Fifth Day of the Icon, 6th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): The wood thrush is a boldly patterned bird with distinctive black spots on its white belly. Smaller than a robin, it sticks to wooded areas, hopping along on the ground. It winters in Central America but apparently has migrated as far north as Georgia by now, as I heard one today and added it to my life list (35 species). 

The rain has finally stopped and I got my walk in today, a Harrison. It was my first walk since Friday of last week due to the near-constant rain. The rain was not without its toll, though, and beyond precluding my alternating day walks, the soft, soggy soils allowed a tree to fall over in the neighborhood yesterday afternoon and I was without power for some seven hours. Not a big problem - I don't need electricity to meditate (I used my phone for a timer) and then I was able to read by a window until the sun began to set. Then I just sat in the dark for a couple hours listening to music of my bluetooth headphones and using the Spotify app on my phone until the lights came back on

I don't know why I feel a need to state this, but despite my post yesterday I am not a Zen Buddhist. As I understand it, Zen Buddhism is a distinct tradition directly transmitted through the ages from teacher to student, and I left my teacher some 10 or 11 years ago. I haven't rejected the teachings of the Buddha, however, and I find no fault in the writings of Dogen or the koan stories of the ancestors. I still meditate and I still study the dharma. I just don't do it with a teacher, or at least not a human teacher. I let my own practice, my books, my walks, and my daily life be my teacher. 

Zen Buddhists would say that the path I'm on won't lead to enlightenment but that's okay by me. After 15 years of formal Zen study under a transmitted teacher, and visits to several well-regarded temples and monasteries across the U.S., I can't say I've met an enlightened person. I've met many kind and generous teachers, I've seen incredible examples of patience and selflessness, I've encountered wisdom and the deepest empathy, but not enlightenment.

I've come to regard enlightenment as the last delusion, the last barrier to awakening. And if I'm wrong about that and the Zen Buddhists are right, well, I guess I'll just miss my chance at enlightenment in this lifetime and have to try again in the next go-round (although I personally don't believe in reincarnation either).

I find many interesting parallels between Zen and the Stoic philosophers, but no one has ever told me I must study with a certified Stoic to understand the philosophy. I call my practice and belief system "contemplative Stoicism" and it works for me, which is more than I think most people can say.

Fourth Day of the Icon, 5th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Atlas): The history of Buddhism, like nearly every other religion, is patriarchal and dominated by men. Zen  Master Dogen, however, had little use for chauvinism. In his Shobogenzo  Raihai-Tokuzui (Prostrating to the Marrow of Attainment), he wrote, 

In the practice of complete perfect enlightenment, the most difficult thing is to find a guiding teacher. Whether in the past or the present, the guiding teacher should be a strong person, regardless of being male or female. The teacher should be ineffable, with excellent knowledge and the spirit of a wild fox. These are the features of someone who has attained the marrow; the teacher may be a guide and a benefactor; is never unclear about cause and effect; and may be you, me, him, or her.

"Attained the marrow" is the odd expression here; it's not something one often says in the 21st Century western world. It goes back to an ancient Chinese story about Bodhidharma, the first Zen teacher to appear in China.

Bodhidharma, a dude, had four principle students: three monks and a nun (even then, there were women practioners). One day, as he recognized that his end was nearing, Bodhidharma called his students together and asked them to each make a statement to demonstrate their understanding.

A monk named Daofu jumped in first and said, "As I see it, it is not bound by words and phrases, nor is it separate from words and phrases. This is the function of the Way." 

That is an excellent answer. It shows both nonattachment (it's not in the words and phrases) and the skillfulness to use words and phrases as needed. Bodhidharma acknowledged the excellence of Daofu's answer by saying, "You have attained my skin."

The nun Zongchi, the daughter of a Liang Dynasty emperor who was ordained as a nun at the age of 19, said, "According to my understanding, it is like a glorious glimpse of  the pure land of the Buddha. Seen once, it need not be seen again.”

Bodhidharma approved of her answer, saying, “You have attained my flesh.”

The monk Daoyu said, “The four elements are all empty and the five aggregates are nonexistent. As I see it, there’s nothing to attain.”

Bodhidharma said, “You have attained my bones.”

Huike, the first student to have come to Bodhidharma, said nothing. He simply bowed and stood still.

Bodhidharma said, “You have attained my marrow.”

The Zen tradition is typically traced from Bodhidharma down through Huike, and then to Huike's students and their student's students and so on to today. But each of the four disciples of Bodhidharma want on to become teachers and had students of their own, but their teachings and lineage are unfortunately now lost to the shadowy mists of time. One wonders what could have become of Zongchi's school of Zen.

Centuries after Bodhidharma told Huike that he had attained his marrow, Dogen wrote that those who seek the Dharma will follow whatever has “attained the marrow,” whether it is "an outdoor pillar, a stone lantern, the buddha, a wild dog, a demon or a god, a man or a woman."

In an even more explicit statement of gender equality, Dogen wrote, 

"Why should men be considered higher? Emptiness is emptiness, the four elements are the four elements, the five aggregates are the five aggregates, and women are also like this. As regards attainment of the truth, both men and women attain the truth, and we should just profoundly revere every single person who has attained the Dharma. Do not talk in terms of men and women. This is one of Buddhism’s finest standards."

I was was told (but have not verified) that the pro-feminist writings of Dogen in Raihai-Tokuzui were considered so radical and unsettling to the patriarchal system of feudal Japan that the fascicle was omitted from some early editions of the Shobogenzo. The document was stored separately in an isolated room for viewing by appointment only to selected scholars and teachers until its undeniable wisdom was acknowledged. 

It's still raining outside.

Third Day of the Icon, 4th of Summer, 525 M.E. (Helios): It's raining again. Fifth or sixth straight day (I've lost count). Haven't got my walk in since May 23. It's forecast to rain tomorrow, too, although they say it will finally clear up on Saturday. 

It may have rained this much at this time last year, but I was only walking about four or five miles each time back then and only needed a two-hour or less window of non-raining weather to complete my route. Now I'm shooting for at least twice that length and need at least twice that time and just haven't been able to get out and walk. I'm now in much better shape physically than I was back then, thanks in no small part to the walking, but this current idleness is affecting me psychologically. Cabin fever. 

I find that I feel far better mentally when I stick to a routine, and that routine since last August has been alternating days of walking and sitting. I've been keeping up with the sitting (meditation) half but I've found that I really miss the other half. A routine is not a routine if it's not complete. My routines have become ritual, and my rituals have come to feel sacred. 

Tropical Storm Alvin, the first named storm of 2025, has formed in the Eastern Pacific. Alvin likely poses little or no threat to North America, but it's significant as being the first of the season.

But enough about the weather. Today, the New York Times ran a fawning puff piece about Elon Musk complete with flattering quotes like Jamie Dimon's "The guy is our Einstein.” The article, under the  subheading "Ideas," tries to portray Musk as a heavyweight, forward-thinking intellectual and opens with a snippet from a Fox New interview, making the bias of the article apparent from the very start. The article refers to Musk as "the man whose rockets can gracefully return to earth standing tall on their launchpads," which ignores that his last three launches exploded on takeoff, and that Blue Origin's rockets land vertically as well.     

