More on the unity of religions

I came across a pretty nice quote by Cheri Huber in SFGate's Finding My Religion column:

Through seeing the [spiritual] transformation that's possible in my life I grew to love all spiritual practices and religions.

[Question:] All of them?

Yes, because at their heart, at their core is the same desire to be one with that which animates us, that which gives us life.

This is pretty much what I have seen as well, in a vision I had in the desert at Burning Man 2003. (No, I was completely sober!) Meeting a woman who had been in the hospital for leukemia for the previous two years made me intensely aware of how incredibly fleeting life is but how lucky we are for it, and I had to ride out to the open playa to be with all that this brought up. I saw a giant sun, and there was only this giant sun, on which were little "solar flares" that instantaneously winked in and out of existence. Even though these "flares" vanished before I could mentally "turn to look at them," I knew that they were all the possible charactistics with which you might describe someone, good, bad, indifferent, in all extremes and everything in between. I saw that the whole ranges of human behavior were only manifestations of this one sun, the "source" or "reality" behind everything. At the time I thought of it as "just the fact of being alive" or "just wanting things to be better", but it is clearly the same thing to which Ms. Huber refers, the "thing" beside which there is nothing else. All religions are, and can only be, intimations of this one truth in some form or other. More mundanely, all human activity can be seen as largely inchoate grasping toward this source, trying to acquire and control it without realizing that we are it.

Moving up in the world

By about 12 feet, that is. We're all moving to the flat upstairs from where we used to live. Overall, this is promising in terms of getting more sunlight, but for now there are the disruptions of not having easy phone and internet access, and having all our stuff in places where we're not exactly sure where it is or how to make use of it. I'll send out an email with our new address and phone number when we get it, but, in the meantime, the old ones will work for us.

J Moves Onward (Backward?)

Okay, just to let you non-parents know the kind of things you're reduced to when dealing with a newborn, J pooped. Especially since we'd been used to his pooping three or more times a day when fresh out of the oven, we were growing alarmed by his not pooping for 2.5 days or so, even though the books warned that rate of pooping would decrease over time. However, now, he just let out the biggest, goopiest poop I've ever seen from him. The thing is, I'd love to have a shirt or pair of pants that cooked-pumpkiny color of brownish orange (dyed, not stained).

Escape to Portland

When we received the announcement from an Oregon winery I like a lot for their harvest celebration last Saturday, L, tired of being in the house with me and J so much, suggested we go. I shrugged and said, "Okay." We took Amtrak's Coast Starlight up to Portland, stayed a few days there, and took the train back. The first night we had to stay in a regular hotel, but the next days we stayed at the Hosteling International hostel in NW Portland. It was new and superb, highly recommended.

Saturday, we drove out to the winery in Carlton. The countryside gets rural quickly, and is quite lovely, with gently rolling hills of fields, orchards, farm buildings. We had a great time at the tasting, with the proprietor / winemaker's wife holding J for a while, indulging ourselves in buying a half case on futures of their best 2005 wine. Scott is very enthusiastic about this wine (and about the 2005 vintage in general), calling it his "favorite wine he's made," and with good reason. It's delicate, subtle, and complex, but with plenty of strength and tannin to hold it together for a long time. When I described to the other winemaker (Kelly) that the wine was being to reticent for me to tell what it had to offer, she suggested that I put my hand over the top of the glass and shake it up and down to aerate it. It would never have occurred to me to be so violent, but it did work very well to open up the wine. Getting home was more problematic, as J would be put into the carseat only to start wailing a mile or two later. We'd pull off and think we had him settled down only to repeat the scene. But we eventually made it home just fine.

Sunday, we walked several blocks to a very lovely classical Chinese garden, recognizing along the way, an elegant urban park that had been a setting in an otherwise terrible movie.

The train rides were fun and pleasant. Or at least I had fun figuring out how to work the bunk beds in the cramped rooms, and sleeping in them for a few hours at a stretch. J liked the train a lot. As people pointed out to us, all we had to do to rock him was just to hold him. He liked the scenery going by, even if he likely couldn't actually focus that far away.

But we've been back for a few days, and are working on moving all our stuff to the flat upstairs. (Mail will always still reach us at our present address.)