January 2009 Archives

Pax posted an entry today talking about building Pagan community.  It's well worth reading, and I highly recommend checking out.  (I also recommend checking out Pax's blog in general.)

As one or two of my recent entries may have indicaed, the thought of community has been on my mind a lot, so Pax's post really rang home with me.  I especially appreciated the following comments that he made when discussing the nature of Paganism:

I would observe that for the different Pagan faiths and paths there seems to be an overall theme of development into being a better person (personal growth and perhaps enlightenment, although it is not neccesarilly phrased as such) by practicing certain rights, and developing our relationships with the Divine (or the All That Is) and with the Spirits of the World Around Us (Elements and Land Spirits), and living certain  (intertwining and overlapping) virtues and values, and by building our relationships with others in our groups and faiths and societies through those virtues and values and practices...[Emphasis mine]

I'd say that overall, Pax pretty well sums up many of the central themes unfolding as I follow my own spiritual path.  But lately, it's that last part -- the part I emphasized -- that has really been waying on me.  There is an aspect to my spirituality that is very dependent on my connection to others and my place in community.

In the past, I've explored the theme of passion and living life to the fullest, which is another important aspect of my walk.  To be frank, with a patron goddess like Freyja, it's kind of hard not to take a passionate, fully-involved view of life.  And in some ways, I see this concern with community as a natural outgrowth of such an approach to life.  After all, the people we interact play an important part in our lives and are often an integral part of enjoying it to the fullest.

I think it's safe to say that most of us are not hermits or recluses.  I know I'm certainly not one.  (Indeed, over the past few years, I've discovered just how much of a people person I really am.)  As such, while we may need, enjoy, and even cherish our moments alone, our lives would not be complete without sharing our lives and many of the special moments with others.  Indeed, I would argue that time spent with others is what actually makes a significant number of those moments so special.

Community enables us to help, heal, strengthen, and rejuvenate each other.  It makes even the strongest individual even stronger.  It is that glue which enables us to build something that is greater than each of us -- both individually and collectively.  Because in the end, that whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

(The picture in this post is of the participants of an open Lammas rite sponsored by the now defunct Pagan Outreach Center back in 2006.)

 

Your Word is "Love"

You see life as possibility to form deep connections with a few people. Relationships are the center of your world, and you always take time to bond with those you love. You are caring and giving. You enjoy helping those you love. And when it comes to romantic love, you feel passionately ... even in a very long term relationship.

This year, I decided to do something unusual for me.  I decided to file my tax returns early.  Normally, I'm the kind of guy who puts it off and forgets about it until April 12 (or later) and then rushes around to do get it done in the nick of time.

This year, I decided that there was really no point in waiting.  So as soon as I got my W-2 from my employer (and remembered to take it home), I installed this year's copy of Tax Cut and got business over with.  Hopefully, that means that my refund will be deposited in my account in the next couple of weeks.

I'm a bit disappointed that my Federal refund isn't bigger than it was.  As it is, it's not quite enough to cover the annual membership I want to get at The Iron Butterfly.  However, it should cover enough of it that I can afford it overall.  And at least I owed the state less than $100.  I may have to look at my witholding informationa gain and see if I can get a refund from the state next year, too.

But the important thing is that it's done and I can forget that the IRS exists for another year.

(The image in this post is public domain.  I found it through Public Domain Clipart.)

I know that some of my readers are familiar with Kiva, the site that allows individuals to contribute to loans made to entrepeneurs in developing parts of the world.  For those of you who may not be familiar with it, I strongly recommend checking it out.  It's an interesting site, and a fun way to help out people around the globe.

I got started with Kiva back in August.  I kept running into friends -- both locally and online -- who were involved with the project.  I decided it was finally time to check it out for myself.  And since then, I've been hooked.   As of today, I've contributed to my ninth loan.  Also, I just discovered that one of my loans was completely paid off earlier this month.  I'm quite pleased with that milestone.

Of course, I'm also disappointed by it.  The loan that was paid off was a four month loan.  Because of the short duration, monthly repayments were in pretty hefty chunks.  This meant that between it and the smaller repayments from longer loans, I had been enjoying the ability to recycle my contributions and add a new loan about once a month. Now that I won't be getting that sizeable contribution each month, I will probably have to funnel more money into my Kiva account in order to keep adding a new loan a month.  Fortunately, that should be doable.

