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Category: perspective

Binge-Watching

Binge-Watching

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Yesterday I spoke with a colleague. We discussed the government shutdown and other matters. She wondered aloud why more people aren’t up in arms about what’s happening to our country. I posited an answer: binge watching.

Of the two 20-century dystopian novels most in vogue when I was growing up, Brave New World was most on the money. Not for a moment underestimating 1984‘s Big Brother or the surveillance under which we now live, I think our peril lies in our pleasures, in our need for entertainment.

Enter binge-watching. In the last week, as my body has been trudging through January 2019, my mind and heart are lodged in Victorian England as I binge-watch the PBS series “Victoria.”  It’s a relatively innocent pleasure as pleasures go—and don’t get me wrong: I love it! But  I’ve noticed it makes me care a little less about present-day reality.

Binge-watching a show is addictive. I’m absorbed in my show just as the denizens of Brave New World were absorbed by their walls. All I need now is a little soma.

(Photo: Courtesy PBS)

Gimme Shelter

Gimme Shelter

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As the snow fell Sunday I glanced out the window to see a little bird fluttering in the azalea bush behind the house. I didn’t see it clearly enough to note the type, but it was probably one of the many flooding the feeder these days, a chickadee or junco. (Look closely at the opening center left and you’ll see its little head and eye.)

What a small, quivering thing it was, preening and rustling in the brush. Seeing it there made me remember fairy stories about animal homes in thickets or under ground and how as a child I could imagine nothing more exciting than exploring tucked-away places like that.

Now I consider the goal that all living things have, which is survival, and how difficult it can be this time of year. There I stood in the warmth of my house, with its insulation and forced air heat and hot water flowing from the tap.

Yes, a part of me wants to beat in the breast of that bird, to be part of the living landscape. But I know enough of cold and ice to appreciate the comforts I have, the comforts I share with other creatures, as a matter of fact, including … two birds.

January Sky

January Sky

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It’s a good time of year to look up. I snapped this shot just before getting on Metro yesterday. It was later than I would like to have been leaving, but it gave me the chance to see the sky on fire.

It was a quieter sky this morning, one mottled with clouds but striking in its own way.  I took this photograph while walking around the block at the Courthouse Metro Station, which it how I occupy myself when I’ve just missed the bus.

Two mornings, two cloudscapes, both ripe for the picking. All I needed to do was stop, point and shoot. But it can be hard even to take the time to do this.  How many other sky shots have I missed?

Revelations

Revelations

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In classical Greek it meant the manifestation of a deity to a worshipper. But now the word epiphany can mean other revelations, as well. Just as our society has become more secular, so too have our revelations. We can have epiphanies about our work, our families, our politics.

But to me, all epiphanies have a bit of the divine in them. And it is in part because of epiphanies, the aha moments that come from nowhere, that I believe in the divine.

Because one moment the world is pitiless plain—and the next it is lush mountains and valleys. What can explain the difference? No atoms or molecules, no assemblage of 1s and 0s.

It is wonder, plain and simple. It is waking inside the rainbow. It is the star, a light in the sky that leads us to the divine.

Slow Cooker

Slow Cooker

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Today it will be not turkey, ham or chicken …  but beef. Beef bourguignon, to be exact. An old crock pot recipe, a meal started in the wee hours to be served 10 hours later.
I wish there were a slow cooker setting for life, a way to slice and dice early, set the dial on “low” and let simmer all the thoughts, happenings, talks, tears and laughter of a year. 
Because that’s what I’m wanting now. To digest what has happened. 
Every year is like that,
but this one…
more than others. 
Calm Souls

Calm Souls

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A warm and windy All Souls Day, the trees finally fall-like after weeks of holding their green.

Crows caw, a sound familiar this time of year, which I often think of as a shoulder season, pausing at the top of the roller-coaster, almost time for the cacophony of year-end celebrations.

Many things are different now, with one daughter living far away, but it wouldn’t be a holiday season without a little cacophony, so I think it’s safe to say that will be true this year as well.

