What Is It?

How do we know if a new thing is a good thing? When we encounter something we’ve not seen before, what is the point where we can say to ourselves, this new addition to my life is a blessing?

I ask that question whenever I encounter something I don’t quite recognize in my garden. I know what I’ve planted, and where I’ve planted it, so when seed turns to seedling, or seedling matures, I’m ready for that growth. I also recognize the plants I explicitly don’t want, the fast growing invasive bermuda grasses and the stabby-stabby thistles and snaking vines that will smother or strangle my beans and ‘maters and herbs.

But when I go in a-weeding, I’m aware that every plant that rises unexpected from the soil of my raised beds isn’t an undesirable one. From prior years, squirrels and chipmunks have planted many a tomato seed, and my composted kitchen leavings are equally fecund. This year, three of my seven tomato plants were volunteers, all teeny tiny pop-in-your-mouth multicolored cherry tomatoes that were sweet as could be. I know and welcome those tomatoes, in the same way that I welcomed the volunteer cantaloupe that came up two seasons ago, and provided the seed stock for the ‘lopes I grew last year and this year.

Just because I don’t know what something is yet doesn’t mean I’ll just destroy it or reject it out of hand.

A month and a half ago, I was doing a deep weeding in one of my green bean plots. They’ve struggled a bit in the dryness early this season, yielding mostly seedstock for next year, along with a reminder that I need to be more aggressive in watering them if I want them to be less seedy. In among the beans were two plants I didn’t recognize. Deep green, with single lobed ovoid leaves, with a darker pigmentation at the branches. They weren’t weeds I knew, nor did I recognize their leafing as any of my more familiar volunteers. I could, I suppose, have just taken a picture of them and let the machine-mind tell me what they were, but where’s the fun in that?

I just let them be, because why not?

In their Exodus journey, the Hebrew people encountered all manner of new things, which one would think would have been a good thing, given their flight from enslavement. But faced with unexpected challenges and wilderness wanderings, people often look back to the imagined past and pine for it.

Through the sepia haze of hangry remembering, they thought back to their time in Egypt, which became in their imaginations a paradise of bread and meat. “If only we had died,” they complained. “Everything then was so great, and the portion sizes were huge.”

The word we hear as “complain” is a peculiar one in Hebrew.


Way-yil-lō-w-nū (וַיִּלֹּ֧נוּ) means “and they grumbled,” or to use the Yiddish equivalent, to kvetch. Like most Yiddish (which is a blend of Hebrew and Old German) kvetch is just such an emotionally onomatopoeic way to understand endlessly picking at something. It comes from an old German word meaning to press, or to squeeze. In the Hebrew, though? The root word of Way-yil-loh-nu is three letters: Lamed, Vav, and Nun (loon), which two thirds of the time means to stay, to remain, to lodge, or to reside. One third of the time, depending on the context and the word construction, that same root word can mean to complain and to grumble.

The relationship between those two concepts in the language is a little hazy. Why does staying in a place also mean to complain? It’s not clear. Maybe it has to do with ruminating or refusing to let something go. Think, for example, of the difference between “dwelling in a place” and “dwelling on something.” As someone who dislikes change, I know being obstinate doesn’t lend itself to cheeriness. But that that’s just speculation.

But in response to their kvetching, God promises that they’ll be fed, with bread coming from heaven. Moses conveys that message, and tells them to be prepared to receive meat in the evening and carbs for breakfast. So that evening, their encampment is filled with quail, which provides for the meat. Then, at morning dewfall, the ground is covered with a peculiar frost-like substance, one that remains on the earth after the dew evaporates.

We hear that the people looked at this strange substance and looked at each other in bafflement. In the Hebrew, the text tells us they pointed at the strange stuff on the ground and said two words: Man'hu (מן הוא), which means, in English “What is it?” So from that, we get the word manna. Manna means...literally..."What is it?"

“What it is is the bread from heaven,” says Moses in reply. “The stuff you were promised.”

We tend to think of manna as a gift and as a blessing, which it most certainly is. “Like manna from heaven,” or so the saying goes. But how do we encounter that which is strange or unknown to us? Are we always and invariably cynical, rejecting every new taste and every new grace with the same fervor as a five year old presented with something for dinner that is not three chicken nuggets neatly separated from precisely one dozen steamed peas?

Do we let our anxiety and our fear weed out the first growth of a new and gracious path in our lives?

If we know, with certainty, that a new path is pure poison, rejecting it is fine. We know the taste of greed and lust, domination and envy, lies and brutality and resentment. Sin is an old and familiar poison, and if we are not fools, we’ve learned to avoid it.

But if it’s something we’ve hoped for, it will always be a little unfamiliar, because we hope for things unseen. “What is this,” we ask ourselves, as we encounter it.

Like, say, those two odd little plants coming up in my green bean bed. I let them go, watched them go to flower, and then completely forgot about them for a while. When I was plucking some of my tomatoes for another batch of pico de gallo a few weeks ago, I glanced down, blinked, and saw what those plants were.

“What is it?”

What it was was jalapeno peppers, which I’d intended to plant at the beginning of the season and hadn’t gotten around to. Some of the seed from last year’s store-bought’n peppers must have made its way into the compost, and all of a sudden and in an unexpected way I had precisely the splash of caliente I needed for that evening.

When something promising appears unexpectedly before you, give it a little time.

Unplanned Obsolescence

We live in a time of peculiar and shaking newness, when the world around us sometimes seems to be changing faster than we have the bandwidth to process. We know, we all do, that so much of our economy is predicated on planned obsolescence, the idea that a given product is only going to be useful for a short amount of time. If you build a widget that does its widget-job perfectly, and that is so well built that it’ll be doing that job perfectly fifty years from now, you’re going to go out of business. So what we get are glass phones and cheap plastic, things that break or must be replaced.

"I'm sorry," says the tech company that sold you your router.  "We're no longer supporting your five year old and still perfectly functional Machine X with software updates.  That will, of course, possibly expose you to criminals who will get access to all of your passwords and drain all of your accounts.  Here's a coupon for 10% off our brand new Machine Y, as a courtesy to you for being such a loyal customer."

But things are getting weird.  

As AI models get more and more competent, and the big AI companies increasingly monetize their services, we're encountering a strange phenomenon.  AI does certain things, like coding and the testing of code, far faster than human beings.  Orders of magnitude faster, in fact.  Large Language Models and GPTs are now being used to improve themselves, a process we're calling Recursive Self Improvement.  The AI helps build a better AI to replace it, which then builds a better AI to replace it, and so on and so forth.  The RSI process is, obviously and recognizably, the camel's nose of what tech futurists once called "singularity."   

Singularity is similar to the way a supermassive star collapses into a black hole, becoming a point of unmeasurable density, in which our physics breaks down.  It's a state of matter that we can no longer meaningfully interact with.  There'll come a point where artificial intelligence isn't just faster and smarter, but is so much faster and smarter that we can no longer understand how it works.  We're not wholly there yet, but our feet are crossing the threshold.

