Who’s your Daddy?

I’ve always held to the belief that we human beings create our gods in our own images. (Talk about narcissism!! But that’s another post.) Sometimes we tinker a little with images from other cultures — change their color, name, toga, etc — so that we can claim them as our own.
And then, of course, each #1 god or goddess is matched to a story of how he/she designed and created the universe. Comparing creation myths is a fascinating excercise — one on which I embarked with the eighth grade English class I taught back in the seventies as part of our study of Greek mythology. The exercise upset my students greatly as it began to dawn on them that an old man with a white beard creating the universe in seven days is no more or less logical than Sky Woman landing on the back of a giant turtle etc. But, of course, Joseph Campbell already covered all of that, and right on public television, too.
But Lord Volderbush (sorry, I’m reading Harry Potter)has gathered his monied minions in the guise of The Discovery Institute and they are on the march to redesign the universe to fit their particular mythology.
Jodi Wilgoren’s piece in today’s Times has this to say about the Institute’s role in promoting “intelligent design”:
Financed by some of the same Christian conservatives who helped Mr. Bush win the White House, the organization’s intellectual core is a scattered group of scholars who for nearly a decade have explored the unorthodox explanation of life’s origins known as intelligent design.
Together, they have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin’s defenders firmly on the defensive.
Like a well-tooled electoral campaign, the Discovery Institute has a carefully crafted, poll-tested message, lively Web logs – and millions of dollars from foundations run by prominent conservatives like Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Philip F. Anschutz and Richard Mellon Scaife. The institute opened an office in Washington last fall and in January hired the same Beltway public relations firm that promoted the Contract With America in 1994.
“We are in the very initial stages of a scientific revolution,” said the center’s director, Stephen C. Meyer, 47, a historian and philosopher of science recruited by Discovery after he protested a professor’s being punished for criticizing Darwin in class. “We want to have an effect on the dominant view of our culture.”
For the institute’s president, Bruce K. Chapman, a Rockefeller Republican turned Reagan conservative, intelligent design appealed to his contrarian, futuristic sensibilities – and attracted wealthy, religious philanthropists like the Ahmansons at a time when his organization was surviving on a shoestring. More student of politics than science geek, Mr. Chapman embraced the evolution controversy as the institute’s signature issue precisely because of its unpopularity in the establishment.
[snip]
As much philosophical worldview as scientific hypothesis, intelligent design challenges Darwin’s theory of natural selection by arguing that some organisms are too complex to be explained by evolution alone, pointing to the possibility of supernatural influences. While mutual acceptance of evolution and the existence of God appeals instinctively to a faithful public, intelligent design is shunned as heresy in mainstream universities and science societies as untestable in laboratories.
Chapman says he wants “intelligent design” and evolution to be debated and compared in the classroom. Actually, what would be more accurate and academically sound is if the various creation myths were examined and compared first — including the Judeo-Christian version. And also the tendencies of each culture to create their gods in their own image. And also the human psychological need to feel there is some sense, some purpose to life — a need so strong that we create stories that explain it all in comforting terms. And also the fact that we humans are not so far evolved yet that we can live without rules. Religious-based myths offer models of behavior and try to instill fear of eternal punishment as a way of keeping wayward humans in line.
So, if students can first examine all of those psychological factors that make many of us need to believe in “intelligent design” and then examine why and how scientists have come to assert our “evolutionary” history, then the debate might have some value.
The bottom line is that pitting faith against fact is a great way to keep a country in turmoil. Faith requires a leap away from fact. For most of everyday life, it’s possible to keep a foot on each landing. But when it comes to a stand on how we got here and why we are here, you either believe the myths (as either actual or metaphorical) or accept the facts as they have been evidenced..
Lord Volderbush and his power-broking cronies are leading us into a time and place that will be even darker than our scariest fantasies if they are allowed to proceed.
Harry Potter! Where are you when we need you!

