My wife and I are currently reprising a scene from Forrest Gump but this time it has to do with ham…lotsa ham.

American plenty-and privilege- makes our current situation a recurring one. At Thanksgiving it’s turkey and at St. Patrick’s day its corned beef. We sit here reciting a litany of ham dishes in the hopes of handling a gargantuan amount of leftovers. I open with split pea and ham she responds with ham and eggs. ham croquettes are even mentioned. Bubba Gump has nothing on us and I think our list is longer than his homage to shrimp.

I am aware that I should be grateful for the plenty that many in the world do not enjoy but the prospect of the upcoming ham fest gives little comfort. I am thinking of exploring ham’s suitability as a building material. The comedian Lewis Black is credited with the opinion that, “You can never put too much pork in your mouth as far as I’m concerned.” I love Lewis Black but here is where we part ways. I am exploring a conversion to Judaism…an ancient and beautiful religion that also affords a particular form of salvation that I am very interested in these days.

I don’t want to be political here but I raise my clenched fist and cry OFF THE PIG !

Is it wrong to want a cheese sandwich…do I dare to eat a peach??

Memorial Day is coming. Burgers and dogs will save us.

I started the day with a cinnamon roll as big as my head and things just got better from there. Life has changed and that was never more clear than when Alexa sang Happy Birthday and proudly displayed JIM”S BIRTHDAY PARTY on the screen. Played the Beatles song and received good wishes from a host of my lovely people. Yes, I sang the doo doo doos out loud.

Being severely overeducated I remembered the lines of old Ausonius, “let us never know what old age is . Let us know the happiness time brings , not count😒 the years.” Good advice form the old Roman. My wife paid me the biggest compliment by posting, “A very happy birthday to my, “sure ,why not ” husband. I love being a, “sure why not guy” and I love it because of my lost, “WHY BOTHER” years. I have trained myself to say yes more often and to overcome some of my fears. This is the gift of time.

What really stands out is that I have miraculously gathered a significant number of people who actually give a damn about me. Greetings poured in and over me from all points of the compass and I am grateful for them. Call it a fellowship, a sangha, a tribe …I am so glad that I belong.

So, Thanks for another trip around the sun and the folks that will dance with me. A famous Buddhist -Adyashanti- put it memorably, ” We are birthed into sangha, into sacred community. It is called the world.” I am very happy to be here.

Now it’s time for a party. See you there.

I will always remember Charles Laughton’s lament in The Hunchback of Notre Dame as he embraces a terrifying gargoyle…”would that I were made of stone, like thee.” This week as Notre Dame Cathedral burned before our eyes our hearts were broken as ancient timbers and stones fell away to dust.

Sacred art is unique among all arts in that it is an act of devotion first and foremost. The art of the sacred destroys limitations and transcends the building materials of every medium. When you see the Pieta for example, the last thing that comes to mind is the stone that is at its heart. The first things are suffering, pathos and a mother’s love. When the medium doesn’t matter and the message resonates we are in the presence of true art. No sacred artist lacks passion and energy as they create works that are the result of spiritual effort. They are studies of the relationship between man and God.

I recently spent a day at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt and in every King’s tomb the wonders of devotional art are displayed. The brilliant paintings and decorations were never meant to be seen…the artists were content with performing magnificent acts of devotion for their own sake…the audience didn’t matter, the creation of beauty did.

Above all, the Cathedral was a tool to aid the devotion of believers and an act of faith by the artists. Audience-as a concept-comes of age later in the Italian Renaissance that was a flurry of commissions and competition. The proper study of man ceases to be the relationship with the creator and becomes a meditation on man, per se. Michaelangelo’s David is a quintessentially modern work, while the rose windows of the twelfth century are windows on the divine.

St. Paul famously suggested that our vision is likely to be per speculum aenigmate- through a glass darkly- and our ability to see and understand the divine will remain limited. The artists of Notre Dame sought to create the lenses that might assist us in focusing our limited vision.

As Notre Dame burned, all this came in a rush. This who were not in heart pain were truly made of stone. The church was the observatory of its time and the object of its view was the divine. We must restore it and continue to explore the spiritual cosmos. It is our destiny.

For the artist of Notre Dame the words of old Henry Miller might resonate: ” true strength lies in submission which permits one to dedicate his life, through devotion, to something beyond himself.” I hope we all learn this before everything turns to stone.

I must admit it openly…I am a Luddite. At least, I believe that new technologies are best approached with caution. In its original form the Luddite philosophy had a great deal to do with the belief that automation was actually a moral aberration….the ability of the fat cats to avoid the responsibility nabobs have to labor. For me, the distrust of technology has more to do with the fact that today’s technologies are a royal pain in the ass.

Yes, this is pedestrian and I make no excuse. A simple example is operating as I write this blog. As I try to move the cursor to make a correction, the cursor lands like a drunken bee upon the word I want to correct and promptly defines it, as if I have no understanding of the word THE. Too much help. I am as yet unable to disable the dictionary feature and so I am getting definitions for words that are normally understood by age six or sooner.

Look, I want my medical records to zip around the world in nano seconds whenever and wherever they are needed but I do not want to communicate with others by selecting a daisy chain of emojis. Perhaps the facility of communication is a moral abrogation allowing us to talk without thinking. Of course, the worst area in the horrible landscape is the password creation swamp. They don’t believe you when you set it. Confirm password is designed to prove you’re not a bot of some sort or another. A good friend shared my favorite password to date: Titanicallypissedoff2015! Makes sense.

My passwords have nearly exhausted all of Napoleon’s battles and many of the wildflowers of the western states as I cast about for a key that is not, “already in use.”

The original Luddites were known for throwing wrenches and wood blocks into the automatic wool weaving machines and I have come close to discovering how far I can throw the average laptop. There seems to be little recognition of the fact that the incredible speed and reach of the internet also allows your stupidest thoughts to have amazing impact and incredible coverage. Silence is no longer golden.

Don’t even let me get started about self-driving cars.

Well, being able to have a decent stir fry delivered directly to your gaping maw is-no- doubt- a good thing. I better order now before I take this rant too far. Hope they recognize my account.

Whether you see the artist’s product as,”solace for the broken,” or as a series of conjuror’s tricks, you can’t deny the fact that i is mankind’s most enduring activity…after birth, death, eating and sleeping. People do art.

I have often gone to the beach and observed that very few people can be on the shore without throwing a stone into the water or pocketing a shell. It seems we love to alter whatever we find amongst the knickknacks of the world. I once watched a child at play move a blue block out of a one of blocks and replace it with the identical blue block from another stack. Here , the act of change was destined and, in a way, the art itself.

We like to leave our mark and we don’t care whether it is a flag on the moon or a handprint made in prehistoric times on a random cave wall. The need for change appears encoded and our flair for mimesis allows us to both mimic and alter the world. My MFA tells me that this type of creative play leads to self discovery. Today I am in Los Angeles to visit my youngest grandchild and his parents, my wife and I took him to the zoo. At the end of the outing we bought this child a stuffed giraffe and that allowed him to have his own animal…it evoked the experience he had feeding REAL giraffes. Another notion…art allows us to possess something no matter how ephemeral the work of art may be. We have the perfect smile from La Giaconda to brighten our days although the real smile left us in the 16th century. It grants us a victory over time.

Today we have art therapy. People work with clay, paint or create a visual journal (among other techniques) to achieve what is called, “creative healing”. deep seated conflicts can be reconciled by a specific creative regimen. ” Drawing your feelings” is what every writer, dancer, sculptor, painter is doing in their chosen medium.

So, art gives us presence, evokes unlimited emotion, enhances our play and makes us whole again. My grandson is now drawing concentric circles in various colors on an easel. They are beautiful circles and he draws them with passion and a hand that may never be as free again. Picasso said it best: “Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” I hope this little artist’s studio never closes.

A few days ago an old friend of mine came home late from work to find his wife dead on the bedroom floor. Grief and shock, acts of faith and meditations on loss came instantly and will last for the rest of his life. What occurs to me -perhaps because of my distance from the event- is the true nature of death…and resurrection.

The world’s great religions are about man’s ultimate victory over death and suffering and it leads us to question where the spirits of loved ones go. Are they gone forever? For me the path to victory over death is marked by memory…vivid memories ensure a form of immortality. Our loved ones are eternally present. Long after the carbon based architecture of our presence is gone the deep force of memory carries us through the generations. When my mother died, a friend cut through the tsunami of condolences with the comment,” you’ll talk to her more now than you ever have. ” I still talk to her today and naturally, I wonder if she ever left.

In the physical world, we have posited the law that matter can not be created or destroyed. The same is true for spirit. As long as you live in memory, you are alive. As time passes and we work through the complex and conflicted feeling that come with loss it slowly becomes clear that all our loved ones remain at our side as we laugh at a remembered joke or act upon their insights. Ironically our loss is an acquisition…the gathering of all the significances our loved ones brought to us.