In this odd time, one sign is that acceleration is overwhelming our cultural yearning for the new and the shiny.  Planned obsolescence is falling apart.  If a product cycle is annual, with minor upgrades, users can keep pace with it.

But if a product cycle is monthly?  Then businesses can't adapt.  You've only just heard of a thing, and are working to understand how to use it effectively for your work or your life, and then...boom...here's another version that's better, and with a superior interface.  And then another three weeks later.  And then another five days after that.

Why engage or commit to an approach, if one week later your competitors might take advantage of something better?  Why restructure your entire workforce to utilize a new functionality, only to have that functionality change three times before you've even had the second meeting of your restructuring taskforce?

As cries rise to slow down the pace of AI development, most of those cries are justifiably about safety.  But I do wonder if some of the motivation comes from realizing that hyperaccelerative recursive self improvement shatters our entire economic system. 

Good Apples, Bad Apples, and the Apples In-between

With the forced harvest of all of my apples following a recent storm, I faced something of a conundrum.

All of a sudden, I had six dozen early-harvest apples, all of which I had to gently pluck from our fallen tree before righting it.  Most of them had sooty blight, which cleans off perfectly with a washing.  I don't use chemicals or pesticides on my tree, so about a third of them weren't even close to edible, overcome by cankers, worms, or rot.  Those, I tossed into my sunflower patch, where they'll degrade and add to the soil.

Another third were functionally perfect, albeit a little greener than one would want for a Fuji.  Those could easily have come from a farmer's market or produce stand, and they went straight into our fruit bowl.  They've been delicious.

That final third was neither one nor t'other.  They weren't the sort of apple you'd just pick up and eat.  There'd be a deep bruise or a spot of rot on one, or a canker on another.  That portion of the fruit was unusable for human consumption.  The rest of the apple, though, was flawless.

Were one sorting apples for sale, those imperfect apples would be worthless.  No-one would choose them for purchase.  You wouldn't set them out for guests, or just snack on them.

But just because industrial agriculture has acclimatized us to hyperabundance doesn't pardon our failure to see value in imperfect things.  

I've just got the one little tree out front, and I get what apples I get.  I've tended it and watered it and pruned it, so not doing something with the blemished and slightly damaged fruit seemed a waste.    "What," I thought to myself, "would I do with these apples if they were the only food I had?"  I'd eat whatever could be eaten, of course.

So over the last week, I've used them to make two apple crisps, both of which have been utterly delicious.  The preparation did take a little more care, I'll admit.  I diligently sliced away anything foul or rotten.  In some cases, that meant half of an apple.  In others, I'd discover that what looked like a small surface blemish was, in fact, just the tip of an iceberg of decay.  That whole apple would be repurposed as compost.

For most of them, though, just a little cutting and paring yielded sweetness that was no less delicious than cosmetically perfect fruit.  

It reminded me, as things often do, of a little passage from Paul, where he talks about how we and our works will be tested.  Not every part of us is what it needs to be, after all.  We are none of us perfect.

But that doesn't mean we are utterly without value or purpose.

The Real George Washington

Here in the Nation's Capital, Donald J. Trump is now demanding that the Smithsonian tear down a piece of modern art in front of the National Museum of American History, and replace it with a towering statue of George Washington.  In addition, he is demanding that they immediately show respect for Our Founding Fathers by putting on a five year exhibition celebrating George Washington.  

Honestly, I think they should take him up on that.

Specifically, I think they should create an exhibit specifically focusing on the end of Washington's Presidency, and the process by which Washington prepared his farewell address to our fledgling nation. 

In that address, which Washington wrote with the help of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Washington both blessed and warned the United States, counseling citizens to be wary of the forces that he knew would threaten our republic.  He was, in particular, wary of the rise of a particular kind of human being who would sabotage the country from within.  

Be wary, Washington wrote, of those who set us against one another, who rule only for their own faction, who usurp the powers of other branches of government, and who ignore the law when it's advantageous to do so.  Watch out for an oversized military, said the first Commander in Chief, and be particularly alert for the self-serving actions of "cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men" who see partisanship and populism as a way around the constraints of both virtue and the Constitution.

A well-crafted exhibit that centers Washington's wisdom and his hard-learned cautions might be a timely thing, eh?

To that end, you can read the farewell address at the link above.  I've drawn out a few key quotes from that address for your perusal and edification.  This being 1796, the language he, Hamilton, and Madison used is a little more convoluted that we're used to, but it's worth taking time to listen to his warnings.  They'd work well in an exhibit, I think:

1) A Warning Against those who foment Cynicism

"The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so; for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad, of your safety, of your prosperity, of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed, to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned, and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts."

2) A Reminder that a Bloated Military is a Threat to Liberty

"While then every part of our country thus feels an immediate and particular interest in union, all the parts combined cannot fail to find in the united mass of means and efforts greater strength, greater resource, proportionably greater security from external danger, a less frequent interruption of their peace by foreign nations; and, what is of inestimable value! they must derive from union an exemption from those broils and wars between themselves, which so frequently afflict neighboring countries not tied together by the same government; which their own rivalships alone would be sufficient to produce, but which opposite foreign alliances, attachments, and intrigues would stimulate and embitter. Hence likewise they will avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty. In this sense it is, that your Union ought to be considered as a main prop of your liberty, and that the love of the one ought to endear to you the preservation of the other."

3) A Warning against "Designing Men" who Turn Region Against Region

"In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations—Northern and Southern—Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heart burnings which spring from these misrepresentations. They tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection."

4) A Reminder that Government must Serve All the People, Not Just a Subgroup

"To the efficacy and permanency of your Union, a government for the whole is indispensable. No alliances, however strict, between the parts can be an adequate substitute."

5)  Those who Ignore the Law or Manipulate it to Serve their Power are an Existential Threat

"All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."

6)  Radical Partisanship Destroys National Unity

"I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy. The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty."

7)  A "Unitary Executive" is the Path to Despotism and Tyranny

"..the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism. A just estimate of that love of power and proneness to abuse it which predominates in the human heart is sufficient to satisfy us of the truth of this position. The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern, some of them in our country and under our own eyes. To preserve them must be as necessary as to institute them. If in the opinion of the people the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates. But let there be no change by usurpation; for though this, in one instance, may be the instrument of good, it is the customary weapon by which free governments are destroyed."

8)  The United States must be a Good and Virtuous Neighbor 

"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all—religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that in the course of time and things the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?"

---

"In offering to you, my countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression I could wish—that they will control the usual current of the passions, or prevent our nation from running the course which has hitherto marked the destiny of nations. But if I may even flatter myself that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good, that they may now and then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, to warn against the mischiefs of foreign intrigue, to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism—this hope will be a full recompense for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated."

