Wednesday, November 24, 2021

 Thanksgiving Day Parade


This is where I’ll watch the parade on Thanksgiving Day.   Not the Macy’s Parade in NYC, but along my main street – Highway One in Big Sur.   


I’ll stand on these cliffs near my home and see (or imagine) a magnificent parade of marine plants and animals. 


H – Holdfast, Hydromedusa

A – Anemone, Avocet

P – Plover, Pisaster

P – Puffin, Pelican, Phytoplankton

Y – Yarrow, Yellowtail, Yellowlegs (Greater and Lesser)


T – Tern, Turbot, Tuna

H – Halibut, Hydrocoral

A – Anchovy, Abyss, Algae

N – Nudibranch, Notochords, Nematocysts

K – Kelp, Killdeer, Krill

S – Salmon, Sunfish, Sea Star, Sculpin, Senorita, Shrimp, Salp

G – Great White Shark, Gastropod 

I – Invertebrates, Isopod

V – Vertebrates, Valella Valella, Vulture

I – Ichthyologist, Intertidal

N – Naturalist, Neurotoxins

G – Garibaldi, Gull, Gill


I join with our pelagic cousins to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving! 


So much to be thankful for.  (Check out <thankyouocean.org>)

___________

I post these Wednesday ocean devotionals here and at www.bluetheologytideings.blogspot.com.  This has been my Thanksgiving
post for many years.Thanks Steve Lonhardt from <sanctuarysimon.org> for the great photo.  An amazing free library of ocean photos, thanks to NOAA.




Wednesday, November 17, 2021

 Back on the Water


The crowd went “OOOOOH!” last week when this school of 30,000 sardines rose as if resurrected from the depths during the 11AM Open Sea feeding at the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  


Actually the sardines were not back from the dead, just cautious.   They had waited below for the big mouths, sharks and tuna and mahi mahi, to get first dibs, then when staff cast their fav little krill on the surface (cast your krill on the water) the sardines snarfed them up.


I’m back writing my Wednesday Blue Theology devotionals, affectionally called Blue Theology “Tide-ings.”


I took a breather after I retired and while the Aquarium was closed for almost two years.  But I’m back on my weekly Thursday volunteer guide shift and the ocean is (still) teeming with life and surprises.


I stayed somewhat sane and connected to our blue planet during the early days of the pandemic by walking the beach and bluffs and praying for healing and comfort and hope for all of creation.  


But the doors were shut at what feels like a temple to ocean life, the Aquarium, where I have served as a simple verger every Thursday for 23 years.


Anything different there?  40% of staff were let go, including some early retirements and different jobs for some of my dear friends, very sad.  Some new young enthusiastic folks were hired, good to meet and learn from.  All staff and guests must be vaccinated, must wear masks – we are a scientific organization, we believe in facts and professionals.  So yes, changes.  As I age, it’s good to meet new folks, be safe, keep learning.


Otherwise the animals looked great, some a little bigger, like this hammerhead shark.  Felt like seeing grandchildren after two years – how you’ve grown!


Outside, the one world ocean, largest habitable expanse on earth, simply went on with life as usual, maybe a little quieter with fewer tankers and speed boats, a little cleaner with less oil spills and plastic, but as deep and full of beauty and hope as ever.  Dive in!

_______

I have retired from the Blue Theology Mission Station at the Christian Church of Pacific Grove, CA but the ministry continues under the fine leadership of Rev. Dan Paul.  Check out www.bluetheology.com. I also post these weekly devotionals at www.bluetheologytideings.blogspot.com.  Be in touch!


Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Nature Shrieks, Again

 

 Nature Shrieks, Again

Fire is shrieking again in California.

Edvard Munch titled this painting in German “Der Schrei der Natur,” “The Scream of Nature.”  In Norwegian he called it “Skrik,” meaning “shriek,” a more pained and searing sound than what we usually call “The Scream.”

 

The horrific fires burning this week in California, including two in rural Monterey County, near Salinas and Cachagua, bring back sad and scary memories for me of the Soberanes wildfire that burned all summer in 2016 in my neighborhood and the Los Padres Forest, 140,000 acres, at that time the most expensive wildfire in US history. 

 

Here’s a rewrite of my column from 2016, days after we had been finally allowed back into our mercifully saved house, after three weeks’ evacuation.  Many folks this month are not so lucky. 

