War: On Christmas

A war on Christmas seems unlikely in a country dominated by Christians, the most vocal (and most powerful?) of which seem to think that their "way of life" is under threat. It makes me wonder if the love affair, replete with domestic violence and all the wonders of domesticity, between 'Merica and Christianity is newly vigorous or if it has been a long running business.

The rhetorical make up of the USA has been multiplicitous for a while, I suspect. With the left hand (the hand of the small sneaky blade), our nation has sold itself as a melting pot, a pluralism, or a multiethnic/racial place. With the right hand (the hand of justice and transparency), our nation has always been Christian in practice and discourse.

So, is the Christian dominance of our country new? No. Is the ironic and duplicitous Christian complaint of liminality new? Kind of. Religious freedom for religious exiles from Europe to 'Merica meant the freedom to be a weird (and often fundamentalist) Christian. I do not think it meant one was free not to be Christian. N. Hawthorne let us know about that. Correct me if I am wrong.

Are we facing a new attack on Christmas and Christianity wherein a completely Christian history of 'Merica is threatened by all those non-Christians? I think we are. Finally, non-Christians are taking up a voice of resistance to the double standards of religious freedom. Admittedly, the public sphere has been scrubbed somewhat clean of religious language in a number ways and places (schools, buildings, etc.).

What's the deal? Are we a Christian country or do we have religious freedom? Is it possible that both are true?

We are free to be Christian in as boring or crazy a way as we please. But, if we dare suggest that late December might be more about family than Jesus, beware.

We are fighting a war. And if you get caught, you will be an enemy combatant.

Help Chris Edit this Personal Statement

This is a draft of my personal statement. It is two pages 1.5 spaced and I want to add a section to address the individual departments I am applying to. The first section has personal history that I can reduce. The second has religious stuff that can be reduced or cut. The third gets a bit long winded on my research interests and can be reduced. Thanks for your help.

A brief history of my path leading to Geography may illuminate my motivations for doctoral work in the field. My final year in high school, I spent staring out the window looking into the sky. Before going to college in Florida, I went to Japan as a Rotary exchange student and lived in the machine of Tokyo. Having escaped the machine in search of freedom I attempted to gain employment as a cowboy in Australia. That failed and I got a job picking grapes and throwing dead sheep into a pile. A few months after I returned to the US, I began my studies at New College, thinking that I would uncover the mysteries of the universe with a thorough study of Physics. After a class called “Asian Religions” my mind was sent tumbling down a very different path. At first, I was attracted to the fact that Buddhism and Hinduism had a broad, cosmological vision of reality. This was consonant with a conviction I held at the time, one that initially led me to physics, that humanity tended to inflate its importance in the grand scheme of things. As I studied the history and philosophy of religion, primarily Buddhism and modern Christianity, this antihumanist bent slowly eroded. Within a few years I was entirely enchanted by the promise of individual enlightenment encoded in Buddhism. While I still did not believe it was possible for a human to fully transcend their mundane circumstances in a passive way (I simply had no evidence for it), I did see that radical change of an individual’s mind was possible and that yogic traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism had cultivated the practices to do so. I was fully taken with the capacity of an individual to be outside of her own context. I had felt this otherness throughout my life as a perpetual outcast. Studying religion revealed examples of practical traditions in which being outside of society as a monastic or spiritual practitioner was allowed for.

Then I went to Nepal and saw living Buddhism. That living religion disillusioned me of my romantic and orientalist notions of the radical freedom of the Buddhist pracitioner. I saw and lived with people who were largely “superstitious” and, to my dismay, were not meditators. The vast majority of the Tibetan refugees I lived with practiced merit accumulation as their primary religious practice. Even the monks I befriended did not meditate. Not only that but they seemed to have a blind faith in the lama as a religious leader. I quickly became disenchanted with Tibetan social structures. After a few months in Nepal, I lightened up a bit and began to probe the subtleties of Tibetan society with a softer eye. What I found was a culture fractured, uprooted, desperate, and savvy about the realities of exile. I also found an oppressive patriarchy that perpetuated religious hegemony, hereditary capital, and rigid class structure at the same time it held up human liberation as its highest value. This apparent paradox did not dawn on me fully until I began my studies in Geography. In the interim years, I spent my time working on several projects. The primary of these was a construction of my own Buddhist practice that dislodged itself from traditionalist visions of Buddhism. In this way I subdivided my study of Buddhism into two not completely separate tracks: study of Buddhist cultural practice as it stands in the light of its own textually inscribed doctrine and study of my own existential being guided by Buddhist principles. While developing an independent post-protestant American Buddhism with a small cohort of friends, I became comfortable with a religious identity (ultimately empty, of course) with which I could negotiate an otherwise raucous cacophony of spiritualist sentiments. In this way, I returned to the Unitarian Universalist fold to find religious community, one that holds my own spiritual practice with respect and honor. With my own Buddhism sustained, I was in an independent position from which to return to the academic study of Buddhist religious history and philosophy; this time within the powerful hermeneutic framework of geography.

