Long Overdue.

Well the semester is at long last over, and my journey through Dr. Clayton's Ecotheology class is at an end. Everything else is at its beginning. Really I'd just rather not think about beginnings or endings. I am where I am. Always beginning; always ending.

It is hard to look ahead to what it will be like to continue this journey "on my own," meaning, apart from the amazing classroom experience that I have shared with my peers these past 15 weeks. Not only that, but apart from the immediacy of the Claremont in general. I struggle for ways to become more authentic in my journey, and begin to put things into practice. Two things on the immediate agenda - to follow through with long delayed plans of partaking in the LA South Central Farming Cooperative, purchasing a box of vegetables once every week (or more likely, every two weeks) for 15 dollars, which is delivered to a drop off spot on Sundays, conveniently about 4 major blocks from our apartment. Another is to begin thinking (amidst the search for more stable and full time employment) about purchasing a bike to replace the fume spewing car I drive around (actually gets like 30 mpg, but that still means I'm chugging a gallon of gas every 25-30 miles, more as the car gets older!). This is something I am excited about, and I am praying that I can find work that is within reasonable biking distance (i.e., not Claremont!).

The next, and perhaps most important thing, is to begin to reenter - softly, so as not to become too overwhelmed or falsely passionate (this is a problem of mine) - a community that can sustain, not only a passionate commitment to the environment as a site of sacred experience, but also a deep and transcendent (yes, Claremont folk, I used the "T" word) spirituality that is able to buoy the heaviness of my heart under which I would otherwise collapse. As I read a couple poems by the great Sufi master Hafiz this morning, I was struck by how meloncholy, despairing, and bleak the world can look when you are not able to step back and celebrate the life that teems in it and around it and beyond it.

Lately I have made the horrible mistake of searching for the "answers" to my theological/spiritual questions in the writings of thelogians and philosophers. These only bring on more questions. When I am lost and in need of God, it is not to the theologians that I turn, but to the poets. To Rumi and Hafiz and Kabir. This is where I find my heart now, in these pages.

Friday I hope to attend a temple service at the Pasadena Jewish Temple, and I might begin to explore going to All-Saints Episcopal Church again, though the liturgy feels strange and foreign to me, and calls me to participate in a Christology I simply don't share. I feel kind of outside, alienated, until the sermon - which draws me deeply in. The important thing right now is to remember that a little done from the center is more than a lot done from the fringes. The Tao Te Ching, again: "The ordinary person does many things, yet many things remain to be done. The master does nothing, yet nothing is left undone." I wish I had more conversation partners in the process of integrating this softness - this Aikido/Tai Ch'i wisdom into engaging the outside world. It is so easy to become just another type of dogmatic fundamentalist, spewing guilt and condemnation and false perfectionism everywhere I go. Just an eco-dogmatist, a fundamentalist environmentalist. This too, is false.

More in the above post. Peace.