 

Nature Shrieks

 

A therapist neighbor says we are a community of both relief and grief.  Some of us are home, cleaning up fire gel on the outside and smoke on the inside.  But others are sifting through the blackened debris of their houses and their lives. 

 

But elsewhere, fire still burns, and people still wait and watch. 

 

And listen. For the roar of fire.

 

It’s not just Edvard Munch who hears the shrieks of nature.

 

The wise “Earth Bible” series offers six “Ecojustice Principles.”  One is the Principle of Voice: “Earth is a subject capable of raising its Voice in celebration and against injustice.”

 

Nature makes all kinds of noises.  Deep calls to deep.  All creation is groaning as in childbirth.  

 

But the noise I’m hearing from these fires and seeing in this painting is a shriek of pain.   We humans treat nature as an object, not a subject.  We stab the landscape with the destructive forces of climate change, drought, overpopulation, a careless and cruel attitude of ownership and objectification.  (I’m talking about you, hikers who started the fire, but we’ve all set the dry stage for worldwide wildfires.)

 

This fire is a shriek of pain from the land.

 

Munch wrote about this painting, “One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

 

Nature is loud and has something to say.  Sometimes the trees of the field clap their hands in joy.  But today to me she sounds sad and mad. 

 

I usually write in these weekly posts about the ocean.  Which can also be noisy and destructive, especially when amplified by climate “change.”   Scientists now call it “climate chaos,” instead of “warming” or even “change.”  No denying the chaos of raging hurricanes and ravaging fires.  Nature’s voice is loud these days, and she’s screaming at us, a cry of pain, a shriek.

_________

I post these ocean (and fire) devotions every Wednesday here and on Facebook.

 

Wednesday, August 12, 2020

Are You a Swimmer or a Drifter?

 

 

 Are You a Swimmer or a Drifter?

 

I used to be a swimmer, but I have become a drifter.  I enjoyed swimming.   Drifting is so very different, I’m still adjusting.  But there sure are advantages to my new lifestyle, and much to learn.

 

Far out at sea, beyond rocks and hiding places and visible sea floor, animals either swim or they drift.  Swimmers, like tuna, mackerel, sardines, find their dinner, and avoid being someone else’s dinner, by moving fast, often in a school, eating on the move, and eating a lot, to make all that energy they need to keep swimming. 

Drifters, another word for plankton, (the word is the same as “planet” – Greeks thought the planets “drifted” through the heavens) cannot propel themselves much, so they find dinner by stinging prey (jellies) or just by bumping into it (copepods, diatoms.)  Drifters need much less energy, so eat much less food.  Unlike the swimmers who can avoid prey by swimming fast and/or in schools, drifters protect themselves by being transparent, or tiny, or stinging. 

 

Actually it’s not really an either/or, swimming or drifting.  Almost every creature begins life as plankton, little drifters.  Even human egg and embryo.  Some remain drifters all their lives – copepods, jellies.  But some drifters, as they age, grow into swimmers (fish) or they “settle” (crabs, sea stars.).

As an Aquarium volunteer my favorite station is the “Tiny Drifters” microscope, formerly called the Plankton Lab, where we can show guests magnifications of tiny live animals.  Putting a tiny plankton baby crab or sea star under the lens, I would say, “It’s drifting now, but will grow up to settle or swim away.  I have children in my house - they are in the plankton stage of their lives, but eventually they will ‘settle’ or move on.”  And yes they have.

 

But strangely I, their aging mother, have gone from a life of happy non-stop swimming through life, moving fast to the next meal and accomplishment, to a contented drifting.  Call it retirement, pandemic lockdown, a spiritual seeking for still waters -  this girl is one peaceful plankton.

 

Another difference is that swimmers travel mostly horizontal, while drifters go vertical.  It’s not quite accurate to say that drifters can’t propel themselves, or that they just float along.  They actually take part in the largest migration on earth, travel
ing every night from the safe dark depths up to the surface for food under cover of night, and then back down deep at dawn.  It’s estimated from their tiny body size it would be like us walking 20 miles a day.  It’s just a different kind of movement from the frantic swimmers.  These days I too, rather than propelling myself forward, am having some “down” time.

 

It’s easier to call myself “plankton” than “drifter.”  We modern Westerners disapprove of drifters, assuming they are tramps or vagabonds, aimless, moochers.  Get into the swim of things! Expend more energy, consume more, including other life forms, you must keep moving to live. 

