March 16, 2020 7:25 AM

The greatest instability in my 78 years—maybe the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 or the Columbia strike of 1968 can compare—and it’s already become a routine. No mindblowing headlines this morning, no new directives for today—the schools all shut down, seniors supposed to stay indoors, stock market crashing again—Jan and I resolved to stay home without company, finding most stimulation in watching old TV shows.

I still go back and forth between fantasizing about how to pull the plug if I get really sick in compliance with my advance directive and thinking that the probability of being affected is less than dying of the seasonal flu.

Our next door fraternity boy neighbors, who are careful not to have parties at night and are friendly and courteous, threw what in SLO is a traditional “St. Fratty’s Day” 8:00 AM bash the Saturday morning before St. Patricks Day.  They had told us of the plan the day before and neither of us were concerned, since we had planned a Saturday morning rendezvous for 6:30.  Once the festivities started I went up the hill in back and looked over the fence and gave a thumbs up, which produced this response:

They urged me to join them, which I did, thinking I was being  discreet by elbow bumping instead of hand shaking.  Sky high on endorphins from the earlier activity, reinforced by avid attentions of the sorority girls, I did not resist many much closer contacts and couldnt help thinking if the end of the world was near, this was the way to go.

When I got back home Jan was not amused.  She’d been reading the morning’s news about the urgent necessity for “social distancing,” and told me immediately to take off all my clothes and put them in the washing machine and to shower thoroughly, soaping everywhere.  I did as she said, but still felt the glow of being a “celebrity””their word”among the neighbors, and so sent you the photos.  Fortunately I left it at that, though Jan put her picture from our yard up on Facebook.  But as the day went on and the news got steadily grimmer, she  got more and more pissed at me, and I felt stupider and guiltier, realizing that the party itself, and my succumbing to it was precisely what the Surgeon General and even the President now was cautioning against. We’ll only know in a couple of weeks whether that lapse will have led to serious   consequences.  But Jan did acknowledge this morning, that though she chose not to join me at the party, she didnt try to stop me going.

As of Friday all schools in the County are closed until April 15, and our burgeoning educational Farm programs are shut down.

An address to the White Heron Sangha, September 15, 2019

A variety of encounters with non-human animals over the past year have opened new areas of experience for me and left me mulling some troubling questions. They’ve led to conversations with family members, friends and co-workers, to reflections on past experiences, to scientific research and to guidance from Buddhist authorities.

One area of experience is my relationship with our two year old family dog, Sophie. Another is a series of cardiovascular incidents which have motivated  me to refrain from eating animals for medical reasons. And another is my work at City Farm SLO, where the production of organic vegetables by small farmers and students is subject to the ravages of gophers and ground squirrels.

Sophie came into my life a year after the traumatic death of our previous family dog, a Yorkshire Terrier who had bonded closely with my wife Jan and our two live-in grandchildren but with whom my relationship was distant.  By the time that Jan acquired Sophie, we were empty nesters, and I was a goner.

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The mockingbird returned
on Spring’s first day
filling the silence
left by students
gone on break.
Its bebop warbles
replaced their hiphop grunts
with a memory of hope.

A talk to the White Heron Sangha
February 3 2018

As a child, I grew up in a small family consisting of my mother, Lise, my father, Henry, and my grandmother, Elise, all refugees from Hitler’s Germany who arrived in New York in 1938. Elise and I adored one another all through my childhood and youth. Though she spoke little English, she was vibrant and irreverent and eloquent in expression and gesture.  She was also adored by the customers for whom she worked as a seamstress and to whose homes all over the City she travelled by subway until well into her eighties.

After my first year in graduate school in California, I returned to New York for the summer of 1964, spent nights in Greenwich Village with a friend and days in upper Manhattan studying for my Latin qualifying exams at Elise’s small apartment. She’d make me sumptuous hot lunches and watch admiringly as I practiced my conjugations.

A couple of months after I returned to California my parents wrote me that Elise had suffered a massive stroke that paralyzed her left side and left her unable to walk or speak. They had no choice but to place her in a nursing home and expected it would be over soon. But by the time I came back for a visit at Christmas, it wasn’t. (more…)

For the last four years the core mission of our non-profit has been to fulfill the terms of our 20-year lease with the City of San Luis Obispo: to manage the 15 acres of arable land at the Calle Joaquin Agricultural Reserve so as to 1) facilitate production of crops by small commercial organic farmers and 2) to provide educational programs about local agriculture to students and the general public.

During 2017 the City Farm School Project has continued for the fourth year to provide innovative instruction for academic credit to students in the “Farm” class at Pacific Beach Continuation High School with the enthusiastic support of students, teachers and administration.  Throughout the year and during summer school, students walk to the farm with their instructors from their nearby campus twice a week to engage in hands-on learning about soil, irrigation, planting, cultivating, harvesting, cooking and eating the food they grow. (more…)

“The universal tendency of things to become disordered is a fundamental law of physics”the second law of thermodynamics”which states that in the universe or in any isolated system, the degree of disorder always increases.

¦it is a common experience that one’s living space will  become increasingly disordered without intentional effort: the movement toward disorder is a spontaneous process requiring a periodic effort to reverse it.

Living cells”by surviving, growing, and forming complex organisms”are generating order and thus might appear to defy the second law of thermodynamics.  How is this possible? The answer is that a cell is not an isolated system: it takes in energy from its environment in the form of food¦..It then uses this energy to generate order within itself.¦a direct linkage of the “controlled burning” of food molecules is required for cells to create and maintain an island of order in a universe tending toward chaos.”

Bruce Alberts, Alexander Johnson, Julian Lewis et.al., Molecular Biology of the Cell,  Garland Science Publishers, 2015, pages 52-54.

A couple of days before the conference in Jerusalem for which this paper was written, I woke up before dawn to avoid the crowds and went down to the Old City to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Under a dark and cavernous rotunda, before the shrine covering the tomb from which Jesus is said to have been resurrected, priests in splendid vestments swung censers, sang prayers and placed communion wafers in the mouths of the few worshippers in attendance. During the performance of that ceremony I sensed the tangible power of their faith. Though I didn’t share it, I was alerted to the gravity of the subject of my upcoming talk. (more…)

The knowledge that we’ll be getting up at 3:30 in the morning to go to the airport and we’ll be enroute home for 30 hours makes this last day especially precious.

We enter the Old City through the Muslim quarter at the Damascus gate, where there’s been a suicide attack on soldiers a few days ago, also mindful of the recent terrible incident in Manchester England.

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