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, Sunday August 26, 2018

1.

One afternoon last May on my way home from working at City Farm San Luis Obispo, the car radio came on with my favorite program, Science Friday. I was surprised to hear the genial voice of Michael Pollan speaking with its host Ira Flaytow. Before I could could pick up the thread of the conversation, out popped the words psilocybin, LSD and mescaline. So that’s what he’s up to now, I thought.

Ever since I heard Pollan read The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007) during a long drive to Canada ten years ago, he’s been one of my favorite writers and most informative teachers.  That book’s comprehensive reflections on the history, biology, economics, politics, and morality of America’s food system altered my tastes, motivated me to design a required general education course in argumentation at Cal Poly around its subject, and inspired me to spend a good part of my retired working life on our local urban farm. The broad impact of his work was demonstrated by a local incident that received national notoriety.  When Pollan was invited to give a public lecture here by Hunter Francis, the director of Poly’s center for sustainable agriculture, large agribusiness funders pressured the university administration to deny him an opportunity to speak unless he was part of a panel that included a professor of Beef Science from Kansas.

That book and two later short ones”In Defense of Food and Food Rules”mainstreamed attitudes about industrial agriculture, factory farming of animals, and healthy eating that had been elements of the counterculture of the sixties. As effective manifestos for change, they contributed to the revival of organic and local food movements. It struck me as fitting that he was now addressing another suppressed strain of that culture of my youth.

The conversation I tuned into was promoting a new book by Pollan called How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Flaytow was dwelling on the opening theme of the subtitle”the New Science of Psychedelics.  What turned me on, however, was its coupling of Science with Consciousness and Transcendance incorporated into a “how-to” book promising doubled satisfaction, with a pun on “change your mind.” (more…)

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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A cab took us across town to the Prima Park, a less posh but comfortable and well situated location for the rest of our stay.  We celebrated the Sabbath by resting and reflecting upon the intense and varied experiences of the last week.

Sunday morning, feeling free and a little abandoned, we walked on our own to the nearby tram stop, struggled with the ticket machine and rode the three stops to the Mehane Jehuda Market, where we mixed with local residents wandering through the stalls and found a lively restaurant for lunch.  In the afternoon we reconnoitered the path to the Hebrew University, weaving our way through a maze of construction of the new light rail line that would soon be serving it. (more…)