Midlife Meditation

The first thing you need to know about mountain marriage is that we made it up. We were climbing Dog Mountain, talking as we climbed about a big step we were about to take: after a year and a half of me living in Amy's apartment, we were going to rent a house together, putting both our names on the rent and utilities. Our relationship had been growing deeper and richer, and now we felt ready. In real terms, the change was just of address; symbolically, though, this was a paradigm shift, from me living with Amy to Amy and me living together . We were heading up the shorter, but far more challenging, trail to the top, battling a ridiculously steep grade. Hiking, particularly mountain climbing, had served as a metaphor for our relationship from our second date, when we took our first hike on Leif Erickson Drive. The hardest climbs had the greatest rewards: the view from the top was always rewarding, but even more was the sense of conquering our bodies' limitations, pushi...

My last post, on the dangers of running or cycling on Germantown Road, generated a response that had me scratching my head and, ultimately, doing some research. One of the nineteen people who read the post put up a comment on Facebook to the effect that, under Oregon law, all those cars attempting to trim my arm hair were, in fact, in the right, and by obstructing their commutes with my soft body, I was actually committing a traffic infraction. As proof, he cited ORS 814.040. Oops. Wrong statute. That provision is only about crossing the street in town. It's Oregon's crosswalk law: pedestrians have the right of way if they're crossing the street at an intersection, whether or not there's a marked crosswalk. If there's a walk signal, they're supposed to obey it, but otherwise, the crosswalk is implied, and cars must yield to them. Crossing in the middle of a block ("jaywalking" in the vernacular), pedestrians must yield to vehicles; if they don'...

Let's start with the disclaimer: roads are for cars. That's why they're paved and marked the way they are. Engineers design roads to accommodate drivers, not walkers, runners, or cyclists. Now for the rant. This morning at 7 a.m., I headed out the door of my suburban home for a summer run. Amy and I live at the far north end of Bethany, an unincorporated area within the Beaverton School District. Running or cycling, it takes me just a minute to leave the spec houses of my neighborhood and be on a lovely country road, looking out across pastures, fields, and valleys to the hills beyond. This morning I surprised a trio of young bucks, and snapped pictures of one before continuing my run. My runner's high was kicking in early as I breathed the fresh air, drank in the long sunrise shadows, and celebrated all the best things about rural life. I was planning a run around the "block," a loop that includes Kaiser Road, Germantown Road, NW 185th, and f...

Biblically Based Bigotry A new book by Stephen Eric Bronner presents the argument that homophobes are bigots, nothing more, nothing less ; and that, as bigots, there is no way to talk them out of their rejection of gay rights, gay marriage, gay ordination, gay anything. Refute an argument--point out, for example, that the passage from Leviticus in the picture above is surrounded by other laws presenting equivalent condemnations of eating shellfish, wearing mixed fiber clothing, and being sassy to one's parents--and they simply shift to a different argument, refusing to even acknowledge that the previous one has been deflated. This is the experience I've had with homophobes for as long as I've attempted to deal with them. For a time, principally in the 1990s when I was serving as a United Methodist pastor, my approach to the homophobes I occasionally encountered in my congregations, much more frequently encountered in ecumenical settings, was to be patient and eva...

Shotgun mass wedding? Happy ending? Sexist cliches turned on their heads? It's all this, and more. If you read the screed I posted yesterday about James Bond movies, you may be of the opinion that I've become a humorless political corrector with no tolerance for fantasy, satire, or simple battle-between-the-sexes fun. If you are of that opinion, this post should dispel those concerns. To rehash, briefly: to my dismay, I found when settling down to a classic James Bond film that the blatant sexism and misogyny of the franchise were trumping the fun for me, and had to turn it off. I fumed about it for a day or two, then wrote up all the problems I saw in the disposable "Bond girls" and the hero's nonchalant attitude toward their frequent deaths, and why I have lost my tolerance for such plot devices. "But it's a fantasy!" someone commented, and she's right: it no more depicts the real world of espionage than Star Wars  is an accurate portra...

Is this an action movie, or an excuse for putting scantily clad sexy women in sexy situations while men in tuxedos look on approvingly? I used to love James Bond. I don't remember not knowing about James Bond, or at least about agent 007 and his cool gadgets. I'm not sure how I knew about him, as throughout my childhood my parents were as disapproving of violence as they were of smoking, drinking, and sexual references, so the only movies we went to were either cartoons or musicals. We did watch a lot of TV, and there may well have been ads for James Bond movies, and one of our favorite shows was the Mel Brooks spy spoof, Get Smart , which was as appealing to me for the coolness of the gadgets as the humor, which often went over my head. Whatever the source, by the time I was six I already knew the James Bond theme and knew that 007 was a spy, and was eager to experience some entertainment in that vein. Twelve years later, I finally saw my first Bond movies. ...

Why do we kill people who kill people to prove that killing people is wrong? --Holly Near I know you've seen it, probably on a bumper sticker, possibly on a button, perhaps a banner, a sign, a poster. I've seen it many times, on all those things, but not until tonight did I, thanks to the magic of the internet, learn that the words I quoted came from a folk singer named Holly Near. Now you can attribute them, too. I've seen it so many times they strike me as a cliche, but even so, every time I encounter this quote, I nod. It's so obvious, so plainly true, that I'm stunned the most democratic nation in the world hasn't figured it out. If murder is wrong, then so is killing murderers. And yet we keep doing it. There's a strong possibility, though, that capital punishment may finally be coming to an end. Not because of the dozens of exonerated prisoners, innocent people who could have been put to death for someone else's crimes if not for the...