On the white planes of my imagination grew tender shoots of grass. They were few in number but luxuriant in composition. You would expect them to be the type of grass that cows would heartily ruminate on. Not so our odd little cow. She had greater ambitions than to find her sustanance on the lowly plane/plain. The lunar sliver hung from the great ceiling, beckoning our friend to jump over the moon. Last time we saw her, she was standing on her hind legs, front legs in the air, head held up high. You might have thought her to be an oversized grasshopper, the way she was ready to spring forth. A grasshopper-cow, absurd on so many levels, was soon ecstatically in flight.

The falling sun set the city on fire
That enchanted night
And I wondered if flames came every night
Whether I saw or cared

Why shouldn't such phenomena occur
That lived beyond my ken?
Indeed even the little I ought to know
Is actually out of my hand.

When I was around 10 years old, I concluded that key to understanding the world was physics, specifically theoretical mathematical physics. I don't remember how I came to such a conclusion or exactly the arguments that buttressed such a view, but I was deeply affected by it. Albert Einstein was an early hero of mine. So was Dr. Who,
the BBC-based Time Lord who wandered not only the spatial but temporal
reaches of the cosmos. Both Einstein and Dr. Who were romantic figures
who mastered the essential nature of the world. I wanted to be like
them in their fame and in their fashion sense; Einstein's unkept mane
and the long scarf of the 4th Dr. Who figured large in my imagination. Thus did fame and fashion become linked to physics and ultimately to my Ph.D. work in Berkeley.

I don't know which is sadder: the row of unread books or the raft of unfilled binders sitting on my shelf.

Something I wrote on Saturday:

When I am sad, very sad, I often try to remind myself of all that I have to be thankful for as a way of making myself feel better. That practice often works so well that I feel selfish for treating thankfulness in such utilitarian terms. Shouldn't I be thankful for its own sake? How difficult then is it then for me to cultivate the discipline of thankfulness when I am happy, deliriously happy? I get caught up in the sheer pleasure of happiness that I lose sight of who and what might have contributed to that happiness: God, my family, my friends, the dumb luck of having had many opportunities falling in my lap. I take for granted what might withstand a taken-for-grantedness for a while, even a long while, but that ultimately wilts away with time and neglect. Today, I am thankful that I can be thankful, even for a short moment on this gloriously beautiful Saturday Berkeley afternoon.

Last Thursday, in a 1-1/2 hours session at the Free Speech Movement Cafe, I had one of the most productive spurts of work-oriented creativity in a while. There's something incredibly freeing about sitting before a pad of blank paper with several pens, some-multicolored, letting my mind wander in structured serendipity. At some point, I might scan in some of my "mind maps"/"cognitive maps"/scribbles to show better what I'm trying to do on paper that I have yet to pull off on a computer. I'm not one to insist that I'll be able to fully replace paper with digital media such as some researchers are aiming to. I like paper and pens and pencils too much to throw them out. And I skeptical about embedding digital technology into pen and paper fully -- though I'm prepared to be wrong on that front.

While I'm excited about my semi-verbal, visually situated, personally meaningful, even colorful mind maps, I've also been anxious to return to writing on my weblogs and in many other different forums. I have found writing to be an equally important way to sort out what's really going on in my head. There's writing to myself -- and then there's writing for other people. Of course, writing for others can take on many forms, but I have found the free form writing of my wiki and blog to be very liberating. There's an energy there that I often lose in more formal writing.

So what's the bottom line here? I will write more -- that's all I can hope to do. And as I write more, I hope that quality of expression and depth of thought will gradually increase.

A number of developments has pushed me to become more expressive, more courageous in that expression, more honest, more open to new possibilities, including that of being shown to be wrong. It's been a rather vertiginous time -- but it's been like a sweet breeze blowing through the somewhat musty chambers of my life, mind, heart, body, and soul. I am, however, bracing myself for the whirlwind that is surely to follow. This anticipation, mind you, is not pessimism or the thought that all good things must come to an end. Not at all. Rather, it is the anticipation that if I am open to the truth and to life as much as I can embrace, then I will be profoundly unsettled. A lot of days, I'd rather have the gentle breeze than the hurricanes. Yet I need to remember that whirlwinds, though absolutely overpowering, can also be the very presence of God (see, for example, Job 38:1-3: "Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: 'Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.'"" For someone who is pretty good at questioning others, I need to keep in mind what it might feel to be questioned by the One who knows all.)

There have been times in which I stopped writing on my weblog because I was sad, so sad that I had no energy or desire to communicate in writing to a general audience. Today is the first time in two weeks that I have updated this weblog -- but I'm glad to report that I have written nothing here, not because I've been sad, but because I've been wondrously happy living away from a mental and physical space that makes for good blogging.

It's not that I haven't been writing at all in cyberspace: my wiki has remained active on a near daily basis. Rather, I've just had the energy to pull together a set of coherent thoughts that I wanted to place here.

Maybe this entry marks a return to this weblog. Maybe not. Time will tell.

Lloyd invited a number of us by name to write about The Passion Of The Christ:

A hope (and a challenge?!) -- a few people I would like to see
write in their weblogs about the movie (and not necessarily a response
to the above): mom ... Pepe ... Raymond (a friendly nudge to Raymond:
dude, just write what you feel, without that inner editor/censor. it
might be liberating, it might be frightening, but the point is: it will
be you, and for that glimpse of You, this reader for one will be
grateful.)

I'm working on a response on my wiki -- and as an act of openness and vulnerability (and/or foolishness!) -- I'll let anyone interested see it in process. I've not seen the film yet, so my response is tenuous. When I finalize my response, I'll publish it here on my blog.

For now, let me quote (without comment here) the part of Lloyd's essay that jumped out at me:

The breadth of the crime against children perpetrated by priests is simply, agonizingly, appalling: 10,667 documented cases in the past half century, in America alone. Even taken at face value, that number is harrowing, and difficult to imagine. And can there be any doubt that the actual figure must be higher? I'm not going to say much more on this issue than this: this is most certainly indicative of a systemic flaw in Christianity. It is a cancer in the corpus of Christianity. Whether or not this cancer is inevitable or accidental is not the point; the point is that it exists, and it must be confronted for what it is, an absolute, horrifying evil. How this generation of Christians confronts it will define all our common humanity for the foreseeable future.[emphasis mine]