They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaa.
They’re coming to take me away, ho ho, he he, ha ha,
To the funny farm, where life is beautiful all the time
And I’ll be happy to see those nice young
Men in their clean white coats and
They’re coming to take me away, ha-haaa!
I did it. I peed in my pants in a fit of hysteria — laughing and crying at the same time and not able to stop any of it from happening.
In the middle of the frustrations of trying to put together some “assembly required” furniture (keep in mind that I was one of those kids who flunked the spacial-relations part of IQ tests), I got a UPS delivery of five baskets that I ordered to use as organizers on the top shelves of my wire “assembly required” closets.
Each basket came in its own terribly oversized 3 foot by 3 foot box. Each box contained one basket and about 10 yards of wide brown paper packing. So, there I was, nuts and bolts and little pegs and tubes of wood glue scattered all over, with these huge five boxes piled up waiting to be opened.
As I was heading out to the garage with my arms full of a paper lawn-leaf bag filled to overflowing with brown paper and five cardboard boxes cut down for recycling, I walked out the wrong door and found myself in the opposite direction toward which I was heading.
It wasn’t that funny, but the Sisyphus nature of my life these days just got to me.
I went back into the hallway, sat on the steps and started to laugh – big expulsions of air. And cry — big constrictions of chest. I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop the pee, either.
I wonder how long it will be before they come to take me away. Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha.

Conflict and criticism make coexistence just about impossible.
I think of this today not in terms of my little picture (well, actually it holds true of my little picture as well), but rather one of the bigger ones with which raging writer Chris Locke is always dealing and where I popped in this morning to be confronted by this quote, with which I wholeheartedly agree.

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil;
but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg ~ A Designer Universe?
Locke, whose book-in-progress Mystic Bourgeoisie is a rant about — well, just about everything that seems silly to him about how America slipped the surly bonds of earth & came to believe in signs & portents that would make the middle ages blush — is a writer who takes great energy to read. I don’t have great energy lately, but I do go in and read snippets because he always stirs my own thinking. I should be unpacking more boxes and putting together more of the cheap press-board pieces of furniture that function well to my purposes but make me crazy while putting them together. But, thanks to the anti-mystical mental meanderings of that probloglific Chief Blogging Officer, here I am instead.
The article to which Chris Locke links in relation to the above quote is just about the best/most readable explanation I’ve come across describing the conflict between science and religion. Weinberg ends his piece with the following:
In an e-mail message from the American Association for the Advancement of Science I learned that the aim of this conference is to have a constructive dialogue between science and religion. I am all in favor of a dialogue between science and religion, but not a constructive dialogue. One of the great achievements of science has been, if not to make it impossible for intelligent people to be religious, then at least to make it possible for them not to be religious. We should not retreat from this accomplishment.
As humans, it seems to me, we are entities of infinite opposities. We are both rational and irrational, logical and illogical, pragmatists and dreamers, warriors and peacemakes, destroyers and creators. We have lives of the body and lives of the spirit. And all of the those dualities always seem to be in conflict, with themselves and with each other.
In my own life, I struggle daily to find a way to enable my opposing tendencies to coexist constructively. That’s often where metaphor and psychotherapy and poetry help. Me. I’m saying they help me.
In various “bigger pictures,” it’s not so easy, not easy at all. And in the the largest global context, when the similar forces of nationalism and religion join their conversion efforts on various fronts (and, of course, I have in mind today’s America as well as Israel and Palestine and Iraq), coexistence is futile.
I believe that there is a place for spirituality in our lives, but it helps us most when it’s kept personal. Once it gets organized into a religion, well, the opening quote to this post says it all.
Science looks for answers. The spirit makes up its own.
Science searches for proveable facts. The spirit thrives on metaphor.
I often wonder if the difficulty with achieving coexistence of any kind has something to do with passion. Passion energizes us, gives us purpose and promise. It is so with the investigations of scientists and so with the journeys of the spirit. What you get as results in both cases can be truly awe-inspiring.
On the other hand, I think of the passion of national and religious proseltyzers/zealots/missionaries and the conflicts they generate.
We seem to very much need a place to put our passions. How do we coexist and engage our passions?
Maybe that’s our real challenge as human beings — not to struggle to rule the world as organized nations or religions, but rather to struggle to understand ourselves and each other from the perspective of our own personal dualities and the way we realize our passions.
I like Locke’s writing because it’s passionate. I’m bothered by his thinking because he seems, too often, to either compartmentalize or dismiss what he can’t seem to make coexist with his passion.
Yet, that’s often what makes his stuff a teeth-clenching rollercoaster read.
And just to annoy him a little more, I have to point out that my continously most popular posts — the ones to which I keep getting the most comments — are the ones where I mention my spurts of seeing the numbers 11:11 — here (100 comments on that one), and here (21 comments on that one).
One comment left today linked to this site, where, coincidentally (or maybe synchronistically), hummingbirds are mentioned.
There sure is a lot of strange stuff out there with which to try and coexist.

