Who You Gonna Call?

Ghosts are a lot like gods: imaginary friends (or enemies).

In Thailand, where Buddhism is a mash up with Hinduism and animism, one of the technologies for protecting yourself from evil spirits is to wear an amulet (or two or three or...).

Although invisible agents are rarely mentioned in the literature of non-theistic western Buddhism, the cosmology of the Pali Canon does include devas and other beings who dwell in various non-earthly realms. While the Buddha disallowed a monotheistic creator god, ghosts,are a fact of life for most people in Thailand where they play featured roles in horror films and on the TV soaps. Brahma, the high Hindu god, is the most prominent icon in many shrines outside houses and businesses, and Ganesh, the Remover of All Obstacles, is not far behind. Unseen spirits can be appeased not only with protective amulets but also with elaborate sacred tattoos as well as by means of a ritual and blessing at the local temple.

Proponents of the new inter-disciplinary study of religion, under the umbrellas of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, say belief in gods and other unseen agents is the default position for a mind that evolved over 10,000 years ago to facilitate detection of dangerous predators.  For a Paleolithic hunter, the survival rate was better for guessing that any movement in the forest was a lion out to eat him than to think that it was only wind in the trees and be mistaken.   These new theorists and researchers argue that the human brain evolved a tool kit of mental facilities that permitted individuals and groups to flourish under harsh conditions so different from today's world.  In addition to the agent detection ability, early humans made sense out of their situations by telling causal narratives to explain natural events, and understood that others had minds similar to their own (what's been called an innate theory of mind).  These conjectures have been tested, for example, by observing early childhood development.  The great theoretical leap in the last 20 years was to conclude that religious beliefs are a byproduct of cognitive evolution and that the human mind is thus primed for religion, the Agent writ large.

Humans continue to personify and anthropomorphize indiscriminately.  The god of Judaism, Christianity and Islam is similar to a person in that he (always a "he") listens and speaks and can be praised (or blamed) for the causation of inclement weather and success (or failure) in business.  But concepts about god as a person are counterintuitive in that he is also all-knowing and sees everything at the same time.  Theorists like Pascal Boyer argue that for a god concept to originate and spread it most be only minimally counterintuitive. Talking trees are acceptable but not an all-powerful cockroach.  Gods are not always like the monotheistic Big Guy.  The pantheon of gods on Olympus as well as the Roman deities possessed numerous frailties.  And the devas in the Buddhist heaven are far from enlightened.

I tried, Lord knows I tried, to believe in God.  My first exposure to religion that I remember was listening to the parables of Jesus dramatized for the radio on "The Great Story Every Told" when I was in the 2nd grade.  In Vacation Bible School we made pictures of the stories out of pieces of felt. While Jesus seemed like a nice man I had little thought of God.  My mother took my brother and I to various churches when we were small but my father claimed he was able to worship in his own fashion on the golf course each Sunday.  If there were moral lessons in my family, they weren't reinforced with reference to God's punishments and rewards. According to theorists, religion is a byproduct of the evolution of the human brain, and not attributing causes to unseen agents goes against the human grain.  While I didn't see gods, I do recall personifying my car and kicking a huge dent in the fender one day when it refused to start.

Some theorists believe religion is all about gods.  Even prominent atheists like Dawkins and Harris focus their ire mostly on the stupidity of believers in an omnipotent being that grants prayers and protects the worthy from the wiles of Satan.  They have a harder time criticizing the "spiritual but not religious" folks who eschew both religious institutions and dogma while holding onto some form of transcendent meaning that goes beyond the obvious.  They rarely mention the movement of Deists following the French Enlightenment Revolution that included such prominent thinkers as Voltaire in France and Thomas Jefferson in America; Jefferson edited the Gospels to his liking and read the Koran.  Even more slippery are those who define their God simply as nature or love.

Thomas Merton, monk

Years after Vacation Bible School, I found myself living in Connecticut and working in Manhattan. In the intervening years I'd run the gamut of New Age thought, from flying saucers to Theosophy, Subud to Transcendental Meditation, Gurdjieff and Ouspensky to est.  While I earnestly tried to believe in whatever metaphysical reality I was trying on for size, my religious quest was ultimately one big head trip.  Little of it stuck, beyond the feeling that life was not enough, that there must be some mystery to be revealed, some wisdom to obtained, and that I'd unfortunately missed it through my own many faults.  A Catholic friend, with whom I'd taken the atheist position in our arguments about quantum physics and science, suggested I read Thomas Merton.  I began with a biography that told me he'd died in 1968, electrocuted by an ungrounded fan in Bangkok.  Merton's down-to-earth approach to the Christian mystical tradition, and his social justice writings about Vietnam and the civil rights movement, converted me to an openness to spirituality I'd not experienced with all my false starts.  He became my guru through his writings. Later I added Simone Weil and Nicholas Berdyaev to my list of mind-changing thinkers.

