Fencing Bear at Prayer

To what extent do the names that we are given by our parents at birth influence our sense of being special, unique, popular, wanted or loved? My name is Rachel.  According to baby names hub , at least 547,035 girls born in the United States since 1880 have been named Rachel, but in 1965, when I was born, it was only the 175th most popular girls' name, nowhere near as popular as it would later become in the mid-1980s, where it hit 15th in 1986.  In 2008, it was back down, at 75th (see chart). Rachel as a girl's name Which is odd, because as I was growing up, I always felt like Rachel was a more common name than, say, Rebecca, my sister's name, because I was named after our grandmother Rachel, and Rebecca was not (at least in living generations) a family name.  And yet, Rebecca was the 39th most popular girls' name in 1967, the year my sister was born. Rebecca peaked a few years before Rachel, hitting 15th in 1982.  It was at 119th in 2008. Rebecca as a gir...

A. The qualia (the “what it is like” characteristics) of an experience are by definition inaccessible to anyone other than the one to which they occur. That is, I can never know what it feels like for you to be happy, hurt, eager, surprised, enlightened, in love, angry, in this place or that place, in this body or that body, male if I am female or vice versa, you rather than me. B. People lie. They lie with their facial expressions, they lie with their words, they lie (at least with respect to their wants and desires and opinions) with their actions. Which means that, pace Ekman's studies even of microexpressions , there is no way whatsoever to gain unambiguous access to what other people are thinking or feeling. Are we then supposed just to give up?

I need to say this carefully so that there is no misunderstanding. Objectively speaking, I am Christian. A Christian, yes, but more importantly, Christian. That is, subjectively speaking, I see the world, reality, what have you from a particular perspective which, objectively, others have identified as "Christian" but which for me is simply the truth. The truth being, that I, like all other human beings, am a child of God, created in His image and likeness, a creature of body and soul, created good and yet fallen and, therefore, in need of salvation. Which means, I realized yesterday talking to a new friend who is a Baha’i and whose family immigrated to the U.S. from Iran when she was a child, that I, like she, am not particularly anxious about being or not being an American, other than that living in the United States gives me political freedom to see myself and everyone else in the world as a child of God without risking criminalization or exile, at least, politica...

Yoga : I've been doing yoga since I was sixteen, since before there were sticky mats, when the only book on yoga that you could find in the local bookstore where we lived was Richard Hittleman 's Yoga: A 28-Day Exercise Plan (1969).  I started going to classes when I was in graduate school up on Morningside Heights in New York and the only yoga studio that I could find was at the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center down on 24th.  We chanted kirtan in Sanskrit, too. Writing : I started keeping a diary when I was eleven, writing to "Toni" in conscious imitation of Anne Frank's "Kitty" as a way of practicing for when I would be a "real" writer.  I kept a diary all through middle school, high school and much of college, then again when I was in graduate school.  I did Morning Pages every day for a good five or six years, particularly when I was working on my first book.  And, of course, I've been blogging here now for three. Swimming : I swam on ...

"[ Mombaer's book ] is divided into titles, or articles.  The first one is called 'Eruditiorium Exercitiorum', or 'Of the more learned (advanced) exercises,' and covers six folios in the Zwolle edition of 1494 .  It is divided into several sub-divisions, which deal with a great multitude of subjects, having little connection with each other.  It seems like a vast jungle of nouns and verbs , suggestive of purity, fervor, moderation, advice, congruity; dignity, doing, commanding, giving, promising, enemies, judgment, example, writing, evil, sin, pride, order, place, time, etc.  Probably this first title or article is intended as a sort of introduction, or survey." --Albert Hyma, The Christian Renaissance: A History of the “Devotio Moderna” (New York and London: The Century Co., 1925), p. 258.

I could write something now, about, I don't know, being hot or getting that sweet parry-riposte at practice last night or wondering what they're shooting a couple blocks away, but that would mean eating the writing frog and I don't really want to. I know, I'm a writer (well, a wannabe writer ).  I'm supposed to enjoy writing.  And I do, sort of.  But not really.  Not as much as I enjoy, I don't know, reading the new comic books I got a few days ago or lying in bed next to the air conditioner trying not to sweat. I'm wasting my life if I don't write, I know.  But if I do write?  Well, then, what happens is what happened to me this morning when I sat down to work on the paper that I am presenting at our symposium next week.  One minute it's 9:00am, the next minute it's noon--and I have no memory of even existing during that time. Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not entirely.  "I" (ironically, given that the topic o...

Seeing the fragility, neediness and imperfections in another person upon whom you depend for your own sense of validation and self-worth--and not resenting them for it. Likewise, seeing their abilities, talents and accomplishments--and being able to rejoice with them.

We all want it, the big pay off.  The watershed that will make all of our problems go away.  We spend our lives convinced that if only I could win the jackpot, if only my book would become a best-seller, if only I could win that gold medal, then, then I would be on Easy Street.  And what happens when we get lucky and all our dreams come true?  As everyone who has been following the happiness studies knows, nothing.  We are typically right back where we started, more or less just as happy (or not) as we were to begin with.  Happiness, it seems, is indifferent to success. So why keep striving so hard?