Musk, they argue, devotes his energies to grand engineering projects with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. “The sun is gradually expanding, so we do at some point need to be a multiplanetary civilization because earth will be incinerated,” he's quoted, although he does acknowledge that it won't happen for several hundred million years.

Cool. But here's a news flash for Musk and the New York Times: the human race will be extinct in several hundred million years. Homo sapiens won't be around to see the sun explode. Our species only emerged about 300,000 years ago, and even without a not-unlikely cataclysmic apocalypse, by any projection of species evolution we'll have been replaced by some other sentient hominid, probably several times over. 

The argument can be made that those future hominids are still our descendants and deserve our efforts to perpetuate both our own and future species, but evolution has a funny way of branching off in parallel developments, with some branches petering out and others moving on. In other words, the future sentient hominids dominating the planet may not be descended from H. sapiens but from orangutans or bonobos. If we're concerned about perpetuating intelligent life on Earth, we should put equal effort into protecting the habitat of all the great apes and ensuring their survival. To take it a step further, the dominant life form in several hundred million years may not even be hominid, so out of an abundance of caution, we should protect all species, all life of Earth, from octopi to ravens, from the whales to the spiders. 

But I don't see Dimon's Einstein of our time doing a goddamn thing about the environment. Perhaps the Einstein of our time will turn out to be Greta Thunberg, not some South African incel nepo baby.           

 

Second Day of the Icon, 3rd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Electra): It's raining again right now, but fortunately for me, today's a sitting day and not a walking day, and I managed to get my cushion time in and even scurried to the supermarket for a little food shopping before the rain started falling. The forecast shows two more days of rain before the sun finally reappears on Saturday.

Trump pardoned some reality-tv couple today who had been convicted by a jury here in Atlanta of fraud, but they were Trump supporters so he's setting then free. Free to commit more grifting and fraud and cheating and lies. 

Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel and a former member of Bibi Netanyahu's Likud Party, wrote in a recent opinion piece that Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza, and that “thousands of innocent Palestinians are being killed.” Israel, he said, "is currently waging a war without purpose, without goals or clear planning and with no chances of success,” adding, "the criminal gang headed by Benjamin Netanyahu has set a precedent without equal in Israel’s history." The “pointless victims among the Palestinian population,” he wrote, were reaching “monstrous proportions” in recent weeks.

This kind of rhetoric has been unfairly labeled as "antisemitic" by the corrupt and cynical Trump administration, but this is the former PM of Israel speaking, not some Hamas functionary. Trump has been trying to shut down major universities for expressing similar opinions, and deporting foreign students and other non-natives here for these kinds of statements, and just for posting them here, I could expect to see ICE agents outside my door sometime soon asking to see my papers.

Let's see, what else? Oh, RFK Jr is threatening to ban on federal scientists from publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals, calling medical journals such as Lancet "corrupt." In its place, he's proposing to create alternative publications to be run by the government. “We’re probably going to stop publishing in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, Jama and those other journals, because they’re all corrupt,” he said, because they're supposedly controlled by pharmaceutical companies.

The three publications Kennedy mentioned are among the most influential medical journals globally, established in the 19th century and now central to disseminating peer-reviewed medical research worldwide. The Lancet and Jama each report more than 30m annual website visits, while the New England Journal of Medicine claims more than 1 million weekly readers.

But wait, there's more. RFK, Jr and Mehmet Oz, a physician and former TV host appointed by Trump as the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, have intervened in an attempt to save more than 300 ostriches on a farm in British Columbia which the Canadian government had ordered to be killed over fears the flock is infected with avian flu. They are offering to move the birds to Oz’s private ranch in Florida despite the kill order imposed by Canadian health authorities.

I remember when our top health officials were trying to protect American citizens, not actively introducing new disease vectors to the population and suppressing opinions contrary to their conspiracy theories. I remember the president currently deporting students for "antisemitic views" calling the torch-bearing white supremacists marching through Charlottesville, Virginia and chanting "Jews will not replace us" "very fine people."  

It's going to rain some more tomorrow, too. And the next day.

 

Day of the Icon, 2nd of Summer, 525 M.E. (Deneb): It's still raining outside. I missed my alternating-day walk on Sunday, and now I'm missing it again today. For the record, it rained yesterday, too, and it's currently forecast to rain for the next three days.

We live is such brazenly corrupt times. Today, it was reported that Trump pardoned a convicted tax cheater after his mother attended a $1-million-per-person fund-raising dinner last month at the tacky Mar-a-Lago golf hotel. There wasn't even an attempt to hide the quid pro quo: the pardon application cited the mother’s support for the president, including raising millions of dollars and a connection to a plot to publicize Ashley Biden's addiction diary.  

The convicted felon that Trump pardoned was found guilty of tax fraud for withholding more than $10 million from the paychecks of nurses, doctors and others who worked at his Florida nursing-home facility under the pretext of using it for their Social Security, Medicare and federal income taxes. Instead, he used the money to buy a $2 million yacht and to pay for travel and purchases at high-end retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman and Cartier. A nepo baby, he had joined his mother’s nursing-home business after dropping out of college, eventually becoming chief executive. After she sold the company in 2007, they invested $18 million in a new nursing home venture in South Florida, where they lived a luxurious lifestyle.

The other convicted felon, the one who issued the presidential pardon, invited the mother to the Mar-a-Lago fundraiser after receiving the application for a presidential pardon. The invitation billed it as an intimate “candlelight dinner” sponsored by the MAGA Inc. PAC, with “very limited” space available to people who paid $1 million each. After the pardon, the tax cheater celebrated with his mother and family while wearing a red MAGA hat. 

Trump defenders have tried to justify the pardon based on Biden's pardon of his son, Hunter. However, Hunter Biden, despite wild conspiratorial claims by the far right, was never convicted of embezzling millions of dollars, and his pardon was not instigated by donations to his father's campaign.

Meanwhile, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a non-millionaire Salvadoran, remains in a notoriously hellish El Salvador mega-prison without any due process for the "crime" of being mistaken for a gang member. despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation.

I'm sorry, but I can't even recognize this country as the America I once knew. We're a corrupt, spiritually bankrupt Banana Republic now, a kleptocracy ruled by oligarchs. 

Dog Days Begin, 1st of Summer, 525 M.E. (Castor): Welcome to summer and the beginning of the dog days.

For the sake of full disclosure, the first day of summer, the 26th day of May (27th in leap years) was Day of the Iron Scepter in Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar. Dog Days Begin didn't occur until the second day of summer, and Dog Days End came on the fifth day of autumn.

I always thought of the dog days as the relatively brief period of the hottest days of the year, usually during the month of August, but MacLise's USC has them over the entirety of the summer, although they don't precisely align with the summer season. My New Revised Universal Solar Calendar changes that. In my NRUSC, Dog Days Begin is the first day of summer, and summer ends 73 days from now on Dog Days End. To accommodate those changes, I had to bump the names of a few other days around.