Cutting Back the Ivy

Out in the front yard, my stand of sunflowers is beginning to fade, as Fall approaches and summer says a long slow goodbye.  The stand is still standing, which wasn't a guaranteed thing.  

A big storm recently blasted through, bringing down the little apple tree that grows right next to the sunflowers.  But the flowers, with a little forethought, are still beautiful, if a bit battered.  The tallest ones no longer tower vertically, now canting discernably southward towards the nearby sidewalk, having been pressed hard by near-hurricane-force gusts.

But not a one of them fell.

The reason: other plants grow in that sunflower patch.  Milkweed and common pokeweed are intermingled with the stalks, adding their flowers to pollinator buffet.  And woven densely through all of it is a densely interwoven tangle of wild grape and porcelainberry vines.  

Between the two of them and left to their own devices, those two vines will smother just about everything else around them.  Their vines snake up the sunflower stalks at a remarkable rate, growing inches a day.  I've thought about rooting them out completely, but they serve a particular purpose.

Instead, once a week or so, I'll wander by the sunflowers and trim away any vines that get within a foot or two of the flowering tops.  My assumption, when I began that process a few years ago, had been that the vine growth would help stabilize the sunflowers without my having to put in metal stakes and support structures.  I'd had one whole patch that I'd staked flattened by high wind years ago, so figured I'd try the natural approach.

The recent storm tested that hypothesis, successfully so.  The complex interwoven mass of vines gave stability to the helianthus.  None were lost, even if they do look a little worse for wear.

That does, of course, come with a caveat.  That organic support structure desires to make more of itself.  If I'm not careful and attentive to cut away that which is not necessary, eventually all I'd have is a huge green mass of ivy, ivy growing upon ivy.  Sucking away nutrient resources, strangling out all other life around it and smothering the flowers this gardener intended them to strengthen.

A bit like bureaucrats and administrators, I found myself thinking.  

Usury, Lust, and Power

 

Chorus:  

    Waste and void.  Waste and void.  And darkness on the face of the deep.

    Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed the Church?

    When the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed, and men have forgotten

    All gods except Usury, Lust, and Power.

    - T.S. Eliot, from The Rock, VII

The Storm Harvest

The storm came late in the night on a Thursday, as I settled into bed.  The rain drummed heavy against the roof and spattered windblown against the windows, and the thunder went from a distant grumbling to sharp, angry, near relentless percussion.   Then the torrent grew stronger, and the howling roar strengthened, and the rain was going near sideways.  Following several spectacular claps and flashes, there was the familiar metallic belch of a transformer blowing, and the power went down.

I had, just the morning before, managed to get our old generator up and running.  Running it for just over an hour every month keeps the electric start charged, and keeps the gas from going bad, so I do that the first of every month.  On the first day of September, the little Honda had growled to life easily enough, but then sputtered and died just ten seconds later, after which it refused to start.  I realized the likely culprit: I'd forgotten to put stabilizer in the gas I'd gotten at the beginning of the summer.  The carb was clogged, again.  So I treated the fuel in the tank, let it set for a day, and prayed that this would solve the problem.

It did, thankfully, as the cacophonous storm that had just knocked the power out came before a day when the heat index was expected to hit 102 F.

But the task I'd left undone, despite having noted its likely necessity, was shoring up my little Fuji apple tree.  The branches on the south-facing side of the tree were heavy with fruit, but there was pretty much nothing on the other side.  "That," I thought to myself on more than one occasion, "could be a problem in a storm."

Which it was.  Looking out to a garden illumined by the strobing staccato of lightning, I could see that the tree had toppled in a seventy mile an hour gust.  "Oy," I thought to myself, lamenting the potential loss of a fine, productive tree.  "I'll check on that in the morning."

The next morning, I was busy with my usual post-storm routine.  I ran extension cords, got the generator purring, plugged in the coffee maker, then walked the dog through the quiet of a debris-littered neighborhood.  Upon my return, I transferred the coffee to a thermos, then hooked up the fridge to the generator.  I closed the south-facing blinds to reduce heat load, then plugged in a fan and an extension strip so's my waking family could charge their devices.  Coffee, refrigeration, cooling, and light?  Done.

Now, out to the fallen apple tree.  Inspecting it, I noted that the trunk was intact, and the root ball hadn't even been pulled fully from the soil.  As falls go, it was a minor one.  I'd looked up strategies for helping young trees survive being downed, and things looked promising if I acted quickly.

I got a five gallon bucket, which I filled up with dozens of nearly-ready apples.  They weren't quite as sweet or as crisp as they would have been three weeks later, but they were still tasty, as good as most store-boughten fruit.

Then I dug a couple of steel stakes out of my shed, placed them, and gently pulled the tree upright.  I secured it to the stakes with rope, being sure to both protect the bark and leave some slack for movement, as storms were again in the forecast for later that day.  The ground was still moist, and the tree took easily to being righted, so there seemed a good chance it might survive.

In the kitchen later that morning, I tended to the apples, cleaning and sorting them for storage and use.

A storm will shape and focus our lives when it arrives.  But it's better if we've done the work to prepare for it before that day comes.

An Ill and Gilded Wind

I was on my way back from picking up groceries when it caught my eye.

It was a golden car, a little stumpy and awkwardly proportioned, as if an otherwise sleek sedan had been compressed front to back.  The golden wheel covers gave it a cartoonish appearance, as if the wheels were wildly outsided.   As I sat stopped at a traffic light, this peculiar car crossed in front of me, turning left.  The driver, a young casually dressed Black man, was sitting in the driver's seat, looking down at a tablet.  Not once did he bother to look up.

His inattention to his driving didn't matter or alarm me, because I recognized the car.  It was a self-driving Cybercab, the latest product from Tesla.  They're being beta-tested now in a number of metropolitan areas, and might be on our streets by next year.  The final version will lack a couple of things we generally expect in a car:  1) A steering wheel and 2) Pedals.  They'll be hailable through a Tesla Robotaxi app, which will send a robot car to your house to drive you wherever you wish to go.  Or perhaps they'll just be your car, given that the regulatory environment now is a little spotty.

Full Self Driving is actually fairly sophisticated, and given the startling incompetence of many human drivers, I'm not quite as alarmed about the prospect of machine mind driver safety as some.  With that said, the reason I love driving is the act of driving, and the idea of cars that require no meaningful engagement or input from me just feels drab and joyless.  Yay.  More time to stare at our phones.

More on my mind is this: there are roughly two million Americans who rely on ridesharing or taxi-driving for their livelihoods.  Tesla's stated goal is to produce two million of these gleaming bot-taxis every single year, doing to ride sharing what ride sharing did to cab-driving.

Back in the day, I drove a Falls Church Yellow Cab for a while, having gone through the relatively demanding process of getting my golden Fairfax county "hacker's" license.  Note:  this was before GPS, before cell phones, back when you found your way to pick up a fare by reading a map.  Was it the best job ever?  It was not.  But it paid the bills for a season.

