St. Andrews Cathedral

I love cathedrals and old churches. I love religious music (organs, Catholic choir music, gospel) and I love religious art. I don't believe in God. Not as an entity that experiences jealousy, hate, has a gender, or a race. The best way I can explain my spirituality is that it is nature. Nature made us all. Nature is a force we are all a part of. It doesn't judge, it undulates through the cosmos, making new galaxies, planets, life forms...it is very large, so large you can never know the end of it and so small that you can't see it with your naked eye, and everything in between.

It is the cycle of life and death. It doesn't seek vengeance or punish us. We punish ourselves. Nature is simply the pull of the universe. Gravity. Balance. Nature seeks balance. When a species gets too plentiful to feed itself it will starve. If it learns to live on nothing, it will get diseases. Nature will find a way to keep the balance.

Therefore, if we ourselves put things out of balance, as we have, it will find a way to right itself. If there are too many people there will be some form of limitation to our survival. Not as a judgment, but as a way to keep all things healthier.

Religion is our way of trying to give voice and words to the forces at work. It is hard for people to imagine a force greater than themselves that isn't in their own image. I believe that we have formed ideas about God based on what we know of ourselves. The bible has it backwards. The bible says something about how god created man in his image. I think man imagined god in his.

What I love about churches is that here I see man seeking his best self. In the statuary, the saints, the beautiful architecture, the music...it is the human imagination trying to embrace something beyond self, something close to universal love. It's true that often man may leave church or synagogue or temple and go kill another man...but religion is his attempt to get beyond that to his best self. It is his effort to find and give acceptance.

Which is beautiful.

Many terrible atrocities have been committed in the name of god. Humans have often believed that god is on "their side". If your idea of god is that god takes sides then either your idea of god is dreadfully flawed or else god is not a good being and I can never side with him/it/her. Nature doesn't discriminate against races, gender, or class. We all die. Every last one of us. We all will have sorrows and troubles.

I take these thoughts into churches and while in the pews I meditate on how man is constantly tangled in his own muddle of spirituality. He cannot seem to get beyond his own image. His own reflection into the greater pool of life. I would like to see in the pool the light that is the opposite of the dark. I would like to see the life bubbling up in it and dragging itself onto the shore where I can know it. Or I would like to dive into the pool myself to see what is outside of myself.

I sat in the cathedral yesterday and experienced it as man's great inspiration, his attempts to get outside of his own skin and let the world in. One of the things I love about catholic churches are the votives. I think it's lovely to light a candle for someone. I think it's lovely to use candles as a request for prayers. There are always candles lit. I love to watch the candles and know that here are human cares being released. I added my own.

I lit (and paid for, thank you!) ten candles. I lit them for the following: for peace, for plenty, for healing, for mother, for father, for child, for sister, for brother, for the forgotten, and for the homeless.

I found another church, this time a Church Of Scotland, which wasn't open. However, they had this prayer tree. I added a prayer to it.

A prayer for peace. A prayer for my country to stop killing people in Iraq. A prayer to end the war. I don't think my prayer is going to be answered, but what's important is that I put my wishes out there and that I have in my heart those who are dying in war right now and keep hope lit in myself that a temporary peace may come.

I am fascinated by the catholic statuary. Very gory stuff. Yet beautiful too. It would be equally beautiful if it were modeled after dark Africans, olive Arabs, or pale Asians. Catholics are certainly responsible for a tremendous amount of bloodshed and while I can never embrace the religion for my own, just as I cannot embrace any organized religion for my own, I think they've also been responsible for some of the most incredible art, architecture, and music.

These feet of Christ make me think of the song Johnny Cash sings "Were you there?" which is all about Jesus being nailed to the cross.

I would like peace and plenty for us all.

Jesus Had A Hammer, Mary Had A Saw

(I like to think Mary was a tool junkie* like me)

Of all the bible lore that has been discussed in my presence, the most interesting things aren't the mystical "miracles" that God and Jesus performed. I have always been much more riveted by the mundane things; things the bible never answers for me such as: did Jesus use a stick to brush his teeth? Did Jesus have lice? Did Jesus hate the desert? And obviously I'm intrigued by the fact that he was supposedly a carpenter. Doesn't it interest anyone besides me that he wasn't a lawyer, or a money changer, or a homeless leper?