Memory is the victory over death.

I once went to a business seminar and the speaker proposed an exercise in the power of memory. He asked us to follow this scenario: God has allowed you to hear the comments of the people at your graveside. What do you want them to say? The answers were telling. One man said, ” I want them to respect me for doing it on my own.” Another said, I want them to sat I was a great businessman.” After a few more answers the speaker said, I want them to say, ” I really miss that guy.”

His point -of course- is that he wanted his spirit to live on in the lives of those he loved. He wanted to be remembered.

As I go on in life and I hear the “departed” voices of the people I love it does me well to remember that they are not gone, not absent. I am always grateful that they are still talking to me.

2019 marks my 50th year as a gym rat and my never ending battle against entropy is still hot. Among the many benefits of regular weight bearing exercise is the opportunity to take advantage of one of the best platforms for observing primate behavior. A good gym is attended by both sexes and every age group and the activities in a good gym are multiple including free weights, machines, classes and an aerobic studio studded with cycles, treadmills and stair climbers. You can study your fellow man in a variety of settings as they perform a variety of tasks.

Over the years I have defined five gym rat subgroups and they are very interesting. The first of these are the gladiators.

The gladiators are young and of both sexes; they never work out on machines, only free weights will do. Their dress includes the essential tank-top, short shorts – to show off the quads, weight lifting gloves and a small towel often rakishly tucked in to the waist band of the aforementioned shorts. They work in a noisy land of grunts and explosive exhales and they talk about technique from the dreaded Valsalva maneuver to the correct form for spotting. Only a select few are admitted to this crowd and the look is all important. Their rooms are lined with mirrors.

The second group are the kittens. These are usually-but not always-female. They are dressed in the newest and most flattering workout gear that shows off their best features. This group displays primate flirting behavior – hair flouncing, creative chat etc-and they can usually be found stretching as weights can make you sweat. This sub-group are at the gym with an agenda other than functional fitness. The gym beats bars and clubs for meeting that signifiant other.

Next, are the Bros. The Bros only come in pairs and one spots while the other lifts. They are notably under appointed and they wear team logo tee shirts and gym shorts that haven’t been washed since Arnie won Mister Olympia. Their talk is complex and cars, women, sports scores and job hassles are included in the repartee. Some have studied work out plans and they are all about the ideal mix of reps and sets. Later, they will have a few cold ones together.

A short glimpse and you will see group number four … The Walking Wounded. These are the people that cause you to wonder how they got to the gym at all. They have bad knees, bad hips, and are looking for some ease of their pain. They are on the machines because they offer safety, control and good minimum weight options. They diligently move among the machines with a particular focus on the equipment that works their non-functioning body parts. This group is the one that sits on a machine and talks on the cell phone while you wait for your turn.

Finally, there are the class takers. These are the gyms maximizers and they add a strong social element to their exercise. Their physical effort is matched by the energy they expend asking about your kids, your job and your overall health. Exercise happens in the background of social give and take.

I am not sneering at any of these groups because in the last 50 years I’ve been a member of each group and the bottom line is that I respect them all for being there and fighting the fight against the indolence that can kill you. So, I’ll pour another protein drink and show up for drill.

Movement is life.

In our arrogance we often think we know the true nature of things but I am increasingly sure that we can only know life’s details -the small stuff- that we encounter. Perhaps it’s because all important tips are more magic than mathematics… that all essential elements of our lives are beyond simple definition and certainty. A friend once put me through an exercise that was very revealing. He handed me a stack of index cards and challenged me to define the concepts he would put forth for consideration.

The first one was love. As I tried to define love in the briefest and most cogent way I could come up with, I found my head spinning and my pen idle. No definition was deep enough; no simple definition suggested itself. I could grasp many of the outward signs of love from the wedding vow to the four o’clock feeding but the nature of love itself defied description. As Plato said, “at the touch of love everyone becomes a poet.” They did not become analytical and at the end of the day no certainty was available.

His next challenge was happiness. Again, I was stumped, not knowing why certain things made me happy at one time and miserable another. Happiness that arises from having enough was also elusive since I have been taught by my culture that I never have enough. Again, my attempts to define were a total failure. After all happiness is a state of being not a thing that lends itself to description or analysis. Another failure.

As the words and concepts-and my failures-piled up, I began to realize that all of life’s most important things defy description and that the business of living is living. Our existentialist buddy, Albert Camus said it well “you all never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

So we are free. Free for speculation and free from certainty. We are free to dance, fall in love and do all the wonderful things that defy description. Turn up the music.

