There are places in Silicon Valley where you can stand along the edge of San Francisco Bay and look back at the Coastal Range, and during the summer you can watch as the fog from the Pacific Ocean spills over the low points in the ridge line. On the other side of the Coastal Range, an ocean current hits the shore line, and deep cold water comes to the surface where it meets warmer air, and condenses into fog. The fog will build up until it’s five hundred or a thousand feet high, high enough to spill over the low points in the ridge. You can watch the fog working its way down through the distant woodlands some miles away and hundreds of feet higher than where you stand, down at sea level, in the warm bright sunshine of Silicon Valley.
Category Archives: Meditations
On civil disobedience
When I went off to college, I immediately got involved with the movement to do away with nuclear weapons; I was a religious pacifist, I was attending a Quaker college, it was a natural thing to do. Some of the other students were planning to engage in civil disobedience, and I began to consider doing so myself. I wrote to Pat Green and asked his advice. Pat had been the assistant minister and the youth advisor at my church, and I remembered that he had talked about being arrested for engaging in civil disobedience while protesting the Vietnam War. “Somewhere in the FBI files,” Pat had said, “there’s mug shots of me wearing one of those conical Vietnamese hats.”
By then, Pat was the minister of the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Birmingham, Alabama. He wrote back quickly, and said he would not advise me to engage in civil disobedience. He felt his arrest had not had any effect on United States war policy; the only thing it had done was to give him a criminal record; the price paid was not worth the end result. Maybe he thought that he had to say that to a seventeen year old kid, but I doubt it: Pat was terribly sincere, and I think he really meant what he said.
Two and a half years later, I saw some friends of mine getting arrested trying to blockade the entrance to Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. That same weekend, I also saw that the greatest effect of our protest at Seabrook was to polarize opposition, and reduce the possibility of meaningful dialogue about nuclear power plants. I was at Seabrook, partly for the adventure of it, but also because of a dawning systems-level understanding that the nuclear power industry was intimately connected with the nuclear weaponry, not least because of the possibility of weapons-grade materials getting stolen by terrorist groups. That kind of understanding had no place in the rough-and-tumble world of protest politics, where often the most that happens is that people yell at each other and get ten second interviews with the news media.
I just went and re-read Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” I had forgotten how deeply personal it is. I had also forgotten how deeply spiritual the essay is: Continue reading
Summer-dry season
This afternoon, I took a break from not writing the things I’m supposed to be writing, and went out to the Baylands nature preserve for a walk.
We’re now fully into the summer-dry season. The plants all look drab: The grasses are crispy and dry; they have faded beyond golden-brown to pale golden-brown. The leaves of the trees have become dull green. Even the cattails, with their feet sunk into damp soil in the marshes, are not as green as they are in the spring.
Away from the bay, I didn’t see many animals: I saw one gopher, heard and insect or two, saw one small brown bird flitting from one bit of cover to another bit of cover. But there was plenty of activity out on the waters and mudflats of the bay. Forster’s Terns were everywhere, diving into the water and sometimes coming up with fish in their bills. Barn Swallows swooped along the edges of the salt marshes, while egrets hunted in the shallow waters near by. Hundreds of shore birds plunged their bills into the mud left behind by low tide.
No progress
This is my study leave, and I’m supposed to be working on two writing projects. But I made no progress today.
The big project I’m supposed to be working on is a series of stories for children about religion. I know the approach I want to use — an approach where I don’t try to reduce the other traditions to platitudes that fit into our own religious schema, but instead retain something of the strangeness and unfamiliarity of other religious traditions. I have primary and secondary source materials lined up. I even have something of a general outline. But I just didn’t get started today.
I’m also supposed to be revising a collection of children’s stories that I put together last year for the religious education program here at the Palo Alto church. I’m supposed to be correcting typographical errors, fixing a few factual errors, and adding a couple of stories that got left out by mistake. But I just didn’t get started today.
What I did do is this: I finished reading a book. I responded to an editor who had some questions about a short essay I wrote. I read a science fiction magazine. I worried about another article that seems to have been swallowed by another editor’s desk. I read the newspaper. I made extensive notes on proposed writing project that, although it is on the topic of a religious or spiritual practice, has only a tangential connection to my church job. I read a professional journal. I did laundry. I sat and thought. I sat and didn’t think.