What I'm trying to understand here in this blog post (and in more to come) is why I continue to find value in religious language and spiritual aspirations even though I consider myself now to be a firm anti-metaphysical materialist who is convinced that human beings are solely body-brain organisms without souls or a future beyond death.  Nevertheless, the evolution of our brains has given us such marvelous adaptions or byproducts (the jury is still out on this) as language, science, culture, and, yes, religion. Religion has a function if not an essence.  People who trust in the myths of their religion tend to live longer, happier lives and die with less stress and resistance.  Religious groups are more cohesive than groups with less passionate identities and also last longer and are more successful in inter-group conflicts.  All of this can be argued without the least belief in divine revelation or the truths of religious tradition.

Living in a Buddhist country now and teaching English to monks, I go through the motions of observance and practice respectfully without taking it all too seriously.  From what I understand of the Buddha's teachings, particularly on the mind, I consider him certainly on a par with Plato and Socrates.  In Thailand there is far less of a separation between the secular and the sacred; going to the temple, feeding monks, decorating shrines, and making merit is just what everyone does, and it's cultural all the way down.  My wife says her prayers for the well-being of all existents, and I echo that hope.  But I have no sense of the spirits everywhere here as those Thais raised in this belief, not the least in large trees that are wrapped with colored banners. And despite a brain evolved for that perception, I usually seek mechanical explanations for the hints of agency I detect in the natural world.

Don Cupitt

The religion that I support unequivocally wherever it can be found is this-worldly, not looking to an afterlife to justify the present. It promotes tolerance and compassion towards all others, human, animal, as well as natural forms.  This faith (or trust as the word was originally intend) seeks justice for all as a reasonable goal and gives aid to the poor and helpless wherever they are found.  Its stories and myths are guides for understanding rather than claims for literal truth.  My religion revels in music, dance and art as a way to ritualistically celebrate life in all its manifestations.  And that's just for starters.  I'm only climbing on the shoulders of a prophetic professor and priest, Don Cupitt, who has put together what he calls "The Religion of Ordinary Life."  You can see the tenets of this faith at his web site. Cupitt, now in his 80s, accepts the term "secular Christian" and is a good friend of my favorite secular Buddhist, Stephen Batchelor.

When I went through the catechism process to convert to Roman Catholicism in 1984, I recall that one of the teachers told us that Buddhism and Hinduism were "cults."  I kept my mouth shut then and confined his idiocies to the closet where the other beliefs I bracketed were hidden: the virgin birth, Jesus as God, the Trinity, miracles, etc.  For a number of years I felt like a schizophrenic, going through the motions at mass and trying to believe in God and the traditions of the church, while also valuing insights from other religions and assorted heretics.  Gradually I found support for my half-assed faith within the church and without.  The closed nature of religious orgaizations makes complete honesty of the contents of one's mind rather difficult to reveal.  When I finally took everything out of the closet I found many like-minded believers who understood.

I continue to unpack my closet.  If you need some help, call me!

d

The Meaning of Life

This cartoon is meant to be a joke, but in my case it's true.  The meaning of my life is largely told in this blog and on my Facebook page, expressed in the links, opinions, photos, check-ins and events of my life as it unfolds now in the first half of 2015 (tho since I live in Thailand I should perhaps write it as 2558, since the Thai year dates from the death of the Buddha).

In other words, after too many years of looking for the meaning of life in various forms of religion, different kinds of spiritual practices from the eucharist to meditation, and books about same, in connection with formal study toward several degrees in schools, I reached the conclusion that the search (quest or journey) only leads back to my own life.  There is no salvation, wisdom or enlightenment out there.  As T.S. Eliot so beautifully put it,

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

I've had a long, good life with no regrets for any of the detours, wrong turnings, and missteps in my years of exploration.  I've learned something about myself in all of the experiences I have ever had, the good ones as well as the disasters (and there have been not a few of those).  But judging by the cartoons in Google Images about the one true meaning of life, it still remains a preoccupation of many.  There are lots of meaningful activities, from stamp collecting and and drug taking to sexual addiction and political campaigning.  Whatever we choose to do defines our identity and self-image and imbues our life with purpose (even crime is purposeful).  The most common way that people seek a purpose for their life is through religion.

