white with foam

While Groundhog Day may, at first blush, seem like an insignificant event — let alone worthy of earning the moniker “holiday” — when we choose to look deeper into its meaning, we discover all sorts of profound messages.

Groundhog Day is the day when the groundhog, after being cooped up in its burrow all winter long, decides, at long last, to test the waters and see what lies beyond his comfortable — yet, confining — space. He heads into the light to see if there’s a better life waiting for him beyond what is safe and secure. If he encounters his shadow, he retreats back into the ground and the world is cursed with six more weeks of winter.

How often in our own lives do we seek to expand our horizons only to encounter obstacles — obstacles which we find so overwhelming that we retreat back into our “old” lives, where it’s safe and comfortable? Like the groundhog who discovers his shadow, we allow setbacks to stop our progress and we end up stuck in an uninspiring rut. More winter.

In perhaps the most surprisingly profound movie of a generation, Groundhog Day stars Bill Murray as someone who has become bored with his life. He ends up living the same day — Groundhog Day — over and over and over again. How many of us feel we are living the same day over and over and over again? This phenomenon is so pervasive, it has found its way into our common vernacular: “Same Sh*t, Different Day” is listed in the Urban Dictionary.

In Groundhog Day, Murray eventually realizes that each day, even if it starts out the same, provides new opportunities for achieving his goals. Once he finally surrenders and starts living life fully, he wakes up to a brand new day — February 3.

The message of Groundhog Day is clear: come into the light. Sure, you’re going to encounter some shadows along the way — but don’t linger there. Turn toward the light and the shadows disappear.

In the shadows, we’ve learned to survive
As we wait for the sun to arrive
As we climb out of our holes
Let’s bring warmth to our souls
As we bask in just being alive!

Happy Groundhog Day, everybody!

Tags:   Groundhog Day · inspiration1 Comment

Item! Here is a list of countries that allow gays to serve openly in the military: Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Republic of China, Colombia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Republic of Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Uruguay. We’re as tolerant as Peru! I wonder if somewhere there’s a gay American soldier whose partner is a townie where he’s stationed. That would be one for the courts to decide, huh?

Item! I’m making a local-color collage for a client in Shreveport, Louisiana. My research has unearthed this list of famous people from the area, none of which will likely appear in the final product: Leadbelly, Faron Young, JT Scopes (of Monkey Trial fame), good old Bocephus, and the Residents. The last has terrific graphic potential, but it’s just not that kind of client.

Finally, though the WSJ readers among you know about this already, I wanted to link to Ricky Gervais’ humble, humane, and eminently sensible celebration of atheism’s teachings. He could have taken the words right out of my mouth — if I’d said them first.

Tags:   atheism · Ricky Gervais · Shreveport · UAFA2 Comments

Tran Nhon cradles Charlie, 50 cents or maybe a dollar cheaper than the mackerel, at Lams’ Seafood on King Street.

Last weekend was the public viewing of Exposed: Little Saigon, in one of the Pacific Rim Center‘s many strange and underused spaces. The building abuts the ID’s physical and cultural divides, right there peering over I-5 and the Viet Wah parking lot. It’s the liveliest ghost mall you’ll ever see; you could say it straddles a dimensional divide, too.

Exposed is the first annual neighborhood photo show, established in part to assert that something does change as you pass under the highway. This is not Chinatown. (Neither is the west side of 5, but that’s another post.) The show helped showcase the neighborhood’s bayanihan (to borrow from a book my friend Joyce gave me at the reception) and build on recent successes, the better to manage future changes responsibly.

One of those recent successes, the Battle of Dearborn Street, will be remembered as a watershed every bit as significant as the Kingdome protests or the occupation of the Milwaukee in 1977, in that it established a new template for how neighborhood interests and developers work together. To describe the resulting Community Benefits Agreement as concessions perpetuates the very inequality the arrangement itself corrected. It was a remarkable negotiation between equal partners that secured jobs, housing and traffic mitigation as part of a major development, as well as financial benefits for small businesses and nonprofits. All of that is worth remembering when they start building the Jackson Street streetcar. As big changes like that roll through, I expect the second, third and twentieth annual neighborhood photo shows will, collectively, turn out to be an invaluable wiki that other areas will admire for their foresight.

And the photos? Well, I report, you decide. I think there were some real winners that got to the heart of the matter. Without much residential housing or family tongs, Little Saigon is where you go to shop, worship or eat — then leave. It’s low to the ground, if that makes any sense, with the Pac Med building up on the hill like an open-armed deity. The best of the photos were those that caught its rhythms in detail, gracefully. The worst were city texture clichés, and mad props go to Panda Lab for making even those look pretty good.

Program note: a smaller version of this show will be on display January 29-30, 2011 at Tet in Seattle.

Tags:   International District · Little Saigon · SCIDPDANo Comments.