Normally, I'm psyched when I encounter a new car, particularly one that's...for now...rare.  It's like seeing your first Model T, or your first VW Bug.  

But as the quants, tech-bros, and equity-class come up with more and more ways to take work away from us, while their faux-moralist political enablers hypocritically curse the unemployed for their laziness, this brazen AI chariot arrives like an ill and gilded wind.

Okra Hospitality

The first part of the growing season this year wasn't exactly stellar.

The absence of rain in the MidAtlantic, coupled with twitchy temperature shifts?  My garden got confused.  Among the disappointments was the poky growth of my okra, which just didn't seem particularly motivated to do much of anything.  My first round of planting did nothing at all, even after I scored and soaked those dark ball bearing seeds, even though I waited until the soil was nice and warm.  The second round was a little more vital, but leisurely.  It came up, and rather than the startling rush skyward I'd seen in prior years, it took its sweet time.  

Now, though, it's finally getting close to shoulder high.  The coming of regular soaking rains and the end of drought conditions means my whole garden is happier, and those beautiful flowers and the resultant pods are starting to pop.  I've got to be out there pretty much every morning with a steel bowl, snipping and clipping, to ensure that I catch the fast growing seedpods before they get huge and woody and inedible.

Okra pods flash-freeze brilliantly, making them remarkably easy to gather and store long-term.  They don't need to be blanched, just lined up on a sheet pan and set in the freezer for a few hours, before transferring 'em into a gallon sized storage bag.   I could have okra enough to fuel regular meals of gumbo and bhindi masala for months, gallons and gallons of tasty nutty nutritious n'gombo, a chest freezer full of it.

But that's not the goal.  First, because I'm far and away the biggest okra fan in my family.  Mom likes a bit of classic batter-fried okra on occasion, being a Southern girl and all.  Rache likes bhindi masala, and is OK with gumbo, but...you know.  One okra-based meal on infrequent occasion is more than plenty in my house.  Sigh.

Second, because there are folks out there who do love it, who come from warmer-clime cultures...South Asian, Asian, African, and South American...where it's a staple.  So rather than harvesting to the edge of my field, I grow my okra with the intention of sharing much of it.  I put three-quarters of a pound or so of it at a time into nice breathable paper bags, write "OKRA" on the bags in a blocky hand-scrawled script, and take it to church with me.

Upon arrival, I'll place that bag or bags into my congregation's Little Free Produce Stand, which sets welcoming right next to our Little Free Pantry.  I wasn't sure, at first, if I'd have takers.  Okra does have a reputation amongst folks who haven't discovered the right ways to prepare it.  

But I needn't have worried.  Agricultural workers and lawn crews, day laborers and the folks who care for our elderly?  They know what to do with ki ngombo.  This last Sunday, for example, I set the bag out, walked the ten yards to my office, and as I was opening the door, an old SUV pulled up to the pantry.  What did those folks take?  The bag of ocra.  

It's a way of being generous and hospitable to the wayfaring strangers who find themselves laboring in a strange land.  Hospitality is, after all, one of the core Biblical virtues, a fundamental requirement of Torah and a bedrock non-negotiable moral imperative in the Gospel.  It's particularly good to offer up that grace now, in a nation that's increasingly forgotten that the Lord God, Creator of the Universe judges the soundness of our souls by such things.

The Names of the Dead

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead.  One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time.  One by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts.  Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cost.  Finally a man stands alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go.

Now I am ready.

-  Wendell Berry, from Jayber Crow, p. 353

Puros

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

- WB Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, III

The Sting of Nature

It was a beautiful Monday afternoon, blessedly free of the dank Mid-Atlantic humidity that defines so many August days, and I was on my bicycle.  Fairfax County has some delightful bike trails, and I and my younger son were taking an hour or so to ride the Cross County trail, starting at a tiny little park and ending at the beach at Lake Accotink.

The ride itself was a pleasure, snaking through woodlands and along the utility right-of-way clearings, which had been left to become lush grasslands.  At the lake...which actually looked like a lake, given recent soaking rains...we stopped to hydrate and chat.

And then we returned. I marveled at all of the life around us as the trail pushed through an area of powerline-crossed wetland.  Small gulleys and streams snaked lazily through heavy growth of reeds and tall grasses, and throughout all of it, insects buzzed and hummed about their business.  So many pollinators, so many living creatures!  

It was all a wonder of natural beauty.

Which was precisely when a small black something crossed my plane of vision right in close and right to left, and I felt the impact of an insect right where my head and the front of my bike helmet intersected.  There was a moment of fierce chitinous scrabbling, followed by what was to be the first in a succession of sharp stabbing stings.  

The insect's efforts were immediately joined by my own, as I endeavored to 1) get it the rackafracking frack off of me and 2) not crash and 3) come to a stop and 4) also not crash.  A second sting was followed by a third and a fourth, before finally my frantic beating at my own forehead dislodged whatever it was, and I came to an abrupt halt.

For the next few days, the flesh over my os frontale was swollen, giving me a faintly Neanderthal aesthetic.  I don't doubt the wasp fared far worse.

Of all the foreheads on all the bike paths in all the world, you had to fly into mine?

Why, one might ask, did that happen?  Was there a reason for it?  Was it purely random, or was there a Lesson To Be Learned about the sharpness of the natural world, about how little it cares for our romantic musings and moonings?

This, I can't know.  In the scheme of things, and against the backdrop of how easily we mortals are broken, that momentary unpleasantness was a very little thing.  

It is a peculiarity of our times that shortly thereafter, I watched a viral video in which tiny little human forms...each, a soul, as fully human as I...fled an oncoming wall of water, rock, glacial ice, and mud in a Nepalese/Tibetan valley.  Along with millions of others, I watched them consumed.  I watched the moment of their deaths.  One moment, they were tourists and workers enjoying the beauty of a mountainous valley.  The next, they were gone.

My trivial discomfort, nothing to theirs, and infinitesimally tiny relative to the wrenching, heartbreaking loss of those who loved them.  Yet still, it is nature, showing how buses can be tossed like matchsticks, how seven story concrete edifices can be shattered like glass, how even the swiftness of flight and terror can end in a tossing, tumbling oblivion.

Why, one might ask again, shaken by the viewing, did that happen?  There are reasons, of course, underlying the mechanics of the event.  Glacial collapses...like wildfires and droughts and megastorms...are more common now that our world is warming.  But the "why" of those particular deaths is harder to parse out.  Do we suppose they died because they deserved it in some way?  They did not.

It is as beyond me as the reason for Job's suffering was beyond Job.

The Inverse of Trauma

 

What, I found myself wondering recently, is the inverse of trauma?  

Trauma...understood as a shattering, malign experience that burns its mark into the self...is a potent thing.  When we've experienced traumatic harm, our entire nervous system says: you survived this thing.  You're not going to go anywhere near anything like it ever ever ever again.  This makes sense as an instinct, but can make some of the rest of life much more difficult.