But logistics and calendar issues aside, the days are getting longer and warmer. We're a week away from the official start of hurricane season but Trump and his DOGE force have cut about a quarter of FEMA's full-time staff, including one-fifth of the coordinating officers who manage responses to disasters. NOAA has lost about one-fifth of its staff, including hundreds of people from the National Weather Service.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear has spoken highly of FEMA's assistance in his state's recovery from recent tornadoes and flooding, but the agency's capacity may be reaching its limit. The staffing cuts have hampered LA's recovery from wildfires, and FEMA recently denied North Carolina's request for additional aid in response to last year's devastation from Hurricane Helene. Meanwhile, NOAA (or what's left of it) predicts a 60% chance of an above-normal hurricane season this year.

Fewer meteorologists at NOAA will lead to less accurate forecasts and the loss of experienced managers at FEMA will lead to less coordination and more inaction. As the Trump administration shifts the burden of response and recovery away from the federal government, less federal financial aid makes it uncertain how the nation will respond to the bigger and costlier disasters coming our way. We may not be ready for when the next big storm hits, and even if we dodge a bullet this season, we still have at least three more years of Trump. 

Hurricanes. Tornados. Wildfires. Earthquakes. Floods and droughts. Epidemics. All of these are happening and will continue to happen, and our president is failing to protect the American people from their affects. He's protecting the right of the billionaire class, the 0.1%, from taxes and the inconvenience of regulations, and he's enriching himself at taxpayer expense, but he's leaving the rest of us out to dry in the wind.

Welcome to the dog days.

 

To the Inaugurator of Movements, 73rd Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): It's the last day of spring today. The sun sets at 8:39 here today, and it's less than a month until the summer solstice. 

Despite it being spring, I didn't get my steps in today. The weather was overcast and gloomy all day, and after getting caught in a downpour earlier this month, I no longer trust the hourly forecasts when it looks like rain outside. But no problem - I've already walked 492.6 miles so far this year, the distance from here to Ft. Wayne, Indiana. I can afford a day off, as long as it doesn't become a habit. 

But that's all for today. I'll see you this summer.   

Shutout and Changeover, 72nd Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Atlas): Another yellow bird, the common yellowthroat is a small and widespread warbler found in shrubby wet areas such as marshes and forest edges and is distinguished by a bright yellow band across its throat. I added it to my life list yesterday on my walk (9.6 miles, a Harrison) through the swampy West Loop portion of the Chattahoochee trail system. The Carolina chickadee and white-breasted nuthatch, too. I'm now up to 34 species.   

Zen Master Shūitsu, whose Dharma name was Shibi, taught that the whole universe in ten directions is one bright pearl. One day a monk asked him, “I have heard the words that the whole universe in ten directions is one bright pearl. How should the student understand this?” Shibi said, “The whole universe in ten directions is one bright pearl. What use is understanding?” On a later day, he asked the question back to the monk, “The whole universe in ten directions is one bright pearl. How do you understand this?” The monk said, “The whole universe in ten directions is one bright pearl. What use is understanding?” Shibi said, “You're struggling to get inside a demon’s cave in a black mountain.”

The whole universe is not a literal bright pearl; "one bright pearl" is a poetic expression pointing to the interconnectedness, interdependence, and lack of separation in the universe. It's that way whether we understand it or not. In fact, the very act of trying to understand just reinforces the idea that there's a separate "us" trying to grasp some separate "thing," and moves us further from an understanding. It moves us from the one bright pearl itself into the demon's cave in the black mountain of delusion.

The monk's answer to Shibi's question, even though it was the exact same words as Shibi's original answer, showed that the monk still thought there was a "right" understanding to grasp, and it must have been the words that Shibi had said. 

In koan practice, students are asked how they would answer Shibi's question. How would they, how would you, express the whole interconnected, interdependent, selfless universe? Can you express it without differentiating yourself from the answer, or from the one asking?

I'd look Shibi in the eye, and say, "It is what it is, bro. Skibidi." 

I'd be asked to leave the monastery the next morning.         

The Transcendental Outpost, 71st Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Helios): In the 1970s, I would sit in my classrooms at Boston University and let my gaze wander out the window, where I could see MIT across the Charles River. If I craned my neck just a little bit and looked upriver, I could see the rooftops and dreaming spires of Harvard.

Sometimes, especially in my last year, I could almost picture helicopters full of job recruiters flying right over BU and parachuting down to Harvard and MIT. I could picture imaginary streams of job offers and salaries cascading onto those two schools with nothing at all falling on BU. 

For two years, I shared an Alston apartment with a Harvard student and a BU Law transfer from Harvard, and they were every bit as insufferable and elitist as you might think. 

In the 1970s, Harvard had a fine geology department, I'm sure, and an even finer museum of rocks, minerals, and fossils dating back to the 19th Century and Louis Agassiz. But they weren't particularly active in the local, '70s geological community in Boston, and I can't recall them participating in the New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference or other organizations. 

The age of the bedrock in the Boston Basin has long been regarded as Carboniferous based on its similarity to other, nearby Carboniferous basins. But as of the '70s, nobody had found any fossils in the Boston Basin to confirm the age of the rocks and then, bang!, out of nowhere, some profs and staff from the Harvard museum turned up the first fossils in the basin. Virtually no involvement in local geological research and then they suddenly hit a grand slam home run with the biggest find of the century. Why of all the schools did it have to be Harvard?, all the other geology departments wondered.       

So it's with no small amount of surprise that I now find myself sympathizing with Harvard in their existential battle with the fascistic Trump regime. Check your favorite news service if you don't know what I'm talking about. As I don't have the time, patience or stomach to go over all the details here, I'll just assume you know all about it.

Anyway, the enemies of my enemy are my friends, I guess. Boston schools need to hang together, I suppose, or else, etc. The whole universe in ten directions is one bright pearl, and we don't need to quibble over which side of the Charles we got our diplomas. Besides, if we're not careful, a team from Harvard will probably find that one bright pearl and add it to their collection.              

Dispersal of the Primal Cloud Mass, 70th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Electra): Xuansha Shibei was an ancient Chinese monk known for the phrase, “The whole world in ten directions is one bright pearl.”

Twenty-nine children and elderly people have died from starvation in Gaza in the last two days according to the Palestinian Authority health minister. In addition, Israeli strikes killed at least 52 people since dawn amid a renewed military offensive across the territory.

Last evening, two innocent staff members of the Israeli embassy in Washington, a young couple on the verge of becoming engaged, were fatally shot while leaving an event at a Jewish museum. The gunman yelled “Free Palestine” after he was arrested.

All of these events are deplorable and unjustified. Violence spawns more violence. The response to the atrocities and genocide in Gaza do not justify shooting a Jewish couple in D.C., and the shooting of a Jewish couple in D.C. does not justify cruel starvation and air strikes against the civilian population in Gaza.