Perhaps you’ve been observing, as I have, the battle that is currently ensuing between atheists and Christians over the veracity of the Christmas story. An atheist group has posted billboards over the Lincoln Tunnel in New Jersey which ask the question “You know it’s a myth, right?” against a backdrop of the Three Kings visiting the Baby Jesus. Christians have retaliated with their own marketing campaign with the headline of “You know it’s real, right?”

Being neither atheist nor Christian, I have no real attachment to either argument. Or put more colloquially, I have no dog in this hunt. However, I would like to posit my own position, which is that both sides are missing the point.

First, let’s look at the atheist side of the argument. “You know it’s a myth.” They say this as if a myth is a bad thing. That if the story of Christmas were, in fact, a myth, this renders the whole story meaningless. But any student of myth knows otherwise. Anyone familiar with the works of Joseph Campbell understands that myths are powerful tools that humans have used for millennia to connect to the Divinity within themselves. As Campbell himself states, “It would not be too much to say that the myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations.” Campbell further asserts that the most important function of the myth is to foster the unfolding of the individual in integrity with himself, his culture, the universe and finally with the cosmic unity and creative mystery which is “both beyond and within himself and all things.” Compare Campbell’s assertion with the words of Jesus himself, In Luke 17:20, 21: Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”

Both Jesus and Campbell understood that the Kingdom of Heaven, Cosmic Divinity or Creative Force — or whatever you want to call it — lies within us. But society and day-to-day living demand that we ignore the mystery of life. Our fascinations with the minutiae of life, whether it be Sarah Palin’s tweets or keeping tabs on who has the most marbles in the playground of life, has limited our awareness of our inner selves and left us in a coma of forgetfulness. And that’s where the role of myth comes in. Myths provide a bridge between one’s local consciousness and the Divinity that lies in each of us. So, if the Christmas story is a myth, it is a powerful one that invites us to be reborn everyday into the Grand Mystery of life.

Likewise, Christians miss the point when insisting that the Christmas story actually happened. Whether there really was a baby born in a manger of a virgin mother is completely beside the point. Jesus is not the end of the story, but the beginning. As Jesus said in John 14. 11-12: Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me … whoever believes will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these. [emphasis mine].

Jesus knew that he was in “the Father” (Kingdom of Heaven, Cosmic Divinity, etc.) and that the Father was in him. And that this was true for every being on earth! Jesus provided a bridge between our earthbound consciousness and our Higher Selves. Was he really born in a manger when there was no room in the inn? Or is it all a myth? Here’s the truth: It just doesn’t matter.

People of all faiths — and no faith at all — should be able to unite through their Divine Connectedness that human beings have recognized since the beginning of time. All paths lead to the Divine. It matters not how we get there.

My invitation to all of you is to use the story of Christmas to recognize who you really are: a divine and perfect expression of the universe. Merry Christmas!

Tags: 3 Comments

In Portland last Friday, after a long day of window shopping and tasting sake, Karyn and I decided to go down to the tree lighting ceremony, wryly noting that in Seattle we wouldn’t have given it a second thought. Turned out it was nothing sexier than traffic and the lack of parking* that prevented us from doing so.

That’s what they call it: the Tree Lighting Ceremony. No ‘Holiday,’ and certainly no ‘Christmas,’ the irony whizzing right past the ears of the event’s Somali-American patsy. Nice green Portland has grown some real thugs without any help from the FBI, like Gary Gilmore and Tonya Harding — and the jackwagons who set a mosque on fire in Corvalis the next night. But a performance like this takes a little more coordination, casting, practice and expert subterfuge, a unique skill set possessed only by the FBI. Well, them and the British monarchy.

As a teenager, I went to a camp with like-minded individuals engaged in military-style training. In the dripping heat of Kansas in August, we learned to subsume our individual will to the good of the corps, to literally never step out of line. The pointed toe, the crisp diagonal, the rote counting of verse and chorus: these were virtues whose value would not be questioned or even seen from the ground. What would the FBI make of that if it weren’t a Band Camp?

The affidavit

I’m fairly confident they wouldn’t prevent me from taking a more benign mettle-sharpening summer job (Paragraph 63 and others). Or conveniently lose a crucial piece of evidence (Paragraph 37). Or allow my dreams to be included in a case against me (Paragraph 34). His own reported convictions notwithstanding, it’s not those privileges Mohamed Osman Mohamud and I share that hold him back from martyrdom, but something far more common and easier to exploit. Don’t make me spell it out.

March Fourth Marching Band: Crack Haus

*Actually, the traffic was at its worst as we drove down Sixth toward Yamhill. Turns out the FBI had arranged for that corner to remain open for the van to be parked, which makes it a pretty damn sexy traffic jam after all.

Tags:   Mohamed Osman Mohamud · Portland · tourism1 Comment