I went for a comfortable jog around the neighborhood around Garmin today.  I was literally lost in suburbia, unable to tell where I was or where I was going, if anywhere.  These are my reflections from my three miles spent on the great outdoor treadmill of cul-de-sacs and intentionally tangled roads:

• It’s in the low 50s, wet but only threatening to rain again.  I’m alone on the sidwalk in the gloom.
• I’m passed by some teenagers in their 90s red BMW.  They park on the street two houses down from another 90s red BMW.  They sit in the car, seeming to wait for someone else.  I eventually jog past them.
• I pass driveway after driveway of minivans waiting for me to pass at my pedestrian pace before they can back out onto the street and drive by as far on the other side of the road as possible.
• I shuffle through a four-way stop where a maroon minivan has stopped well in advance of my arrival.  She could have come and gone before I reached the intersection.  I think she’s checking me out. But I can’t tell; the windows are tinted.
• I jog down a slight hill and around a pine-tree lined corner where houses are made of stone.  They stand out against the wood siding of a brick-layer-union-busting neighborhood.  I grew up in a pine forest.  These houses’ facades  remind me of my childhood home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains like a green tree car freshener hanging from a mirror in a sticky-hot car reminds one of an evergreen forest, which is to say: close, but no cigar odor was masked.
• I follow the road side into several dead end cul-de-sacs, which is Catalan for “Bottom of the Bag”.  In the bottoms of these bags, with identical houses all facing each other at slightly different angles, I wonder if anyone looks out and wonders why the neighbors would choose such an ugly shade of taupe.  Dogs bark in warning that this is not a through street and non-residents are not welcome.  If we had wanted people jogging by, we’d have bought the house on Sleepy Hollow Drive.  This is Sleepy Hollow Circle.  You must be lost.
• I look down when I run.  This neighborhood is over 10 years old, which is to say it’s falling apart and the streets have several minor potholes.  I notice some plastic pellets that are evocative of the ammunition from a toy gun I once wanted so badly as a child.  I finally got it one day.  It was my most prized possession.  Until I saw a commercial for something else and wanted it more.  The toy was discarded and the rubber ammo is likely littering a driveway somewhere like plastic land-mines for my brother’s GI-Joes.
• Another minivan passes.  This one’s windows are not tinted.  She gives a sideways, suspicious glance.  This isn’t a through street.
• Does this street go though?  I really am lost.  How could I know where I’m going?  The roads are intentionally obfuscated by real estate planners who want to conceal the fact that an actual meadow was destroyed before East Meadow Lane was built.  Transplanted trees keep me from being able to see the next street over.  The landmarks are houses that all look the same.  Wait–that one is powder blue and this one is baby blue and this one is rotated 30-degrees off from the one up the block.
• More litter:  Soda bottle caps.  Mountain Dew is for snowboarders.  Pepsi is for cool kids with leather jackets.  Coke is for people who want the whole world to get along.  But this cap is useless and the trash can is so far away–except on Tuesday morning, when every trash can is lined up at the end of every drive next to the house numbers and an American flag icon painted on the curb.
• The cool air has made my nose run into my open mouth.  It’s salty–it’s real and honest.  It’s playing outside in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  It’s climbing a pine tree.  It’s the safety of a road in the woods.  It’s living in a stone house and getting warm by a fireplace that isn’t for show.  It’s desire that isn’t sated by high fructose corn syrup or plastic BBs or a red BMW.  It’s personal, but it isn’t alone like these streets are alone.  I haven’t seen a single person who wasn’t safely hidden behind a curtain of steel and crouching airbags.

If you’ve read this far, you either have a biological imperative to love me (Hi Mom!) or you’re really convinced that Suburbia is an environment built to be discarded.  In the latter case, you will also enjoy watching James Howard Kunstler talk about Suburbia at TED.

Inside the church, the liturgy is timeless and uniform yet resonant. Voices in perfect pitch reflect from the high ceiling–impossibly held up by stone–and surround everyone in the creaking wooden pews.

We’re just a little late to the service. As we quietly walk down the aisle trying to find seats we can access without disturbing anyone any more than we already have, we pass all manner of people. Urban dwellers from uptown are seated in their regular seats for the evensong service on the eve of the Second day of Advent. Tourists are sitting next to their shopping bags. The curious are leafing through the prayer book and the handout. The awestruck are staring at the vaulted ceilings or the towering reredos, one of the largest in the world.