The whole universe in ten directions is one bright pearl. Everything is connected and nothing is separate. There is no "us" and "them" yet countless acts of violence continue due to this delusion. 

What is the appropriate response to the genocide of Palestinians? I say it is to stop committing genocide. What is the appropriate response to the shooting of the innocent couple? Stop shooting innocent people. It sound so simplistic, almost infantile in its naivety, but all other actions are just adding unnecessary steps toward the goal. "It's hippie bullshit but it's true," as the song goes.

But let's be real and let's be practical. Chances are good that neither you nor I are actively carrying out the atrocities in Gaza. Neither you nor I are probably shooting people. If I'm wrong about either assumption, then knock it off. But since neither of us can stop doing what we're already not doing, then what? 

I propose we can recognize the interdependence and connectedness of all things, how our every action affects everything else in the universe, and govern ourselves accordingly. There's always room for improvement. The whole universe in ten directions is one bright pearl.

 

The Touchstone Breath, 69th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Another wave of severe storms rolled over the South last evening . Why do these storms always occur so late at night? It might be observational bias, at least in part, but it seems it's always like 2 a.m. when these storms hit. 

Anyway, last night there were tornado warnings and tornado watches from Chattanooga, Tennessee to just north of here. The danger line was uncomfortably close to here, just a few miles north of me, and I stayed up late watching the forecasts because they kept changing. As it turned out, a tornado watch never got called for here, but we were under an extreme thunderstorm warning for a while, as lightning flashed outside, the lights flickered (but never went out), and the rain came down in sheets. Scary stuff, and then it was all over by 3:00. 

The weather today behind the front was just delightful - dry, temperate (high 70s to low 80s), and clear skies. I got my walk in today, a whopping Polk along the river. I was hoping for a Taylor, but the Polk is still a year's best and brings my total so far for the month of May to 83.9 miles (482 on the year). 

Birds: I added the canary-like prothonotary warbler to my life list today. I had never even heard of the prothonotary before, but apparently they're shockingly bright-yellow little fellows that frequent southern swamps and wet forests, which is exactly where I found them. Anyway, the warbler brings my life list up to 31 species now.         

 

Laws of the Dark Trance, 68th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Castor): An article in last weekend's New York Times was titled Road Trips That Changed Their Lives. The title alone, much less the recollections of the various contributors, triggered a lot of memories.

It's been a while since I took an epic road trip. Once a year since the covids ended, I drive from Atlanta up to Knoxville, Tennessee, an unremarkable, three-hour trek mostly along interstate I-75 that scarcely qualifies as a road trip, much less a life changer.

Back in the first two decades of the 2000s, I used to make more-or-less annual trips from Atlanta down to the Georgia coast - Savannah and Tybee Island, or Jekyl Island,  or St. Simons. The default route was on interstate I-16, an amazingly boring stretch of flat, straight, featureless road, where the only real adventure is staying awake long enough to complete the drive. I prefer getting off the highway and driving the backgrounds through the small Georgia towns of Cochran and Eastman, McRae-Helena, Lumber City and Hazlehurst, and Baxley, with its surprising nuclear-power plant. By the time I get to Jesup, it seems like a city after all those small towns. 

But those were simply summertime diversions, and hardly qualify as change-my-life road trips.

My last epic road trip was probably in 1993 driving from Pittsburgh to Atlanta. I was moving, changing jobs (or at least offices), I was in transition, so you can argue that it changed my life, but the change was more in the destination than the journey itself. However, I did take in part of the Blue Ridge Parkway for a portion of the trip which was impressive and memorable.

In 1990 or '91, I took a road adventure from Albany, New York to the town of Percé on the tip of Canada's Gaspé Peninsula and back again with four friends from work. It was a four- or five-day trip and did contain some adventure, exploration, and discovery. It may not have been a life-altering experience per se, but it was far more than a simple commute to some vacation spot. In fact, it wasn't a vacation at all; our purpose was to attend the annual field trip of something called the New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference.

One of my more epic road trips was in the early-mid 1970s from northern New Jersey to Indianapolis. Indy wasn't even the original destination - we had set out for central Illinois - and my traveling companions when I got back weren't the same as those with whom I had left. My car made it only as far as central Pennsylvania before breaking down and we hitchhiked most of the rest of the way. (it was the 70s). Along the way, we were arrested and jailed for hitchhiking and vagrancy, at one point found ourselves set up with a free dorm room at Case-Western University for some reason, and took part in two separate rock festivals. An epic, an odyssey, but I was still the same person I was when I had left. 

My real, truly life-changing road trip was back in 1969. Three of my best friends and I got one of our fathers (not mine) to drive us cross-country on a camping and hiking adventure that took us from Long Island to central Texas and even down into Mexico for one day. From Texas, we travelled the Gulf coast to Pensacola, and from Pensacola eventually back home to New York. Six weeks, our summer vacation. On the trip, I learned how to really read maps, not just connect-the-lines routing, but to infer the look and feel of the landscape and the quality and nature of the countryside. To this day, studying a map to me is almost like virtual reality. Cartomania. Girlfriends have learned that if they want to distract or silence me, all they have to do is hand me a map. 

We camped at almost two-dozen sites, we hiked, we caught turtles and snakes and lizards and even bought home a pet armadillo that we caught in Texas. We watched the first moon landing on a portable t.v. in a bayou in Louisiana. We met some girls in Corpus Christi, we saw segregated water fountains in Alabama, we watched scissor-tail flycatchers in Oklahoma. We visited LBJ's ranch on the way to see the Alamo and netted a soft-shelled turtle in a nearby pond. 

That road trip did change my life. My interests to this day in hiking and backpacking, in wildlife and natural sciences, all trace back to that trip. It's no wonder that by the time I got to college, I became a geology major.

I've long wanted to thank that one father for giving up his summer plans and driving the four of us across the country. But I never got that chance and sadly, the last time he saw me, I was deep in my punk adolescent rebellion phase. I've always wanted to tell him that the trip did indeed change my life and for the better, and I owe no small part of who I am today and what I've achieved due to his guidance behind the wheel. Thank you, kind sir.

 

Council of the Million Visitation, 67th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): They say water is tasteless, but that is not correct. That statement is a product of anthropocentric bias. 

To say water is tasteless implies that tastelessness is a property of water. In fact, it's the human tongue that can't taste water. If our taste buds and senses were wired just a little bit differently, we might be able to taste water. I'm sure that some other living creature can taste water just fine. On the other hand, fish probably can't taste the salt in seawater. 

I suspect that those primate ancestors of ours that could discern the impurities in water had a higher survival rate than those that couldn't and lived to pass down their genes. One way to reduce the noise-to-signal ratio in discerning impurities in water is for pure water to taste "neutral," that is, to have no taste at all. That way, salt or other chemicals or organic matter would be all the more obvious. 

But pure water itself isn't "tasteless," it's just that our tongues are insufficient to the task.

Next question: is air really "clear"?  