Like, you can't be around water.  Or cars.  Or dogs.  Or men.  Or people that remind you of a certain person.  Or people at all.

Trauma, by its nature, forcibly defines our engagement with the world.  Understanding this is an important part of reclaiming ourselves and our agency.  The challenge, of course, is that trauma-responses are themselves dysfunctional.  Trauma is a thing to acknowledge, but is the very last thing you want to center as a healthy integrating aspect of your psyche.  If trauma is the focus of a therapeutic approach, then in less-competent hands, all efforts can become to find the trauma...up to and including defining any suboptimal event or difficult relationship as "traumatic."  When the hammer is "trauma work," every nail starts looking traumatic.

This perhaps the greatest challenge of trauma-centered therapeutic approaches, because the task .of healing is to heal...and the trauma that warps our choices and stunts our lives is fundamentally and essentially dysfunction.  I mean, literally.  It's function shaped by shatteringly negative experience.  That's what the word "dysfunction" means.

To which I found myself contemplating what it would look like for a therapeutic approach to  emphasize the shatteringly positive.  Yes, "shatteringly positive."

Because there are such experiences.  There are moments in life when we are suddenly and irrevocably changed for the better, times that function in the inverse way to trauma.  Instead of having horror, fear, or anxiety seared into us, we are suddenly and unexpectedly made more whole, given courage, and given hope.

What do such experiences look like?

They are, first, epiphanic.  Having an epiphany means being caught up in the realization of something, as your consciousness suddenly grasps a vital and necessary truth that you've not had before.  Epiphanies are life transforming, shattering the present reality and the norms that have come before and replacing them with something new.

They are, second, ecstatic.  Ecstasy means, literally, standing outside of oneself, and describes a state of awareness in which you are at a remove from your normal consciousness.  They can be stirred by psychotropics or trance-inducing actions (think dance/song/prayer), but can also arise in moments of unusual experiential intensity.  

Third, they are sublime.  English is a weird language, in which "sublime" means "rising above a threshold" and "subliminal" means "existing below a threshold."  Why don't they refer to the same thing?  It's just the way English is.  Our language struggles in such places, but the unifying feature of these concepts is the encounter with and pressing through of a boundary.  A moment of breathtaking awe can be sublime, but...I would contend...so can the breaking through of a disintegrative part of yourself.  Those in recovery describe that moment of "hitting bottom" as being the place where real change begins, and it's a threshold encounter, in its own way sublime.

Finally, they are eucatastrophic.  Eucatastrophe is a term coined by J.R.R. Tolkien, who saw it as the core  defining feature of "faery" stories, by which he meant any supernaturally grounded narrative.  It's the good-shattering of a broken order by the indwelling of the transcendent holy, in which change is effectuated by something both good and greater than the existing and dominant power.

All of these point to an experience that is analogous to trauma, but that is radically and fundamentally positive.  And all are also essentially religious experiences.  

"Come to Jesus moments," if you will.

The Divine Nonconformist

I've doing some planning work for an adult education class this Fall, one in which I'm going to be exploring familial conflict and dysfunction through the lens of Scripture. Meaning, go into the Torah and the Writings and the Gospels, and surface pungent archetypal tales of Folks Not Getting Along.

The challenge, of course, isn't finding such stories. Lord have mercy, is that not a problem. The challenge is picking and choosing from the great groaning table of human mess woven into our Holy Book of Books, so's it ain't a one hundred and fifty seven week study. I mean, we get one opening chapter in which it's all good, and by the end of the second chapter, Adam's shaming and Eve's blaming and then it’s the healthy sibling dynamics of Cain and Abel and we're off to the races.

As part of that, I went searching for an old book on family systems that I'd read years ago, one called How Your Church Family Works, which somehow had made its way from the pastor's office into the parlor of the manse. 

Bowen/Friedman Family Systems work isn't cutting edge these days, as the therapeutic herd has moved on to trauma-centering approaches, but I still find some of the core concepts useful. The operating assumption of family systems therapy is this: we're part of organic systems and networks of relationship that shape our reactions and responses to others in ways that we frequently struggle to understand. That has always made sense to me, and it can be quite useful as a therapeutic process, but digging back into those concepts reminded me of a couple of things that never worked for me about that approach.

First, one of the core ideas behind Family Systems work is the concept of the triad. Meaning, it's not just your binary relationship with your mother, but your relationship with your mother and your father. It's not just your relationship with your mother, but your relationship between you, her and your younger brother. You talk about her to him, he talks about you to her, and you talk to him about her, and everything is emotional triangles and triangulation, as the trifold energies of interrelationship play out. There, the challenge I have isn't that this is too complex. It's that it's far too simple. Most of us are connected intimately to more than just two other people, I would hope, and that means our true relational connections aren't a two dimensional shape. They're more like energies playing across an ever evolving four-dimensional neural network than anything crudely Pythagorean.

Second...and this is a nontrivial problem I have with secular therapy-speak generally...it can get too centered on the dynamics of dysfunction. Everything is seen through the lens of dysfunction. As part of my family systems counseling coursework years ago, one central class assignment was to chart our emotional genealogy. We created actual charts of our family history going back as many generations as we could remember. Then, we had to use a set of labels to indicate the triangulated dysfunctions...the divorces, the addictions, the estrangements, the co-dependencies. That left us with a dark genealogy, a familial tapestry of wreck and ruin. And on that chart, there was no way to indicate the places of health. No mutual care, or faithfulness, or honor, or nurturing, or love.  It felt both jaundiced and a weensy bit counterproductive.

There’s a rule in motorcycling, and it’s a simple one: you go where you’re looking. If you anxiously target-fixate on a hazard in the road, you’re going to go right into it. Without a hopeful vision, a clear sense of the good, or anything to orient one’s faithful action towards, things stay broken.

The Apostle Paul describes a very different approach to life in his letter to the Church at Rome. In the twelfth chapter of Romans, Paul talks about how we live our lives. That represents a shift from the tone of Romans up to this point, which has been mostly diving deep into the theology of salvation by grace through faith.

As the letter ends, Paul takes a step back, and starts grounding all his theologizing in what it actually means to walk the Way of Christ. Here is what that actually looks like, Paul says.

In the first verses of Romans 12, Paul is once again talking about the body as a deep metaphor for the nature of how we participate in Christ, with each of us contributing our gifts towards the good of the church. Our purpose as Christians is to serve the good of one another, just as every part of the body serves the good of the whole. Some lead, some praise, some give, some show mercy and kindness. But all Christians have as their purpose the business of contributing to the joy of all, each part of the other, each serving in their own way as agents of God’s love. This is an important image for Paul, because he presents exactly the same image of the church as the body of Christ for two whole chapters of another letter, in 1 Corinthians 12 and 13.