A month ago, I made a beautiful schedule of how I was going to organize my study leave so I could finish both writing projects in two short weeks. I’m usually pretty good at sticking to writing schedules. When I’m not good at sticking to a schedule, it usually means there’s something missing in the overall plan for the project, and I’m pretty sure that’s what’s going on right now. I even think I now know what the problem is. But in the mean time, I have made no progress, and I’ve already lost two days of work.
Worst day of the year.
I love my job. I love the the staff and lay leaders and everyone else at our church. I love being a minister, and hope I never have to retire.
Nevertheless, the first day back from vacation is the worst day of the year.
Summer
At midday, my old friend W—— and I packed sandwiches and water, got into his canoe and paddled up the Concord River, and paddled upstream. It wasn’t as hot as yesterday, but it still was in the 90s. Sometimes we’d catch a light breeze, depending on where we were along the bends of the river. The hot sun was straight above us, and there was no shade except over water too shallow for us to paddle in. We saw Daniel Chester French’s statue of the Minuteman, passed under the Old North Bridge, passed the replica of the boat house where Nathaniel Hawthorne had tied up the rowboat he bought from Henry Thoreau,* and at last got to the confluence of the Assabet and Sudbury Rivers, which is the beginning of the Concord River.
“Which way do you want to go?” I asked Will. He didn’t have an opinion, so I suggested we got up the Assabet River because it was likely to be shadier. We passed some people fishing, and I asked them if they were catching anything. “Nothing,” they said, “just a few little sunfish. It’s too hot.” They were standing waist-deep in the water to keep cool.
The Assabet River is narrow, and just a little way up it we were in the shade. We went up stream just a short way before it got too shallow to go any further. We drifted downstream until we found a bend in the river that was in the shade, and which also caught the desultory breeze. Fish swam under us, and a Spotted Sandpiper bobbed on the opposite bank. It was the perfect place to beat the heat, and we talked about our families for a good hour until it was time to drift back downstream to where we put in.
* For my Unitarian Universalist readers, French, Hawthorne, and Thoreau were all raised as Unitarians, although Thoreau resigned from his church in his early twenties.
Summer
At about five o’clock, it had cooled off enough that I was willing to go out for a long walk. I walked out of my sister’s air-conditioned house in Acton, Mass., into the heat. At least it wasn’t unbearably humid; it was merely mildly humid and oppressively hot. When I got off the main road onto a side street, away from car exhaust fumes, I could smell the warm earth, the roadside plants and weeds, the occasional tang of pollen. I passed a hay field that had just been mowed, with all the cut hay raked into rows so the baler could scoop them up, and the sweet smell of fresh-cut hay overwhelmed all the other smells. Then I got back onto a main road again, and once again the hot summer smells were lost under the exhaust fumes. That evening, Dad said his digital thermometer had recorded a high temperature of 99.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
Summer
Three of us were driving across the Dumbarton Bridge from the Peninsula to the East Bay. As we came up over the height of the bridge, my eyes were drawn to the golden-brown Hayward Hills.
“The hills are brown,” I said, and sighed. “Summer’s really here.” I don’t like
“They were still green just a few weeks ago,” said Marsha.
“Well, our last rain was in, what, late May?” I said.
“The rains ended unusually late this year,” said Marsha, who grew up in California.
Julian sat and listened to us. He has just moved here from western Massachusetts, where it remains green all summer long.
Water
The dry season has set in, the creeks have dried up, and the soil is getting powder dry. Our tomato plants looked like they needed water, so one evening we turned on the soaker hose that we buried in the garden, and let it run all night. The next morning, some animal — a roof rat, a large bird, a cat? — had uncovered portions of the hose, presumably to suck water off of it. And this morning when I watered the kale and tomatoes we have growing in containers on our second-story porch, and Oregon junco (Junco hyemalis [thurberi?]) came to sip at the overflow. Although the last rainstorm was only a few weeks ago, water is already precious to small animals.