Of course, another big challenge with Kiva right now -- and I admit that it's a nice challenge to be facing -- is actually finding new loans to fund.  There are enough lenders participating that loans are being funded almost as quickly as they're being added.  This means that to contribute, it's often necessary to regularly check the site and jump on a loan as soon as you spot it.  Otherwise, it's liable to be fully funded.  But like I said, that's a nice challenge to face.

I haven't helped buy a goat yet, but I have some of my contributions have been gone towards the purchase of a cow, a sewing machine, supplies for a couple stores, and building supplies.

 

Well, I've made more progress.  I can now successfully build my main indexes and entries statically.  This means that comments will show up immediately now.  I'm still running the monthly and category archives through the publish queue, though.  I don't think that's a bad thing.

To get things to work better, I've made a few changes, including caching widgets, enabling some widgets as server-side includes (I discovered the beauty of SSI when I started Ingvi's Corner, and am glad to use them here), and changed my archive widgets so they don't display a count for each category/monthly archive.  (I figure part of the problem was that trying to generate this data for each page was really thrashing the script's interface to the database during a database.)  Hopefully, all of these things will add up to much better experience for both myself and my readers.

I'm also starting to realize the MT is becoming an extremely powerful system.  In some ways, I suspect it's more than I really need.  I'm just a simple blogger, and I've found myself spending more time that I planned tweaking MT to get performance and stability.  In some ways, it's enough to make me consider going back to Typepad or blogger, where someone else can worry about most of that stuff.  But I like running my own blog software, so I don't foresee that happening.  Besides, who knows, I might find benefits to the increased power.

(Special thanks to Jon Sullivan for providing the public doman image used in this post.)

UPDATE:  Success!  I've found that by switching over to using the Publish Queue, I can manage to rebuild my entire site.  Of course, it's not done yet.  So far, the publish queue has only made it back to the entries for April 2007.  In fact, this update may not show up until the very end.  But for now, using the publish queue rather than immediately publishing seems to be the way for me to go.  Of course this means there will be a slight lag time (up to fifteen minutes) before a submitted comment will show up.  Ah well.  I can't have everything!

I've decided that it's finally time to upgrade my blog to Movable Type 4.  I've been putting this off, as I wasn't sure I wanted to go through the hassle involved.  But recently, I've looked at a few new features that are incompatible with MT 3.x.  So I decided it was time to make the switch.

Let me just say that if Six Apart plans to stay in business, they need to make certain aspects of upgrading between major versions of MT much easier.  I decided that it would be better for me to just go ahead and blow away all my old MT 3.x templates and start fresh.  The problem with this is that Six Apart provides no easy way to just tell MT 4.x, "Hey, take this existing blog, get rid of all its old templates, and start with a fresh batch of MT 4.0 basic templates."  Instead, I had to manually create most of the new templates.  (I was able to shoehorn in the five or six templates that actualy kept the same name between MT 3.x and MT 4.x  using the "Refresh Template" option.)  This meant creating a brand new blog and starting the comparison and revision process.

Now I just have to go back and add back in some of the extras I added to my templates, like the Sitemeter code, the MyBlogLog Widget, and a couple of other things.  Of course, I'm also thinking about getting rid of some of the add-ons (like Jiglu) as MT 4.x now offers similar features directly.

Of coures, I also need to figure out why my server won't let me rebuild the entire site.

For my readers (all six of you), this upgrade means a couple things:

1.  Any links from your site to posts on my blog are broken.  The way MT 4.0 structures everything has changed.  (Apparently, they decided to structure things more like Blogger and WordPres do.)

2.  My blog only allows authenticated comments now.  Now that MT 4.x offers many options for comment authentication, I decided to kill spam for good and turn off "anonymous" comments.  The good news is that there's support to leave a comment using your login from Typepad/Typekey, Livejournal, Blogger, and any other service that offers OpenID authentication.  Also, I'm allowing people to register an account directly with my blog.  So there's plenty of options for commenting.

So please bear with me for the next week or so if there seems to be any issues.  Hopefully, I'll get things straightened out from this upgrade quickly.

(Special thanks to Peter Griffin for the public domain image used in this post.) 