 

Signature of Light, 66th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Atlas): As it turns out, I got my walk in yesterday, a full Van Buren - 8.2 miles. The weather cleared up in the midafternoon and I wasn't even a mile into my walk before I forgot what my reluctance to going outside even was in the first place. I feel better now for having walked.

I awoke this morning to a way-too-early 6:50 am text message from a neighbor saying her wi-fi was down and asking if anyone else was experiencing problems (the only problem I was experiencing was getting woken up too early about someone else's first-world troubles). There was a power outage sometime last night - I woke earlier in the morning, sometime around 2:15 am, to the beeps of various electronics resetting themselves when the power came back on, and had to get up and reset my alarm clock. But before it even went off, but after the 6:50 text message, the ominous rumble of distant thunder woke me up for the third time from my fitful sleep. I guess what I'm trying to say is I didn't get a good night's sleep last night, but I won't let that stop me from my alternating-day sitting today (meditation is challenging when one is sleepy).     

The thunderstorm blew over by 11:00 am with no incident.

Today's post was intended to be a criticism of the recent journalism by Jake ("I dated Monica Lewinski") Tapper and others about Joe Biden's mental acuity during his last year or so in office, and a broader attack on ageism in general, but then I saw the news today that Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. This sad development makes my intended point irrelevant, renders Tapper's current book tour meaningless, and highlights the pettiness of the reporting about the former president. A man in his 80s might need a wheelchair sometime in the future, according to an unnamed source? Is said not to have recognized Georgia Clooney at a fundraiser? How petty, how irrelevant, how disrespectful. 

Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in the U.S. and the second leading cause of cancer death among men, according to the American Cancer Society. The cancer has spread to the bone, Biden's office said in a statement.

Impermanence is swift.

Spectre of the Lapse, 65th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Helios): The air conditioning has been restored. The technician showed up for his 12-4 pm appointment at 5:45, and the cool air was blowing through the house by 6:15. His explanation for the breakdown was, "it had shut off," with no explanation as to why it had shut off other than, "it happens." But I'm a forward-looking kind of a guy. It doesn't matter why it had stopped, just that it's running now and I can survive another season. 

Waiting around for the technician, however, disrupted my mediation schedule. I didn't sit in the morning because, you know, mornings, and I didn't want my sitting to be interrupted in the afternoon by the technician's visit. After he left, I didn't want to sit and miss the Celtic's game, which went horribly wrong and was something I wish I hadn't seen. So I wound up missing the whole day.    

Last night, after the game (and the Celtics' season) was mercifully over, severe storms and tornadoes hit Missouri and Kentucky and killed at least 21 people, with the total number of deaths expected to rise. The tornadoes were part of a major system that rolled across the Midwest and the Mid-Atlantic Friday night and downed power lines and sent debris whipping through the streets. That storm came through here at around 8:00 this morning with thunder and rainstorms, but it was far weaker and diminished here in Georgia compared to what had earlier come through Missouri and Kentucky.

I knew the storms were coming when I went to bed last night due to the forecasts of the National Weather Service. Weather reports, from The Weather Channel to AccuWeather to iPhones to your local television weatherperson, all rely on the data and forecasts of the NWS. But due to DOGE-initiated layoffs and retirements, the Service has lost nearly 600 people from a workforce that had been as many as 4,000. Those reductions impact the work of collecting the data used to make forecasts, such as launching weather balloons, and reduce the number if people who turn that data into crucial warnings when extreme weather is on the way. The NWS office in eastern Kentucky that covered the area where last night's tornadoes hit no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster and had to rely on nearby offices for support.

Although the thunderstorms have passed, I'm reluctant to go on my alternating-day walk today because  it's still dark, cloudy and unsettled outside and I don't want to get caught in another downpour like I did a few weeks ago. I could stay inside today and make up for my missed sitting yesterday, or I can wait it out and see if the weather clears up later this afternoon. I honestly don't know what I want to do or what I will do, as already, after missing just one day of meditation, I feel disoriented and "off."

My official attitude toward my alternating-day schedule is to try and maintain it as best I can, but if I miss a day here or there, no biggie, just pick back up the next day as if nothing happened. No need to stress out over it, even if I miss a sitting day for one reason and then have to pass on a walking day the next for another reason. But that's easier said than done. It's apparent my mental health and wellbeing rely on keeping my alternating-day schedule, and I have to learn to adapt when disrupters like air conditioning breakdowns and inclement weather throw my schedule into a tailspin. 

 

Dream in the Rock, 64th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Electra): The most frightening words in the English language to people living in the Deep South, "The a.c.'s out." 

It's not that unusual to see record warmth in May, but summerlike heat smashed record highs in parts of the Northern Plains and upper Midwest the past few days. On Mother's Day, International Falls, Minnesota, on the border with Canada and nicknamed the "Nation's Icebox," reached 96 degrees. That was their hottest May high on record and the dry heat has helped fuel wildfires in northern Minnesota.

Here in Georgia, we reached a high of 87° yesterday, closer to the record high of 91° (set in 1947!) than the average of 81°. But yesterday, when I got back home from my afternoon walk, I noticed that the air conditioning wasn't working in the house. The fan was running, providing some air movement and a slight amount of cooling, but the compressor wasn't running, so the air coming out of the ducts was the same temperature as in the house. And that temperature slowly crept up to 77°, then 78, and then 79, even as the evening temperatures were dropping outside.

I called my HVAC people and a repairperson is scheduled to arrive sometime between noon and four pm, which based on my past experience means sometime around 6:00 or 7:00. It's 78° in here now, which is on the upper end of tolerable, but as the day warms up (it's forecast to reach 85 outside today) it will get more uncomfortable.

This is frustrating because it's happened to me every year since my new system was installed back in 2021. Each year, a technician shows up sometime in late March or early April for annual a.c. maintenance and tells me the system is fine, and each year when summerlike temps first arrive in May or June, the system won't kick on like it refuses to today. Each year I have to schedule a follow-on appointment and it gets fixed within an hour or two.   

Everything's impermanent and this warmth too shall pass. When the repairman leaves this evening, I will once again be enjoying cool, dry air circulating through my home again while offering a toast to Willis Carrier, the patron saint of the South, without whom life would be unbearable down here.           

 

Separation of the First Stage, 63rd Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Deneb): On today's Van Buren, I added the common grackle and white-eyed vireo to my life list (I already had the red-eyed vireo). Tuesday, I added the song sparrow, the most common and widespread sparrow of North America.   

I don't have anything to say today, so I'll just post Leslie Jones' rant from The Daily Show last night. 

Launching of the Dreamweapon, 62nd Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Castor): Oh, the mysteries of the New Revised Universal Solar Calendar! Ten days ago, the 52nd Day of Spring, was Establishment of the Dreamweapon and now, ten days later, it's Launching of the Dreamweapon. The ten days of the Dreamweapon. I tried to keep some conceptual continuity in the daily images here, including the color blue, the blue sky, the blue circle, and so on. 