 

Like all metaphors, this one is exaggerated and imperfect.  But these days this drifter is certainly consuming less (well, at least buying at lot less stuff), impacting my environment less, using less energy. I am not hiding in crowds or chasing a dream.  Of course, while both swimmers and drifters live dangerous often short lives, I am so very lucky to be able to drift in my small safe habitat with enough to eat and not much danger (so far.)

 

Maybe I’m reversing that normal pattern, how drifting plankton grow up to become determined swimming fish or settled crabs.  I’m doing the opposite, getting out of the swim, taking “down” time, and casting my fate to the wind.  And currents.  Sail on.

__________

I post these Blue Theology “Tide-ing” ocean devotions every Wednesday here and at on Facebook.  Come and sea, be in touch!

Wednesday, August 5, 2020

Masks

Masks

 

When I wear my jelly fish mask I am protecting not only myself, and others, but I am also protecting the ocean.




How does wearing a mask protect the ocean?  Ed Ricketts would know – that’s his statue near the water in Monterey.  Even though he has been dead for 70 years, he’s protecting the oceantoo by wearing his mask.

 

Ed Ricketts revolutionized the study of marine biology in the 1930s and 40s by spending countless hours knee deep in Pacific Grove’s rocky tidepools, exploring and cataloguing what he called “the habits and habitats” of marine animals and plants.   His fabulous book “Between Pacific Tides” is Stanford University Press’s bestselling book, and it has never gone out of print.


Ricketts organized the book not by individual species, as all previous books had been, but by habitat, where they live.  “Thus, crabs are not all treated in one single chapter; crabs of the rocky shore, high in the intertidal, are in a separate section from crabs of lower intertidal zones or sandy beaches.”  It was the students and grand-students of Ricketts who created the Monterey 


Bay Aquarium, which is likewise 



organized not by separate species, like old aquariums, but by habitats – Kelp Forest, Deep Reef, Sandy Seafloor, OpenOcean etc, neighborhoods.  Even the “Splash Zone” is not a cute name for the kids’ area, but a term from Ricketts, the high intertidal, where the waves splash.

 

Ok, but what about the masks and the ocean?  Back in April I wrote in this weekly blog that Covid-19 does not live at sea (other viruses do), but I did propose a theology of viruses – check it out at http://bluetheologytideings.blogspot.com/2020/04/corona-virus-at-sea.html

 

Masks are a paradox because they both separate us and connect us.  They separate and protect me from the dangerous sneezes of others, and my sneezes from them.  But masks also connect us – they prove dramatically, lethally, that one people can sicken others, or worse.  When one suffers, all suffer.  We’re in this together. No person is an island, or lives on an island.  Or dies alone on an island. We’re all connected.

 

Rickets didn’t call his book “The Study of Ocean Animals and Plants” or even “The Study of Marine Habitats.”  He used the word “Between.”  He talked all the time about “inter-“ I think he coined the term “intertidal.”  Oceans are in-between places, in between land masses.  And oceans, like masks,  both connect and separate.  The Pacific separates us from Asia, and at the same time it connects us.  That blue is so vast that Thailand monsoons don’t wreck our shores, but we do feel the effects of earthquakes and tsunamis even this far away, and ocean currents run shore to shore.

 

So wearing a mask doesn’t literally save a fish’s life, but it does remind us how deeply connected we are, how we are a “between” people, in our towns, our nations, our world.  Our so-called freedom to do whatever we want stops right at the deadly cough, the in-between that is between you and me.  Our intertidal.

 

And masks remind us that this invisible thing called air, that we blithely march through and breathe through every second of the day, air carries life and it carries death.  And where does that air come from?  – the ocean.    75% of all oxygen we breathe comes from ocean plants, and all weather comes from the ocean.  As we live and breathe, or as we breathe and die, it is the ocean, connector and protector, we have to thank. 

 

Stay safe out there.

________ 

I post these ocean devotions every Wednesday here and on Facebook.  I got my mask from another fab aquarium, the Aquarium of the Bay, at Pier 39 in SF.  They sell many different cute mask animals.  Buying their masks also supports their work, which is another way to protect the ocean. Check out a cool video about Ricketts, www.thegreattidepool.org

Wednesday, July 29, 2020

Coral Castle/Breathing Underwater

Coral Castle/Breathing Underwater

“The sea crept higher, till it reached my door.
And I knew, then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning.
That when the sea comes calling, you stop being neighbors,
Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance neighbors,
And you give your house for a coral castle,
And you learn to breathe underwater.”