This post is a continuation of my last when I set out to "find my religion" but only came up empty handed.  Wherever you look these days, religion is in the news. The main topic is Islamic fundamentalism with fanatics slaughtering the innocent in Manhattan, Kenya, Nigeria, Boston, Syria and other Middle East countries.  In Israel, Jewish fundamentalists (another term for truest believers) are attacking and injuring Palestinians in order to steal their land, with the connivance of Israeli forces that have bombed Gaza back to the stone age.  Fundamentalist Christians in America may be more benign, but with the aid of right-wing state politicians they are shrinking the voting franchise to remove the poor and minorities, and legislating against sexual tolerance.  Even Buddhists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka are forming racist nationalist fronts to protect their religion from what they mistakenly see as a threat from the small minorities of  Muslims and Hindus. All of these fundamentalisms share a similar characteristic -- hatred of those who are different.  While most of the conflicts may only be about struggles over land and the state (or tribe), the result of these comparisons is to tar "religion" -- whatever that word may denote -- with the bloody brush of hatred.

Karl Marx

Despite arguments from social scientists in the last century that modernization would gradually remove the need for religion, what Marx called "the opium of the people," it has not disappeared. The fall of the Soviet Union resulted in the return of orthodox Christianity, now a conservative force. Globalization has not been a melting pot, despite Facebook, Starbucks and American films. The reason for this was recognized by Marx who identified religion as the "sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions." Religion was an antidote at the time for the horrific conditions in the satanic mills of early capitalist industry.  Wherever people lack jobs, education and opportunities, and are oppressed by outside forces, they turn to the consolations of religion.  And this religion is not necessarily the "love your neighbor" kind.  It is often a tribalistic faith, viciously insular and exclusive, and it promotes views and attitudes that demonize outsiders in an attempt to provide a security and control that can only be illusory.

Manchester U fans vs Roma

What does this tribal religion have to do with gods, dogma, rituals and institutions, the stuff of atheist and anti-religious discontent? Very little, and only as a discourse that separates the sheep from the goats.  This religion is not about beliefs and propositions that can be discussed rationally, but it is rather a form of idolatry and identity somewhat similar to that of the football hooligans who regularly run riot after European games.  A professor of mine wrote a book about National Socialism in Germany as a religious movement.  Gang membership among minorities gives them a home in a strange culture.  Even second-generation immigrants in Britain feel so out of place that they run off to join ISIS in a search for meaning in their lives.

Karen Armstrong

Historians of religion like Karen Armstrong and Robert Wright try to sketch an evolution from the religious practices of hunter-gatherer tribes to the institutionalized faith that provided social glue for empires, from Constantine's Rome to Mughal India and the Ottomans.  Like empires, however, religious unity constantly broke into pieces.  Christianity fragmented in 1000 AD and again in the 16th century.  There is so little similarity between the Anglicans, the tent evangelists in the southern U.S. and the proselytizing Mormons in Latin America (to name only three sects) that "Christianities" is a better label for the largest of the so-called "world" religions.  The split between Sunni and Shia Islam is now well known because of news events (although Bush and his advisers to their peril knew little of it before invading Iraq). And even Buddhists have trouble finding commonalities between the three major divisions (four if you count western Buddhism which is quite different from the Asian varieties).

Christians in America hate the gays, Israelis hate the Arabs, warriors of ISIS hate all westerners, Sri Lankan Buddhists hate the Tamil Muslims, Hindu nationalists hate the Sikhs, Bangladeshi Muslims hate Buddhists and Burmese Buddhists hate the Muslims of Rakhine state.  And maybe even the Protestants in Northern Ireland still hate the Catholics!  Hatred is an equal opportunity passion.  What we hate too often defines who we are.

These hatreds resemble in many ways the antagonisms between tribes more than 10,000 years ago before many of the wandering peoples settled down in place to invent agriculture.  Before the population explosion when tribes stopped moving long enough to grow crops and raise animals for food, there was enough land so that tribes could remain self-contained and avoid others.  After agriculture, there would be struggles over land, and after the rise of city states and empires, struggles over territory.  Religion was the handmaiden, holding people together in common rites and rituals and separating them from the unbelievers.  It's still performing that role.