I first became aware of Angus MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar from a 2014 mixtape curated by Stephen O'Malley of the band Sunn O))) for London's FACT Magazine (Fact Mix 445). He included MacLise's vocal recitation of the names of the days from MacLise's 2003 album, The Cloud Doctrine. It's a nearly 20-minute-long spoken word performance with no background music or context, and I had no idea what it was about. "Ways to the deep meadow, the white fleet's landfall, realm of violent dream, pre-dawn chart, sun quarter pass, basalt day," and so on, MacLise drones in a deadpan, monotone voice. It's a long, difficult listen, especially if one has no idea what it's all about.

It wasn't until months later that I discovered that Universal Solar Calendar was indeed an actual calendar, as quixotically laid out in MacLise's own handwriting. It's as much calendar as it is poetry and a piece of calligraphic art. I was further intrigued when I read that the visionary composer La Monte Young encouraged use of the Universal Solar Calendar to track the days rather than the traditional Julian calendar, and I  figured if it's good enough for Young, it's good enough for me.

But I found it hard to follow along with the calendar as MacLise had laid it out, but that's on me, not the artist. However, I retrofitted the calendar into the traditional grid, and then came up with the idea of six-day weeks with the days named for stars and added a leap year day (Fifth Twelve) on the 60th day of the year so that each year the calendar always begins and ends on the same day of the week. Launching of the Dreamweapon will always be on a Castor, the third of the six days of the week.    

It's still nearly impossible to track a year based on the names of the days (does Day of the Crooked Spirit come before or after Child Found Within the Tree, and by how many days?). But it is possible to understand the passage of time between today, the 63nd Day of Spring, and, say, the 12th Day of Autumn, especially when you know that each month contains 73 days (except for autumn, which contains 74).

Walt Disney once encouraged younger artists to take a good idea and stay with it, and work it until it's done and done right, or something to that effect. I know my new revisions to MacLise's Universal Solar Calendar has little to no practical value now, and probably confuses people more than it enlightens anyone, but I intend to keep at it and keep moving forward with it until I can figure out what can be done with it.

 

The Wooden Works, 61st Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): I got my walk in today, a Van Buren (8.6 miles) despite the threat of rain. I missed Sunday's walk because of the rain and it even rained on me briefly today, although very gently and while I was under tree cover. 

Even though I got my sitting time in yesterday, I felt very unsettled late last night, possibly due to not walking on Sunday. Or possibly because the Celtics lost Game 4 of the Conference Semifinals in New York on Monday night, and are down 1-3 against the Knicks. Or because Jayson Tatum went down in the late Fourth Quarter with a game, season, and, not impossibly, career-ending injury. All this on the same day that the Red Sox were humiliated in Detroit in a 14-2 loss to the Tigers. 

Yesterday, I noticed that a part of the lower dashboard of my car seems to have come apart from the rest of the dash. Everything still works fine, but it's an unpleasant reminder of impermanence and that my 16-year-old car isn't going to last forever, and I have no clear idea how to afford a new car on my fixed retirement income, especially in these times of tariff wars and recessions.

My eyes are getting worse. I was told I needed cataract surgery nearly a year ago, but I've done nothing about it to date. 

I live alone and have few friends. My cat, my only constant companion, is the same age as my car and is in worse shape. I'll miss the furry bastard when he's gone.

So all this unpleasantness was in my head last night as I settled in for the evening to read the ending of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel, The Road, a dark, depressing read by any standard.  

So, in summary, after a week of rain, I was housebound and cooped up, my teams had lost, badly, I felt like everything was falling apart on me, and to relax I was reading a grim end-of-the-world novel. 

But that was yesterday. The sun came out for a while today, enough that I got my Van Buren in (even if I did get a little wet), and now I feel much better. We think that we're such complex, sophisticated beings, capable of logic and discerning thought, but our moods are really controlled more by our metabolism than by the ideas rattling around in our minds.

Please remind me to walk again on Thursday, even if the weather doesn't look ideal.

 

Day of Creaking Aftermath, 60th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Atlas): The Emoluments Clause is a provision in Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution that prohibits the federal government from granting titles of nobility, and restricts members of the federal government from receiving gifts, salaries, offices, or titles from foreign states without the consent of Congress. It was intended to shield federal officeholders against corrupting foreign influences. It reads:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

In other words, we have no kings or queens or earls or lords or other royalty of any kind, and those holding office cannot accept title and cannot accept gifts from foreign countries.

Despite this, Donald Trump plans to accept a $400 million luxury jet from the royal family of Qatar for use as Air Force One and later as a fixture in his personal presidential library. This couldn't more clearly violate the U.S. Constitution but the Republican Party was brushed the Democrats' objections. Trump has praised the offer as a “great gesture” and said he would “never be one to turn down that kind of offer.”

Last week, it was learned that a memecoin launched by Trump's World Liberty Financial crypto venture is being used by an Abu Dhabi investment firm for its $2 billion investment into the crypto exchange Binance. Trump stands to earn hundreds of millions from the Arab firm's investment.

After the election, Trump took an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution. Accepting these gifts would violate the Constitution so Trump is not honoring his oath of office. He's derelict in his duties as President and for that must be impeached.

But Republicans are all in agreement about "well. what can you do?" and the MAGA base is applauding the "smart business move." 

So pay close attention as other than a few sharply worded letters and fund-raising speeches by Democrats, nothing happens.

 

The Divine Versions, 59th Day of Spring, 525 M.E. (Helios): Here are some questions worth considering: does the soul outlive the body? Is there rebirth after death? Are there eternal realms we inhabit after this mortal existence?  

Possibly considering these very questions, Zen Master Dogen once asked himself, rhetorically, “It has been said that we should not regret life and death, for a quick way to get free of the cycle of life and death is to know that our mental essence is eternal. In other words, the physical body, having been born, necessarily moves toward death, but the mental essence never dies at all. The mental essence is unmoved by birth, and decay exists only in our body. Therefore, the body is just a temporary form; it is born and it dies, never remaining constant. But the mind is eternal; it is unchangeable in the past, present, and future. To know this is to become free of life-and-death. 

"Those who understand this principle stop the cycle of life-and-death forever and, when the body passes, they enter the spirit world and gain wondrous virtues. However, our bodies have been shaped by our deluded behavior in past ages, so we are not the same as the saints. Those who do not know this principle will remain trapped forever in the cycle of life-and-death. Therefore we should just hasten to understand the principle that the mental essence is eternal. Is this not what the Buddhas and the patriarchs all taught?”

Dogen did not agree at all with that position. He answered his own question saying, "That view is absolutely not what the Buddha taught. According to that non-Buddhist view, there is a spiritual intelligence existing within our body. That intelligence can discriminate between pleasant and unpleasant and between right and wrong, it can know pain and irritation and suffering and pleasure. When the body dies, however, the spirit casts off the skin and is reborn on the other side so even though it seems to die here, it lives on there. Therefore we call it immortal and eternal. 