Before we reach Romans 12:4-8, the Apostle makes another statement about the body. He suggests that we need to present ourselves as “living sacrifices,” giving ourselves over to the reason for which God created us. Our minds are to be transformed, and the purpose given to our lives is not one that comes from the pattern of this world, but from the pattern of the love that is the Holy Spirit of the living God.

This is a significant part of our reality right now, as our culture stumbles through thickets of violence, chaos and turmoil. The world is on fire, there are unprecedented storms and the spreading blight of war, and none of that is metaphorical. In all of that, we’re obsessed with dysfunction, focused on dysfunction, because that’s what our culture wants us to look at.  Obsessing over what is broken is the primary business model of commodified media, eh?  And where does that get us?  Just deeper into the mess.

What is our task, as disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, in such a time?

It is not to be conformed to that world. We are not to yield to the disorder that comes from the human hunger for control. We are not to hunger for power, spread fear, or expect others to serve us. We are not to succumb to slander and innuendo, eagerly passing along gossip and misinformation. That does not mean “the gossip and misinformation spread by the people we disagree with.” It means our gossip and misinformation. It means the lie we tell ourselves about others to reinforce our bias against them.

As the apostle Paul writes elsewhere, true followers of Jesus do not seek to tear down, but to build up. They do not deconstruct, but construct. We are children of the God who brings order from nothingness. If we wish to build or rebuild, that creative act rises from having developed a deep sense of the gifts and graces God has given you, and knowing what makes the world good. Know what is broken and why, sure. But it requires grace and wisdom to heal that broken thing.

For all of the wisdom in that family systems book about church as a family...and let it be said, there are very valuable sections in there...there was a third thing that I found challenging.  The last part of that "triad," so to speak.

There was a minor missing piece on the church front: God.

Oh, the concept of God was present.  Scripture was cited.  Here and there God would be included as one of the persons in a dysfunctional triangle, like some absent uncle or neglectful parent. 

But God at work among us, as the one that stands above our mess, and that can transform our mess? That was entirely missing. All we got is systems on systems on systems, and no sense of engagement with the higher power and startling grace that heals and transforms the wreck we make of things.

So, sure, we must accurately observe the things that don’t work, the shredded quiltwork of the pain we inflict on one another. There are good uses for family systems thinking, as there are for so many of the myriad other approaches to surfacing our brokenness. Being aware of how we sustain and maintain our pain is a vital step in that process.

But what heals?  What transforms?  That comes from knowing that God is above that dysfunction, and that Christ’s path leads us to something very, very blessedly different.

The Crumbs

Whenever summer arrives, I’m reminded of one of those entertaining facts about the complex, beautiful living world around us. We humans may seem to be the dominant species on the planet, but there are other creatures that do just as well. Like, say, the ants, who outnumber us two point five million to one, and are one of the most successful and adaptive creatures on our little world.

There are nearly fourteen thousand distinct species of ant. There’s the nearly two-inch long Amazonian Dinoponera Gigantea, meaning “Terrible Painful Giant” ant, which has a pretty potent sting and sharp mandibles. There’s the less threatening Carabara Atoma, the smallest known ant, which means “Heavy-Headed Speck” ant, which is as long from the tip of its antennae to the end of it’s abdomen as a credit card is thick.

Ants have a solid foothold on every continent but one, and that one is…kind of ironic, right?

Mostly, my encounters seem to be with the nearly ubiquitous Tetramorium Immigrans, the little black pavement ants that invariably find their way into mid-Atlantic homes when the weather gets warmer. They’ll come noodling into bathrooms, or booping across kitchen counters, and where one comes leaving a little pheromone trail, it means more will follow. “Dave, we’ve got ants again,” Rache will say, and I know it’ll be my sad duty to spray. Otherwise, I try not to kill them if I can avoid it, because they neither bite, sting, nor carry diseases.

So long as they stay in the yard, they’re welcome. There’s been a constant stream of Tetamorium Immigrans flowing across my carport this season, a relentless bustling rush of tiny chitinous bodies running right along the brick wall of the house, along a groove in the concrete, and then down and under the driveway. If it’s an average-sized nest, there are fifteen to thirty thousand of them down there, and so that flow doesn’t ever seem to stop, morning, noon and night, as relentless a bustle as any major human thoroughfare at the height of rush hour, with the only differences being 1) size and 2) the fact that the ants are actually moving. 

I got to wondering: Where are they going?  So I tracked them one day.  They’re going to my compost bucket, where they push past the charcoal filter to help themselves to countless little bits of rotted tomato, carrot peelings, and the cut-tops of okra.

Should I begrudge them this? I know, given the frequency with which I receive flyers from exterminators eager to kill every insect on my property, that there are some folks who struggle with the idea that there might be any unauthorized living creatures on their land. Kill the bugs!  Sure, spray kills mosquitoes and ticks, but it also kills nearly every other insect.  It kills the ants and spiders, kills the beetles and butterflies, kills all of them, all for our convenience.  We human beings can be weirdly territorial that way, mindlessly guarding even the crumbs that fall on the periphery of our lives.

The Gospel of Matthew delves into that a little bit, in a strange passage about a foreign woman who just wouldn’t back down, a woman who was not just subordinate because she was a woman, but also because she was a Canaanite, a Syrophoenician, to be exact. She was as other as other could be, and was treated as such by both the disciples and by Jesus himself.

First, she is ignored, as she cries out in faith for the healing of her daughter. She’s not a Judean. But she won’t stop, and the disciples finally get so sick of her persistence that they ask Jesus to send her packing. As the woman comes and kneels at Christ’s side, Jesus drops a surprisingly cutting metaphor. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He’s the food, the children are Israel, and the dogs...well...she and her daughter are the subhuman creatures.

But her faith and her wit drives her to come back with an even better line, and Jesus...impressed by both her faith and her relentlessness...very publicly backs down. She is given what she has so persistently sought. Her daughter is healed.

It’s worth noting which Gospels have this story, and which Gospels do not. Mark has it, Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, Mark, clearly written for a community of Jewish Christians before everything in Judah fell apart. Matthew has it too, Matthew, whose primary goal is to show how Jesus meets and exceeds the demands of Torah and the Prophets, again for a primarily Jewish audience. Luke and John, which were written for Gentiles, all of whom were outside that first fold of Galileans and Judeans? They don’t have this story.

The difference seems obvious. There were ethnically insular Christian communities at the dawn of the church, who assumed that the Gospel belonged only to their particular race, nation, or ethnic group. The communities that first received Mark and Matthew tended that way. So Mark and Matthew made sure to remember to them that one time when Jesus allowed himself to be seen publicly changing his mind. Jesus himself, yielding to the insistence of a foreign woman who just wanted to experience God’s healing and grace, allowing his hardness to fall away.

We know, we do, that this selfishness of soul still lives in the heart of humankind, and that we are prone to treating certain others as if they are not human, as if their hopes and their sorrows aren’t as known to God as our own. It seems just part of our lingering soul-blindness, that inability to offer the grace we mistakenly assume is ours and ours alone.