Robert Wright, among others, thinks that despite setbacks, religion has evolved.  Wright, a cognitive psychologist who describes himself as a materialist and an agnostic, defends moral progress in his fascinating 2009 book, The Evolution of God.  Since the pre-agriculture tribal period, people have gradually learned the benefits of extending moral consideration to those outside their own tribe.  “As the scope of social organization grows, God tends to eventually catch up, drawing a larger expanse of humanity under his protection, or at least a larger expanse of humanity under his toleration.”  This progress can be seen in the sentiments of the Golden Rule, "love your neighbor as yourself," which can be found in all religions. It's also taken time for "neighbor" to be seen as everyone on the planet.

From this perspective, religion is not about gods, heaven or hell, orthodoxy, and the nation favored by the most powerful deity, but about behavior in this life that leads to peace.  Morality is mutual interest, the compassion that arises when you contemplate the suffering of others that is much the same as yours.  Each of the so-called world religions has various foundational scriptures that believers cherry pick to find rules that align with their prejudices and exclusionary views. Homosexuality and abortion have become important to fundamentalist Christians despite their absence from most texts while other prohibitions are often ignored.  If religion had no other purpose other than to guide and encourage us into getting along with each other, it would probably fulfil the aims of the different founders.  Everything else, St. Aquinas said of human additions to the divine, "are of straw."

As for the meaning of life?

Finding My Religion

Over on Facebook I often find myself verbally butting heads with a co-worker from long ago over the topic of religion.  Even though I self-identify these days as a materialist and consider the twenty years I spent as a Catholic convert to be memories of times past, my position in our debates is always in defense of religion Whenever I link to a story that shows religion in any kind of a favorable light, I trust that my friend will soon comment on the dangers of all metaphysical world views, the superiority of science to religion, and the religious education of the young as a form of child abuse (here I'm doing a gross disservice to his more nuanced arguments).

Religion in all of its many forms has been a major curiosity of mine since I was seven and attended summer vacation Bible school at the Baptist church in Greensboro, North Carolina.  These days I usually write "religion" with scare quotes because I think no one has a comprehensive definition of the phenomenon with which I can agree.  The old "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck" argument no longer seems valid.  It's not that there aren't any definitions but that there are way too many and most seem inadequate for describing what people do and think that might be called "religious." Those with the most rigid definitions tend to be atheists, those critics Schleiermacher called religion's "cultured despisers." In my experience, they inevitably try to dictate what the faithful must believe and then condemn it. Whenever I see this happening, I go into lawyer mode for the defense.

Now that I'm in the last quarter of my century, I live in Thailand where the religion of 97% of the population is said to be Buddhism. Christianity has never gotten much of a foothold here, and those Muslims living in the south have been trying to break away for decades. While Buddhism isn't officially the state religion, it's included in the government's purview and the current military dictatorship is trying to wrest control for prosecuting misbehaving monks from the ruling Sangha Council.  Buddhist temples here in Bangkok are almost as common as 7-11s.  They're usually crowded with Thais "making merit" (tam bun in Thai) by bringing gifts (often an orange bucket full of trivial items for a 20 baht donation) and receiving a blessing from the monk on duty.  We keep an altar of icons atop our bookshelf (photo above) and refresh the flowers and liquid offerings every Wan Phra (monk day on the four phases of the moon). My wife says her prayers each night before going to sleep, and when I ask what she prays for, she says "that everyone be happy."

My objective in this post and perhaps a few more in the future is to ponder the word "religion" and what the term might point to that both pleases and upsets so many.  I've written much about my own experiences with religious beliefs and practices here during the last nine years.  After all, it's the first topic in the title of my blog!  Now, however, I'd like to think a bit deeper about the disparate reactions to the phenomena that people generally think of as religious.  A number of my friends get absolutely venomous about any form of religion, and slam all of it as backward, stupid and possibly lethal. These days, fundamentalism, Islamic as well as Christian, is the object of their ire, but many atheists, new and old, argue that tolerance towards any religious thinking or activity is ludicrous.  Just as anti-drug campaigns declared that smoking marijuana opened the door to cocaine and heroin, anti-religion activists believe that even liberal or progressive religion is a stepping stone to fundamentalist extremism.