Carpentry is one of those skills that man has depended on for as long as man discovered he didn't want to wander the earth all year long, every year, running from mastodons and saber-toothed tigers. There are only a few things humans really require for survival (besides avoiding being eaten by anything higher on the food chain...but we sure did take care of that problem by killing off everything that was higher on the food chain...yay us?): food (whether hunted, foraged, or cultivated, we require food), shelter (either under big rock over-hangs or shelter we build ourselves), a safe place to grow sperm and eggs into more people.

Clearly, humans have mastered the whole reproductive gig. But how many of us could provide ourselves with food and shelter if we had no one else to hand it to us on a golden platter?

Jesus was a carpenter and I wonder if there is any particular significance to that fact? It is one of the most basic and important skills humans can have. I like to think that Mary might have picked up a saw and cut herself some timber if need be. I've had my own hammer since I was nineteen years old. I relished choosing one for myself and telling the scoffing men in the hardware store to get lost while I got up close and personal with all of the hammers they had and pretended to bash them in the head to test out the feel of the handles and the weight. I chose a very nice hammer that has never once let me down.

Having a hammer has not, in itself, made me a handy person. In fact, I wouldn't describe myself as handy at all. I do aspire to it though. The dog is Houdini reincarnated and has many escape tricks up her tail. One of them is to quietly smash the fence to bits while we're not looking, as you can see above, her work is swift. In the past I would have grabbed my hammer and looked for some stray nails with which to fix this problem.

But that was before I got comfortable and capable with Philip's power drill. Women love to roll their eyes and comment about "men and their power tools" but I think most women, once they get a feel for them will understand the magnificent possibilities inherent in the ownership of such a tool. Women love power almost as much as men do and I admit that while it took me YEARS to even consider trying to use this tool, I am now at a point where I'm wondering if I don't need my own. (The answer to that is no. Because one power drill per household is enough. Sharing is good.)

This is my modest circular saw. I'm not a pro at using one but I'm proficient. What I have yet to master is to change the blade position to match the job I'm doing. I built a chicken coop from scratch a few years ago using this saw and the power drill. I also used levels, squaring tools, post hole diggers, and a staple gun. I wish my pictures of it aren't lost in the ether. I would show you what a woman can do when left alone with some wood, imagination, tools, and a need. It wasn't the prettiest thing you ever saw, but it was draft proof and provided a solid safe nest for my hens.

Our friend Jim came over yesterday to cut a pre-built fence panel in half for a bigger part of the dog containment project and he is a professional carpenter. He has things like chalk line and fancier skill saws and routers and things that are a huge mystery to me. I watched him cut that panel in two and wondered what it would feel like to have that kind of skill at my fingertips? Then I realized that I do. I do have some of the most important skills humans can have: foraging, growing, cooking, and preserving food is extremely important to humans in the same way as building shelter is.

Chick didn't bust this hole in the fence but once access to her other escape routes are closed off I know she'll find a way to wedge herself through here.

I might not be able to build more than a rudimentary shelter but I'm ridiculously proud that I can fix a hole in a fence like this.

The above picture required only that I screw the existing board back into place.

But for these two missing fence panels I had to cut a larger 1x6 board in half and then screw it into place. So easy to do. Yet a few years ago I would have looked at you like you were floating past me on the Nile holding up a sandwich board that says "Headed For Hell" if you had suggested I fix it myself.

Next up is some raised bed building. I am going to make them all by myself. The raised beds we made at the last house were made with the help of Philip and our very dear friends Sid and Dennis. This time it will just be me, the skill saw, the power drill, and a bunch of wood.

As a side note, I will have to take a picture of our pencil sharpener in the basement. Oh yes, oh my...it's the kind that schools have. The crank kind made of metal that are the only way to sharpen a pencil. If the porch facing the back yard didn't instantly make me want this house, the pencil sharpener in the basement did! I used it yesterday and it worked well and gave me the kind of small bright pleasure that a good life is filled with.

I am a tool junkie.