"If we assume this is what the Buddha taught, however, we are even more foolish than a person who mistakes a tile or a pebble for a golden treasure. If we think the Buddha taught that the mind is eternal but forms perish and believe that we can escape life and death when we are in fact promoting the original cause of life and death, are we not being stupid? That would be most pitiful. We shouldn't even listen to these wrong non-Buddhist ideas. 

"Remember, the Buddha taught that the body and mind are one reality; body and mind are not divided. How could we then say that the body is mortal but the mind is eternal? Does that not violate reason? Furthermore, we should realize that living-and-dying is itself nirvana; Buddhists have never discussed nirvana outside of life-and-death. Even if we wrongly imagine the Buddha taught that the mind becomes eternal by getting free of the body, that imagined idea itself intermittently appears and disappears in the mind and is not eternal at all. Isn’t that understanding unreliable then? 

"The Buddha consistently taught that body and mind are one reality. How could it then be that while the body appears and disappears, the mind independently leaves the body and does not appear or disappear? If there is a time when body and mind are one reality, and another time when they are not one reality, then it might naturally follow that the Buddha’s teaching is wrong. Further, if we think that life-and-death are something to overcome or get rid of, we are likewise contradicting the Buddha's teaching. 

"The Buddhist schools of thought that say the mind includes all forms consider 'all forms' to be the entire universe without dividing essence and form, and without appearance or disappearance. There is no state, even nirvana, that is different from the essence of mind. All the myriad phenomena and various things are just the one mind without exclusion or exception. All Buddhist schools assert that the myriad things and phenomena are the even and balanced undivided mind, other than which there is nothing. That being so, how could we divide this one reality into body and mind, or into life-and-death and nirvana? 

"We disciples of the Buddha should not listen to such nonsense from the lips of the madmen who speak these non-Buddhist views."

[This discussion is adapted from Dogen's Shōbōgenzō Bendōwa.] 

 

Day of the Rainhouses, 58th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Electra): For some reason, I didn't want to sit for my meditation today. Everything about the day felt a little off - it started with the shutters rattling at 9:00 am from a 4.1-mag earthquake up in Tennessee and then continued with nearly constant rain. I felt hungry all day and eating didn't seem to affect my appetite. Perhaps subconsciously to avoid having to sit, I randomly started on a big cleaning project, emptying out the cabinets in my study into big piles of papers, books, junk, and ephemera onto my floor that I couldn't just ignore and leave there while I sat.

But I did eventually get the piles sorted and threw out recycled a lot of paper. Somewhere in the process, and to give you an idea of the size of the project, I found, organized, and stored all of my tax returns going back to 1980. But I did finally finish, and then, despite my preferences, sat down for my alternating-day zazen. 

It was easy. The hard part isn't sitting for 90 minutes - that's easy. The hard part is just first sitting down and getting starting.

When I finished and started to settle back into my housebound, rainy day, I saw that the Celtics game had started at 3:30 and was already well into the 3rd Quarter. I had thought it was an evening game, but had I known the tip-off was 3:30, I definitely wouldn't have sat down and started my zazen. I would have waited until after the game, and then put it off until after I fed the cat, and then after I ate dinner myself, and then after, well, whatever other excuse I could come up with. I'm glad now that I didn't know the start time. Ignorance is bliss.

The rain's forecast to last through tomorrow and for the next several days. I may not get my every-other-day walks in, but I'm glad I got the intervening-day sitting taken care of today. 

 

Day of the World Tree, 57th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Deneb): Towards the end of the Heart Sutra, the Prajñā-Pāramitā mantra is invoked  It is introduced in the sutra as "the great miraculous manta, the great bright manta, the supreme mantra, the incomparable mantra which removes all suffering and is true not false." 

It is my least favorite part of the Heart Sutra. It's so insistent on the virtue of the mantra and tries so hard to sell it that I've always wanted to go on and ad lib, "the really fucking swell mantra, it really is the best mantra, the guarantee your money back mantra, you won't find a better mantra, goddamn I really love this mantra," etc.

Buddhism is generally humble about its virtues and encourages its followers to question and critically evaluate the teachings. So it's a bit surprising the way the Heart Sutra insists that the Prajñā-Pāramitā sutra ("gate, gate,  pāragate, pārasamgate, bodhi, svāhā") is so superior to any other. That last phrase ("and is true not false") is especially jarring in its stark duality for a religion that preaches non-duality ("these is no up, there is no down, these is no true and false").

In 1994, Gudo Nishijima translated those lines of the Heart Sutra as, "So remember: prajñā-pāramitā is a great and mystical spell; it is a great and luminous spell; it is the supreme spell; it is a spell in the unequaled state of equilibrium. It can clear away all suffering. It is real, not empty." A later (2007) version of his translation used the traditional term "mantra" instead of "spell." 

I like "real, not empty" much more than "true, not false," especially in the way that "emptiness," or shunyatā, is understood in Zen (impermanent, devoid of an independent existence). 

In his commentary on the Heart Sutra, Zen Master Dogen pointed out that the manifestation of prajñā (wisdom) is the arising of the myriad things (the real dharmas), while the real dharmas are themselves aspects of emptiness. Form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

So one can assume that the Heart Sutra is saying that actual wisdom, prajñā, not the words of the Prajñā-Pāramitā mantra or even the practice of chanting, is the manifestation of reality (the myriad things) and the myriad things are all impermanent and empty of an independence existence. I can understand how translators might come up with "true, not false" from whatever the original words were, but I like "real, not empty" much more.

At this point, someone out there is wondering, "Sure, but the sutra is saying it's 'not empty' and you're saying 'all things are empty.' So which is it?" 

I'm saying that all things are empty and without all things there is no emptiness. Interdependence.

 

Day of the Holy Mountain, 56th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Castor): These are the end times. 

I know that sounds hyperbolic and over the top, but I really believe it to be true. We are on the verge of so many collapses - ecological, climatic, political, economic - that I don't see any way the world continues without violence, and by violence I don't mean only mobs and riots (although that will happen) but also armies and bombs. It's not a question of if it will happen (it will) or when (soon), but where. Each person's best hope is that it happens elsewhere and affects someone else, not them.

It's already happening to Ukrainians and Palestinians and now to Kashmiris as well. It's been happening all across Africa and in Central and South America. It's been happening in Haiti.   

I'm not a prepper - my reaction to the impending collapse isn't to horde food and water and arm myself to the teeth, ready to kill anyone who tries to take away from me what I think of as mine. It's that kind of mentality on both a personal, national, and international level that got us into this situation to start with. I have no interest in being the last person on Earth to starve to death after I've exhausted my and everyone else's rations.

Preppers are actually optimists - they assume that there will be some version of society or a world worth surviving for if only they could make it through some temporary crisis. Pessimists assume things will get bad and then get even worse. Why delay the inevitable just to experience even more suffering?

But in the meantime, today. It's sunny outside and birds are chirping. Food is still available in the supermarkets and I get clean water from my tap. Why darken these days with anxieties about future famine and war? These are the days about which future people will dream. Enjoy them now.