You may recognize these concluding words of the poem “Breathing Under Water,” by Sister Carol Bieleck, RSCJ, if you’ve read the fabulous book of the same title by Franciscan Father Richard Rohr, about Spirituality and the 12 Steps.

In a Blue Theology prayer book of “Ocean Devotions,” this one could be my Call to Worship.

Here’s the whole poem.  Just read it and let it “sink” in.  I then add a few reflections, including a cool idea about how coral itself breathes underwater, and helps us all breathe as well. 

But, really, the poem sinks/floats on its own – it might be best just to let the deep mystery be, leave that tender wet moment alone.

Breathing Under Water
I built my house by the sea.
Not on the sands, mind you;
not on the shifting sand.
And I built it of rock.
A strong house
by a strong sea.
And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.
Good neighbors.
Not that we spoke much.
We met in silences.
Respectful, keeping our distance,
but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.
Always, the fence of sand our barrier,
always, the sand between.
And then one day,
-and I still don’t know how it happened –
the sea came.
Without warning.
Without welcome, even
Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand like wine,
less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.
Slow, but coming.
Slow, but flowing like an open wound.
And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death.
And while I thought the sea crept higher, till it reached my door.
And I knew, then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning.
That when the sea comes calling, you stop being neighbors,
Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance neighbors,
And you give your house for a coral castle,
And you learn to breathe underwater.

-Rohr uses the poem’s imagery to offer, in his words, “some underwater breathing lessons for a culture and a church that often appears to be drowning without knowing it,” trapped in the rising tide of brokenness and addiction, needing to surrender to God.  Rohr calls the 12 Steps “12 Breathing Lessons.”  Having had a spiritual awakening, “We can breathe, and we can even breathe under water, because the breath of God is everywhere.”
-“Breathing under water doesn’t make sense,” writes Fr. Arthur MacKay in a lecture based on Rohr’s book.  “God acting on us does not make sense– in a world where we thought we succeeded, or failed on OUR OWN…  It is the opposite of what we expect, a paradox.”  Rohr calls that paradox healing, salvation, recovery.  
-Why is a castle made of coral so intriguing?  I had a fishbowl in college with a fabulous castle my goldfish swan in and through.  My mother read me Robert Louis Stevenson’s  A Child’s Garden of Verses, and I can still recite the poem of a little boy dreaming as he sends boats of stick and leaves down river; “Green leaves a floating, Castles of the foam, Boats of mine a-boating, Where will all come home?”  Castles of the foam.  I want to live there in that mysterious wet palace.

-Talk about mystery – coral.  It does breathe underwater.  It looks like rock, forms solid reefs.  But coral is an animal.  And coral has its own in-house food service – ocean algae, a plant, lives in symbiosis with and within the coral.  Animal and plant each ensure the other will live – structure and safety for the plant, built-in food for the coral animal.  And while coral reefs cover only 0.0025 percent of the oceanic floor, those resident plants inside the coral generate much of the Earth’s oxygen.  Breathing for themselves underwater, corals also help create the oxygen that keeps us alive. 

Another reason to move into the coral castle.  There we can breathe.

I post these ocean devotions every Wednesday here and on Facebook.  Dive in with me!