*I really wanted to say "tool whore" but then I thought that "whore" is still a pretty hard word to use without it coming off as deeply offensive. So then I thought "junkie" would be more appropriate. But if one is to really consider it seriously, is it less shocking to refer to oneself playfully as a drug addict or as a prostitute? Of course, either of them is better than saying "gosh I sure do love tools" which is really what I'm trying to say but is so milky and bland when it's stripped of all it's colloquial edge. I use language to weed out the hyper sensitive and gentle people because they make me itchy. I'm allergic to milky character. Wow, for a footnote this is impressively rambling and philosophical. I like it here in the footnote though. It's decorated exactly like a corner of my brain. I could stay here in this foot note all day talking to myself. Well, now I'm cracking myself up because I'm totally just talking to myself at this point and it always cracks me up how easily I can amuse myself when it's just me and a typewriter. If you happen to be reading this still then that's just incidental and you are now eavesdropping on my brain.

Shame on you!

I Wonder If Jesus Ate Pita Bread

I'll bet he did. And I'll bet he liked it too. Jesus was a Mediterranean guy, after all. One might even speculate that he was part Arab. How likely would it have been for him to be purely of European descent? Philip is telling me that the area in which Jesus lived was, by his lifetime, a real crossroads of cultures already. There were Mesopotamians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Phoenicians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Turks (for a start). Does it still bother some Christians to imagine that Jesus was probably not really white?

I like to imagine him as a blend of ethnicities. Though it would be deeply ironic if there was ever proof that he was of Northern African or Arab ethnicity. How that would make some millions of American and European Christians uncomfortable. Not that it's my life ambition to make anyone uncomfortable.

I like to think about what I brought back with me from my trip to Israel* to visit my father, his wonderful wife, and my half brother. I brought back with me, as souvenirs, a much sharper political understanding of the region, a deeper respect for the diversity of culture and the educational sophistication of that nation, some amazing cheesy Christian holy water and Jesus relic souvenirs which have sadly been lost in the fire, time spent with family which was both wonderful as well as raggedly emotional, and the best thing of all?

The experience of eating pita bread as it is eaten by the people who have been making it for a thousand years at least. It is not a pocket bread as Americans generally think of it. It's a flat bread that is used to scoop food up with. You tear it into pieces and use it to scoop up your meze dishes like Baba ghanoush or lebneh drizzled with olive oil, and maybe you use it to slop up some of the juices from your inevitable lamb dishes.

When you bring home new food ideas from trips abroad they stay with you a lot longer than trinkets do. I came home, found a recipe for home made pita from Deborah Madison's book, and I've been making it for the last twelve years. Every time I make it I think of Israel. I think of my father, his wonderful wife who is beautifully practical and yet also creative, and I think of my half brother who grew up knowing he had at least a brother and a sister but was raised alone. He's a full grown man now and I wish I could have grown up nearer to him so we could have gotten to know each other. Every time I make pita I feel like telling him that I have not smoked a cigarette in over four years now.

Every time I make pita bread I also think about the Arab restaurants where I had this exquisite flat bread and experienced the meze table for the first time. It makes me think of how textured and rich the Arab culture is. It makes me sad that my country is busy gunning it down right now. As though all Arabs were savages. Our government is restricting the seed saving rights of the Arab people we are currently occupying. The seeds we grow say a lot about the culture we nurture just as the bread we make and eat does. You take that kind of autonomy away from a people and you destroy who they are.

I make pita and remember that Arabs, like all other people on earth, have a lot in common with me on a cellular level. They have traditions that are meaningful to them; they have a rich history; they have an amazing culture which deserves to be respected by us all.

I feel confident that even if Jesus wasn't part Arab himself, he most likely ate lots of pita and no Wonderbread. I'm not really into Jesus from a religious perspective, but I'm fascinated by the stories about him and the times he lived in and endlessly riveted by the clash between who he apparently was and how so many Christians are so personally worried about me believing in him but then they ignore everything he supposedly stood for. It's like watching a silent film in which Jesus is doing all manner of peaceful things but the dialog stills are putting these words in his mouth:

"Ye Arabs are hoarding oil and God hates you for that so I am going to bomb your asses until you give it all to me!!!!"

I like to think that bringing pieces of culinary and cultural knowledge home with us from our travels helps us all connect with each other and helps to foster a greater respect for each other across the globe.

Easter for Everyone

While I seriously enjoyed making my Easter baskets this year, I am generally pretty ambivalent about this holiday. Mostly because it has no meaning for me. I let Max celebrate it because, well, it's almost as though Christians designed this holiday for the wee ones. We haven't really discussed the whole "Jesus rising from the tomb" thing yet. This is Max with his friend Joschka who came up from California to hang out with us. We miss Joschka and his parents who are more like family to us. Joschka and Max certainly are just like brothers the way they seem to be cut from the same cloth and bicker all the time.

