There’s a quote floating around the internet attributed to Thomas Merton: “if the you of five years ago would not consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually.” I have not been able to find the quote in any of his writings, so that attribution is dubious, but I do find that I agree with the message. And certainly the me of five years ago—struggling to keep my head above water in the first semester of a brand new tenure-track job, agnostic (when I thought about it, which wasn’t often), and generally indifferent to the idea of religious community—that person would have been stunned, absolutely floored, if someone had said, “in five years you’ll be giving a sermon to the congregation where you attend church every Sunday.” But there I was.

The first time I went to the Unitarian Universalist church, it was on the recommendation of my friend Paul, who divides his time between the U.S. and Costa Rica. I had just returned to this country after a few years of living down there, and I was struck by how hard it is to get to know people here. In Heredia, within a few months of arriving, I knew my neighbors. I knew the people who ran the fruit stand, the corner grocery store, the pizza shop. A quick trip for dinner ingredients was also a chance to check in: cómo están sus primos? Ya se mejoró Doña Lela? Here in New York, after two years in the same house, I knew hardly anyone.

“People don’t talk to each other,” I complained. “How can I meet people if they never talk?”

“You should go to a Unitarian church,” he said. “They talk.”

“A church?”

“You should go and see.”

And that was how I found myself sitting in the very back row, somewhat petrified, listening to Rev. Dr. Michael Tino. He has a doctorate in molecular biology as well as his M.Div. As I would later find out, he also has a loving husband and an adorable baby daughter. I think I was there four weeks before anybody actually said “god” from the pulpit. Instead, the services were more about how to be a good person, how to enjoy the blessings of everyday life. And people do talk, in the coffee hour after the service. And they listen. The friends I’ve met through the UU fellowship are considerate, deep-thinking, irreverent, funny, and generous.

After about six months of attending services (and playing the piano when the regular accompanist was out of town), I decided to become a member. I had a moment of trepidation telling my mother about it, given my atheist upbringing.

“Oh, Unitarians!” she said. “They have the best pot lucks. And they sponsor all those social justice events. I’d probably go if the nearest UU church wasn’t so far away.”

The church has been a surprising source of solace and inspiration for me. I say surprising because it surprises me, but I imagine that it doesn’t come as a surprise at all for people who grew up in churches where they felt welcome.

The UU faith is often misrepresented as “go ahead and believe anything you want!” It’s true that the church is full of people who believe different things—atheists, agnostics, and people from a whole host of other faiths—but there are some core principles that unite us. The “Unitarian” part of the name comes from the belief that Jesus was human like the rest of us, not the son of God, though he did bring a great prophetic message to the world. The “Universalist” part comes from the belief that we are all “saved:” there is divine grace in each of us that we are all capable of reaching. Beyond that, rather than shared dogma, the faith community is united around shared principles that we commit to upholding in our daily lives. I was amazed how well these principles corresponded to the humanist values that have guided me for my whole life.

Years ago, I argued with my friend Emily, who was in divinity school at the time, about whether it was possible to be spiritual without being religious. She held that it was not possible, and I—who considered myself entirely “spiritual without being religious”—objected pretty strongly. I felt wonder at the miraculous nature of life and the universe, I felt thankful for this gift of existence. I didn’t feel the need, at the time, to share these feelings with a community. At the time, I associated organized religion with dogma, and I hadn’t ever found a body of dogma that fully conformed to my understanding of the world. After all this time, I am reconsidering my position on the issue. I still think it’s possible to be spiritual without being religious, but I find it vastly more rewarding to be part of a spiritual community. Being “spiritual but not religious” in the space of my own head, I was like a musician who practices behind closed doors and never shares the music with the world. As part of a faith community, I’m playing as part of an orchestra, sometimes as a soloist and sometimes blending into the background, but now part of a soundscape quite beyond anything that I could have made alone. No one is more astounded than I by this turn of events.

Here is the text of the sermon from this morning:

I have to say that it’s strange to me to be standing in a pulpit, speaking to a congregation. I’m not a minister; I’m a professor of environmental science at a public university. Organized religion, such as it is, played essentially no role in my life until very recently; I was raised atheist, and in my upbringing there was something of a sense that we educated people, scientists, were above all that. Usually when I give a lecture to a large group of people, I’m teaching an undergraduate course. It’s a role that I’m comfortable with. But I’m here before you today to share some ideas outside of that factual envelope that I generally inhabit. I have to admit, as a scientist, I’m a little uncomfortable talking about my faith. But I hope that there will be value in it.