Over time, I’ve had some interesting challenges converting the use of one object to another purpose. For example, right now I’m attempting to convert tension pole shower caddies (because they are the only inexpensive tension poles I could find anywhere) into fixtures between which I can attach a drapery pole and hang drapes to form a kind of partial room divider. If it works, it’s the perfect solution for my loft space.
As much fun and frustration I have with that kind of “conversion,” I have even more anger and annoyance at the kind of “conversion” that some major religions insist on making their major mission.
I think of this because I saw a car today with a bumper sticker similar to the one below — two car magnet versions of which I just sent for from www.stampandshout.com:

— which fit right in with what my ol’s blog pal Jeneane Sessum has been posting about re cults and such.
Coexist rather than try to convert. Now, there’s a thought.
I’m going to put one of those car magnets on my car. The other on my front door.
three who haven’t lived together in almost 50 years have become even more unalike than they were a half-century ago. one mind lives as though it were five decades ago. the other two, while sibling-similar in being set in their ways, have ways that are set in very different personal realities.
conversion is not an option.
compromise is exhausting.
coexistence is a tough — but necessary — lesson to learn — Little Picture and Big Picture. otherwise it’s constant war.

Sometimes, one is all you get. One chance. One choice.
Last night, for the first time, I saw one meteor streaking across a sky that was just beginning to cloud over. We stood outside in the dark, with my mom leaning against me so that she could look upward without toppling over. But I was the only one who saw it. I did. I really did. I made a wish. One wish on one shooting star.
…………
All day long today, what we believed was a lone female hummingbird (females have a greenish color; males have the ruby throat) glutted herself at the feeder. We wondered how one little creature could be so continuously ravenous. Did she have an eating disorder? And then, as we watched out the window while we ate dinner, suddenly there were three female hummingbirds, all the same size and coloration. They buzzed around each other and the feeder, engaged in whatever hummingdances hummingbirds do. My mother insisted that they were fighting over the food in the feeder — which didn’t seem likely to me, since the feeder has four access holes.
So, to me, they were Three Sisters, three hummingbird sisters dancing their pleasure and thanks for their feast on the other side of our window.
————-
Sometime in the last week or so, I’ve developed a “floater” in my right eye. It hovers around my peripheral vision — a tiny, tiny black and white image that looks an awful like a tiny, tiny hummingbird. Yes, indeed, a hummingbird.

************
Sometimes, you only get one. One son. One daughter. One son-in-law. One grandchild. And sometimes you get a one-in-a-million son-in-law who bakes a blueberry pie with the berries picked by his one little son.

____________
Sometimes, when you only have one, and he is sent off to be killed in a war without reason, without purpose, without WMD, you become so angry, so betrayed, so brave, that you dare to stand up, stand out, speak out, cry out. Shout. SHOUT! Praying all the while that your pain will break through the plague of public denial.
From here:
Cindy challenges Bush to level with her: “You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East. You tell me that, you don’t tell me my son died for freedom and democracy.”
When questioned about the war, Bush invokes his mantra of September 11. “Yeah, but were any of those people in Iraq?” Cindy asks. “And the people who flew those planes into the Trade Center, were they from Iraq?”
“I don’t believe [Bush’s] phony excuses for the war,” Cindy told a CBS reporter. “I want him to tell me why my son died.” She said, “If he gave the real answer, people in this country would be outraged – if he told people it was to make his buddies rich, that it was about oil.”
And this, from here:
During my many years as a writer, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people. But talking with Cindy Sheehan this morning was unlike any conversation I’ve ever had. Even though we were talking via cell phone – and had a crummy, staticky connection at that – her authenticity and passion reached through the receiver and both touched my heart and punched me in the gut.
She spoke with a combination of utter determination, unassailable integrity, fearlessness, and the peace of someone who knows that their cause is just. Her commitment was palpable – and infectious. It reminded me an old quote about the great Greek orators: “When Pericles spoke, the people said, ‘How well he speaks.’ But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, ‘Let us march!'”
That’s the feeling I got from this former Catholic youth minister. She of the floppy hat and the six foot frame (though she’s standing even taller than that these days). A woman driven by faith and conviction who used to think that one person couldn’t make a difference and is learning otherwise. Her humanity stands in stark contrast to the inhumanity of those who refuse to admit their mistakes and continue to send our young men and women to die in Iraq.
So, while the usual idiots begin their expected attacks on Sheehan, she responds the way one would expect.
Sometimes one…..