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Sandcastle Theologian

Sandcastle Theologian
Paul Tillich built sandcastles all his life.  First on the sands of the Baltic Sea as a child and as an adult.  Then in the US, from his 40’s long into retirement, on the Atlantic beaches at his beloved home on the eastern tip of Long Island. 
I have always pictured Tillich as a man of cities, this profound Protestant theologian.  He taught in urban, industrial Berlin, Dresden, and Frankfort until the Nazis forced him to flee Germany.  In 1933 the faculty of Union Theological Seminary all agreed to take a cut in pay to fund Tillich’s escape and new life in the bustle and business of New York City, where he lived the rest of his life.
But Tillich credited time spent on the coast and by the sea with inspiring many of his radical new ideas and new language of theology. 
(This is a longer post than I usually do, reprinted from another website I used to write for.  Tillich is hard to edit/summarize, but if you can, keep reading to the end for a sweet Frederick Buechner story about Tillich building in the sand and weeping.)
In his late career reflection On the Boundaries: An Autobiographical Sketch, Tillich frames his whole life as a series of paradoxes, boundaries he straddled, one of which is “The Boundary of City and Country.”  He writes:
“The weeks and later months that I spent by the sea every year from the time I was eight were even more important [than his family background] for my life and work.  The experience of the infinite bordering on the finite suited my inclination toward the boundary situation and supplied my imagination with a symbol that gave substance to my emotions and creativity to my thought.  Without this experience it is likely that my theory of the human boundary situation, as expressed in Religious Work, might not have developed as it did.
“There is another development to be found in the contemplation of the sea; its dynamic assault on the serene firmness of the land and the ecstasy of its gales and waves.  My theory of the “dynamic mass” in the essay “Mass and Spirit” was conceived under the immediate influence of the turbulent sea.  The sea also supplied the imaginative element necessary for the doctrines of the Absolute as both ground and abyss of dynamic truth, and of the substance of religion as the thrust of the eternal into finitude. 
"Nietzsche said that no idea can be true unless it was thought in the open air.  Many of my ideas were conceived in the open and much of my writing done among trees or by the sea.  Alternating regularly between the elements of town and country always has been and still is part of what I consider indispensable and inviolable in my life.”
Tillich can be a bit dense and abstract.  Let me unpack the above quotation for its “marine theology.” 
§      Coast and ocean give Tillich an imaginative symbol for the human experience of “the infinite bordering on the finite” and of religion as “the thrust of the eternal into finitude.” Ocean is the eternal, the infinite, while we land mammals are dependent on the land, the finite, but drawn to the depths, to the infinite.  We are boundary, coastal people, longing for the infinite. 

§     The infinite he also calls “the depths” and “the abyss” (which in Greek means ocean depths) and writes in a sermon, “The name of infinite and inexhaustible depth is God.  That depth is what the word God means.”

§   Tillich likes the word “dynamic” – the dynamics of faith, and here, “the dynamic, ecstatic ocean” and “the Absolute (God) as ground and abyss of dynamic truth.”

§    True ideas come from the open air, and open sea.  Tillich loved cities, but he had studied German Romanticism, that we experience God in nature.  In several sermons he condemns our utilitarian view of nature and how we must hear nature itself longing and crying for salvation.

But Tillich not only thought “deep” thoughts at the sea.  He played there.  I’m reading a biography of Tillich in which a grainy snapshot of a Long Island Tillich sandcastle appears.  There are also all kinds of stories about his extensive travels, long walks, mountain climbing, and rambles by the sea. 

And there is this beach story about Tillich that Frederick Buechner relates.
“They say that whenever the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich went to the beach, he would pile up a mound of sand and sit on it gazing out at the ocean with tears running down his cheeks. One wonders what there was about it that moved him so.
“The beauty and power of it? The inexpressible mystery of it? The futility of all those waves endlessly flowing in and ebbing out again? The sense that it was out of the ocean that life originally came and that when life finally ends, it is the ocean that will still remain? Who knows?
“In his theology Tillich avoided using the word God because it seemed to him too small, denoting only another being among beings. He preferred to speak instead of the Ground of Being, of God as that which makes being itself possible, as that because of which existence itself exists. His critics complain that he is being too metaphysical. They say they can't imagine praying to anything so abstract and remote.
“Maybe Tillich himself shared their difficulty. Maybe it was when he looked at the ocean that he caught a glimpse of the One he was praying to. Maybe what made him weep was how vast and overwhelming it was and yet at the same time as near as the breath of it in his nostrils, as salty as his own tears.”
Why is it so sweet to picture Tillich doing the childlike playful act of making a sandcastle?  Why are we surprised to hear of him sitting on a pile of sand and weeping?  Maybe because we believe the stereotype of German sternness or that theologians repress their feelings?  Do we assume that academics stay inside all day?  Can one have such “deep” profound ideas and then spend hours building something that the tide will destroy?  
This ocean person is simply grateful that Tillich followed his countryman Nietzsche’s idea that true ideas must be thought in the open air.  For me to be able to finish this essay, I had to take a walk outside.  Thanks, Paulus.
___________
I post these ocean devotions every Wednesday here and on Facebook.  Come and sea.