May the Fourth Be With Us

 Today is a big day on many levels for me. I came to admire the Star Wars franchise a lot later in life and through a series of Middle Grade books called Origami Yoda. That series gave me amazing insights into how much this franchise is part of the cultural psyche and made me appreciate the original more through the eyes of the parody. But today is special not just because of Star Wars. My dad if he were alive would have turned 81 today and it is still very difficult to imagine him as a senior citizen as he left us when he was 59. Wherever I was in the world, I knew he would be waiting for me to call and wish him on the 4th of May and these days when I wish my daughter May the Fourth I cannot help imagining my dad as Yoda in Dagobah somehow just in exile but still imparting his wisdom through the soul-force. 

But today's significance didn't end there.  Our daughter's college choir sang for the last time under their outgoing Choir Director Prof.Christmas (yes, with a name like that...). Due to technical glitches or human error the event was unfortunately not live-streamed or recorded and sitting over a thousand miles away I can only imagine the performance in my head. It must've been very emotional for her as he has been a ray of sunshine in her artistic life. One of the reasons we chose a liberal arts school for our daughter was to allow her to marry her scientific and artistic pursuits without feeling like she has to give up on one to pursue the other. While personally not very artistic, I grew up in an environment enriched by art and music thanks to my paternal side of the family and I had always wanted that for our daughter. She is definitely more musical than either of her parents but she was very low on confidence with regard to her musical abilities until she went to college and joined the Choir. The Professor had created such a warm, kind, nurturing environment which was very different from what she had experienced until now in the performing arts space. Under his guidance she gained confidence in her own abilities and the Choir became a space for her to find and be herself. She once told me that he managed to organically build a community instead of simply stating that a community has been built! Under his coaching she performed last semester in the College's production of Into The Woods as the witch, a role she would not have even auditioned for if she had not had his support and his faith in her abilities. Because of the college choir, she also ventured into the town and started singing in the UU church choir (although we are not members of the UU) and in that process found a warm and welcoming community there too. A couple of weeks back she sang a Requiem at the funeral service of someone she never knew but learned about a life well-lived and enriched in art.

I had no great words to thank Prof.Christmas for all that he had done and so I turned to Ferdia Lenon's book Glorious Exploits, one of my favorite books of last year. What does music, literature and theater mean to prisoners of the Peloponnesian war fighting for their lives while being held in quarry pits in Syracuse - everything! Lampo at one point says

I play, though of course you couldn't really call what I'm doing playing, but it clashes with the scurrying of rats, their awful screeching, and in my mind, those rats aren't just rats, they're everything in the world that's broken. They're the things falling apart, and the part of you that wants them to. They're the Athenians burning Hyccara and the Syracusans chucking those Athenians into the quarry. They're the invisible disease that ate away at the insides of little Helios till he couldn't walk or, in the end, even speak, just cry with pain. Those rats are the worst of everything under an indifferent sky, but the sound coming from the aulos, frail as it might be in comparison, well, that's us, I say to myself, that's us giving it a go, it's us building shit, and singing songs, and cooking food, it's kisses, and stories told over a winter fire, it's decency, and all we'll ever have to give, I say to myself, as my lungs burn and my eyes water, 'cause I don't have much left, but I keep blowing away at the aulos, playing my song...” 

I spent last evening watching a 1000 year old vampire being drawn to the power of music albeit with nefarious intentions, but as Ryan Coogler says in Sinners, every culture has stories of those who can pierce the veil of space and time through music. I don't know if the Bowdoin Chamber Choir has the power to pierce realms but I would like to think my dad and his brothers and his mother were all listening in even when I couldn't. Thank you Prof. Christmas and to all those amazing individuals who create art especially as a group, in times of madness and encourage others to do so. 

GBBC 2025

Aldo Leopold said "There are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot!" The tens of thousands of birders who are submitting checklists these past few days are proudly proclaiming that they cannot live without wild things. Yes, it is that time of the year when birders around the world get counting - they go out and make checklists of all the birds they can see either in their neck of the woods or in special places - as part of the Great Backyard Bird Count 2025.

This is how I chose to spend President's Day weekend - celebrate the species around us that make the earth what it is! It is also a demonstration of how nature and wildlife know no boundaries requiring humanity to work across lines on a map to conserve such wonders.

In my neck of the woods it is a great time to see winter visitors stopping by on their migration journeys that have gone on for millennia. The highlight of this year was the lone Long-Tailed Duck which seems to have had a faulty GPS and ended up in San Elijo Lagoon and becoming a mini celebrity. 

A lost Long-Tailed duck has become a minor celebrity

Here are some of the beautiful birds that made my weekend! 

Saw a pod of white pelicans fly by and settle down

A Black Necked Stilt

Magnificent Ospreys

Although I've seen Ruddy Ducks many time before this was the first time I got a great pic of their blue bill

Good things do come in small packages too

Birds are in the news for all the wrong reasons. As of December 300million birds have succumbed to the bird flu. 280 million of those cases were from poultry but wild birds haven't been spared. There is so much we don't know about the virus and this is an area that needs research funding. It is very hard to motivate the current government to do anything for conservation sake, but this one can have a direct impact on human health and so maybe this might get attention. 