And check out the website of the Gold Star Families for Peace.

Traveler 1 — back from the dead
I just got back from my Uncle John’s wake, where I sat in the front row next to my favorite cousin’s husband, who also doesn’t do “Catholic.” While the cute young priest led the rest of the group through the required statements and responses, I stared at my hands folded in my lap — the best I could do under the circumstances of my usually irreverent nonbelief.
That’s when I noticed that my fly was open. I felt the giggle rising up from my toes, right past my open fly. Camouflaging the zipping up of my fly with a sudden shift in my chair, I managed to get myself in order, but the giggle was still rising to the occasion.
The room-wide “Amen” came just in time.
Traveler 2 — a disposal problem
Yesterday, on my drive back to Albany for a dentist appointment, I heard a review of a book called The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks. But I get ahead of myself. What I want to say about the book and that review is coming up as Traveler 3.
My car was loaded up with clothes and housewares for the Salvation Army (I know where the drop-off is in Albany), a cheap tv cart that I had to exchange because the one I bought was defective, a shopping list that took up the whole length of a 10 inch envelope, and a bag full of smelly cat litter.
Why the cat used litter, you ask? Because the garbage truck only picks up on Tuesdays, and the bin could not fit another inch of anything.
Since I was meeting my women’s group friends for dinner, I figured that I would ask one of them to take the bag of litter home and throw it in her trash. (Yes, that’s a bizarre thing to ask a friend to do, but they all know me well enough not to be suprised by anything I might ask of them.)
On my way running around the city taking care of what was on the extensive list of things to buy (including a bigger black mailbox), I considered (1) tossing the bag of used litter out my car window on some side street (2) taking it into a ladies’ room at Burger King and throwing it into their trash (3) driving back to my old apartment building and leaving it in the back where the big dumpsters are.
But then, as I was putting some groceries (this burgh to which I’ve moved has a very shabby Shop Rite that never has challah), into my car — which I had parked next to one of those fenced in places for shopping carts that big marts provide in their big parking lots — I noticed that there was a trash bin right there next to all the carts.
So I never did have to ask one of my friends to take that bag of shit off my hands.
Before I left town, though, I had in my hands instead, a hard cover copy of The Traveler that I got at Barnes and Noble. I very rarely buy hard cover books; I just wait for the paperback copies or else get the books from the library. But I thought that this one might be worth the full price (not including B&N standard 20 percent off).
Traveler 3 — “A cautionary tale guaranteed to raise the paranoia level of anyone who reads it”
The guy on NPR whose review of the book I heard on my way upstate yesterday said the the author, John Twelve Hawks, is not identifiable by anyone, not even his publisher. When he talks to his publisher, he uses a voice distorter. He lives off the “grid.” Well, that piqued by interest right there.
Can satellites track your every movement? Do covert Internet surveillance programs inspect your emails and scrutinize the web sites you visit? Is what we believe to be the true history of the world just a “puppet show for childish minds”? Scary stuff says the B&N review.
Twelve Hawks presents big ideas about free will and determinism, good versus evil, social control, and alternate dimensions, all while impressing with knowledge ranging from the New Testament to string theory. Although reviewers compared the novel to the films Kill Bill, Star Wars, and The Matrix — with echoes of authors Dan Brown, Stephen King, George Orwell, and Michael Crichton thrown in — they called it wholly original, says the Bookmarks Magazine review on Amazon.com
I don’t know when I’m going to have time to read it, since I have to finish Harry Potter first, and then Enchantment.
I never read non-fiction. I have more than enough reality to contend with these days.
And more than enough unpacked boxes that I’m still tripping over.
Meanwhile, “Happy Trails to You…”

“But you study him,” continued Doctorow, “you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be. They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life. They come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing.”
He eats ’em up, spits ’em out, and burps out another lie. That’s our pres, feasting on death.
Read the entire essay by William Rivers Pitt here.