I am taking the calm when I can get it, then. The warm and windy calm. The calm that holds within it all matter of rustlings and bustlings. Which is, perhaps, the only kind of calm we can claim.

Window Seat

Window Seat

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Usually I sit on the aisle. But not when the American West is involved. Yesterday I grabbed a window seat so I could snap the vistas when I saw them … the jagged peaks and dark valleys.

… a river snaking through brown hills,

… a blue lake shaped like a jigsaw puzzle piece,

… and the snowy, showy Grand Tetons.

I was never quite sure where I was — but my phone camera’s location finder knew. We flew over the Cascades, down to Pomeroy in southeastern Washington State. From there over Sugar City and Dubois, Idaho, to Bridger-Teton and Medicine Bow National Forests in Wyoming. And from there, we flew into Denver.

Those were the geographic realities. But from my window seat I saw only shapes and shadows, geometric purity. It seemed like I was seeing the essence of things.

Peak Experience

Peak Experience

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The Chief Sealth Trail winds its way through southeastern Seattle for almost five miles. Though I’d read about it in my Airbnb welcome note and tried to find it on a map, it was proving elusive to pinpoint — at least in cyberspace.

In the long run I literally ran into it. Walking down 32nd Street, I saw a rise, an opening, a grassy meadow, a break in the cityscape. It was the trail!

I turned left, and the sight almost took my breath away. There was Mount Rainier looming large in the sunset sky.  I couldn’t find an angle that didn’t involve power lines, but there it was, Seattle’s iconic mountain.

When I reached my place, I told Cris, Airbnb host, how excited I was to spot the peak. Oh yes, she said. But you can see it from our house, too. She led me to the dining room window, pointed off in the distance. And there it was again, only slightly less imposing.

Sometimes, peak experiences are closer than you think.

Green and Gray

Green and Gray

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Ireland seems like another world already. It is another world, of course, or at least another country. But it’s one I’m going to imagine now, because the fields are so green and the stones are so gray and the two go so well together.

There was a feeling there that everything will be all right in the end. A strange feeling, when you think about the history of the place. But a cozy, warm feeling.

Maybe it’s the gallows humor there or the expectations, which aren’t as high as those on this side of the Atlantic. But whatever it is, I’m going to be drawing on it today.

Knowledge and Numbers

Knowledge and Numbers

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The Scientific Revolution began not in knowledge but in ignorance, writes Yuval Noah Harari in his book Sapiens, which I’m more than halfway through now. (See last Friday’s entry.)

“The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions,” Harari says.

In the ancient or medieval world, the pre-16th-century world, there were two kinds of ignorance. An individual might not know something, in which case he or she would ask someone who did. (A peasant asks his local priest how the world begins; the priest will know the answer, which has been laid out for humankind in the Bible.)

The other kind of ignorance, says Harari, was that an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things. How spiders spin their webs, for instance. The answer was not in the Bible, and there were few if any spider scholars back then. But it was not important to know the answer to this question. God knows everything, the world has its order, and homo sapiens took comfort in that.

“The willingness to admit ignorance has made modern science more dynamic, supple and inquisitive than any previous tradition of knowledge,” Harari writes. “This has hugely expanded our capacity to understand how the world works and our ability to invent new technologies.”

In his scientific manifesto, The New Instrument, published in 1620, Francis Bacon argued that knowledge is power and that the test of knowledge is not whether it is true, but whether it empowers us. Science and technology have been connected ever since.

This is very good for science, for unlocking the secrets of the universe, but not always good for social order — and certainly not good for people who aren’t good at math.

Because ever since the Scientific Revolution, darn it, the secrets of the universe seem to reveal themselves in equations. “Newton showed that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics,” Harari says. And this mathematifying (my word) of knowledge has moved from the hard sciences to the social sciences, even to fields like psychology.

“Confucius, Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed would have been bewildered if you told them that in order to understand the human mind and cure its illnesses you must first study statistics.”

They aren’t the only ones.