced that the world as we see it was shaped by the again genuinely miraculous, let’s even say transcendent, hand of evolution through natural selection.
And later in the piece —
From my godless perspective, the devout remind me that it is human nature to thirst after meaning and to desire an expansion of purpose beyond the cramped Manhattan studio of self and its immediate relations. In her brief and beautiful book, “The Sacred Depths of Nature,” Ursula Goodenough, a cell biologist, articulates a sensibility that she calls “religious naturalism,” a profound appreciation of the genuine workings of nature, conjoined with a commitment to preserving that natural world in all its staggering, interdependent splendor. Or call it transcendent atheism: I may not believe in life after death, but what a gift it is to be alive now.
I wish my mom could read those books, but she isn’t a reader. Never has been. As a result, she’s not much of a thinker either.
But she does think a lot about God. She needs someone to take responsibility for what happens to her. It’s never anything she does. She also worries that I’m damned. Begs me to pray.
As I’ve often said, if there is a “god” who actually allows all this awful stuff to happen to people, then I wouldn’t want to go to his heaven anyway.
I’d rather hang out with people like Natalie Angiers and Tamarika.
OK. So, how do my atheistic tendences jibe with doing ritual house cleansings and other such pagan-based ceremonies. Well, they’re psychologically empowering; they’re performances.
And we have not yet discovered all the laws of physics. Perhaps generating energy through communal ritual does somehow affect the cosmic flow and science hasn’t yet figured out how it happens.
If nothing else, I get a kick out of playing the conjuring Crone.
Headology and all that.