Typically, I read this passage as speaking most directly to our ethnonationalist biases, to our tendency to look on those from other cultures as unworthy.  It's not primarily about how we treat our dogs, eh?  

But I do wonder, at times, if the measure of the grace we will receive might rest in our willingness to show compassion not just to our human neighbors, but also to those creatures that really and truly aren’t us, and that we consider less than us.

Just to be clear, I’m not considering converting to Jainism. Nor will I…and my wife will be relieved to hear this…be scattering crumbs for the ants in our kitchen. If there were some way to come to an agreement with ants, in which they’d only come into the kitchen to clean up debris between the hours of one and four am, we’d be good. But I don’t speak any of the many varieties of ant-language, as the pheromones I produce aren’t of much help.

That said, I’m aware, as I watch the ant highway to my compost bin, that they’re God’s creatures too, and I watch where I step. I’m aware, as I tend to my garden, that the dozens of species of native bees and little wasps and tiny shining flies that bustle from my flowering mint to my bolting basil to those great gorgeous okra blossoms are the very farthest things from pests.

Sure, they’re small and their lives are fleeting. But so are we, and so are ours. 

It’s a hard world for little things, but we don’t need to contribute to making it any harder.

----

Just because, here's a Portlandia sketch about ants that amuses me.  Note: Tetramorium Immigrans are also known as "sugar ants."  They do not eat wood.  I know this because I am a Dad.

Uncle Tom's Eisegesis

"Religion!" said St. Clare, in a tone that made both ladies look at him.  "Religion!  Is what you hear at church religion?  Is that which can bend and turn, and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?  Is that religion which is less scrupulous, less generous, less just, less considerate for man, than even my own ungodly, worldly, blinded nature?  No!  When I look for a religion, I must look for something above me, and not something beneath."

"Then you don't believe that the Bible justifies slavery," said Miss Ophelia.

"The Bible was my mother's book," said St. Clare.  "By it she lived and died, and I would be very sorry to think it did.  I'd as soon desire to have it proved that my mother could drink brandy, chew tobacco, and swear, by way of satisfying me that I did right in doing the same.  It wouldn't make me at all more satisfied with these things in myself, and it would take from me the comfort of respecting her; and it really is a comfort, in this world, to have anything one can respect..."

Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 190-191

The Music of the Machine

I have, of late, been struggling to keep a certain type of music out of my playlists.

The auto-generated "favorites"  that YouTube Music pitches me can get a little stale, as one overfamiliar song after another is served up.  Sure, they're songs I like, but algorithmic recommendations start feeling a little bit like the musical equivalent of Bread and Jam for Frances.  "Sweet Lord Jesus, this again?" I'll mutter, skipping to the next one.

Usually, new additions are welcome.  Only now, I find myself having to be warier and warier around new music, particularly if it feels a certain way.  More and more new music isn't produced by human beings at all, but is instead the result of a short prompt dumped into Suno or some other AI.  I created a few songs myself, back when it was unusual and felt like a fun thing to try.  But I'd rather not listen to it.

As every ad for Suno reinforces, that creation process requires exactly zero talent, as people who haven't the skill or won't put in the work are encouraged to pretend they've made something.  So when I hear a song that exactly matches a particular vibe, I'm on alert.  Machine music takes advantage of our distraction, engaging parasitically with the musical styles we enjoy and crowding out human voices and talents.

Like, say, my listening preferences when driving on a cool summer evening.   I drive with the windows down and the sunroof open at such times, letting the wind play through my hair.  I want stuff that's utterly relaxing, both mellow and sophisticated.   Give me a tree-lined country road paired with a sultry chanteuse purring over a tightly constructed jazz standard, and I'm as happy as a clam.  

If clams liked driving briskly whilst listening to jazz, that is.  It may or may not be a mollusk preference.

So the other day while driving home from church, I heard a new tune that landed perfectly.  Bubbly and playful, with lyrics that danced between English and Japanese, it was just one hundred and ten percent chill vibe.  "Little Sunny Moments," it was called, and I enjoyed it as it hummed away in the background.  But as it progressed seamlessly from verse to chorus and came to a quick and easily digestible conclusion, I began to wonder.

Is this a real song?  

It felt too tight, the vocalizations too sharply defined and breathless around the edges.  Each "Doo Doo Doo" didn't quite have the shape and form of a human utterance.  I'd not really paid attention to it, so I listened to it a second time, tending to the lyrics, trying to come to a determination as to its provenance.

[garbled] is shining in the light. Everything just feels so right. Tiny waves go up and down. Nothing special, nothing big. Little sunny day.

Doo doo doo. Drifting far away.

Doo doo doo. Come and stay. Seagulls dancing in the blue. I just sit and think of you. Clouds are floating like a dream.

If I laugh a little more,

will this day just last forever? Doo doo doo. Little sunny day. Doo doo doo. Doo doo doo. Drifting far away. Doo doo doo. Come and stay.

The lyrics sort of made sense, but were more a feeling than anything coherent, and the garbling of some words and hyperprecision of others felt less organic and more generated. Odds of it being AI? Now at 90%.

And then came the final verse, sung to precisely the same tune as the rest of the song:

Smooth relaxing jazz Bossa Nova.

Similar mood to Quiet Glow.
Soft breathy female.
Soft Doo Doo Doo

Soft Breath Doo Doo Doo
Soft breathy female.
Smooth.

It. Was. The. Prompt.  O Lord have mercy, how perfect.  From behind the wheel, I cackled with delight.   

Somehow, the prompt used by a human to tell an AI what kind of song to make had been accidentally folded into the lyrics, and...this being a low effort sort of thing...they'd just burped the thing out without even noticing.  

"This," I thought to myself, "should be mandatory."  Meaning, at the end of every AI song, the final lyric must be the prompt.

Just so we know.  So it's clear how much effort was involved, and how little humanity.

Each Season Different

This year's been an odd one in my garden.  Some of my old stalwarts have struggled, and promising new growth has been unexpectedly stunted.

The butternut squash which flourish with wild abandon most years haven't sprawled across my yard.  Their great glorious golden flowers and fattening fruit have been half of a typical summer's production.  

My okra, now in its third year, are yielding but dwarfish, standing thigh-high where last year they were now already towering over my head.  It might be the heat, and that we're still a bit behind on rain for the year is likely a factor, my regular watering aside.  Or it might be the soil, particularly for the butternut, where the hugelkulture beds that have always shown the greatest production probably needed a refresher of decaying wood prior to the start of the next season.

My trusty bush beans have also struggled, although that's more a factor of my taking an unexpected nine day vacation right as they were starting to produce.  That first wave of beans was missed entirely.  I don't mind that they went to seed, though, because last year's seed crop was devoured by marauding deer...again, when I was on vacation.