Those of you who have been with me since the beginning will remember that one of the inspirations for my starting a blog in the first place was the excellent series of reflections that my brother had posted on his original blog about being an American living in Belgium.  Well, after a hiatus, he has now started publishing again.  Indeed, he has started a whole net of blogs , in which he plans to reflect upon not only his experiences living in Belgium, but also his teaching and further travels , as well as giving advice to his daughter and homage to his favorite video stars .  Given that he is not only a Buddhist, but also my younger brother (ahem!), it is more or less guaranteed that there is going to be a fair amount of (ahem! ahem!) sibling rivalry at stake in my response to his blogging. What can I say?  It is in the nature of family members to disagree, particularly when they have so much in common.  As, thanks to several of his recent posts, I reali...

I'm sorry, I can't write this any other way.  I am sick to death of people ( white people , enlightened seekers, well-meaning agnostics who were scarred by the experiences of growing up in less than forgiving communities) bleating about how they dislike "organized religion."  As if they know the first thing about what it means to participate in a tradition or belong to a Church. There, I said it.  Now stone me.  But, first, listen for a moment.  Please.  Because maybe, just maybe what Krishnamurti so famously told the Theosophists when they hoped to recognize him as the World Teacher wasn't the whole of the story about what it means to be a Church.  Maybe there is a point to participating in a tradition, a community of worship, following others in the journey of life. No, I can tell you aren't listening, don't want to listen, know that what I am going to say will make you frustrated and upset.  You don't want to be told what to think--nor do ...

The best description yet for why I am keeping this blog. Jacobs is talking here about essays as a way of representing "the mind -- following in its habitual way its branching pathways of memory and reflection -- discovering something deeply true that the mind's owner would just as soon not know": An old phrase holds that to be a Christian is to be homo viator : the human being as wayfarer, as pilgrim. Wayfarers know in a general sense where we are headed: to the City of God, what John Bunyan, that great chronicler of pilgrimage, called the Celestial City -- but we aren't altogether certain of the way. We can get lost for a time, or lose our focus and nap for too long on a soft patch of grass at the side of the road, or dally a few days at Vanity Fair. We can even become discouraged -- but we don't, ultimately and finally, give up. And we don't think we have arrived. To presume that we have made it to our destination and to despair of arriving are bo...

Things that I have wanted desperately that I no longer expect or care whether I ever actually get or achieve: A C rating in foil A house Promotion to full professor My family (either side) to come visit me in Chicago Thousands of hits per day on my blog 20/20 vision Goodness.  I must be near perfect .  If only I could stop caring about the size of my thighs, I'd be there.  Truly. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity," sayeth the Preacher.  "What does a man gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?...  What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun."

I wanted to enjoy it, I really did.  And I did, in a way.  The casting and sets were as usual delightful (go, Snape!); the special effects fully up to industry standard (great dragon!); the 3-D was much better than I thought it would be (even if, without the glasses, the world looked like nothing so much as post-PRK ); the audience was enthused and cheerful.  And yet... I've had a love/hate relationship with J.K. Rowling's blockbuster series ever since book 4, which I thought contrived beyond imagining (really, three trials spaced out over the academic year so that, what, the plot could end in spring as necessary?) but nevertheless read in more or less one sitting the weekend after it came out (my husband read it first, the same night).  The first three books had me fully captivated, but the last three I read more out of duty to my earlier interest than out of joy.  Not that they weren't gripping reads.  But. But what?  What was missing for me?...

It's huge.  It's ugly.  It's sitting there on my dining room table (where I'm writing), just waiting for me . I've done laundry (that was yesterday).  I've looked into upgrading my MacBook (still running OS X 10.5.8; I didn't even know there was an App Store for Macs until I tried to find iA Writer this morning for my MacBook, thinking, you know, that maybe having a different word processing program would help me get over this block).  I've upgraded my blog template and rearranged all the gadgets.  I've read various articles about the late medieval devotio moderna that my research assistant scanned for me.  I've tried taking the dog for a walk (tried, but failed--she is terrified of all the branches that came down in Monday's storm).  And I'm terrified.  Still. It's been almost two years since I wrote anything remotely resembling a research paper.  Sure, I did a plenary address last autumn for a conference on the Virgin Mary, bu...

Yes, I'm updating my blog template today. I should, of course, be eating a wholly different frog , but it's hard to look those warty buggers in the face when you're tired. You know, from fencing all weekend . Unlike many who seem to be happier having updated their blog templates, I'm actually sorry to be losing the old Blogger style. But the older templates don't support the nifty networking buttons and response boxes, so here I am in Josh Peterson's "Picture Window" rather than Todd Dominey's "Scribe". I miss the background and the parchment colored "scroll". But I like the ability to have tabs across the top for my "Writing Time" and "Point Control" pages. Maybe I'll even add some more pages, just to make things fun.  And I like the way I can set off the blog posts against the background of the side bars, as well as that the posts appear in their own little boxes, not just as a continuous scr...