Jeremy over at Good As You blogged about a fictitious student spec ad that recently ran in CMYK magazine. The ad, which can be seen in this post, plays off on the stereotype that a man who does ballet is somehow less masculine than a man who plays football or some other sport. (Of course, I wonder what the guys who do ballet and play football would say to that.) Of course, on another level, some people are taking this as a homophobic ad, concerned about the stereotype that a man who does ballet is most likely gay.

As a gay man who is taking dance (though not ballet at this time) classes, I'm not too bothered by this ad. I have heard people suggest that dance in general and ballet in particular are not masculine activities, and I personally think their point of view is baseless and ignorant. My usual response to such a claim is to either roll my eyes and move the conversation along or to politely challenge the speaker to join me for one dance class before we discuss their opinion. I have yet to have any guy accept that challenge.

Personally, I'm not bothered by the ad because as a dancer, I know the lie behind it. And I know who I am and what I like, and I'm not willing to let the opinion of an ignorant person get to me. It's really that simple.

However, one of Jeremy's commenters, Lorion, does raise a good point. There are those people who are hurt by this kind of mentality. Some men -- especially younger guys who are still trying to find themselves -- are more deeply affected by this. It's hard to be that seemingly rare teenage boy who's interested in dance, singing, or theater. Friends who think men should follow more so-called masculine pursuits tend to tease, and that can be hard to handle. In fact, it could exert enough pressure to get a young man to reconsider pursuing such an interest. This is even worse if similar pressure comes from parents. And that is a problem that needs to be addressed.

It seems to me, however, that the proper way to address this problem is on an individual basis. After all, a student spec ad merely expresses an unfortunately common sentiment. That sentiment would have permeated some sectors of our society regardless of whether the ad was published. In some ways, I think it's good that the ad was published, as it provides and opportunity to address the underlying mentality, its prevalence, and its effect on some people. It also gives us the opportunity to consider how to counteract and otherwise mitigate its effects.

I think that the first and most important step in helping a young man who finds himself ridiculed for having in interest in dance (or anything else) is simply to encourage him. I think it's important to let him know that while others might not approve of his interests or seem them as worthy of respect and honor, we do. And we need to help him find others who share his interest. (After all, even though I'm secure in my own masculinity, I fully admit that it's always a pleasant discovery when I find another guy is going to be in a particular class with me.) These things will stop the sense of isolation that such ridicule is usually intended to create and what ultimately empowers it to be hurtful.

I also think that it's important to encourage sympathy for those who would choose to ridicule another. In my experience, it seems that the most common reason for such ridicule is that its a way for the ridiculer to mask his (I can't think of a single woman who has ever made a negative comment about my interest in dance) own insecurities. Having your own masculinity challenged is much less painful when you realize that the challenger feels like his own is in jeopardy. (Indeed, it's quite sad to continue that another man's masculinity is so fragile as to face potential damage and even destruction simply because of how I choose to spend my free time.) Understanding this also opens up the possibility of compassion and even an opportunity for healing for the person who feels threatened and needs to lash out.

My second semester in college, I took an Honors Program class titled "Thought and Science." Another appropriate name for this class would have been "The Philosophy of Science." The class focused mostly on the philosophical underpinnings of the scientific method, how it works, and some of the common problems (such as researcher bias, which can even be unintentional).

Towards the end of the semester, we got onto the topic of pseudosciences and the difference between a pseudoscience and actual science. During this discussion, our professor, Dr. Holt, spent a lot of time discussing evolution and the debate over evolution and literal 7-day creationism. His lectures were fascinating, and I found much of what he said quite compelling and informative. I came out of his class with a much better appreciation for science and evolutionary theory even though I was a creationist at the time.

The most memorable event in the class took place during our lab period of the semester. During that lab, Dr. Holt decided to talk about and demonstrate the things that he felt made humans stand out from the rest of the animals: culture and art. He brought in a tape of various styles of music -- most of them traditional songs from around the globe. When the second song began, he mentioned that there was a traditional belt dance that was associated with this new song. He then proceeded to demonstrate that dance.

We spent the next hour watching our professor -- who had spent the previous few months educating us about observation, inductive reasoning, and many similar topics -- perform and talk about several different dances from various parts of the world. It was a fascinating and amazing class, one that had a strikingly different tone from the rest of the semester's lessons.