There is a special concordance between Buddhism and geography that is probably present in other religious movements, but is particularly compelling in the Tibetan case. The splicing of spiritual experience, religious hegemony, and dramatic landscape demands a sustained analysis of the spatiality of Tibetan Buddhism and the places its practice inscribes on landscape both founded on and driving of discourse. Thus my study has come to a fuller point in which I wish to access and address the variety of forces that create a religious place. Among those, I want to pursue the experience of an individual practitioner, the structures of state tied up in religious hierarchy, the legacy of agrarian capital supporting that structure, the inscription of universalistic discourses upon local landscapes, the resistance of those local landscapes as they are personified by spirits, the compliance of the local after being subjugated by the universalistic bulldozer of Buddhism, the transformation of culture via its landscape, the cosmopolitan project of altruistic Mahayana Buddhism, the colonization of the “barbarous” to support altruism, and the role of advanced and (dis)embodied yogic practice in connecting these structural, discursive, and cosmopolitan/globalizing/universalistic systems with grounded, local, and practical everyday life.

WORT Goes Global

My favorite radio station, WORT, is streaming until the end of the 18th as a test run. This radio station is the soul of Madison. Check out their stream.

Cell Phone: Lost

So, wait a few weeks until I have a new one and then call me. 'Cause I don't have your number any more.

The story is relatively interesting. On Thursday nights I make a pilgrimage to Blue Mounds, WI. This is an odd place where my yoga teacher has opened a Dharma center. It is also a place where Ray-town homey, A. Allred, has moved into a waterless cabin in the woods. I go to Aaron's at night, sit in front of the woodburning stove, untangle the twists of being, disgorge my woman problems, and absorb the quiet of the forest.

In the morning, I get up early to go to yoga practice from 6-8 at the Blue Mounds Dharma Center. Then, I go into the forest for a walk. Today, I went snowshoeing.

As I was clumping along, I thought, "gee, this isn't all that much more efficient than walking in the snow." This is not true, but I was disappointed that the snowshoes were not more buoyant upon the snow.

I tried running. Wow. While striding across the frozen fields on top of the west mound, I realized the effect of snowshoes. I was moving much faster than I thought was possible. It was in the thrall of this excitement that I suspect the small demon I carry on my hip took its leave to lay at the bottom of a foot and a half of snow.

I retraced my steps, had Scott call me, and sat paralyzed with unanchored anxiety. I was so fixed and focused on the ground and any sign of the phone's entry into the powder, my neck began to ache. And after all that wonderful, neck-freeing yoga.

I got back in the car with blue fingers and my corduroy pants inundated with ice and snow. For a moment, the entire world was silent. The pause broke as I felt a vibration on my leg: I could still feel the missing phone ringing! I felt a very deep pull in my stomach as if I wanted the phone so much, I was hungry for it. I was disoriented and confused. What was I going to do without that phone? My eyes focused again on the white field around me. The trees stood silently dormant. The wind began to cover up the cell phone entry point that I had failed to find in the surface of the snow powder.

Then I laughed. It was more like a chuckle. My chest felt light, as if a weight from my left hip had been removed. I have felt oddly free and disconnected all day, as if I really had been let loose from a bond. The phone was a particularly stealthy bond because I could carry it around with me. It was a karmic lodestone that was far denser in its actual weight than I had thought it would be based on its size and gravitational weight. It's actual weight included the massive social node I had sculpted that phone to be. I relied on its powerful little electromagnetism to connect me hundreds to of people. The phone carried that weight and I did not realize how heavy it was until I lost it. It was not the moment at which it parted from my body, I was too delighted to fly across the snow to feel that. It was the moment, or series of moments, in which I realized that I did not have the phone-as-social-node with which to access vast networks of people.

I have been drifting in social anonymity all day.

'Merica the Suspicious

Today's Democracy Now broadcast features the former intelligence officer, William Arkin. He writes/blogs for the Washington Post under the title Early Warning. He talks and blogs about the use of Department of Defense intelligence apparati to surveil peace activists and war resistors in the United States. This does not come as a surprise to me. However, it violates the basic function of a standing army and drives our society closer to the year 1984. Arkin makes the point that the United States itself, as a territory, is a battleground in the war on terror and "we are the potential enemy."

Hawai'i Ultimate

This is not the most seamless connection. But, it is an interesting introduction to my favorite sport and has scenes of Hawai'i which are particularly intoxicating as I sit here in southern Wisconsin loving the sub-freezing weather. Many video introductions to the sport (especially those sanctioned by the UPA) focus on the sport as an athletic competition. This video seems to approach Ultimate as a fuller cultural form; an approach I appreciate. Enjoy if you have uber-broadband.

Snowbound, Walking

Madison snows heavily Saturday and I walked.

There were some rumblings of an excursion to the south side (via the car/coffin), and that was eventually scrapped because the coffin aspect of the car emerged with greater prominence as the evening wore on and the snow accumulated.

Instead, I went for a walk. This was not the kind of walk without destination. This was not the kind of walk for walking's sake. This was a travel, a journey, a quest across the Isthmus to the east side from where I live downtown to meet and greet (an activity Madisonians are oddly prone to in blizzards.

The walk was a purposive spatial flow contained by the fluff and comfort of a blizzard. The containment of the snow storm has been perplexing me since that Saturday night. Somehow, in sub-freezing temperatures, the most compelling way to travel was by foot. The snow did that thing where it falls and enchants my mind with each descending inch as it lightly and then convincingly alights the ground and merges with previous generations of flakes.

The visual field of the snowstorm was luscious. It engendered the feeling of a hug wrapping its long wintering arms around me. It was not just the snow, though. It is only in tandem with my human presence, bundled warmly and dryly against the snow but also with the snow that I was comforted by the snow. The embrace of the blizzard was in the relationship of my loving mind, mystified by beauty, and the mass of the snowfall surrounding me completely.

The snow not only demanded a stop to my machine mediated movement, it called me out of my home into it to be within its oceanic density.