The scientist and philosopher Stephen Jay Gould speaks of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria,” these separate realms of inquiry. Science deals with the objective, the measurable and factual; religion deals with the subjective and miraculous. In my view, it’s a nice, neat approximation—and, like most nice, neat approximations, it leaves out most of the interesting stuff.

The truth, in my view, is that science and religion need one other. Science is important because it’s the best method we’ve found yet for giving us a reality-based view of the world we live in. In the past four hundred years or so, science has given us enormous power. We can understand and respond to the causes of disease, allowing us to live longer and healthier lives than our ancestors ever dreamed of. We can produce food using a fraction of the time it once required, allowing many of us to dedicate our lives to interests beyond the day-to-day necessity of feeding ourselves. We’re surrounded by conveniences and luxuries we take for granted. We can literally travel around the world with a speed and ease that would have astounded my great-great grandparents on their voyage across the Atlantic escaping the potato famine. We understand so much about our world and its creatures and the complex, interrelated web of interactions that binds our biosphere together. We know something about our galaxy and our breathtakingly enormous universe. All these things, and many others, we understand thanks to the process of science.

But here’s the thing—not many people, these days, actually understand how science works. I see headlines all the time that grossly misrepresent it. “Scientists prove that Wikipedia is not scientifically accurate!” (Tell that to my freshmen!) “Scientists prove that 80s pop music is boring!” (Yeah, that’s a real headline.) The thing is, you can’t actually prove anything with science.

Here’s how the scientific method actually works. The only assumptions are that the universe behaves according to certain fixed laws—the speed of light, Planck’s constant, gravitation—and that human reason and senses, aided by instrumentation like telescopes, are sufficient to make sense of these natural laws.

You observe something happening in the universe—think of Charles Darwin observing the beaks of finches, or Marie Curie observing that atoms release enormous amounts of energy as they fall apart. Based on these observations, you develop a hypothesis, which is a falsifiable statement. That is, there has to be some way to definitively figure out whether it is true or false.

And then you do everything you can to show that that hypothesis is false. You test it in every way that you can imagine, and then you imagine some more tests. You can’t prove anything with science; you can only disprove and disprove and disprove until whatever’s left, this little kernel of information that you can’t refute no matter how you test it, becomes our working understanding of the world.  

In the Origin of Species, after presenting the theory of evolution by natural selection, Charles Darwin wrote a challenge to future generations of scientists. “If it could be demonstrated [he wrote] that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.” Today, 156 years after Darwin’s book was published, we still haven’t been able to find one, which is why evolution forms a cornerstone of the science of biology.

Science is fundamentally about uncertainty. And so is religion. The difference lies in the relationship with uncertainty. Science asks us to probe the uncertainty, to try to reduce it, to treat it as a challenge to be overcome. Religion, especially a questioning faith such as ours, asks us instead to sit with uncertainty.  We recognize its presence in our lives, even perhaps honor it. Where have we come from? Where are we going? Why are we here? Religion asks us to treat these mysteries as holy. Religion asks us, like the trees in Mary Oliver’s poem [“When I Am Among the Trees,” read earlier in the service], “to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.”

The statement “god exists” is not really a hypothesis, because it’s not really testable. What would constitute conclusive proof of god’s existence or non-existence? You get almost as many answers as you have human beings.

On the other hand, a statement like, “increasing carbon dioxide levels are causing the Earth’s atmosphere to heat up” is a hypothesis. There are many ways to test it: you can examine the heat-holding properties of different gases in the laboratory. You can examine the atmospheres of other planets and their resulting temperatures. You can drill down into ancient glaciers and use bubbles of atmosphere caught in the ice to examine how the carbon dioxide concentration has changed over time, and use other indicators to see how temperature has changed. You can build computer models of how the Earth stores and transfers heat, and you can change the parameters of the models to test different scenarios. With all these tools, scientists are trying to disprove the hypothesis that CO2 emissions are heating up the planet. And so far we haven’t been able to.

