Under an open sky

It's noon, Thursday, May 31st. On Sunday the AIDS LifeCycle begins... 545 miles to L.A.! Right now I'm just conserving my energy (or perhaps recharging, Memorial Day Weekend was a bit busier than I had anticipated :-).

I think I'm ready for the ride. Justin and I did back to back rides last week, and I felt great afterwards.

My current fundraising total is $4,210, but I have a $2500 contribution that hasn't been processed yet. I am so grateful to all of you out there who have stepped up and made pledges. Thank you!!!

I haven't written much since returning from Mexico in April. It's been a strange time. While I had a wonderful adventure in Puerto Vallarta, I came home feeling a bit of melancholy and have been covering it with a hefty dose of extroverted hedonism. And I'm sad today in particular... there was a new man that I recently met for whom I was developing a strong affection, but it doesn't look like he is looking for a relationship right now. Ah, life.

So just a few bits and pieces today.

Last Saturday I volunteered at a fundraiser for the San Francisco Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society. It was a great time, and the crowd was young and cute (and clearly in need of some history lessons ;-). Check out their site here.

Also on a historical note, I just read Robert Oppenheimer's 1966 profile of Albert Einstein.

And today there was an interesting New York Times article on Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg's recent dissenting opinions, two of which she read in front of the Court.

Finally, the June Harper's Magazine includes two pieces that have been echoing in my head for a couple of weeks now. The first is Garret Keizer's "Climate, Class, and Claptrap" in which he makes the case that global warming--which he agrees is an issue of great significance--allows the privileged classes of the world to focus their money, energies, and moral capacities on fighting it while continuing to neglect the everyday miseries that so many already endure. He observes that "the bottom line here is, as always, the bottom line," that there are huge sums to be made as the world slowly turns to confront climate change. And this:

It is not enough to acknowledge that global warming exists; we also need to ask what global warming means. Surely one thing it means is that a culture that has as its highest aim the avoidance of anything remotely resembling physical work must change its life. If you want an inconvenient truth, there it is: that the very notion of convenience upon which our civilization rests is a lie that is killing us. And if you want to see how quickly green can turn to yellow, make mention of that abundant, renewable fuel source whose chief emission is human sweat.

The second essay also addresses the environment, or as Edward Hoagland remembers it in "Endgame," conservation:

And Conservation, which used to embrace national parks and forests, wild rivers, and the like, has blurred into a new term, Environmentalism, concerned with petroleum efficiency, groundwater quality, ozone statistics, sea-level maintenance, tradewinds pollution, recycling yardsticks, climate stabilization. People want mobility, yet a hideway "off the grid," and to have the heart muscles of a hunter-gatherer, attained in a gym, though practically living in cyberspace, but still touch the earthly verities through yoga.

Hoagland explores some intriguing ideas on the origins of our sense of beauty and suggests that our appreciation of the natural world is shared with all the other creatures of the earth:

But what did inspire our sense of beauty? My hunch is that, like our intelligence, it's an outgrowth of a gradual refinement of existing rudiments in other creatures.... Do the species that wear the splendid plumage or coats of fur or superb scaly camouflage we admire not feel an equivalent ebullience at the sight of one another, too? Not merely lust or rivalry, in other words, but something of what Emerson expressed in his essay: that "ecstacy is the law and cause of nature...."

The velvety rustle of fine fishing water, the dewy scent of a deer herd's favorite glen, are delights that connect to evolutionary logic. But not all that's delectable to us does: like frost flowers on a windowpane, more delicately shaped than real ones but signifying how the cold outside will bite. And when we present long-stems on Valentine's Day, are we sharing something deep-seated in common with insects? ... As that vixen carried her young about in her mouth, how different were her feelings from a mama crocodile doing the same; or a human mother's protective hug? And when a drought ends in the desert and toothsome rains begin to fall, is just the pick-and-shovel prospector, with perhaps his donkey, happy? Do other living things only process the new conditions mechanistically? Or if antelope, bighorn sheep, cactus wrens, peccaries, and coatimundis experience a surge of gladness, does the chucawalla, the sidewinder, and the desert tortoise also? I'd certainly be sure about my toad, with his radiantly tremulous sweet song, his vocal sac bulging.

Hoagland ends with a warning to humanity as it moves indoors:

Worldwide, the question is room. Is there room for our multiplying leisure activities and longevity; the cruelty of our market economics; our implacable seining of both land and sea, lest anything escape the harvest, but otherwise fabricating a boxed reality of electronic graphics to live within? Nature has been our aquifer, siphoned from, and thus sinking, century upon century, seldom replenished even a little by anyone, not in the tropics, not in the arctic, the first world, the third world, or our mind's eye. The electricity that powered our changes in direction and attention span is derived from fossil fuels, but scalds the present. Robinson Jeffer's 1929 simile of humankind as a vast spreading fungus of slime-threads and spores may be too laggard a blight. Blindly accelerating, we burn through entire galaxies of other life, unimaginably interlinked and unmapped--amputating ourselves from the rest of Creation, whether destroyed or still undestroyed. The risks are unfathomable. And if you don't find this tragic, open your heart.