Here's Max collecting eggs. Plastic ones full of weird doo-dads, like sticky bunnies you can throw on the ceiling and leave there until they drop and scare the shit out of you because you forgot they were there.

Although no one signed up for my Easter Bonnet decorating class, Maddy really wanted to. Unfortunately she's ten and doesn't have the income to support millinery classes yet. We worked out a deal where she would sweep our store floor for four days to earn the hat and then I would let her play with my decorations and use them to make a cool hat. She brought some of her own stuff too.

Her hair is just killing me! It makes me want to grow my hair out so I can have braids again. I think her hat turned out great, don't you?!

Here are a few random things I'm thinking about right now:

• How it is that people can get so excited about being saved by Jesus, but then completely ignore the fact that the guy was ANTI VIOLENCE? So a lot of people have fought wars in the name of God, but completely spit on his son's entire message to do it, how do people reconcile this in their hearts? Do they think his real message was "turn the other cheek, but only when you feel like it"?

• I'd like to have a bumper sticker that reads: WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? But I couldn't do it because that would mislead people into thinking I was a Christian. While I actually think Jesus' message is one to live my life by*, I think it's completely immaterial whether or not the dude really existed. You know those ten commandments that we're supposed to follow? The ones that read something like: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife" and "Thou shalt not steal" and more importantly "THOU SHALT NOT KILL"? I live by those rules. I have never coveted my neighbor's wife.

• I've come to realize, writing this blog, that you can't say anything worth saying without pissing someone off. You can't have an opinion without it being critical of someone, somewhere. I've thought about what it would be like to not be opinionated, about the value of being "non-judgmental" and of just keeping things to myself. It's so much more comfortable to not put your neck out there on the block where every one's got an ax poised above it. But there's one really important fact that people are all too ready to forget when their feelings are sore: if you lead a life devoid of judgment of others, you will have a very short life.

• Our ability to be critical of others is absolutely necessary in order to decide which people might be dangerous to know, which people will bring nothing to us but trouble, and our ability to avoid being sold a paper cricket for our life savings. Anyone who thinks they aren't critical of others, or judgmental, is lying to themselves to feel righteous. Being critical doesn't mean you hate others, or that you are being mean to hurt others, but your survival depends on your ability to assess the choices that you AND others are making and how those choices may reflect on your own life, and to decide whether you would be best off avoiding those same people/choices.

• Kate Beckinsale is beginning to get that processed Hollywood look. It's so disappointing. Pretty soon she will be just as bland and standard looking as Paris Hilton. Pretty soon she's going to be indistinguishable from Joan Rivers. I have been on the fence about her for a few years now. I keep waiting for her to prove that she might become admirable. That she might redeem herself. But I just spied her on the cover of Allure last night and realized the debate is over. She's no longer a British beauty, she's completely Hollywood now. I kind of feel like having a wake for her potential lost.

• We are watching the British series "Ballykissangel" and we've just got past the part where they kill off an integral character. I was so shocked I almost peed my pants. Now I'm not sure I can stand to continue to watch the rest of the series. Because a priest without the love interest of a woman who isn't remotely religious isn't half as interesting. Plus it was a cheap shot. Just as he's about to leave the clergy to be with his true love, they kill her. Now Father Clifford has just gone off into the sunset, implying that he won't be there either. But he's the main character. While the rest of the characters in that show are great too, they really won't stand up well without the main character. So if he comes back, I think he needs to come back as the publican. But I don't know if I can stand to find out. I'm not fond of suspense.

*There are some who will be shocked to hear me say this. Not because they think I'm much too evil to follow the teachings of Christ, but just that I could align myself with any religious figure. But hey, I have always lived by the teaching's of Christ kind of by accident. And the one time I didn't turn the other cheek on my fourth grade oppressor? I felt like total shit. I kicked her when she was down and even though it could be said that she deserved it for the three years of bullying she practiced on me, it wasn't until I literally ceased to care what she could do to me that she stopped trying to push me around. When I stood up tall and figured that if she knocked me down I would just get up and tell her to get it the hell over with and pummel me, that's when she actually respected me. I was following the teachings of Jesus, Buddhism, and Ghandi without really belonging to any of their respective religious groups.