Even the sturdy sunflowers seemed slow to get going, although they're now once again feeding pollinators and beaming down beneficently at passers-by.

The majority of my efforts haven't been optimal.  But there are exceptions.

I cut my tomato planting by 60%, as I was convinced that the bed-density of earlier years had contributed to fungal blight.  Only four plants went in, and they've done wonderfully.  Pico de gallo and caprese and bruschetta have been present in abundance lately, and I'm enjoying regular vegetarian BLTs with sweet slices of those homegrown 'maters.  Also abundant: my basil, which started slow but has rebounded, contributing to multiple rounds of pesto and the aforementioned bruschetta, both of which also draw on my copious garlic harvest.

In all of this, I'm reminded that I am just a suburban gardener.  A weak year for me isn't a threat to my livelihood, and it doesn't carry with it the fear of famine.  It's simply a thing to observe and learn from, part of the wild and joyous variety of God's complex and unpredictable creation.  

Headwinds

I knew, when I headed to church one recent Sunday, that the ride home was going to be a little damp. The forecast was for rain, copious rain, blessed, welcome, drought-busting rain, and with the MidAtlantic humidifier turned up to eleven, there was no question we were going to get a drenching.

It drizzled a little bit on the way there, but when I stepped out to the scooter to head home, it was pouring. I no longer fit into the rainsuit I bought thirty years and thirty pounds ago, but that doesn’t matter. Riding home in the rain on a hot day is like getting free admission to a water park, and I was actually looking forward to it. I stowed my phone and my wallet in my waterproof courier bag, which I put in my scooter’s waterproof storage compartment, and with my torso protected by an excellent raincoat, I set out home.

In light, moderate, or passing rain, scooters are superior to motorcycles. Tuck your legs as demurely as Audrey Hepburn behind the scooter fairing, and you often don’t get wet at all. In light, moderate, or passing rain, that is. Last week was not that. But getting soaked isn’t the primary challenge when you’re on two wheels and the heavens are set to torrential-plus.

Challenge one is traction, as water courses across the road. When the ground is first dampened, things get slick. Then, the issue is flowing or standing water. Have you ever hydroplaned in a car? Let me assure you that hydroplaning on two wheels is a more…interesting.. sensation. You need to be careful of pace, particularly when changing directions, because the direction you go when you hydroplane in a sharp turn on two wheels is down.

Challenge two is visibility. When the rain picks up, you soon notice that the wiper settings on motorcycle helmets leave something to be desired. When you’re on the Beltway and the cars around you are slowing and pulling over, have hazards on, and their wipers are flailing as wildly as a panicked eight year old trying to escape a yellowjacket? When rain isn’t just torrential-plus but torrential plus coming at you at highway speeds? 

This is where doubt begins to enter one's mind.

Whenever we attempt something challenging, particularly if that challenging thing speaks to becoming the grace-filled soul that that God yearns for us to be, there is a moment of enthusiasm, a moment of delight. But then the storm has a tendency to pick up. You commit to a new life, a new path of action or a time of recovery, something that you know will bring you into alignment with a more gracious path.  But the wind howls in your ears that you’re sure you can’t do this, that it’s too much, that it’d be better to be back in the safe prison of your familiar brokenness.

The world around us is filled with powerful things we cannot control, after all, and our fear that our humble efforts will be sunk by those powers and principalities can crowd out our hope.

There’s a story of storm in the Gospel, as the disciples find themselves out on the sea of Galilee. They’ve just left a gathered throng, and between the demands of the crowd and the endless questions of his inner circle, Jesus was spent. He first needed that time away after the death of his cousin John, and after feeding the five thousand, he finally was able to be by himself, and he told his friends to go on ahead across the sea while he went to the mountaintop.

The Sea of Galilee is susceptible to sudden storms that blow up, winds that race across open waters and turn what is typically a flat and easy passage into something rather more significantly challenging. As fishermen, the disciples would have known this, and known how to cope with it. It wasn’t life threatening, or so we are told, and the sea was up, and the waves were high, and the wind was blowing hard against them.

They were handling that, although the going was hard.

What freaked them out just a little bit more was Jesus, as he walked towards them across the water. This is entirely understandable, because it’s unsettling when things step outside of their normal pattern, and a dude walking across the roiling surface of a lake in heavy seas is pretty far outside of the normal pattern.

They are justifiably a little upset by this, and Jesus hollers out to them to calm them down. Peter, hearing him, is still a little doubtful. Hey Jesus, he yells back, if it’s you, ask me to come join you! To which Jesus says, sure, c’mon over.

I’m not quite sure why this was enough for Peter to get out of the boat, but apparently it was. So the story tells us that Peter set out across the water towards Jesus. Now, it’s one thing to be in a boat on the water, and it’s another thing to be right there on the surface of the storm.

Peter panics. He’s suddenly aware of his vulnerability, of all the different reasons this just won’t work, and the water starts to consume him. Jesus comes over, lends a hand up, and the two get into the boat. The winds calm, and the disciples are in awe.

This story is a story of faithful striving when all around us is churn and storm and spray. In those times, faith in our purpose is tested, and doubt comes easy.

We all do that, but those first earnest efforts can be so easily undercut by doubt. We know you need to heal that relationship. We know we need to stop doing that one thing…you know what that is, for you…that has continually sabotaged our ability to show the grace of the Spirit. We know you’re called to something new and wonderful and hard. For a moment, it’s wonderful and euphoric. And then things get harder.

The salt of the spray fills our mouths and blinds our eyes, and we feel our hope bleed away to nothing, and it seems as if we’re going to sink beneath the waves. We falter, we hesitate, and any hope we had vanishes like Eurydice before the eyes of Orpheus.

That’s the point, as Jesus folk, where we need to set aside strangling anxieties and smothering doubts, reach our hands out, and trust in God’s strength and Christ’s grace and the love of the Holy Spirit.

If you are anxious and fearful on two wheels, you’ll freeze or panic, and that doesn’t end well.  There've been times in my life...times of stress and times of hardship...where I've stopped motorcycling, because I could feel my confidence in everything shaken.  But that wasn't what I felt on the road that day.  

I knew that I knew what I was doing.  When the wind drives the rain into you, and your water-coated visor makes visibility like opening your eyes in a swimming pool, there are two solutions.

First, pause, pull over under an overpass, and wait it out.  That works, but I prefer not to do that on the Beltway in low visibility situations if I can avoid it.  It's a dangerous road, filled with incompetent and distracted drivers who don't have a great sense of whether they're in a lane or on the shoulder.

There's a second approach, one that works if the road isn't flooded.   You want to clear your visor?  Go faster.  Don't speed.  Just be sure that the same wind that's blinding you is driving the rain off.  It works, time and time again.  So I forced my way into the storm.

The visor cleared, the beaded rain streaming away as rapidly as it landed. I could see again, as I pulled onto the high occupancy toll lanes, empty but for myself.