Maybe I'm tolerant toward religion because I never went to Catholic school and got my butt slapped by a nun with a ruler.  My mother joined the most fashionable churches in the many places where we moved as I was growing up while my father claimed he found his god on the golf course.  I learned about the different world religions from a couple of books given to me by a friend in high school.  In college another friend's outwardly respectable mother communicated telepathically with flying saucers and wrote a book called Wisdom of the Universe.  For a time I took part in her study group and fell in love with all the kookiness of New Age Thought that predates by many years the hippies and other more modern New Agers. For years I thought there must me something more to life and pursued a plethora of spiritual disciplines, from chanting, meditation and genuflecting to alcohol and psychedelics.  But I never had that AHA! moment I thought and hoped was possible at the end of the journey.

Despite the disappointment of not achieving what was after all only a creation of my imagination, I have remained compassionate toward others who continue to seek what I did not discover. It's up to each of us to find our own way, so why be angry with anyone who choses a path you would not? Of course it's easier to be tolerant of the seekers than of the true believers who think they've found the truth and urge, nay demand, that you recognize theirs and validate it by joining them.  I suspect the anti-religion activists are more angry about the finders than the seekers.  There is something obnoxious about the missionary who solicits your conversion and won't take "no" for an answer.

Atheism is not really an adequate term for despisers of religion.  It denies the existence of gods and other metaphysical entities but doesn't really get at the whole "spiritual but not religious" movement of seekers today.  What happens when you pull the rug of religion out from under their feet? Buddhism, at least the modern form of it in the west, gets a pass since many of its proponents argue that Buddha didn't propose a god.  There is ample evidence that Buddhism was re-tooled in Thailand, Tibet and Sri Lanka for western consumption, made to seem more scientific and anti-metaphysical than the early scriptures would indicate. There are passages in the Pali scripture where Buddha speaks of devas and the different realms of heaven and hell, embarrassingly close to the monotheistic cosmologies.  Visitors to Thailand are surprised to see so many icons of Hindu deities in shrines, to learn of the popular belief in spirits, both good and bad, and to hear of the many methods of protection against spirits enjoyed by Thais, from tattoos to amulets.

Despisers of religion prefer science based on evidence and reason as the best description and guide for reality.  The scientific method yields truth, or at least the best hypothesis until a better one comes along to explain the origin or the mechanics of how life works.  Any other method comes up with superstition and idolatry.  Religion is ignorance writ large.  To deny the facts of science is stupid, and dangerous.  After explicating the mechanics of evolution, Richard Dawkins has devoted his life to stamping out the disgusting vermin of religion.  Others have joined him: the late iconoclast Christopher Hitchings, philosopher Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris (who says he's a Buddhist) and the comic commentator Bill Maher who lampooned religious belief in his documentary "Religulous."  At times their activities have the air of a crusade.  The social media has allowed atheism to become more vocal and more prominent, although it remains the kiss of death of politicians.

Some pretty scary people can be found at both ends of the spectrum.  In America numerous elected officials are making pronouncements supposedly based on Christian teaching that encourage hatred and discrimination of others.  In the Middle East, fanatics claiming to be Muslims are slaughtering their opponents and anyone who gets in their way with Medieval efficiency.  Buddhists in Myanmar and Sri Lanka declare that Islam is a threat to their nationalist religion.  On the other end of the spectrum, official atheism in the Soviet Union under Stalin and Mao in China was responsible for hardship and death.  The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the Viet Cong in Vietnam destroyed churches and monasteries and tried unsuccessful to stamp out religion.  Eliminating religion is about as successful as forced conversions.  After the breakup of the USSR, orthodox Christianity came back with a vengeance and now is a conservative force in Russia.

Religion is the elephant and we are the blind describing it from different perspectives with only the other senses to go by.  My current point of view is to avoid the word "religion" as much as possible. It has become reified beyond all meaning.  Atheists frequently mean by it the religious institutions, authorities and sacred texts.  It's easy to ridicule the monotheisms by pulling texts out of context from the Bible or Quran.  Religion they believe refers to dogma, to the propositions that followers must affirm according to their leaders.  If you argue that Catholics get abortions and use birth control just like everyone else, they'll argue these are not really Catholics and remove them from the equation.