In this sacred space, countless souls have worshiped, sought refuge, answers, and above all, meaning. The flow of voices raised and voices whispered, the flood of thoughts turned heavenward in this place are near infinite. For a single moment, fleeting in comparison, my thoughts contribute to this nearly perpetual hymn.

As many others here are, I’m swallowed whole by the immense space around me. It reminds me how small and insignificant I am: my body cannot fill but a portion of a seat, my mind cannot fill but a fraction of this collective consciousness. This place is a monument to mankind’s yearning to understand our place in the world. It is for something. It has a purpose. That purpose is to pull the incorporeal into our world, to connect mankind with the infinity that is God, to find order in the chaos of existence.

Everyone who has slid off 5th Avenue all throughout the service has left behind a frenetic world and entered a world of expansive order. But this bubble of order exists fully seated in the vibrant chaos. Beneath our feet, the rumble of the subway can be felt, reminding us that while we pause, the world continues without us.

As the service ends, we all make our way to the exits and move from this stone and wood chamber into Manhattan. But standing on the steps of St. Thomas, between the world of inward contemplation and the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic of the sidewalk, I stand with a foot in both places. I stand in a spot where countless have stood before me and countless will stand after me.

The dim lighting of St. Thomas blends into the street lights and headlamps of 5th Avenue. As the flood of people rushes by with so many varied life experiences, at once completely unlike my own and yet wholly shared, I see my immortality.  Just standing on these steps is an act of immortality.  I cannot stand where I am without the benefit of an unfathomable chain of events, linking me to the stoneworkers who built these steps, to the ironworker who crafted this handrail, to the priests who perpetuate the Church, to my parents and ancestors who bore me, to the bacteria who share my gut and sustain my life, to the plants I eat, to the very DNA that instructs the construction of my hands and brain.

I stand at the edge of this stream of people on Fifth Avenue who are sculpted by all that came before them and changed by all that is around them; by me. Every decision, known and unknown, changes the outcome and ripples its effects across the universe, creating an indelible mark.  The signal may attenuate or find magnifying constructive interference, but it propagates forever.

The spirit of God hovers above the sidewalks, turning chaos into form into chaos.

I am but one participant in an infinite awareness of the world, endowed with the gift of consciousness, of forethought, memory, and imagination. I am able to internalize the very cosmos–to shrink the universe into a space the size of my head, and yet able to conceptualize its infinite and indomitable size. I am the cosmos, made of the same substance as stars and as dung beetles. Yet in this miracle of being, I am utterly common and quotidian, walking down Fifth Avenue to 50th street to see the tree at Rockefeller Plaza.

This is backwards. The definition of marriage depends on society. Marriage is not a natural phenomenon nor a free-standing institution. Marriage is a social contract defined by society. It is completely mutable and has no inherent nature beyond what society defines for it. If not, then what gives inherent meaning to marriage as between one man and one woman? Is it a gene… the monogamous heterosexual marriage gene??

If there is some biological inherency in one-man-one-woman marriage, then it must be in its current form via evolution. Looking back through the historical record (even the one provided by the Bible), we see that marriage has been one-man-many-women, it has been about finance and property, it has been about alliances and power. It has changed, evolved.

So, either marriage as defined by DOMA (one-man-one-woman) is a consequence of some biological configuration that is subject to change via evolution and has arrived at it’s natural present state through natural selection, or marriage as we know it is socially constructed and has changed because society has changed it.

(I suppose there’s the third option of the Intelligent Designer having created marriage in it’s current state and then a pernicious devil-like character has gone back through history and the Bible and planted false evidence of a different notion of marriage in order to trick us.  But some things are just too absurd to believe)

I doubt anyone takes the biological evolution of the nature of marriage seriously. So we as a society are permitted to change the definition of marriage. Your definition is not sacred and neither is mine. It never has been.  It is now and always has been what we define it to be.

A storm is coming. That storm is the dying fit of those who wish to suppress the democratic process by which states are changing the legal definition of marriage to match the social contract already written by our changing culture. The storm is coming, but you do not need to be afraid. A rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color is what comprises society. And that society is increasingly choosing freedom over fear.

She writes:

I believe that human life is given meaning through the relationship which the individual’s conscious goals have to the civilization, period and country within which one lives. At times, the task may be to fence a wilderness, to bridge a river or rear sons to perpetuate a young colony. Today, it means taking upon ourselves the task of creating one world in such a way that we both keep the future safe and leave the future free.

You can read or listen to her whole essay here.

Read at the inauguration of Barack Obama:

Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.