The main idea that I took from that experience and have since expanded upon from that point is that there is more to this world than science and what can be observed and rationally dissected through it's methods. I learned that science can explain the interaction between light and atmospheric particles that create a colorful sunset, but it takes a poet's soul to be able to express the sense of awe and beauty that comes from watching it. Some things about the human experience move beyond the rational and are even irrational at times. These things are by definition beyond science.

To me, religion encompasses the rational, the trans-rational, and even the irrational. In effect, it brings together and sums up the entire realm of human experience. This is something that science cannot do.

At its best, religion builds upon science. It takes the observations and rational explanations of science and merges them with the wonder of emotional and spiritual experience.

This post is part of an interfaith synchroblog on the topic of religion and science. Please check out the other participants' contributions to this event:

• K.W. Leslie (Christian/Pentecostal/Assemblies of God) of The Evening of Kent on How I taught science instead of "Christian" science.
• Matt Stone (evangelical Christian) of Glocal Christianity on Is Evolution Atheistic?
• Fr Ted (Orthodox Christian) of Fr Ted's blog on Post-modernism: A Challenge to Science?
• Steve Hayes (Orthodox Christian) of Notes from underground on Reality isn't what it used to be
• Liz Dryer (Christian) of Grace Rules on Dreaming Quantum Dreams

This morning, my father called to let me know that his plans had changed suddenly, so he would not be coming to Rochester today. He also let me know that the reason that his plans had changed because our old pony, Saddle, died in the middle of the night. So Dad has to see to that today.

While I'm sad to hear that Saddle has passed beyond the veil, I am not surprised by the news. We all knew that it was merely a matter of time. Saddle would have turned thirty seven in the next month or so, which means that he lived roughly a decade beyond the normal life expectancy for his breed. Indeed, I remember back in the summer of 1997 when Dad was building Saddle's new pasture at the new house. Dad commented on more than one occasion that he was putting a lot of effort into building fence for a horse that probably wouldn't make it through the coming winter. But the following Spring, the old codger (Saddle, not Dad) was running and kicking as if he were still a young colt. (Come to think of it, Dad's still pretty spry, too.)

Dad went through that same process for the two or three summers after that, each time he went out to mend fence. After the last time, he simply decided that Saddle was going to stick around and said nothing more. We all knew that our little pony wouldn't be with us forever, but we decided to quit expecting the inevitable. And as if out of kindness, the inevitable stayed away for several more years.

I vaguely remember when we purchased Saddle (actually, we purchased him back, as he was originally born on my parents' property back when they used to keep multiple horses, but they eventually sold them all when they started a family) when I was about five years old. I learned to ride horse (both bareback and with a saddle) on him. Saddle was a stubborn old coot, and I learned quickly how to handle a horse who didn't want to do the things I wanted him to do. I also learned how to duck the low hanging branches that Saddle would sometimes walk under as I rode him. (I could have made him go around, but that would've spoiled the fun.) I also remember when Saddle bucked my sister and I off when I was between the ages of five and seven. Both of us had wanted to ride him that day, so my father decided to have us ride double as he led Saddle. The old pony decided that was too much to ask for and bucked. I don't think my sister ever rode him after that. I didn't give up, though.

Rest in peace, old horse. You will be missed. But I'm sure I'll see you again someday.

(Special thanks to Petr Kratochvil for releasing a public domain source for the image in this post.)

Thread of golden light and red fire weave throughout the universe. the connect, intertwine, merge, and separate. This complex web hold everything together, binding and supporting it.

This is the web of wyrd, that runs through everything. It is not static, but fluid and ever-changing. Threads shift and reweave themselves, changing the tapestry and the very universe.

The very universe changes itself in this way. And as a part of it, you are an agent of this constant change. Each action, each choice alters the fabric of the universe, reconfiguring and recreating it.

This is why community is so important. Every individual's changes in the web radiate outward, affecting all. Being aware of this calls for consideration for all those around you who are affected.

More importantly, community allows for communal efforts in the weaving process. Building and strengthening community strengthens the strands that connect the community's members. It creates bonds that strengthen the whole web. And such community bonds allow for a greater reweaving of the web.