In place of "religion," there are many alternate ways to describe those participating in religious activities.  Here in Thailand, Buddhism (mixed with Hinduism and animism) is an intricate part of the culture; there is no division between the sacred and the secular which occurred after the French revolution and Enlightenment era in Europe.  One's religion becomes an essential part of one's identity, not unlike the team football fans root for.  The language used by co-religionists solidifies their community and allows members to be recognized.  While fundamentalists treat religious stories as literal truth, many traditions base their meanings on universal myths and pedagogical metaphors. Anthropomorphism, rather than being error, can also be a useful technique for negotiating the dangers of reality. Struggles between religions are quite often a conflict over something else, like land and resources, and religious identity can be used to compel participation.  To see religion as only institutions, authorities and texts is to miss the way that humans have used their imagination to make sense of their reality, and to find truth and beauty in the process.

I was thinking of R.E.M.'s song, "Losing My Religion," when I titled this post, and thinking of it ironically.  But of course I haven't "found" (or "lost") anything.  I was "in the corner" and now I'm out of it.  "Religion" is only a site of contestation, a term of dispute with no pure content.  And yet people fight and die for their religious concepts.  Academics declared for a few centuries that religion was increasingly unimportant and irrelevant.  Advanced civilization and modernity had no need of such illusory thinking.  But of course they were mistaken.  Current events show this.  And yet, no one can agree on what religion is.  How strange!

If these ideas seem scattered, it's because I have been thinking about them for a lifetime and their slipperiness and changeability make it difficult to put them into an organzied form.  If anyone finds these questions and proposals intriguing, and they speak to your condition, please let me know.  If not, no matter.  It's time for me to chew over these matters, organized or not, to find out how and what I think.  I will conclude with a couple of videos on the question of religion which I found interesting. Karen Armstrong is particularly astute at arguing persuasively that the meaning of "religion" today has changed considerably.

Dreaming of California

[This post is written for graduate students in a writing class for monks I'm teaching in Bangkok. Their final assignment for the semester is to contribute a post about their home for the class blog, MCU Travel Blog, and my intention here is to give them an example.]

In a 1965 record, the Mamas and the Papas sang about dreaming of California on a cold winter's day somewhere else where the weather is not so nice.

All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray.

I've been for a walk on a winter's day.

I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A.;

California dreamin' on such a winter's day.

Downtown Santa Cruz

These words of mine are written in a tropical climate where the leaves are never brown and if the sky is gray it's because of farmers burning off their rice fields before summer planting. While I was born elsewhere, I lived for most of 60 years in California, both south and north, and the second half of that time was spent in Santa Cruz on the Bay of Monterey, as close a place to Paradise as I've ever found. California, where I lived in Surf City, is surely my home forever.

Santa Cruz Farmers Market

Growing up in Ohio, North Carolina and Georgia, I was 12 when my father came home one day to tell my mother, brother, grandfather and I that we were moving to Los Angeles where he'd found a job selling plywood in the lumber industry. California!  Where movies are made, and oranges grow on trees! I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.  My goal at this point in life was to become an actor and now I'd have my chance!

My cabin in 2010

After a memorable cross-country trip in our new 1953 Ford sedan, we found a "ranch" house in the northeast suburb of La Cañada with an orange tree in the front yard and four in the back, all full of ripe and delicious naval oranges. Later the back yard trees were uprooted for a swimming pool.  The good life was great!  I attended junior high school, found girlfriends aplenty, dressed like a juvenile delinquent, climbed the rope in gymnastics, played clarinet in the orchestra and was chosen assemblies commissioner to MC at school functions.  Quickly I became a Californian, and every day on the way to school I picked an orange to eat.

Santa Cruz Town Clock

The native population of California was displaced in the 16th and 17th centuries by Spanish conquerers, and then the land became part of Mexico when they broke away from Spain in 1821. Twenty-seven years later gold was discovered in the Sierra mountains and the whole world rushed in to find some.  California was quickly stolen from Mexico and became the 31st state. Queen Calafia was the queen of Amazons in a 16th century Spanish novel.  Today, the state has the 3rd largest U.S. population behind Texas and Alaska, provides most of the fruit and vegetables eaten by Americans, and if it was a country would have the 8th or 9th largest economy in the world.  Non-whites (Mexicans, Asians and blacks) are now 60% of the population.