The boxes are not yet all unpacked, but there are two things I couldn’t wait any longer to make function anew: (1) a space near the windows that face east with a rug and a rocking chair, and a cat perch so my feline roommate can curl up and watch the birds at the feeder and (2) a Kalilily Time that better reflects where I am at this point in my life.
I live at the foot of my Momma Mountain, where there are reports of a bear wandering around getting into the neighbor’s garbage; where a family of hummingbirds visits outside my mom’s kitchen window each day and where the female often hovers right next to the window, watching us watching her; where I want to rise early and bed early to enjoy the sunny promises of each morning, but my biorhythms just won’t cooperate.
I’ve dropped almost ten pounds from all the physical labor and walking up and down the stairs a hundred times each day carrying all the stuff that we should have gotten rid of. Yesterday afternoon I lay down to take a half-hour nap. I woke up four hours later.
he cut down the wild mullein growing next to the driveway — the four-foot tall sisters with spikes almost ready for harvesting and drying. they take over everywhere he says — big ugly weeds. but he’s good to her. brings her ice cream, makes sure she’s taken her meds, sits with her and watches tv. keeps making room in his basement for the stuff that just can’t fit. and he always fills the hummingbird feeder. and he can make you laugh at the things she does that stopped seeming funny to you. so you figure that there will always be more mullein.
Momma Mountain watches as I keep climbing the hard path I’ve chosen.
I wish I cared more about giving.
I wish I knew more about weblog design/codes etc.
I figure I’m not doing too badly despite my ungranted wishes.
And so it goes.

Yes, I know. It’s supposed to be where the heart is. But not for me. It’s where I can engage my head and the spirits who visit there.
Last night, the sky above my new digs was filled with all of the stars that could squeeze in between the towering trees and Momma Mountain. I call her Momma Mountain because she is strong and stable and I can see her welcoming face for miles before I reach the safety of her shadow.
In the center of my starry, starry night, the air reeled with the calls of frogs and cicadas and all of those other rowdy night creatures that are invisible except to the ear.
I was dizzy with delight. At least for that moment. That one quiet moment when I went out to my car to close the sunroof.
My old email address seems to be working, even though I am no longer connected to the net the way I used to be. We’ll see how long that lasts, but meanwhile, at least I can decompress from my day here where my head is.
she follows you around, asking questions about everything you touch, everything you do. she doesn’t read, watch the news, have any interests. there’s nothing to talk about. you yell at her. tell her to shut up and leave you alone. your sibling is usually good with her — often better than you are. your temper has quickened; your patience smothered. you and your sibling live in different realities; the clashing is loud and full of f**ks inserted into every sentence. this upsets her. but we two blow it off and keep on keeping on. sometimes we even laugh, the three of us — although usually it’s not for any reason that she understands.
Most of my plants have died. I thought that leaving them outside for a few days might perk them up after the long car ride. Did you know that plants get sunburned? Only they get paler instead of darker. All except my ugly cactus, which, despite an extremely traumatic and dismemebering ride, seems to be holding its own, still outside in the sun.
I think that I will be unpacking for the next year. I have to get rid of more stuff. Too much stuff. Too much stuff, in all of the meanings of that word.
Today I finally understood why medical practitioners in nursing homes give their patients meds to keep them as calm as possible. Otherwise they would need two caregivers for every patient. And even those two would burn out after a few months of coping with all of those paranoid accusations, insatiable needinesses, constant complainings.
Now I understand why I should have used my head and made the choice not to care.
It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.
I ditto what my ex-spouse tells our offspring. When I get like that, just put me in a trash bag and set me out by the curb.
Or, maybe it would be kinder and just as effective to put me outside in a blizzard and just let me drift off (pun intended).
It’s bedtime. I’m off to join Harry and Hermione and the half-blood prince.