Midlife Meditation

First the grumblings: Tucson the city is like everything that's wrong with Portland's TV Highway--times ten. Yes, there's a quaint downtown with interesting shops, an arts district, and a few good places to eat. As soon as you've passed the rattlesnake pedestrian bridge, though, Tucson is nothing but mile after mile of unremitting suburban sprawl: strip malls, fast food franchises, car dealerships, and nothing to distinguish it from any other American metro monoculture. We came to Tucson hoping for some Southwestern flavor, Mexican influence, some sense of place. The neighborhood we're staying in has adobe-style houses, but apart from that, we might as well have stayed in Beaverton. And in case you're wondering, yeah, it really sucks to get sick on the first day of a vacation. But now on to the wonder. The main reason we chose Tucson for our winter vacation was the cactus. Tucson borders the Saguaro National Park, and is within daytrip distance of the ...

I'm angry. I don't say this lightly. I'm not a believer in anger. Anger is an emotional appendix, a feeling that has long outlived its evolutionary purpose. In our world, expressing anger does not get constructive results. It does foment violence in the home, in the schoolyard, on the streets, and between states. It drives couples apart, traps children in the middle of divorce, turns town meetings into free-for-alls, furthers the causes of reactionaries who shout down information they'd rather not here, and thus furthers the descent of this nation, this world, into the inferno of climate change. Anger gets us nowhere. I've believed this most of my life. Expressing anger, however justified, has never yielded a result I coveted. In fact, however I have expressed my anger--and that includes the vaunted "I statement"--has always made matters worse. Always. And yet I feel it. However dedicated I may be to detachment, however logically I may seek to t...

Another area of fuzzy thinking out there is the movement called Intelligent Design. It asserts that somethings are too marvelous or too intricate to explain. The contention is that these things defy common scientific accounts for cause and effect, and so they’re ascribed to an intelligent, purposeful designer... So let’s start a movement called Stupid Design, and we’ll see where that takes us. For example, what’s going on with your appendix? It’s much better at killing you than it is at anything else. That’s definitely a stupid design. What about your pinky toenail? You can barely put nail polish on it; there’s no real estate there. how about bad breath, or the fact that you breathe and drink through the same hole in your body, causing some fraction of us to choke to death every year? And here’s my last one. Ready?  Down there  between our legs,  it’s like an entertainment complex system  in the middle of a sewage system.  Who designed that? — Neil DeGrasse ...

When I was in nursery school (what they used to call preschool, back in the olden days), my favorite toy was a plastic Noah's ark, complete with plastic Noah, plastic Emzarah (Noah's wife), and two each plastic giraffes, plastic elephants, plastic lions, plastic tigers, plastic et cetera. When my own children were of preschool age (because that's what we called it in the not so olden days), they had their own plastic Noah's playset, though this one was bigger and cuter, probably made by Fisher Price or Playschool. I spent many a happy hour with mine, and my kids did with theirs, walking the animals up the ramp and onto the boat, floating it off in the air, perhaps even in the bathtub, never stopping to think about this: The artist's name is Flora Tucinovic, the title is "Accurate Noah's Ark," and it depicts quite well the part of the story that we don't tell our children, because it really is a horrible, ghastly, abominable tale of global genoci...

Art is such a hard thing to qualify. And yet we do it all the time. My earliest preferences were colored by my opinionated mother, who never waffled on anything, and always had a reason for her preferences. This place is better than that place because such and so happened at that place; this TV show is better than that one because its sex jokes are implied rather than explicit; this piece of music is intolerable because it's performed by hippies; and so it went. She could back up every one of her clearly-defined judgments with some bit of information, some personal experience that rendered the conclusion obvious to anyone with a brain. As a child and adolescent, I clung to this binary view of all things. But then along came college and professors whose opinion mattered to me even more than my mother's did. They clearly knew what they were talking about, and mostly what they wanted was for me to keep an open mind about music I initially disliked intensely. This was partic...