Santa Cruz Pier and Boardwalk

There are really two Californias, north and south, with different climates and even political leanings. The country's 2nd and 5th largest cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco, preside over each territory. Most of the water is in the north which means and empire dams and pipes to carry this valuable resource have been constructed to quench the thirst of the south.  The state's landscape is 1240 km in length between Mexico and Oregon, and 400 km in width between Nevada/Arizona and the Pacific Ocean. I lived for 20 years in the south, in and around Pasadena where I began my work life as a newspaper reporter. During my time in the rock and roll business I lived in Venice a stone's throw from the sand and surf.

Over the years on frequent trips to the north, where relatives lived in Tiburon and Berkeley, I fell in love with the cooler temperatures and greener hillsides.  San Francisco is a sophisticated city compared to the shabbiness of LA.  My first foray into big-time academia was at UC Berkeley but I dropped out twice, and I worked one summer as a vacation replacement reporter on the San Francisco Chronicle.  The north felt like more my style but I never managed to find a foothold in the city in those early years.

Seals gather beside pier

After getting myself fired as a music biz PR guy, I finally escaped to the north in 1976 and began a long tenure in the coastal city of Santa Cruz, between the redwood-covered hills and the rocky shoreline along the Pacific.  North of Monterey and south of San Francisco, it was a sleepy fishing town until the university and the hippies arrived in the mid 1960s. I lived in both cabins and houses in the mountains where hippies and rock bands (my friend Peter managed one of them) dwelt in communes, as well as down in the flats of the town where the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake disturbed the tranquility of the Victorian neighborhoods.  To make ends meet, I wrote and edited a local newspaper, handled art direction and circulation for a music magazine by commuting over the hill to Cupertino, and managed a database of alumni for the University of California's Santa Cruz campus. At UCSC my dormant curiosity about, well, everything, was aroused and I returned to study, lifting my head from books only after I'd received BA, MA, and finally a Ph.D. degree in the new century.

Ancient redwood trees

Santa Cruz is smallish, with a population now of about 60,000, three-quarters of whom are white.  It began in 1791 as one of the string of Spanish missions to spread religion by the book and the sword (a horribly large number of native Americans died from their ill treatment by the Europeans).   The city was incorporated in 1866 with an economy based on agriculture, lumber, gunpowder and lime (necessary for construction).  The first state park, established by middle class anti-logging activists in the early 1900s (my Ph.D. thesis), was at Big Basin.   Most of the Mexican immigrants, legal and not, currently live in Watsonville in the south county.  It earned the name "Surf City" (contested by Huntington Beach in the south) for the big waves at Steamer Lane next to the lighthouse.

Everyday Dharma

My wife and I raised two kids in the notoriously liberal and free-thinking place and time (Santa Cruz had a Marxist mayor for many years who also taught at the university).  I researched the redwoods and park history for my doctoral thesis, became a Catholic at Holy Cross, and meditated with the Everyday Dharma Sangha down the street. After I began traveling for community college Spanish classes (Mexico, Argentina) and to build houses with Habitat for Humanity in Guatemala, I also helped start an ecumenical spiritual group based on the teachings of Fr. Bede Griffiths who established an ashram for Christians and Hindus in Tamil Nadu, India.  I grew wings in northern California that hadn't yet sprouted during my years in the south.

Sunset along West Cliff

This has become more about my journey than about the landscape that supported and inspired it.  The central coast is incredibly beautiful and many times I drove along the ocean south to Big Sur (where I stayed at the Catholic monastery) or north up to San Francisco.  I sunned, burned and tanned in summers (when the ever-present fog had lifted) on the many gorgeous beaches where the sand is hot but the water too cold usually to swim.  In the hills around the city I hiked alone or with friends through the redwood and fir forests.  Most of the San Lorenzo Valley was clear-cut to rebuild San Francisco after the 1916 earthquake but by the 21st century much had grown back.  During my last and perhaps final visit (the high airfares) in 2010 I tried to hit most of the hot spots I remembered. The downtown area has evolved from the sleepy main street that I saw in 1966 to a cosmopolitan pedestrian mall with trendy shops and restaurants, perhaps too fashionable now for my tastes.

Where I used to teach

And yet...30 years is a long time to spend in a place and I sunk deep roots.  My memories of friends and familiar environments, in the town and up in the mountains, remain strong.  I left to become an expat in Thailand for reasons too numerous to list here, but it was never a rejection of the place that sustained me for so long.  I commune with friends on Facebook and follow news stories like the recent student strike over rising tuition fees that closed down the university for several days.  I left a good chunk of my heart back in California.