If I'm on my skateboard, coasting toward a curb with intentions to ollie up on top of it, I can watch the curb and begin to think about timing it, and then notice how fast I'm going, I get worried and mess up every time. But if I let the curb fade into the peripheral, and focus on the skateboard under my feet, and think about performing tried and true technique, I surprise myself by putting it right on top of the curb where it should be. I had trouble with math because I could never bring myself to trust the formulas. It wasn't enough that they demonstrably functioned to generate correct answers. Because I couldn't understand why they worked, I couldn't bring myself to commit to them. I've since learned that it is okay to trust the mathematical geniuses who've understood more than I ever will and have graciously left their methods behind for us to follow. Though I once regarded formal education as an inhibitor to creativity, I now see that learning and applying techniques, whether they be epistemological or martial arts, is conducive to freedom and spontaneity. Ensuring that we commit ourselves to the correct techniques, then, is critical. So I begin with reason to discern the technique which has taken its masters the highest, and following reason is a decision to place my faith in this technique. Faith is not careening toward the curb wildly hoping I can ollie it. Faith is concentrating on what I've been taught and shown, knowing what I must do and doing it.

Darwin Day

I emailed the sponsoring Professor of the Anthropology club's Darwin Day display in the university library. Darwin Day is February 12. The display contained books, articles, quotes, pictures, all quite appropiate, except for multiple stickers depicting "icthus", the Christian fish symbol, with added legs and labeled "Darwin". I took a cultural anthropology class once for my religious studies minor. The most astute and useful observation I made was in noticing the consistent hypocrisy among some of those who presumed themselves to be observing human behavior objectively without noticing the blatant double-standard they held due to their own biased contempt for anything nominally Christianity. For the cartoon show South Park to parody anything possibly held sacred by any group in America, religious or otherwise, is comical and even progressive, but for Christian missionaries to unwittingly disrupt an indigenous culture's social structure by bringing gifts of axes for chopping firewood is contemptible, an inexcusable act of ethnocentric hubris, condescension typical of white Americans. And so it was with the Anthropology club's display: biased contempt, not objective Science, betrayed by the inability to resist an inflammatory signal to the less educated bible-thumpers. In a "Christians are Stupid Day" display, the modified Jesus fish would be appropriate; in a Darwin Day display, they are insidious. I begin to wonder if Darwinian Evolution can even be disconnected from anti-religious agenda. I think as an experiment, Christian fundies should begin to zealously advocate rapidly occurring macro-evolution as the only reasonable explanation as to how every species of non aquatic animal could possibly have appeared from Noah's ark, and then watch how quickly "respectable" science vacillates.

I once talked to a young druid at Paganfest. He'd been practicing druidism for a decade or more. His father was buddhist and his mother, he told me, was christian. I asked him what he found in druidism that appealed to him so. "Harmony with nature," he replied. "Nature has almost no one to defend her, and druids are her guardians." He wore a long, black robe and sold staffs which he whittled and ornamented from, as he pointed out, "already dead" forest material. We were at Paganfest peddling tie-dye. Next he flipped my question on me: "What do you find in being a christian?" I wasn't expecting the question; my subject had suddenly become the scientist. I had rather anticipated demonstrating to him that, whatever his answer, my God would not only put his talents and interests to good use, but bring them to completion. I was working off of the presupposition that no religion has anything good to offer which cannot also be found in serving Christ, and I still believe that to be true. We are broken and incomplete fragments of what He intended for us to be, prior to our acquiescing to His perfecting hands. In God's kingdom there is a place for environmentalists and capitalists, vegans and ranchers, poets and warriors. To cast myself upon God's mercy, His Son Jesus Christ, is not, I have been pleased to discover, to be brainwashed and assimilated. "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation" (1 Cor 5:17a) but that doesn't mean God threw all the old pieces away. Some of them were quite salvageable, and He doesn't like waste. I have been a dirty, outdoorish, guitar-playing daydreamer both out of His beautiful will and in the dead center of it. Nevertheless, "the old has gone, the new has come!"

Skimboarding Feb 07

It snowed lightly. The roads looked to me unworthy of travelling with only liability insurance, and so I delayed going to work. I instead spent the morning skim-boarding across the front yard while Nobey wrote his name and made tracks in the snow. I was pleased to discover last winter that the skimboard I bought at the beach also works over ice and snow. I've even used it though with little success in heavy rain when the driveway flooded, but the concrete really scuffed it up. "Buenos Dias," I called to my Mexican neighbors. No matter how much spanish I use in conversation, native speakers consistently insist on speaking to me in english. It kind of hurts my feelings. They watched with grins as I made an attempt to skim the snowy lawn, and of course that time I only made it a foot or so and slipped off. They went back inside. Making my feet stick to the board is the most difficult part. Everyone knows that surfers use SexWax, but I don't know if I could find that in Arkansas. I had a few successful runs anyway. Skimboarding is a sport in which one must content himself in the pursuit, rather than the achievement, of the ideal. I resign myself to the possibility that failing at this repeatedly is somehow beneficial to my mind and body, and in the rare event that I do go gliding gracefully 15 or 20 feet over surf or snow, it's beautiful.

Feb 2007 Love and Prejudice

There was a presumably Muslim fellow in the gym on campus. He was working out as was I, maintaining my ultra-elite athleticism. I wanted to talk to him, and I hoped to catch his eye, but he avoided my glances. I am often unfriendly because my own prejudices intimidate me. I am convinced that Muslims hate me so I ignore them. The more logical response would be to reach out and make peace, but prejudice is not logical. I did not find opportunity to converse with him, but the event was still significant. I wanted to talk to him. I looked on him with a compassion that suddenly almost made me cry, and I have discovered it happening increasingly, and towards lots of people. I have been praying for love for a long time, and while I have made observations as to what love must be like, it is only recently that I have felt love growing exponentially within, that I have noticed compassion welling up, on the verge of overwhelming my own introverted personality, and my isolationist propensity. Maybe Father never fixes something about us without also showing us, in spite of our disappointment, where the problems lie. My lack of love was obvious to me, but my prejudices much less so.