An American Eclipse

Eclipse Watchers at Sea-Tac Airport

I ran with the eclipse across America today, and what a day it was.

It just so happened that August 21 was the day I had a ticket to fly west and visit our daughters and grandchildren in Seattle  -- right along the path of the total eclipse, or just north of it.  I woke up at 4 a.m. and caught a taxi from Manhattan to JFK -- with a young African cabbie.  
     -- You want some music?  he asked as we started out.
    Sure, I said, wondering what he had in mind.  On came Bob Marley.  The reggae beat begged to be turned up.   
   Turn it up, I said.
   -- Oh. you like it?
   Yes!

Ignoring the timed lights on First Avenue, he peeled out at every intersection and slammed on the brakes at the next.  Hitting the highways, we went at least 15 miles over the speed limit all the way.  But there was little traffic on a Monday, so I decided to relax.  Bob Marley had bigger things on his mind.  Move .. Move ...Move.. A Movement.. of the People!

 Alaska Airlines was 30 minutes delayed but our pilot assured us we'd get to Seattle on time. He was a retired Navy Captain, and this, he said, was his "afterlife" job.  Before takeoff he came back into the cabin to brief us on the E-clipse -- that's how he said it.  It would be following us, tailing us across the west and reaching its peak just as we landed.  Still, he warned us, don't look at the sun unless you have those special glasses.  A couple of passengers did have them, but I had neglected to find some.  This was gonna be frustrating.

 Still, I had a window seat on a clear day, and I got my first look ever along the northern border of the US -- narrated by the pilot, whose interest in geology and geography sparked a running account.  We crossed Lake Erie, meandered over Canada and then across the farmland of Wisconsin.  "The Cheesehead State!" cried our captain. 

How many people get enthusiastic when sighting Bismarck, North Dakota?  He did, and I did shortly after that as the flat Midwest farmland broke into a rutted surface, then into stark Black Hills with only patches of farmland, then into a lunar waste with no towns and barely a road.  Then suddenly out of the clouds ahead a whole landscape, blue heaped upon blue, of sheer uninhabitable gorges and peaks -- the Rocky Mountains. "We're goin' over the Continental Divide!" whooped the pilot.  And now the race was on.

In the Shadow of the Bomb

-- By Tom Phillips

In my lifetime, Western Man's greatest fear has always been that he will be "hoist by his own petard," blown up with one of his home-made  bombs.  Baby boomers grew up in the shadow of the A-bomb, then the H-bomb.  Today, the fear of nuclear war has receded, but another spectre of the post-war era has returned -- babies themselves. 

With the earth warming and seas rising, the "Population Bomb" is upon us again, bigger and uglier than ever.     

Why God Created Woman

Botticelli:  Birth of Venus

The Bible tells us that God created woman as a helper to man, because it was not good for man to be alone.  But God's thoughts are not our thoughts, God's ways are not our ways.  For this St. Valentine's Day, let me offer another theory of Why God created Woman:

Maybe God saw the flaws in his original design, and wanted to fix it. Woman was a new form of humanity, not just a helper but a refinement of the original.   This was a new being -- more beautiful, subtle, gentle, peaceful, more like God herself.

End Game

The Seventh Seal

-- By Tom Phillips

The game is on, and I'm already losing.

The game is chess, in which I have little experience and no aptitude. My opponent is ranked number one in the world, having checkmated every player who ever lived, excepting possibly one.

I didn't make this up. I saw it in a movie, Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," from 1957.  A knight plays chess with the hooded figure of Death. He plays his best, he draws out the match, but Death makes a surprise move, takes his queen -- and soon, checkmate.  I saw it at 19 when it was new, and couldn't comprehend it.  I saw it again at 39, and it scared me, but I held out hope that I could avoid this defeat, by staying out of the game.

At the time I was a Buddhist, sitting on a cushion every day, achieving an equanimity that supposedly went beyond birth and death.  It's true, I'm sure, that the universe is One, and we simply pass from one form of existence to another -- eventually into a many-tiered heaven that rises to Nirvana, the end of suffering, extinction of desire.  I was fairly good at that game. 

Then, I had the misfortune of marrying a Presbyterian minister and losing a challenge match with her, in which the loser was bound to adopt the religion of the winner. I found myself in a new world, where this earthly life mattered, and you had one chance to make yours mean something.  Equanimity was neither the path not the goal -- life was a struggle to bear witness to the truth in a world that didn't want to hear it, to show mercy in a world that lived by conflict. Worst of all, other people mattered. Suffering was not to be contemplated, but fought on every front. Our job is to not to get out of here and into God's Kingdom, but to prepare the way for God's Kingdom on earth.

And where does death fit into that?  I have no ready answer. 

Recently, I made my first move -- a stupid move -- and only then realized the game was underway.  Visiting children and grandchildren on the West Coast, my wife and I went to see an apartment complex designed in part for the elderly and infirm.  No need to climb stairs, the agent assured us. It was new and sterile, but comfortable and affordable. 

I found myself tempted by the prospect of an easy decline, with daughters and sons-in-law nearby to scrape me off the floor when the inevitable fall came. A comfortable end. But something in me screamed NO, that's not what I want.  I want the struggle to continue -- my pride intact, my faculties working, my words read, my music danced to.  

My second move was even worse, and in direct contradiction to the first. Unconsciously I set out to prove I was still young and strong, in no need of Senior Living.  I tried to make myself attractive to a much younger woman -- for no reason, just to see if I could do it.  She seemed to like my stories and jokes, so I set out to impress her further. At that point I immediately became self-conscious and lost my charm, becoming a clanging bell, a nattering nabob. The rest of the evening was painful. Still, at bedtime, I preened in front of the mirror, puffed out my chest and asked my wife, "Do I look young and strong?"

"Sure," was all she said. 

Two moves -- two pawns advanced on opposite sides of the board. That can't be right. Meanwhile Death has moved his ranks into some classic position, the first steps to an invasion that will inevitably destroy me.  I have no more strategy than Donald Trump, sitting in the West Wing in his underwear, watching TV for his next cue to act. 

Come to think of it, I don't really want to play chess!

I'd rather not identify with the hero of the movie --  the knight, a tortured, self-hating intellectual searching for God -- especially when there's another character more to my liking, the knight's squire. He's a cynic, a jester, a fighter, a singer, a ladies' man -- and facing death, his counsel is to savor the incomparable feeling of life, right up to the end.      

Oops! I knocked the pieces off the board.

See you later, Mr. Death.

-- Copyright 2017 by Tom Phillips

Knight and Squire (Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand)