Artificial Intelligence and Human Sexuality

The news flitted by, as so much does in the torrent:  OpenAI, the parent entity of ChatGPT, announced that the guardrails put in place to restrict it from producing erotic and sexual content have now been removed.  We're "not the elected moral police of the world," or so OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it.  So now, if you want and you spool up the correct prompts, ChatGPT will play the role of your idealized lover.

This is not a good thing.  Not just for kids, either.  It's bad for humans of every age.

An acceptance of porn as "natural" and "sex-positive" seems baked into American progressivism, which hasn't ever made a lick of sense to me.   Why in the name of the sweet Lord Jesus would anyone trust the forces of predatory capitalism with human sexuality?  How is turning physical intimacy into a commodity to be bought and sold a good thing?

Surely, surely we've learned by now that this ain't the case.

We know that corporate social media has supplanted our natural sociality with algorithms designed to addict us, hitting us with little burps of dopamine as we're pushed further and further from genuine human interaction.  Porn is and has always done that too.  Since human beings first learned to scratch a clumsy sexual image onto a cave wall, it's been sexuality as objectification, sexuality as seeing the other as a means to your own pleasure rather than a person, and it was that even before the internet arrived to bring it into our homes and offices and everywhere we go.

In the last three decades, algorithmically-amplified online sexual content has had a catastrophic impact on contemporary sexuality.  It's poisoned a generation of the young, warping their understanding of sex, driving them away from the complex reality of actual flesh-and-blood partners.   This isn't even faintly healthy.

A lover is a person, complex and alive, and requires us to adapt and grow.  If one is Christian, as I am, we also acknowledge that partner as worthy of love, another sentient being whose pleasure is as important as our own.  This is a great deal of fun, and is also organically complex and unpredictable.  It requires us to learn from one another, and to appreciate one another.

But an AI simulacrum does none of those things.  It demands nothing of us as persons, because it is not a person itself.  It has no desires.  It feels nothing.  It needs nothing.  It is...for now...truly and actually an object.

Now that pornography has integrated AI, it can offer up an infinite array of purchasable "partners" that only do and say exactly whatever we want, and look precisely like whatever we lust for in that moment.   AI will adapt to us and indulge us, an erotic sycophant that will shapeshift itself to our solipsistic onanism with the precision of a lab-designed virus overcoming the natural defenses of a cell.

It does not bode well for the future of human physical intimacy.

A Pandemonium of Parrots

It was a lovely afternoon, warmer than one would expect for the early Fall, and I was face to face with a pandemonium of parrots.

Earlier that week, I'd been invited to pay a visit to a Tibetan Buddhist temple by one of the congenial Buddhists who pray and meditate there.  They've been a vital partner in my congregation's efforts to feed the hungry in our little town.  One Sunday while helping unload a van-full of donated food for our Little Free Pantry, I remembered that I'd not been out to visit their community for nearly a decade.  So I got the invite, and puttered out to the temple on my scooter.

Kunzang Palyul Choling, which we just call KPC, is a rather more complicated and symbolically rich ritual space than our simple, soft sanctuary, and its bright flags and sacred iconography rest on acres and acres of land in the agricultural land around Poolesville.  In addition to a visually lush central worship space, they've got all manner of delightful gracenote accretions on their property.  Hiking and meditation trails.  Stupas and statues.  A large, productive garden.  Burbling ponds filled with slowly circling and brilliantly colored koi.  Pettable goats and pigs, all of whom are undoubtedly grateful for Buddhist vegetarianism.

In the thick of it all, there's also a parrot sanctuary.

Parrots are remarkable birds, justifiably known for their intelligence, sociability, and their capacity to mimic the human voice.  They also live for a very, very, very long time, with lifespans approaching that of human beings.  Meaning, they often outlive their owners, and family isn't there to offer a new home.  Or their jungle-born voices prove more voluble than apartment dwellers realize.  Those birds need somewhere to be, and so there they are.

As I approached their large outdoor enclosure with the monk who was kindly showing me around the temple grounds, I thought to myself: 

My gracious.  I don't think I've ever seen quite so many parrots.  

I stepped nearer to the space.  "Do they talk?"  I was assured that they did.  So after my host affirmed it'd be fine, I said hello.  How does one start parrots talking?  You start talking.

"Hi!" I said, in a squawky parrotish voice, which for some reason also came out sounding faintly Australian.

The parrots replied in a cacophanic chorus.  "Hi!"  "HI!"  "HI!"  The human words cascaded out of their beaks, along with squawks and shrieks that pierced the air.  

"Hello," I returned, and a few of them said "Hello" right back, while the remainder continued with their sharp, avian "HI!"  To my left, in the middle of the cage, a single older macaw sat hunched over itself, grumbling inaudibly, for all the world sounding like a disgruntled older man mumbling quietly to himself in eternal irritation.

They kept at it for a while, croaking out greetings and salutations and muttery grumblings, as my initial "Hi!" echoed from parrot to parrot, ricocheting from one psittacine voice to another.  

It felt paradoxically both like communication and not like communication, as their parrotish utterances reflected nothing of their true and inscrutable internal mindstate.  It was just an endless reflective imitation, as they screamed exactly what they heard around them back into their surroundings.

"This is a lot like Facebook," I thought.

Bad Apples

 

As the season for harvest arrived, the little apple tree in our front yard was finally yielding.  It's a dwarf Fuji, planted as a sapling half a decade ago, and it's really not done much up until this year.  

Last year, there were apples, but a historic drought meant they were half-sized, with flesh the flavor and consistency of balsa wood.

But this year?  After a spring in which the tree was spangled with blossoms, I carefully pruned away about half of the newly growing fruit, allowing the plant to pour its energies into what remained.  That, and a good season of rain?  They did the trick.  

It yielded several dozen nice plump apples, of the size one might expect to find at Harris Teeter or a farmer's market.  I'd expected, as the apples had matured, that they'd be devoured by the neighborhood squirrels, the same critters that take about seventy-five percent of my tomato crop each year.  But none of them were touched, and I never had to go charging out of the house to roust a brush-tailed bandit from the branches.

The why of that seemed obvious.  The apples looked terrible.  There were plenty of them, sure, but by the time they reached maturity, they were all covered in a mottled blackness.  It started slowly, but the further into the season we went, the worse they looked.

I wasn't quite sure the cause, but as I don't spray any chemicals on my plants, I thought it might possibly be some form of blight.  A mold, perhaps?  But they didn't seem to be rotting, at least not so that I could tell.  There was none of the softness of decay.  They were plump, full, and looked a bit like they'd just finished a shift in a West Virginia coal mine.

Which was another possibility that occurred to me, to be honest.  Wave after wave of smoke from Canadian wildfires have swept over the region again this year, and coupled with the ambient particulates already floating about in this urban region, these filthy fruit would have received coating after coating from months of airborne pollution.

A bit of Googling, though, brought me to the conclusion that it was not that.  Instead, it was likely sooty blotch, a fungal infection that spreads over the surface of many fruit, particularly in moist conditions.  

I was curious, though, as the apples reached their fatness.  Might they be edible?  Reddit said yes, totally. Just wash them.  

So I picked one, and brought it inside.  The skin was foul, but unbroken.  I put it under the kitchen tap, and with water running slowly over it, took a bristle brush to it.  Scrubadubdub, I went, for a couple of minutes, working my way over every square millimeter of the fruit.  

At the end of the process, that same apple looked like this:

It looked perfect.  And when I cut into it, it was tart and sweet, the flesh firm and crisp.  There was no taste of anything but apple.

It's easy to judge the worth of fruit from their surface, to look at a coating of schmutz and grime and let that first impression mislead us.  Ye shall know them by their fruit, said my Master.  Sometimes, you need to give that fruit the scrubbing of time, patience, and effort to get to the sweetness beneath.

Chuck Adams

The news came through as personal news often does, via social media.

Chuck Adams had passed, succumbing to pulmonary fibrosis after a remarkable life.  Chuck was an editor, or as my Texan Episcopal gentlewoman agent would put it, "a REAL editor."

I had the pleasure of getting to know Chuck during the process of his acquiring and editing my first novel, or...to be fair...the first novel I'd ever had agented.  She'd called him to bend his ear about a few things, among which was trying to figure out what to do with my manuscript.  Postapocalyptic Amish fiction isn't exactly the most well-trodden genre, and she wondered if he might point her in the right direction.

He volunteered to take a look at it, which was generous of him.  And then, to our great surprise, he said he liked it enough to potentially acquire it.  There were committees to go through, of course, because as a Presbyterian there always are, but the next thing I knew, WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL had a publisher.  And more importantly, "a real editor," which isn't always something utterly unknown writers have the privilege of experiencing.

When I tell folks about how the editing process went, I usually say that Chuck changed nothing but the beginning, the middle, and the end.  This gets a laugh, but it's entirely true.

Chuck's first suggestion was that my opening was too slow.  "It's a quiet, meditative novel, and that's its beauty," he told me.  "But you need to draw people in.  There needs to be a sense of tension, something to show the reader what's coming.  Give them a hook."  He didn't say what that was, but that direction meant that I shifted some sections around, and all of a sudden, the whole thing was better.  All the words were mine, but it was tighter, the plain and deliberate pace woven through with more tension.

The middle?  Well, there were things that needed to be refined and focused.  Errors of continuity and logic.  Those things.  He found them, and pointed them out, and helped steer me to fixing them.

The end? It was too short.  Barely longer than a novella, when he read the first version.  I'd loved the ambiguity of the original ending, but...well...that darling needed to be killed, so to speak.  I flailed about in a bog of anxious overwriting for a bit, but he kept gently pushing, redirecting and encouraging.  When I finally found something that worked, he told me so.

In every way, the final book was better for his guidance.  

It would have been lovely to work with him again, and while he brought a few of my manuscripts before the editorial committee, it was not to be.  There are only so many quirky sci-fi manuscripts you can sneak through a literary house, after all.

In life, there are souls who offer up their insights with grace and clarity, who challenge us to be more than we are, and who draw out the best in us.  Chuck was just such a person.

The Totoro Tax

I have beef with anyone who messes with my freedom.

And few things are more emblematic of freedom than the right to read what I want, and watch what I want.  Freedom of speech is kind of a nontrivial part of the First Amendment, and without it, our Constitutional liberties wouldn't exist.

I also love movies.  I love the depth and richness of visual storytelling, love sitting back with family and sharing in a movie night, or going out to see something in theater.

Only now, well, now that's being threatened.  A one hundred percent tariff has been decreed on all films made outside of the United States.  How's this going to work?  Who knows?   There are no plans.  More thought goes into the average bowel movement than goes into American policy statements these days, and at least bowel movements accomplish something.

If it ever became real, though?  It would be a terrible, terrible thing.

First, it attacks some really great storytelling.  The other day, I watched an astoundingly excellent sci flick.  MARS EXPRESS is a gorgeous, handcrafted tale of a robot uprising on Mars, smart and elegant and grim.  It's not the sort of preprocessed dullness that often comes out of corporate Hollywood, because it was freakin' French.  So. Very.  French.   Am I to be charged double for that?  

Or what about Studio Ghibli films, magical and charming and deeply traditional?  Are we really imposing a punitive tax on Totoro?  

And not every American story happens in America.  Are you going to penalize the making of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN if they don't film it in the swimming pool at Mar A Lago?  

That brings me to the next infringement on our freedom.

It penalizes Americans who want to hear the heritage and stories of their ancestors.  I have the right to take pride in and honor my history.  As someone with Irish blood, I loved loved loved THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN.  It's an IRISH FREAKIN' MOVIE.  Where else are they gonna make it besides Ireland?   If you want to watch a Korean film made in Korea because you're an American who came from there, or a Bollywood film because you have Indian heritage, are we all now having to pay a penalty?  

Why is this misbegotten brainfart diktat even a thing?  It seems to have come from one conversation Trump had with John Voight, who noted in passing that the film industry is really struggling in America right now.  There's a truth to that, one worth exploring.  Why are films being made elsewhere?

Because films here are too danged expensive to make.  MARS EXPRESS was brilliant, and it got made on a $9 million dollar budget.  GODZILLA MINUS ONE, a nearly-perfect recent Japanese monster flick?  That got made for under $15 million.  Movies here are often ten times more expensive.  Costs are just too danged high, because...why?  You know why.  Everything in America is more expensive than it needs to be.  Health care.  Groceries.  Cars.  Homes.  Everything.  Our bloated, inefficient, profit-maximizing corporations have created the least efficient, most parasitic economic system in human history.

That's the problem.  

Well, that and a president who hasn't got a single advisor who dares suggest that maybe he needs to occasionally think before speaking.

Staying above the Fray

Fortnite is a peculiar, peculiar game.

I've played it for years now, on and off.  I'll drop in at the beginning of a season, play for a while, then drift out.  It's become something different now, as the original Battle Royale gameplay mechanic is now just one of a seemingly infinite and fractally expanding number of variant sub-games.  If you're going to keep players playing forever, buying virtual "skins" and emotes and other in-game "products," that's the way to go, I suppose.  And Lord, are there products, a wild capitalist smorgasbord of every conceivable IP from music and entertainment and gaming culture.  It's actually a great way to know what corporations are pitching.

I've never spent a dime on Fortnite, not a single penny, because I'm cheap.  I still play the Battle Royale version, in which 100 players parachute onto an island, and then spend the next thirty minutes fighting as a lethal "storm" shrinks the battlefield around them.  The goal, of course, is to be the last one standing.

I'm not bad at the game, best I can tell.  Not even close to being a pro, but I do alright.  In a typical season, I win about one out of every ten rounds, getting that "Victory Royale" dopamine bump.  I'm almost always top ten.  I mean, sure, my opponents are all twelve years old, and some have been alive less time than I've been playing the game.  But it's still entertaining.

My rule of thumb, every season, no matter what: you don't need to get into every fight.  

If you want to win, which is kinda sorta the whole point of the game, staying out of firefights during the midgame is just as important as winning them.  Firefights draw the attention of every nearby player, as kids rush to the fray hoping to pick off a weakened player and collect their stuff.  I avoid that.

Early game, I get kitted enough that I can dish out damage, heal myself, and restore my shields.  Then I do everything I can to stay out of conflict.  Play it in stealth mode on foot, moving from cover to cover.  Flee in a car.  Fly above the fray, if there are air vehicles.  Whatever.  Just don't fight unless you have to.

This season, that means I use the "get to the choppa" strategy.  I find a chopper, which I use to soar as high above the melee below as I can.  Folks take potshots at me, which I encourage, because if they're trying to shoot me down, they're drawing attention to themselves.  I repair and refuel often, returning to the skies to watch the carnage as the other players fight it out beneath me, or finding a quiet spot to land and conserve fuel.

That usually gets me to the final five, at which point I'll either drop down and play stealthily, or...if the copter is fine...just stay out of the mess until it's just me and one other player.  Then it's down, down, down, to press aggressively on the last opponent with close quarters weapons.

Of the last five games I've played using that strategy, I've come in second once, and gotten a Victory Royale four times.  Meaning, I did better than four hundred and ninety eight players. 

Again, you don't need to engage in every single fight.

It's not a bad strategy outside of Fortnite, either.

Because there's a different fight, every day.  Our conflict-fueled culture offers us something new to rage about, or to posture over, every danged day.  

It'll destroy your soul, wear you down to a bloody nub of rage and anxiety, consume your every thought.

Better to listen, and to keep one's own counsel, and to act only when it matters.

Reverie, Rage, and Repentance

It was a beautiful afternoon, and I was on my way to pick up my mom for an evening at our house. I'd been ill for most of the week, laid low by a particularly unpleasant bacterial infection. I'd not been out much, other than to crawl whimpering out of bed, shamble whimpering into the bathroom, and shamble whimpering back to bed.

But things finally seemed to be trending towards health. The fevers, finally faded. The discomfort, largely banished. So we invited Mom to our standing Friday British Baking Show watch gathering with my father-in-law, and I was going to get her. It felt good getting into the car, opening the sunroof and rolling down the windows, and putting on some chill music. Motoring along those deeply familiar roads, I bathed in the goodness of some relaxing playlists and the pleasure of feeling the breeze under a perfectly cloud-speckled late afternoon sky. I sang along to them, as I often do.

I came to a stop at the intersection of Graham road and Route 50.  It was a Friday at five thirty, so there was traffic. It's a long long light, so I leaned back, peered up at the blue sky through the sunroof, and sighed.

I was just meditating on how lovely it all felt when the shouting began.

"JESUS CHRIST!"

From behind me and to my right, a man's voice raised and harsh.

"JEEEESUS CHRIST!"

Someone out there on a beautiful day, windows open, yelling his fourth commandment violation at the world.

Was it road rage? Just a crazy person? I couldn't tell. I couldn't see the car or the driver in my mirror, just the Lord's name taken in vain again and again in a harsh and dissonant tone.

My reverie disrupted, I was a little annoyed. Why was this man so angry? The traffic was what it was. No-one was blocking traffic, or failing to turn when they should be turning. I couldn't see any reason anyone would be yelling, but it felt somehow part of the bitter zeitgeist of the day.

Because we barely seem to need reasons to be yelling. We're so reactive, so quick to find fault, quick to anger, quick to violence. Human beings have always been like that, of course, but it feels so amplified now, as provocateurs and professional agitators are supercharged by corporate algorithms designed to keep us addicted to being always upset, all the time.

That’s stirred the bubbling cauldron of political violence and the din of our endless shouting and finger-pointing, and for the umpteenth time in human history, a people seem drifting closer to a familiar psychosis.

It feels a dark path we've set ourselves down, so hooked on a poisonous cocktail of dopamine, adrenaline, and cortisol that we'd rather blow it all up than find a better path. We seem so lost.

But there is always a better path. As far as we flee into our personalized bespoke darknesses, there is always a way out, if we’re willing to take it.  If we're willing to accept that we're lost, and that we're so often wrong, and that no amount of pride and bile will make things better.  If we're willing to understand, and to act on that understanding, there is always hope.

As I marvelled at the amount of anger in the world, the lane to my right opened up a bit, and the voice grew louder. I thought about rolling up my windows, but I did not. I wanted to hear the voice clearly, and see who it was that just couldn’t seem to stop shouting.

As a battered Nissan Altima pulled alongside, windows down, I saw it was driven a middle aged man. He wore black plastic glasses, and looked to be either Afrocaribbean or Latino or some admixture thereof. He was, given the ruckus he was producing, surprisingly calm. JEEESUS CHRIST, he croaked, but then he gargled, laa laa laaa mmm mmm laaaa laaaa, and I realized that he wasn’t yelling at all.

Because there was music coming from the car, too, an old Christian contemporary song I kinda faintly remembered. He was singing very loudly to a song whose lyrics he didn’t totally remember. 

Was he singing well? No. O Sweet Lord Jesus he was not. But what he lacked in natural talent, tone, and training he was making up for with enthusiasm and volume. Whenever he’d hit the chorus, he’d shout it at the top of his lungs.

That was all I had been hearing. It made me laugh.

 
We can always, all of us, be wrong. We do need to remember that.

The Wings of the Dragon

Left and right are the wings of the dragon

that flail as it falls from highest heaven

My Winter Garden

As the first whispers of autumn crisp the air, I'm beginning to bed down my garden for winter.

The tomato plants went first, much to the disappointment of the squirrels and chipmunks who've been the primary beneficiaries of the crop.  They were followed by the cantaloupes, which I overplanted this year.  Of the dozen-plus 'lopes that grew fat on those vines, we ate four, and gave away one.  The remainder fell prey to rot, sinking slowly into the soil like setting moons.  This being only my second year growing them, I'd neglected to raise the fruit off the ground.  That, and they simply came in too aggressively to harvest them all.  I'll have that in mind next year.

My attention then turned to my sunflower planting.  At the northeastern corner of my front yard, two-dozen-plus sunflowers rise in early summer, creating a towering thicket of greenery topped with a firework display of blossoms.  It gives pleasure to passersby and pollinators alike.  As the helianthus goes to seed, it draws small flocks of goldfinches, which twitter and flirt through the air like flecks of sunlight.  It's just so utterly lovely.  

But that loveliness doesn't last forever.  By early September, those flowers are drooping and dry, the leaves browning and withered.  It starts looking a little grim, a little "gone to seed," as one might say if one were to wrap that metaphor around itself.  

Yesterday, it was time to bring them all down.  Uprooting a flowerbed gets a little more technical when the flowers are nine feet tall, densely packed and interwoven with wild grape vines, grasses, and miscellaneous other flora.

As a suburban gardener, I'm not taking a John Deer DM50 disc mower to the thicket.  That'd make it a one second process, but as I approach it by hand, it takes a couple of hours.

Every part of those sunflowers has a use, so I take them down one by one with care.  

First, I cut away the vines and lower leaves with a hedge trimmer.  Those go into a pile that I mow into compost.  Then I top the flowers, checking each one for seeds that escaped the attention of the birds.  Heavily seeded flower heads I save, hang, and dry.  When they're ready, I'll gently massage the seeds for use either in next year's planting or to give to Mom, so she can feed the birds in winter.  The towering stalks I trim and set against the sunny front wall of the house to dry.  Once they're dried out, they make decent garden stakes, and even better kindling for the hearth.

Taking down those fading flowers is always bittersweet.  Another summer passed, another season gone.  When I step outside the next morning, there's a sense of emptiness in the yard, a notable absence of green and gold.  Like all things mortal, we note a summer garden's passing with an awareness of our own finitude.

But the stalks will burn hot in the hearth on cold nights, the composted leaves will feed the garden when the days grow long again, and the seeds have been gathered in.

When you tend to the needs of the season, and set your intention to seasons yet to come, there's no need for sorrow when the flowers fade.

  

The Strange Theology of K Pop Demon Hunters

You can ruin pretty much anything by overthinking it, and K Pop Demon Hunters is no exception.

In the event you're old and cranky and utterly outside of the zeitgeist, K Pop Demon Hunters is an animated movie produced by a partnership between Sony and Netflix.  It tells the definitively fluffy tale of a three-member K Pop (that's Korean Pop, boomer) girl band called Huntr/x who...in addition to packing stadiums full of adoring fans..are also engaged in a battle to prevent the earth from being overrun by demons.  They do this through the magic of their infectious bops and by killing demons with their prodigious martial arts skills.  Hunter/X has a chance to create a magical shield around the world with their song, one which will wall off the demonic world forever.

The demon world finds this threatening, and the dictator of the demons is convinced by a hunky demon musician that the only way to battle Huntr/x is to form the Saja Boys, a demonic boy band.   Music and actual battles ensue.

It's wonderfully animated by the same team that created the brilliant animated Spiderman movie.  It's an artfully spun cotton-candy confection, one which reflects the pop-ethos of both Korean and Korean-American culture, and it's been a wild success.  Meaning, the songs sung by the two in-movie fictional bands have topped the pop charts, the soundtrack is a number one album, that sort of thing.

Am I the target demographic?  O Lord no.  Those sugary tunes and synchronized dance moves just slide right off my middle-aged neurocalcified brain.

And as a Presbyterian, I'm always both overthinking and looking for a theological angle.  As it happens, theology of a sort is front and center in the movie.

Here, there will be spoilers.  Just saying.  Go forth forewarned.

The movie's obligatory romantic entanglement is between Jinu (the leader of the Saja Boys) and Rumi (one of the three members of Huntr/X, who also happens to be half-demon by birth and is hiding the tell-tale marks of that identity).  Most of the Message in the film is about how shame turns you into a demon, forcing you to hide yourself behind a web of lies and self-loathing.  For example: Like every other demon, the hunky pretty-boy demon Jinu was been enslaved by the demon king Gwi-Ma, trapped by his shame at having betrayed his family in exchange for success.

Why Rumi is ashamed isn't quite clear.  She's ashamed of being half-demon, but if becoming a demon requires you to be ashamed, how that works seems a bit recursive.  Perhaps she's ashamed of her demon father?  Or ashamed of her demonic heritage?  Or ashamed of lying about being half-demon?  I couldn't quite parse that out.

As the movie progresses, the one great goal is creating the ultimate Honmoon barrier between the worlds, trapping the demons forever in the infernal realm ruled by Gwi Ma.   Rumi and Jinu fall in love, of course, and at the end of the film, Jinu overcomes his demonic shame.  He chooses his love for Rumi, and sacrifices his soul so that Rumi and the other members of Huntr/X can defeat Gwi-Ma and...activating the new improved Honmoon shield...forever trap all of the demons in their bitter realm of shame and lies.

As I watched, this was where my overthinking kicked into overdrive.

Here's why.  We know that, if loved, Jinu can change and be released from the power of shame.  We know that Rumi, a half-demon, can be freed from the power of shame.  

But what does that mean?  It means that every other demon...all of whom are souls who have been enslaved by Gwi-Ma...can also change.  It's clear they're all living in fear of the demon king, and when they're not being slaughtered by Huntr/X, most of them are portrayed sympathetically.  They're not really threatening, and are utterly powerless against the OP triple threat of our heroines.  Heck, two of the demons...a three-eyed magpie demon and a Totoro-eque tiger demon who Jinu uses as messengers...are cuddly comic relief.

So what does that say about Rumi's goal, and the conclusion of the movie?   

Again, the great victory of the film was to be this: trapping every single soul that has been enslaved by demonic shame eternally in that oppressive realm.  When this happens, backed/evoked by a triumphant Girlboss pop song, we're supposed to cheer.  All the while, we also know that within the logics of the narrative, every one of those demons has both human backstory and a self-loathing that they could still potentially overcome.   

Yay inflicting eternal torment on the damned?  You..um..go girls?  

As a recovering Calvinist, this seemed...oddly hopeless.  

Particularly for a sugar straw candy concoction like K Pop Demon Hunters.  Being doomed forever because of shame seemed a bit on the grim side, and flew in the face of the whole "coming to terms with the truth of yourself" and "acceptance" schtick.

And here's where my plans for this post went a little awry.

As I dug into it a bit more, I found  a little detail in the freshly minted "lore" for the movie.  Because no IP out there now doesn't have lore, as internet fandom interfaces with world building to create fractally endless ruminations on the "universe" that any popular narrative inhabits.

The shield formed at the end of the film wasn't, evidently, the long planned Golden shield.  It is, or so the eagle-eyed interwebs informed me, very possibly a Rainbow shield, which may be permeable, which may mean the hunky demon Jinu could still be alive, which may point to a sequel, Q.E.D., O.M.G.  

Was that evident at any point in the watching of the film?  Nope. 

Is it evident to a casual viewer?  Not really.  

But pop fandom has an explanation for everything, and can make angels dance on the edge of even the slightest detail.  Films are watched, and rewatched, and watched again, with deep meaning hinging on the tiniest fragment of narrative minutia.

Which is, itself, remarkably theological.

It's nice to know that overthinking isn't just a Presbyterian trait, after all.

Freedom of Commerce

 

A few years back, I found myself in a gifting conundrum.  It was my parent's anniversary, and I wanted to get them a gift.  Mom and Dad had been together for over fifty years, and had become perhaps the world's greatest Ballykissangel Superfans.

Bally K, as they both called it, was a British show from the late 1990s featuring the goings-on in a small Irish town.  Romance, minor intrigues, and that sort of thing.  Not much action, just an amiable band of characters living out their lives in an entertaining way.

Mom and Dad watched it every single day, religiously, and even though they'd seen the entire series through a dozen times or more, they wouldn't miss it for the world.

As I considered what to get them, I thought to myself: where...twenty years after it aired on the other side of the Atlantic...might I be able to find some BallyK merch?  

Nowhere within the borders of this nation was there anything, which wasn't a surprise.  It'd be like finding a Phantom Flan Flinger costume, or a Blue Peter T shirt.  Decades old esoterica from the Isles is just not going to be about in the U.S.

But across the pond, there were several sellers offering what seemed the perfect Bally K tchotcke.  It was a decorative teapot, shaped like the pub that's a central meeting place in the show.  It's one of the miracles of the modern age that one can find a used specialty teapot in a knick-knack shop in rural England, and without too much muss or fuss, you can have it shipped across the planet.  That's precisely what I did, and within two weeks, it had arrived at my doorstep.

Having lived in England as a boy, that worked both ways.  My grandparents could ship presents to me from Georgia or New York, and they'd be there on Christmas Day.

Only, well, that's how it used to work.  Back when things worked, and before Dear Leader and his Death Eaters mucked it all up.

Small items...like teapots, or specialty parts for old cars, or books?  These things used to be sent freely, by the mutual agreement of all of the civilized nations of the world.   If it's worth less than $800, we didn't worry about it.  

But the new tariffs included everything sent by everyone, no bottom limit, no exceptions.  And also, no process for actually doing what was proposed.  You know, like when you get that new idiot manager, the one who has no idea what they're doing, and they start making literally impossible demands that show they don't understand the business at all.  You'd have to put in an insanely excessive bureaucracy, and waste all of our time and money.

So now, a thing that has worked for 100 years no longer works.  Other nations, faced with this arbitrary, ill-conceived new demand, are choosing just not to work with us at all.  They're stopping all citizen-to-citizen or small-business-to-citizen mailing across borders.  You can't get that part for your vintage Triumph.  You can't peruse the wares at a little shoppe in Dublin and order it from the family that runs it.  You can't send a gift to a family member.  You are disconnected from the souls who still live in the lands of your ancestors.

That's temporary, hopefully.  Other people will clean up the mess.  Systems will figure their way around it, hopefully sooner rather than later.

How does that make us great?  How does that make us more free?

Incompetence never does.

Deep Gleaning

Every other morning lately, I'm out in the front yard, harvesting okra.  

I've grown far more of it than I need, with just about twenty plants chugging away.  Ten of those are packed over-dense into a four by eight bed, so their production has been less per plant.  This is only my second season growing, so I'm still figuring the whole thing out.  The tallest of them now stand well over five feet, and lately I get about a quart a day from the lot of 'em.  

I don't need anywhere near that much, and there's only so much bhindi masala, gumbo, and batter-fried okra folks in my household want to eat.  I've already selected the healthiest plants to let run to seed stock for next year, so the question becomes: what to do with the rest?

Giving those pods to neighbors?  That's a bit of a stretch in the suburban Mid-Atlantic, where okra mostly has a reputation for slime.  This is, of course, utterly unfair.  Okra's delicious when prepared properly, nutty and nutritious, with a satisfyingly toothsome texture.  But still, folks seem confused and unfairly repulsed by it.

In most of the rest of the world, that's not the case.  In the traditionally warmer regions of the planet, where most of humankind dwells, it's a staple crop.  Easy to grow and productive, it's highly desired, even in its spinier forms.

Out in front of my little church, there's that Little Free Pantry, one that we started to supplement the traditional food bank in town.  Folks get hungry in the off-hours, after all.  It's taken off in ways we didn't anticipate.  In the last six months, with the support of the church and our friends in the community, twenty seven thousand pounds of food have been funneled through a cheery little bird-feederesque box.  We've set out coolers, too, and...notably...built a Little Free Produce Stand.

Because Poolesville Presbyterian sits in the heart of an agricultural reserve, there are plenty of folks who garden, and from their efforts produce an overabundance.  There are, similarly, many who have more resources than they actually need for their well-being.  When gardens produce more than we need, it shouldn't ever go to waste.

When there's an overabundance, the great sacred narrative of the Bible is real clear about how we are to use it.  More than you need?  Torah sez: don't squeeze every last drop out of the land.  We are called instead to be sure to set a portion of our efforts aside for those who have need.  From Leviticus 19, we hear:

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner. I am the Lord your God.  

From Deuteronomy 24, we hear:  

When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow.

And as the Law was woven by storytellers into narrative form, that becomes part of the defining mythopoetics of a culture.  The Book of Ruth recounts how Ruth the Moabite and her mother Naomi...a foreigner and a widow, respectively...gleaned from the fields of the honorable Boaz.  And Ruth and Boaz getting to know one another better was, as the story goes, how the lineage of King David.  Without the ethic of leaving something for those who have need, there is no Israel.  There is no messianic understanding.  It's kinda sorta important.

And in our grasping, Mammonist age, we've forgotten this.  We're encouraged to anxiously optimize, until everything we have is turned inwards, our energies like those of a collapsing star, hoarding light as it folds upon itself.

If my efforts serve me alone, if I maximize my profit at every turn and seek my own advantage without exception, then I have become an affront to the justice of God's covenant.  That's a sustained and basic moral imperative, if you understand the Bible as an authoritative text in your life.

That said, there's not a whit to stop you from doing more.  Gleaning can go deeper.  If you expand your plantings, you can do so with the explicit intent of feeding those who hunger.

And so I knew, when I planted all that okra, that I'd have my fill, and that come harvest time, I'd be bringing bag after bag of tasty nutritious pods to the produce stand.

They're gone within the half-hour, picked up by women driving cleaning service vehicles, or men driving pickups filled with lawn equipment.

And every morning, when I snip those pods, I recall that if I expect any blessing upon the work of my hands, I need to be that blessing.

A Covenant of Meat

It was time, once again, to get our van inspected, and so I found myself sitting on a metal chair by an inspection station in the middle of the day.  It being the heart of suburban Annandale, all around me was strip-mall paradise, asphalt roads and asphalt parking lots radiating the heat of the mid-August Midatlantic sun.

In the sliver of shade afforded by the gas station's eastern wall, I observed my surroundings.  They weren't exactly verdant.  

Broken concrete and potholes abounded, wrappers and plastic debris scattered about, the endless flow of cars up the four lane of the Pike, all of it an anti-Walden of metal and rush and ambient polluting particulates.  Above it all, a dirty blue sky and a fiercely pressing light.  It's a harsh and ugly world we have made for ourselves, an alien incursion into the lushness of life.

Yet life adapts.  In almost every crack in that hard harsh habitat, pressing through blacktop and concrete alike were stubborn grasses.  Their roots set down in soil that was little more than crumbled rock, their shoots and growth defying and breaking apart our constructs.  

Near my feet, there lay the remnants of an almost finished hotdog.  Fragments of bun and a nubbin of sausage baked grey-black by the sun, it was hardly the most appetizing thing.  But there came a fluttering of brown and tan wings, and the sparrows landed, first one and then another.  They were dirty birds, ragamuffin birds, the sort of crass ubiquitous generalists that aren't worth a birder's notice.

They watched me warily, but still set quickly about the business of living from our waste.  They aren't the only creatures that do so.  There's a roaming murder of crows in the neighborhood that makes its way dumpster diving.  There are countless rats that do the same, sharp-eyed rodents which hide away from our eyes, knowing we're eager to poison and kill them.  When the neighborhoods around the strip malls were heavy with cicadas, the rats came pouring in to feast.  There are tiny critters...roaches, ants, and flies...that are similarly flexible.

These are the sturdy creatures that seem well adapted to the current Anthropocene mass extinction event.  Just as weeds and the small generalists endured asteroid impacts and planet-wide belches of volcanism, they'll do whatever they need to stay alive and reproducing while human hubris burns across our little world.

Observing the fiercely focused energies of these creatures, I recalled something spoken in an ancient sacred tale.  Up on the mountaintop, the Lord spoke to Noah and his family, standing wobbly on their land-legs after their vomitous forty-day journey through the tumult.  There, God unilaterally made two peculiar promises.

First, that flesh could now devour flesh.  Unlike the mythic perfection of a peaceful Eden, suddenly we were in a covenant of meat.  All creatures would fear us, because all of them were now ours to devour.

Meat was back on the menu, boys.

But that meant that we, too, would be devoured by the creatures that we consumed.  Further, bloodshed was the now the fate of all who shed the blood of others.  As divine blessings go, it's mixed, sharply double-edged, the sort of blessing one might receive when wished upon the withered paw of a monkey.

The Noahic Covenant, in Torah, is a peculiar one for another reason.  Unlike other covenantal commitments in the Bible, it's not between humankind and the Creator.  It's between all living things and the Creator.

Not just humankind, but with everything that lives.  

"I will never again destroy all of you," said the I Am That I Am, and he's talking to every living thing.

Let it be noted: God doesn't say "any."   Just "all."  "I'm not going to destroy all of y'all" means an unsettlingly different thing than "I'm not going to destroy any of you."

It would be fair at this point to note that in Hebrew, the meaning of the word kol (כָּ ל).  Kol is what we translate into English as "all" in Genesis 9.  Kol can mean both "all" and "any," and Hebrew requires us to grasp the distinction from the context of the statement.  But the context is clear as crystal here, particularly as expressed in Genesis 9:9-10.  All means all.

And that means that for some flesh, destruction may be still be God's intent.

Which for "some" flesh...that which won't adapt, that which won't listen, that which won't acknowledge the real or the good, that which willfully ignores God's fierce insistence on grace and justice...is a rather notable caveat.

One must take care around any one-sided covenant written in meat.

A Nation without Shame

Don't ever let anyone shame you for who you are.

It's one of the axioms of our culture, so basic now that we take it divinely received wisdom.  Shame is just what people do when they're trying to control you, or put you down.  Love yourself!  Love everything about yourself!  Love your light and your shadow equally!  You're perfect!

This seems lovely, and affirming, and inclusive.  All of those things.

In some circumstances, these things can be true.

In Nadia Bolz-Weber's engaging 2019 book SHAMELESS, for instance, the case is made for stepping away from shame.  As she puts it:

“Christians should help one another to silence the voice that accuses. To celebrate a repentance—a snapping out of it, a thinking of new thoughts—which leads to possibilities we never considered. To love one another as God loves us. To love ourselves as God loves us. To remind each other of the true voice of God. And there’s only one way to do this: by being unapologetically and humbly ourselves. By not pretending. By being genuine. Real. Our actual, non-ideal selves.”

Shaming and mocking others is a significant human addiction, to be sure.  It's the entire business model of most influencers on X, and it's all too frequently used to bully, manipulate, and control.  What could possibly be wrong with being honestly, wholly yourself, and loving yourself unconditionally?  In the book, Bolz-Weber talks about needing to integrate every aspect of yourself, embracing the whole of who you are, and argues that shame is an impediment to that process. 

“In my pastoral work I've started to suspect that the more someone was exposed to religious messages about controlling their desires, avoiding sexual thoughts, and not lusting in their hearts, the less likely they are to be integrated physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually.”

And right there is where I am obligated to disagree.  If shame...anxiety over potential loss of status, wealth, or influence...prevents you from getting help in dealing with your mess, sure.  If you can't get started down the path to recovery and restoration because you fear people will think less of you, yeah, it's a problem.  

But that's a very very different thing from being shameless.  Because there are new things that are selfish, unexplored possibilities that are cruel and brutal, and you can be genuine by being genuinely evil.

Being shameless, I would contend, is the darkest form of toxic empathy.  Here, I'm not using that loaded term in the same way as the false "Christians" who have lately taken issue with caring for the poor and the stranger and the outcast.  Radical, unwavering, and complete love of neighbor is a Gospel imperative, and those clucking about feeding the hungry and showing hospitality to the foreigner are simply trying to justify their own ego-driven cruelty.  

At the same time, the most dangerous form of empathy is our own seemingly endless willingness to tolerate our own BS.  Compassion becomes poison when we constrain it with our selfishness.  It is toxic when we only feel our own pain, and only sympathize with those who are exactly like us.  Unwavering and shameless love of self is nothing more and nothing less than narcissism, and it wrecks lives.  It is purely amoral.

Morality...meaning our defining purpose, the governing ethogenetics by which we understand the good...is what integrates our personhood.   Just as pain and discomfort alert us to that which damages our physical being, shame alerts us to the damage we're doing to our souls when we act in ways that subvert our purpose.

Shame is our moral pain.  As such, it's not something we are to do to others.  It's a necessary aspect of our own ethical existence.

If and when I violate the moral teachings of Jesus...meaning the things he ACTUALLY TOLD US TO DO...shame is a healthy response.  If I harm another, if I lie or cheat or steal?  I feel shame.   When I find myself lustfully objectifying others, or am distracted by the trivial baubles offered up by consumerism?  I feel shame.  When my righteous anger devolves into blind and consuming hatred?  I feel shame.  

Those impulses are a part of me, sure.  I'm human.  Failure to acknowledge that would be fundamentally dishonest.

But those desires, uncontrolled, become my rotting edges, the parts of me that sabotage my growth in grace and justice.  They impede my life-purpose.  Like an untreated and gangrenous necrosis in a living system, they will spread in a soul until the soul dies.  They are fundamentally and essentially dis-integrative, and as such, they must...for a moral person...be debrided away.

Being truly shameless is the mark of the soulless sociopath, the bullying brute, the serial predator, the unteachable fool and the breaker-of-things.

This is true of persons.  It is also just as true of nations.

If a nation's only purpose is itself, it is just as amoral as the most venal narcissist.  Some, like 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, suggest that nations are inherently immoral.  As he argued in his seminal MORAL MAN AND MORAL SOCIETY, political collectives are interested only in their own constituent members, and are unable to make decisions that might go against their own power and wealth.

This is, apparently, America's national ethic now.  Brazen, self-glorifying, and utterly unwilling to acknowledge any error, we are becoming a nation without shame, blustering and shouting at the nations around us like a drunken reality show contestant.  

Our moral purpose is our own power and our own wealth, period, end of story.  We are told that to suggest otherwise is to be ashamed of America, and that we should instead glory in our greatness and our power.

If your moral purpose goes deeper than pride in national power, though, this feels like nothing more than collective narcissism.  For those of us who actually pay attention to the sacred stories of the Bible, and who understand that God relentlessly calls both persons and nations to account, this is just the teensiest bit troubling.

Because if you've spent even a few moments reading the Torah and the Prophets, or cracked open the Gospels and Epistles, you know that God has never had much patience with wanton and shameless nations.

Lord have mercy on our souls.

The Sweet Sticky Harvest

In my morning walkabout through my garden the other day, all was pretty much normal.  I knocked back some of the wild grape that's tangled throughout my sunflower patch, snipping away the choking growth.  I checked in on my butternut squash, which is starting to cure on the vine, the soft wan green tanning to faint yellow.  I watched bumblebees noodle about through the wildly abundant, sweetly pungent basil, which...as we're getting into August...I'm now allowing to bolt to flower.  No flower means no seed, and as I'm two years into basil that I've started myself, I'd kinda like to keep that pesto-fountain going. 

Finally, I went around harvesting okra pods with my best sharp steel scissors.  I've got two four by eight beds dedicated to that traditional Southern crop this year, and the pods are poppin'.  They sever with a satisfying snap, as real force is required to get through the thick stem.  The yield has picked up as the season has progressed. There's a nice fat gallon bag filled in the freezer, with far more yet to come.  Batter fried okra and bhindi masala awaits.

But as I moved to the second of the two beds, I noticed a shadowing on the leaves and flowers a single one of the plants.  Uh oh.  Okra is pretty resilient, but the truth of gardens is that everything in the world wants to eat them.  As I approached, my fading middle aged eyes only saw a dark stippled fuzz.  Fungal growth?  Perhaps.  I couldn't tell without my reading glasses, so I used my other senses. I reached out and touched the greyness with an index finger.  It was sticky.  I held my finger to my nose, and sniffed.  Sweet.

Not fungus.  Aphids.  Drat.  

I went and grabbed my glasses from inside, then peered at the leaves to confirm.  Yup.  Black Aphids, a great bumper crop of them.  They were sucking the life from the flowers, and were a grey living hoarfrost suckling on the shaded underside of the leaves.  

I'd had another species of aphid devastate several kale crops a few years back, but hadn't had these particular little devils about yet.   As I mused on how I might destroy them, I noted that the aphids weren't alone.

All across the thickly blighted leaves were hundreds of small black ants.  They streamed up and down the stalks.  They moved delicately across the dense masses of feeding aphids.  Ahah, I thought.  Farmers.  

Ants are remarkable for many things, and one of the peculiar outputs of their distributed social intelligence is insect agriculture.  Aphids poop out honeydew, a sweet sugar-rich byproduct of their digestion, and so ants will gather and tend herds of aphids.  Think teeny weeny dairy herders, and you're not far off.  They'll eat some of the aphids, too, and while I can't confirm they use aphid leather as clothing, I wouldn't put it past the industrious little beggars.   I'd never seen it in action before, not that I can remember.    

It's cool if you're an entomologist, but rather less so when you're a gardener.  

The more I looked, the more I discovered the aphids, dense on the flower clusters, or squirreled away by the veins of a leaf.  Everywhere, they were tended by ants. My early fall okra harvest was under threat.  I mixed up a spray bottle or two with a mixture of soap and water, which weakens the aphids.  I doused every one of their colonies, and let that set for a while.

Then out came the garden hose, set on "Riot Suppression."  I revisited their leafy pastures, and blasted the aphids bodily from the plants.  It was rather satisfying.  

Ants are great pollinators, and generally garden-friendly, but once they've brought their livestock to feed, they've crossed a line.  They're not working with me, but against me.  The plants so carefully placed will wither and perish under that excess burden.  In pursuit of their sweet honeydew harvest, ant and aphid alike are taking more than the garden can give, and no gardener is obligated to tolerate that.

As I rewound the hose, I found myself musing on the ramifications of that idea.  I glanced for a moment skyward.  Nestled in the sprawl of the 'burbs, where all is steel and concrete and sticky sweet hyperabundance, I looked at the August sky, the blue tinged by the haze of far-off wildfires.  I considered how much more we take than can be given.  How much more we have than is mindful.

For a moment...in my mind's eye, and all...I visualized a great nozzle in the heavens, clicking the nozzle to "jet."

It wouldn't be the first time.

Prayer, God's Will, and the Multiverse

We are tired of multiverses, because multiverses are exhausting.  Every variant of every narrative?  It's inhuman, unmanageable, utterly overwhelming.  We are creatures of linear space-time with a limited amount of organic storage in our sloppy noggins.  At a certain point, we have to stop considering every single freakin' possibility and just go with something, or we go nuts.

Disney and Marvel haven't quite figured this out yet, but having wrassled theologically with the concept of the multiverse for years, I'm quite aware of how inhuman it can be.  It can shatter the self, and unless approached with caution, be inherently dis-integrative.  

My faith is paradoxically both multiversal and orthodox, idiosyncratically heretical in ways that at many points in the history of the Christian faith would have resulted in my being turned into a human S'more, charred and crisp with a screamy filling.  

My sense of the reality of God...meaning my intellectual assent to God's transforming presence in my life...arose from my engagement with the idea of the Many Worlds.  There, finally, I found an understanding of existence in which God was both necessary and inescapable, where the Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans, Being Itself, and the Numinous had the elbow room they needed.  It's the beating heart of my practical theology.

Years ago, I expressed that journey in a book.  Who wants to read a book on faith and speculative physics written by a small church pastor?  Very few people, as it turns out.  

But...why does that matter?  It does not.

That theology still shapes and stretches me.

One struggle that I encounter in my faith comes at the foundation of my prayer life, as I speak the prayer taught by my Master.  "Thy will be done," I say, every morning as I rise, and I'll often pause to reflect on how beyond my grasp even that simple statement is.

God's will, from my theology, is everything.  Every. Possible. Thing.  The Divine Self-Expression, the Logos?  It's everything, as omniscience must be.  Everything that can be known is known to God.  God's thought is perfection, and perfection means completeness, eh?  Every joy, every sorrow, every delight, every horror, all of it is part of the Divine Will.

"Thy will be done," I pray, knowing that with all possible futures open, this could include terrible things.  

There's a possibility, every day, of my own failure and inadequacy.  Of my own death.  Of the suffering of those that I love.  It's the fundamental challenge that rises from our mortal freedom.  God knows what our most abject desolation looks like, and to God, that knowledge is as real as this very moment.

It's a grim, hard teaching.  But that, if I am honest to my spiritual intuition, is part of God's will.

If it weren't for Jesus, that knowledge could leave me anxious and fearful, or estranged and angry.  But the life and teachings of Jesus define God for me, and they press back hard against my doubt and my ignorance.  There are things God knows that we would best not know, as we were warned in Eden.  God is entirely aware of how far we can fall, and will allow us to fall farther than we can imagine.

But the Gospel shows God's simultaneous desire that we not partake of that knowledge.  

Our flawed wanting, our greed and lust, our resentments and hatred?  Our compulsive injustices, and our pathological gracelessness?  We are shown they might be overcome.  We can understand our smallness, and embrace Christ's mercy, and find in Jesus the nature of the Good.

I see in Jesus the fullness of what it means when God's love is made real.  When I pray for God's will in my life, that's how I understand it.  What is the most Christlike outcome?  Sometimes, that's healing or teaching.  Sometimes, it's forgiveness.  Sometimes, the cross.

All are God's will, and as I pray, I hold to that truth with fear and trembling.

Itch and Thistle

It was in the early spring of last year, reaching down to pluck a green bean, that I first got stabbed.  

It was an unexpectedly sharp pain in the pad of my thumb, not overwhelming, but decidedly unpleasant, like experiencing the ministrations of a nervous trainee phlebotomist.

I recoiled.  Had I been stung?  There was no swelling, no redness.  I popped out my reading glasses and peered at my thumb.  There was no evidence of a thorn, or a stinger.  The jab hadn't even drawn blood.

I carefully investigated.  Down in the dense foliage of the bed, amidst the fat and growing beans, I found the culprit.  A thistle, girded round about with needle-sharp thorns.  Next to it another, and another.  Further recon revealed that they were suddenly everywhere, and that they'd spread to most of my raised beds.

I'd not seen them in my garden before, but it didn't take long to realize where they'd come from.  We'd had a birdfeeder in our front yard, one we stocked and restocked with seed.  Among those seeds: thistle.  It had gone forth and multiplied.

Thistle is, viewed through a certain lens, a very desirable plant.  It feeds pollinators, which is a good thing.  With a whole bunch of effort and some heavy gloves, it can be eaten, particularly the roots.  Most importantly, it is Indigenous, or at least Field Thistle is, and as we all know, Indigeneity is axiomatically magical and virtuous.

But believing all those things won't keep it from stabbing you.  It has evolved to stab you, and any naive romantic notions of traipsing barefoot through grass where thistle is starting to establish itself will end in pain.  

Poison Ivy is a vigorous Indigene too, as a recent trip to Urgent Care with my swollen-faced 86 year old mother reminded me.  Toxicodendron Radicans also grows vigorously, feeds pollinators and birds, and slathers itself in urushiol, an oily compound that causes rashes, blistering, and anaphylaxis.  Were it a human, it would be the sort of human who violated international treaties on chemical warfare.

The thistle is back this year, and I don't hesitate when I encounter it. Wherever I see thistle or poison ivy, I destroy them.  I root up the thistle with heavy gloves and pointy metal implements.  I poison the poison ivy.  I give no quarter, and I hunt them down proactively. 

There are always souls who'd find reasons these plants and other creatures of similar stabby toxicity should be tolerated.  They're just being what they are, one might say.  They're part of Nature in all Her Beauty!  Live and let live!  Let everything grow!  Let a thousand poisonous, needle-sharp flowers bloom!  

This seems peculiarly abstracted from the reality of life.

I am not such a soul, nor do I feel that's my purpose in this beautiful, dangerous world.  I am as alive as they are alive, and our striving against one another is simply part of the order of God's creation.  

I appreciate my opponents, their vitality, their energy, the honed foil of their thorns.  But that doesn't stop me from rooting both itch and thistle from the garden of my tending.