Day of the Marauders, 55th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): The Union of Concerned Scientists' Doomsday Clock might officially be at 89 seconds before midnight, but my own sense of impending doom sets the clock far closer to the end of the world.   

India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed nations, have exchanged deadly, although non-nuclear, strikes. Jets have been shot down over Kashmir and civilians killed. The conflict could quickly spiral beyond the nations' borders.

I've never been to Kashmir (I've never been on the Asian continent), but by all reports it's one of the world's most beautiful places. It's literally the setting of the fictional Shangri-La, paradise on Earth. Mountainous and remote, it includes the India-administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh, the Pakistan-administered territories of Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, and the Chinese-administered territories of Aksai Chin and the Trans-Karakoram Tract. India and Pakistan have been contesting the boundaries and each others' claims to sovereignty for decades.

The last time the dispute escalated to a military confrontation was in 2019. Then, U.S. officials detected enough movement in the nuclear arsenals of both nations to be alarmed, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was awakened in the middle of the night. He worked the phone in an attempt to convince each side that the other was not prepping for nuclear war. That clash quickly cooled after India dropped bombs in a wooded hills near a madrasa that it claimed was harboring terrorists and Pakistan dropped some munitions on the Indian side soon after. Things remained touchy for awhile  time with the news in both countries in a jingoistic overdrive before returning to an uneasy middle ground.

That was six years ago. The attacks last week were very different: The Indian military did not drop bombs in the middle of the woods this time. The strikes hit near major population hubs, and Pakistani military officials said that more than 20 people, including a child, have died. The world is expecting Pakistan to retaliate and it’s hard to imagine this skirmish ending in memes and a media frenzy.

Formerly, the U.S .would have stepped in and steadied the situation, calming the fire, and leading diplomacy. That's not the case now. The President's financial and personal self-interests aren't served by this conflict, and a detached Trump simply called the escalation, “a shame.”

“We just heard about it,” he said of the Indian strikes. “They’ve been fighting for a long time. I just hope it ends very quickly.” Shortly after the strikes, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was briefed on the military actions. Rubio tweeted that he’s “monitoring closely,” as if watching a crisis unfold on TV counts as leadership.

This isn’t just embarrassing, it’s dangerous. The world no longer sees America as the stabilizing force it once was. Instead, it sees disinformation replacing intelligence, posturing instead of policy, and a White House that can't, or won’t, lead.

This is how trust collapses. This is how vacuums of power form, and authoritarian regimes boldly step into such vacuums. China has an obvious interest in a potential nuclear war breaking out on its border and in an area to which it has claims of its own. They're likely to step in and attempt some diplomacy, but with their ties to Pakistan and their own territorial interests in the area, they may not be as trusted by either side as the U.S. once was. China could decide to step in with military action. It's less clear how Shia Iran will react to the situation in Sunni Kashmir.

I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but Kashmir and situations like this have long been considered likely scenarios for the start of World War III. Add to this the stunning level of sheer incompetence and absence of leadership in the United States, where the president doesn't see how he personally could make a profit off this crisis, and the situation becomes even more dangerous. Add to this the current situations in Ukraine and Palestine, where Russia or Israel might decide to use fighting in the Kashmir as a diversion to escalate their own war efforts, and things are even more dire. 

When the world needs more than ever the cool-headed diplomacy of an Obama or even a Biden in his prime, we instead have the self-serving narcissism of a mentally diminished Trump, surrounded by his boot-licking lackeys who dare not question their dear leader. 

I don't see this all ending well for anybody.

 

Day of the Everlasting Moraine, 54th of Spring, 525 M.E. (Atlas): I may be the only one, but I couldn't care less about the Met Gala. 

I couldn't care less about the celebrity guests, the outlandish, attention-getting outfits they wore, or who attended which after party. The media insists on giving the event breathless, page one coverage, but it's really just another attempt by the entertainment aristocracy to continue their demand of our attention and veneration. 

I don't care about the 20-foot or whatever trailer on Diana Ross' gown. I don't care about Diana Ross (c'mon, it's 2025 and she hasn't done anything noteworthy since the 1980s). I don't care that Andre 3000 strapped a piano to his back. I wouldn't care if he arrived carrying the Christ's original cross on his back. I don't even know or recognize most of the so-called celebrities on the red carpet and their ridiculous-looking outfits don't compel me to learn more about them.

Some people just have too much time, money, and ego on their hands.

The planet is dying. There are wars in Gaza and Ukraine. Our president is a corrupt demagogue destroying our democracy. Life-and-death is the great matter. These are the things the press should be discussing, not the width of Chance the Rapper's lapels.     

 

Day of the Blue Circle, 53rd of Spring, 525 M.E. (Helios): Today, I resumed my alternating-day walking routine (I missed Saturday because of rain). I drove up to the Paces Mill trailhead along the Chattahoochee River, a different route than usual to spice up my routine, but the parking lot and trailhead were closed due to construction. Apparently, extensive repairs were needed after Hurricane Helene last year, but the Park Service claims it will all be completed for reopening later this month. From my quick look as I drove past, they still have a lot of work left to do and a May 2025 reopening seems optimistic.

I went back home and walked instead on my local Beltline/Tanyard Creek route. It was a lovely day for walking - high 60s, dry, and partly sunny. I also managed to double my birding life list from the 13 species at the beginning of the month to 26 species. Many of my new birds are quite ordinary and common, like the crow, the house wren and house finch, and the bluebird and catbird. Others are a little more exotic but hardly rare, like the cedar waxwing, red-bellied woodpecker, brown-breasted nuthatch, blue-gray gnatcatcher, and pine warbler. I finally spotted a barred owl, which are ubiquitous in this area but had been playing coy and eluding me lately. I also saw a pair of Canadian geese walking on the golf course and a pair of mallards swimming in Tanyard Creek. Naively, I always thought that "mallard" was just a term for a male duck of any species, but TIL that it's actually a species unto itself, Anas platyrhynchos (which sounds like a rhinoceros' asshole).

So my modest, just-getting-started, life list after only five days is now:

• American crow
• American robin
• barred owl
• belted kingfisher
• blue jay
• blue-gray gnatcatcher
• brown-breasted nuthatch
• Canadian goose
• Carolina wren
• cedar waxwing
• downy woodpecker
• eastern bluebird
• gray catbird
• great blue heron
• house finch 
• indigo bunting
• mallard
• mourning dove
• northern cardinal
• northern house wren 
• pine warbler
• red-bellied woodpecker
• red-eyed vireo
• red-shouldered hawk
• summer tanager
• tufted titmouse 

It's not much, but it's a start.

Update: Shortly after posting this, I took out the trash and heard a bird practically screaming at me. It was quite loud and simply calling out a demanding "tweet" over and over. It was easy to spot: a fat, sparrow-like bird with a dark blue head and orange sides. It flew up on my roof tweeting at me, then down to a low branch on a nearby tree, and finally starting hopping around on the ground, all while loudly shrieking as if demanding my attention. I identified it, an eastern towhee, and added it to my life list above. It was as if it had felt left out and was demanding to be included.