Among my many defects of character is one that is hard to bring under control. It is contempt before investigation (CBI). It is the death of learning and it comes in many forms. The least virulent strain is something like the feeling many have when they look at their first raw oyster. These things can’t be good, just look at them. No oysters are ever tasted and a potential favorite gets no chance. I once introduced guacamole to someone who aggressively asserted that they did not like guacamole…despite the fact that they had never tasted it.

More troubling is the strain of CBI that creates our prejudices, promotes stigma and forces our fellow humans into alien status. People dismiss whole populations that they make no effort to understand. It can lead to Dunning/Kruger syndrome, the state in which people with limited skill and insight believe they are super competent geniuses. Chaos ensues.

My recent trip to the Middle East made the dangers of CBI very clear. I landed in Tel Aviv with a pro-Israel bias fueled by a heady mix of ignorance and propaganda. Travel in the Occupied Territories and in Jordan changed this to a more confused and conflicted understanding of who was right and who was wrong. This is the price you pay for learning…you are no longer certain and you can’t continue to be intellectually lazy.

Now, I am very careful about my opinions. I know what I don’t know. I have no opinion about abortion- for example- because I was born without a womb…I will never know the fear and anxiety – the grief and horror – a woman feels when abortion is considered. I do not deserve an opinion. When a minority friend tells me what it means to be Black or Latino, I can only listen. You have to have, “your ass in the grass” as my Vietnam vet friends would say as they explained what really went on.

It is critical to know what you don’t know and the willingness to know, coupled with the effort is your duty. I like what Charlotte Bronte wrote in Jayne Eyre : ” Prejudices, it is well known, are the most difficult to remove from the heart whose soil has never been loosened by education. They grow there as firm as weeds among stones.” My Buddhist hero, Thich Nhat Hanh does a timely spin on the Injunction in the eightfold path regarding, “right thinking.” He suggests the cultivation of mindfulness, concentration and insight. Both Bronte and the Monk make their point in earthy terms (soil, weeds, cultivation) that suggest the bedrock, earthy nature of true knowledge.

As I work in the basic earth of my own knowledge I hope to pull the weeds of pontificating and pedantry…I want to be free of CBI.

A word-a concept- that is taking a horrible beating these days is SOCIALISM.Many react as though such a concept is the embodiment of all evil and that the implementation of socialist programs will be the end of freedom and individuality. Famous socialist like Buddha, Jesus, the Fabians and others are-apparently- subversive. Really?

Capitalism does support individual initiative, expanding markets and the ability-for better or worse- to amass personal fortunes. It can also lead to an objectivist rejection of mankind’s number one saving grace…altruism. I believe that every human being is born an altruist, being with a sense that assisting others is the right and proper thing to do. As life goes on, individual traumas and circumstances limit this emotion and we have people who lionize the greedy, the wealthy and those who seek to oppress.

Capitalists argue for individual initiative, no limits on wealth and the primacy of money in general. The image of Natty Bumpo comes to mind….the rugged pioneer wrestling with the environment and turning everything to his will. Does anyone ever succeed without another’s help or, more to the point, without someone’s basic altruism? Recently I have seen lists of all the socialist programs Americans accept without much enquiry. The Church you attend, the Social Security check you cash all reek of socialism and most would argue that they are good things. Even professional golfers play on courses they didn’t build with clubs they didn’t buy, in clothes that were given to them in sponsorship deals. Takers.

Rather than hurl grenades over the barbed wire of the socialist vs. capitalist battle we might step back and realize that most advanced countries are a mix of both philosophies. When these systems work well they are informed by the natural altruism of human beings that mandates our care for the elderly and the infirm. The young and striving need access to opportunity and a better life. The socialist/ capitalist cocktail is by far the most drinkable.

We had a St. Patrick’s Day dinner with friends who are marvelously altruistic. One couple has completely taken over the affairs of a neighbor who is failing. Another teaches Chineese immigrants English and two guests are very active in the Soroptimist Organization.Another guest works hard on affordable housing. They are un-compensated and working for free is bad business. There is no monetary ROI. They are a bunch of damned SOCIALISTS and thank heaven that they are.

As all of us age we better hope that these socialists -ALTRUISTS- are near and dear to us. They will advocate for medical care, bring us food and ease our pain. Let’s not weaponize a word that means so much. Set me up a nice cocktail mixed with capitalist and socialist liquors. They blend together well.