In all I saw 52 unique species this weekend within 5-10 miles from where I live. And as I write this, 7862 species of birds have been observed by birders around the world in the past 4 days. Given there are about 10,000 to 11,000 known species of birds this is a huge achievement.  "For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television. And the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech" said Aldo Leopold in the Sand County Almanac. Even before I saw the Long Tailed Duck I agreed with him wholeheartedly!

 

 

Climbing Mount Fuji But Slowly

Compassion is no longer in fashion. Cruelty clothed in the name of efficiency seems to be in. Gratitude and humility are out. Corrosiveness and retribution clothed in the name of meritocracy and fairness are in. We are seeing the birth of a new religion, one that is so unlike any of the famous world religions. Whether you believed in Karma or Christ it used to be that showing compassion towards the less fortunate, knowing that your own position in life is fleeting and true salvation/ nirvana/ moksha lies in realizing the ephemeral nature of our existence were tenets to live by. Now that most of us have a religion-shaped hole in our lives we, (especially those of us who are fortunate) seem to have filled it up with self deluding myths about "deservedness" and "just rewards" as though each of us rose to our positions in life purely by self-effort. In this form of self-mythology, there is no room for chance, contingency, luck, and everything boils down to choice.

And it is here I am grateful for Robert Sapolsky’s monumental work Determined which I urge everyone (especially those who believe that they have succeeded purely on the basis of the choices they made in life) to read. His thesis in the book is stated simply as “we are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck over which we had no control that has brought us to any moment.” He spends 500 pages examining every piece of scientific evidence from neuroscience, animal behavior, genetics, and even quantum physics on the question of free will and intent and concludes that:

“there is no justifiable “deserve.” The only possible moral conclusion is that you are no more entitled to have your needs and desires met than is any other human. That there is no human who is less worthy than you to have their well-being considered. You may think otherwise, because you can’t conceive of the threads of causality beneath the surface that made you you, because you have the luxury of deciding that effort and self-discipline aren’t made of biology because you have surrounded yourself with people who think the same. But this is where the science has taken us.”

I am all for re-evaluating government efficiency, how our tax dollars are spent, and even removing some of the performative aspects of DEI. I would also like to see a reform of our immigration laws and definitely would like to keep dangerous people from endangering the lives of others and themselves. But the manner in which this whole exercise is conducted is just callous. If we are talking about dangerous people shouldn’t we also focus our efforts on reducing the 80 odd school shootings that happen every year? Shouldn’t we scrutinize defense budgets while we are scrutinizing education budgets? Surely, saving $15M over 5 years for gender affirming care in the military cannot be the primary source of efficiency? Surely protecting women and girls should mean more than just preventing 10 transgender athletes out of 530,000 in the NCAA from competing in women’s sports when access to basic healthcare is not guaranteed?

Are we really serious about making significant changes to the way government operates or are we just doing what is easy by bullying some of the most vulnerable people in the country? Eleanor Roosevelt used to say, “My interest or sympathy or indignation is not aroused by an abstract cause but by the plight of a single person whom I have seen with my own eyes. Out of my response to an individual develops an awareness of a problem.” This is a lesson our family has learned through our daughter. Ironically sending her to a private school and college with a generous financial aid program has actually helped us interact with kids from other parts of America and from social classes or family backgrounds vastly different from ours. What does it mean to be a trans kid or to be a child of undocumented parents or to be a first-generation college goer is no longer an abstract idea for us.

We are working hard in our family to incorporate more gratitude in our lives. We all know how random tragedy can be. But when it comes to fortune we are unable to see it as a random act and often attribute it to our own intellect or mettle or hard work. Does that mean we don’t deserve any praise for our accomplishments? Sapolsky argues that praise is only useful if it helps us replicate the positive acts. What about punishment for our wrongdoings? Sapolsky advocates for a quarantine-approach instead of a punitive form of justice so that a person deemed dangerous to society is quarantined but not judged. Hard to implement or practice but worth trying even if we fail everyday.

I have been working in my own small way to extend our community to non-human species and that seems like a Sisyphean task at this moment. As always when frustrated I turn to books and this time is no different. I was reading the Haiku masters Basho, Buson and Issa on a recent flight and was touched by the kindness and compassion they extend to all lifeforms from cormorants to monkeys and to flies and fleas. A seemingly impossible cause at this point when even compassion for other humans appears to be at an all-time low. John Donne preached that no man is an island. He wrote “Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in mankind.” Such sentiments are not bubbling up in our society at this moment. Both identity politics and technology have eroded our humanity by giving us a false sense of interconnectedness and a pseudo-community. I don’t know what the solutions are or what the future holds, but I take solace in Issa’s words

Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
But slowly, slowly

And that's all I can do - one step at a time.