Hacking my way through the jungle

I need to write.

I keep waiting for that grand moment of clarity when the words careening around in my brain will add up to something coherent and meaningful. That they will cut through the chaos of 2016 like a machete through jungle.  

But the clarity doesn’t come. And the jungle in my mind remains choked with vines that grow faster than I can push away.

Which is why, I have decided, that I need to stop waiting for this grand moment and just start writing.

Maybe the act of typing will be my machete. Maybe I just need to force myself to randomly hack away, not worrying about where my blows land, until the cuts become cleaner with practice and I will start to see the path ahead of me.

Which is why, starting today, I will revive this long-ignored blog and will write. Every day. To get through 2017 and what so many of us fear the new year will bring.

In less than a month, Donald Trump will be president. Seriously, how the hell did we get here? I want to figure out what I can do, how I can be part of the fight against the expected attacks on civil liberties, public education, labor rights, the environment, immigrants, racial justice, science, religious freedom, health insurance ... it all feels like a game of whack-a-mole on steroids.  

In my 52 years on this Earth, I've acquired a few skills that might be helpful in standing up for social justice. But at this point, I'm so overwhelmed and confused, that I don't know how to contribute. Which is why I need the clarity. 

I will write about what I am thinking about at any given moment. My writing will meander and I won’t angst over my lack of cohesion. Because that’s the point. Some posts will be long and rambling. Others, short and maybe kind of pointless. Some of them, I hope, will be good enough that I will sit back and wonder what orifice I managed to pull those insights from. But, I repeat, I will write every day.

I am announcing this vow on a public site, so that I will take it seriously enough to live up to it.

My father always told me that if you want to lose weight, you tell the world you’re going on a diet.  Fear of public failure can be a powerful motivator.

Even though I will write in a public forum, this web site will be my little secret, anonymous to all but the most random of explorers. That way, I won’t be afraid to write poorly, as I hack through my jungle full of thoughts.

**

I am sitting on a beat-up couch under the large open-air canopy of The Tucan Hotel, in the tiny town of Uvita, Costa Rica. This is the fifth year that I have plopped myself on this same couch, surrounded by brightly colored hammocks strung about, where I watch the owners Tra and Bette, American and Italian respectively, the Italian cooks, Christian and Al, and the Tica housekeeper Loraina, take care of the parade of young international hippies who drift in and out.

My husband is working today on the property that we bought four years ago, a sliver of land that sits between the Pacific Ocean and the beginning of what is known as the Talamunca Mountains. White-faced capuchins and howler monkeys visit our property, as well as coatimundi, anteaters, toucans, grissons and at least one jagurundi, a kind of wild cat slightly larger than a lynx. 

We chose this location, because it overlooks a stunning land formation that juts out into the ocean. A mile-long vertical sand bar, it is shaped like a giant whale's tail. Bahia bellena. 

My husband’s plan is to build a resort here. He has hired a team of Tico farmers, who drive down from the mountains every day to construct it. Mucho trabajar. 

Me? I’m spending the next three weeks here on vacation, playing housewife. Which is a nice break from my daily life. And, at the risk of sounding privileged, much needed, considering the year that I have had. Which I will explain later.

The money to buy the land and to pay for all this construction comes from the beer cans that Jeff has spent his life – and our life savings – collecting. He has amassed the largest collection in the world, which he has been selling off piecemeal. A weird way to finance this type of project, I know.  If my life were a television sitcom, I would remind any readers at this point that Jeff’s plan is so crazy, it just might work.

I feel a breeze blowing through The Tucan and it’s past 11 a.m. Enough writing for the day. I think I will go in search of sloths.

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Pura vida.

Goin' to Kathmandu

In September, my mother and I visited Nepal. While in Kathmandu, we befriended a couple of Americans, Amanda Contrino and Joshua Bookman, who were getting married at a tiny village about an hour outside of the city and scored an invite. The event caused a great stir with the people in the village. A woman asked if my mother would pose with her for a photo.

Elijah, Prophet of the Desert

Slab City, California, in the Colorado Desert

Ted Haggard v Evangelical Church

My blog post for Religion Dispatches:

I’m sitting here in the Rev. Ted Haggard’s new church of St. James in Colorado Springs, listening to him talk about love.

“The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself as love,” says Haggard, who speaks softly and matter-of-factly in a collared shirt and jeans and has lost much of the bravado he once exhibited before he was outed three and a half years ago for having sex with a male prostitute and buying crystal methamphetamine from him.

“How cruel and mean and brutal people are getting toward one another,” he says. “Even the hatred in the church toward our current administration, I think, is sad.”


Evangelicals have gotten too focused on politics and not enough on improving the lives of those around them, he says.

After everything that has been said and done in the past several years by the religious right, his remarks sound positively refreshing, so much that I feel like putting my hands in the air and giving him a hearty “Amen.”

I know. Weird. But in Haggard’s church Sunday, there is no discussion of Obama being a covert Muslim, of socialist-led plots to force death panels on Grandma, or of decrying the concept of social justice. (Actually, each week, Haggard devotes 30 percent of the offering to a cause named by a member of the congregation.) So, it makes me realize just how quickly times have changed in only three years.

In this context, Haggard seems tolerant. There are no far-right historical revisionists here trying to hijack the civil rights movement from the memory of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by holding a religious rally at the Lincoln Memorial; no one is trying to further a conservative political agenda by calling President Obama’s faith a “perversion,” as Glenn Beck said last week:

“You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”
At least if Haggard is harboring such ideas, he’s not talking about them. Instead, he just talks about love, which he says is woefully lacking in today’s evangelical churches. He says he can’t find a seminary class exclusively devoted to teaching future leaders about love. He can’t find any megachurch conferences that have one workshop developed to teaching about how to love one another.

“It’s not surprising that we’ve developed a loveless church,” Haggard says.

Since June, at the Pikes Peak Center (Cheech and Chong will be performing their Getting Legal tour there Oct. 16), Haggard holds Sunday worship in Studio Bee. It’s part of his gradual return to his ministry, which he began in November.

Perhaps he’s picked up some humility since the scandal which led to his ouster from his pastorship of the 14,000-member Free Life Church and his resignation as head of the 30 million-member National Association of Evangelicals. Or perhaps his ego is still stinging from some of the comments church leadership made about him, a man who was once one of the most powerful evangelical leaders in America. After he had pronounced himself healed of homosexual “urges,” he received much criticism from his former community.

Haggard closes his sermon by addressing the elephant in the room. He refers to it as the “tragedy” that befell him, an interesting choice of word for someone who says he’s accepted responsibility for his actions. He says the three weeks of trauma resolution therapy he received saved him and since then he says he has not had “one compulsive thought or one compulsive act.”

Haggard tells me later that his message hasn’t changed and that he has always espoused a message of love. But the ubiquitous Youtube videos certainly reveal a man who spent a lot of time preaching about the biblical evils of homosexuality. He says he hasn’t changed his opposition to gay marriage (he supports civil unions), even though he claims to have an “inclusive” church that embraces people from all walks of life. He still maintains that homosexuality is a sin. So I guess inclusive means he wants to help those who are gay find “healing” as he did.

Also, the man who has often spoken of the violent spirit of the Qur’an, says that the Park 51 mosque is a local zoning issue and should not be up for national debate.

Now that Haggard knows what it’s like to be judged, it remains to be seen whether he is truly creating a church based more on compassion than hate. But it’s interesting that he chose the Book of James as the cornerstone of his church. James 2:13 says that “judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful. Mercy triumphs over judgment.”