My Religious life

The Tao that can be thought of is not the real Tao.
So, the Tao that can be spoken is not the real Tao either.
Sooo, the Tao that can be named is likewise nothing too.
–Lao Tzu (sort of)

The spirit of the best of men is spotless,
like the new lotus in the muddy water
which does not adhere to it.
–buddhanet.net

 

My Religious Life

I was Catholic,
but was not universal enough
when I was.

I was Protestant,
but did not protest enough
when I was.

I was a Transcendental Meditationist,
but was not transcendent enough
when I was.

I was a dilettante Buddhist,
but (unlike the lotus) I failed to bud
when I was.

Now as a Taoist
in an inscrutable plan
I’m most content, because
it’s nothing I can really talk about
while I am.

Tao in a City of Light

On a recent visit to San Francisco I discovered,
among other things, that the city on a hill is a city of  

light.
Vistas and light. 
Hills, vistas, and light. 
Brake shops, hills, vistas, and light. 
Bay windows, brake shops, hills, vistas and light. 
Human diversity, bay windows, brake shops, hills, vistas, and light. 
San Francisco has it all.  Even earthquakes, but everything good has a downside.

As for hills and vistas, everywhere you turn in San Francisco there’s a hill to climb and a view to see.  A view with a bay.  However, I discovered that the “San Francisco Bay” area is not named after San Francisco Bay, but after what must be a city ordinance that every building have a bizillion bay windows.  Without buildings with bay windows San Francisco would literally not exist.  Take ‘em away and all you’ve got are inclines and Alcatraz.  San Franciscan openess to diversity could be explained by the fact that all dwellers are forced to see in triptych.  Every view is of three parts when you’re looking through a bay window; you must look in three directions at once if you want to get the whole story.  There are few single points of view in San Francisco.  This must have contributed to the wide ethnic and cultural diversity found there.  Asians, Anglos, Latinos, Blacks, straights and gays, mingle in general good will as a result of an architectural conceit!  And you thought architecture was about the aesthetic stacking of bricks and lumber.  

It’s not obvious except by deduction, but you’ve got to figure that any city with the abundance and extremity of hills such as San Francisco must have a thriving market for brake jobs.  While there I drove down some hills so close to vertical my mind was flooded with thoughts of the sanctity of calipers, discs, and drums.  “May the Tao be in my brake linings.  May these discs be in tip-top shape,” I muttered.  “May the mechanic who adjusted these calipers have been the apotheosis of meticulous craftsmanship.  May the manufacturer of these drums not have been of the same ethical caliber as Chinese entrepreneurs that coat kid’s toys with lead-based paint.”  When we reached bottom on those occasions I jumped out and kissed the cable car tracks.

(On a nostalgic note, plodding up and down the hills through my host’s neighborhood I kept expecting Steve McQueen, careening in a downhill chase, to be launched from a cross street flat and crash before my eyes in a hail of sparks and zip out of sight around the corner of Polk and Sutter.)

The light’s fantastic in the city in which Tony Bennet left his heart.  Brilliant.  This abundance of light must be the result of the relative lack of skyscrapers coupled with reflected rays bouncing off the embracing bay.  I’m used to New York and its deep canyons.  In New York the sky’s arrayed in strips.  Uptown-downtown strips as wide as 5th Ave. or Broadway.  And east side-west side strips no wider than, at best, Grand St. or Houston.  Most of the time most of NY is cast in shadow.  But SF is awash in light.  Biking along the bay with my dear companions, bay on the right, city on the left, in a constant breeze, was like cycling on the surface of a diamond while being cooled by the breath of god.  Ok, maybe that’s a little hyperbolic, but not so far off the mark.

The biking I just mentioned started at the carnivally commercial circus around Fisherman’s wharf and proceeded through Fort Mason (intimating the 1940s and another war), along the marina with its stark-white boats bobbing and smelling of saltiness and bucks, out to Fort Point where Kim Novak being stalked by Jimmy Stewart once hurled herself to the rocks below at the direction of Alfred Hitchcok, across the Golden Gate bridge under its rust-red towers and over a departing container ship probably laden with weak-dollar American lumber heading to Japan, into Marin County, and ending with an easy coast into chic Sauselito and ferry ride return, plunging back into a vista of lights seething through a billion bay windows arrayed up and down impossible hills.

Nice, nice city. 

Practical Miracles

Last night –which turned into today somewhere between there and here– I flew from Los Angeles to Hartford.  I never liked flying and have avoided it for years.  Even gurus have fears after all.  Show me a guru without fear and I’ll show you a fool, or a dead guru.

In any case, I seem to have overcome this particular fear to a large extent, if not completely.  But Billy Collins covered this so well in his poem Passengers, it’d be redundant to repeat it here.  Suffice to say, it’s a miracle of ingenuity, excellent engineering, and attentive maintenance that keeps that huge machine aloft for 5 hours straight. 

I don’t mean miracle in the metaphysical sense though.  I mean a practical, dirty-hands miracle.  The kind we see everyday but take for granted.  The kind the Magliozzi brothers would appreciate.  We prefer our miracles be delivered by angels; as if that made them more potent and mysterious –or as if God were not as down to earth as the staff and student body of MIT.