Science itself often proceeds by numerous, slight, successive modifications. We find that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, that it’s heating the planet, that human activity is responsible, and that the consequences—for human health, biodiversity, and the future of the world as we know it—are, frankly, terrifying. Science can tell us what is, and it gives us good tools to predict what might be. But science can’t tell us what should be. That is the realm of ethics, philosophy, and yes, religion.

Mahatma Gandhi said, “if you want something really important to be done you must not merely satisfy the reason, you must move the heart also.”

Science satisfies the reason, but that other all-important part, moving the heart, is central to human decision-making. For billions of people around the world, religious communities are a big part of what moves our hearts. And I don’t mean to conflate morality and religion—as I said, I was raised atheist, and I was a moral person long before I joined a church. But I think there’s a great power in the messages that religious communities transmit. Right now, faith communities are taking a stand on climate change. In June, the Pope released an encyclical that lays out the moral case for confronting climate change. In August, Muslim clerics from 20 countries came together to call for climate action.

As Unitarian Universalists, we are called to respect the worth and dignity of every human life, and the interdependent web of life that supports us all. In past moments of humanitarian crisis, UUs have rescued refugees from war and stood up for the rights of the oppressed. In our current crisis, we can be leaders again.

Climate change is the defining challenge of this generation. The climate scientist Curt Stager makes a strong analogy for human control over the Earth’s climate systems. He says it’s as though we’ve just woken up to find ourselves hurtling down the highway in a giant truck going the wrong way with our hands on the wheel. And what do we do? Do we accept the responsibility and bring it safely to a stop? Or do we give up and steer into the ditch?

To confront this unprecedented threat to our world, we need to build the biggest coalition possible. And the good news is, that coalition is already coming together. Last fall in New York, many of us joined the People’s Climate March. I walked with other scientists, but I stopped at one point to watch the march stream past. Nearly half a million people had converged. I saw representatives of unions, preschools, Southern Baptist congregations, investment banks, Amnesty International. I saw people of all races, all ages, all genders; everyone committed to building a brighter future for us all.

Back to my central thesis, that science and religion need one another. Science can show us what the world is and what it might be. Science shows us an almost incomprehensibly vast universe in which our planet is a tiny speck, but it also shows us that we are quite literally children of that universe. The calcium and phosphorus in our bones were forged in the hearts of giant, perished stars. Our scientific quest for understanding calls us to explain our world. Our faith calls us to love that world and all it contains: the pain, the beauty, the uncertainty. And our faith calls us to action. May it be so.

The last time I left Hawaii, at age 7, I was on a 32-foot sailboat with my father at the helm and the rest of the family— my sisters, age 5 and 10, and my mother, a few years older than I am now— trimming sails and trying not to look back at the fast-receding island of Oahu, the last land we would see for 30 days. In deference to the Polynesian seafaring tradition, we threw a lei overboard to signify the wish for a safe voyage and that someday we’d return to the islands. Little choppy wavelets and long ocean swell soon swallowed the fragile petals. We’d spent almost a year living in Honolulu and we’d decided, instead of flying back like most people, to buy a used boat and sail to Alaska. That adventure shaped me in many ways. It didn’t make a sailor out of me, though. If anything, it made me more deeply connected to the land. I will never forget the first time the wind blew offshore and brought the scent of land to us after weeks of the salty, dry iodine scent of the ocean. Suddenly the air was alive with the damp scent of forests, of things growing and dying and reaching the light, of the loam of nurse logs feeding the next generation of trees and mosses. Days before we saw them, the temperate rainforests of the Alaskan coast spoke to us in a language that still sings in my blood.

This time, I’m leaving Hawaii on a jetliner like the rest of the world. Already we’re at 30,000 feet, with the islands receding astern at several hundred miles per hour and the vast Pacific deceptively smooth beneath us. This time, I’ve only been here for a week. But it’s been a good week.

From the moment my plane touched down, I’ve been periodically overtaken with waves of nostalgia. Certain things were so familiar—the banyan trees shading the waterfront walk at Ala Moana Park; the barely visible fish flicking over the coral rubble in the shallow water at the end of Ala Wai Marina; the impossibly steep mountains reaching for the clouds and the impossibly blue water reaching for infinity. Of course the experience is overlaid with all the years that have gone by: I see a five-petaled white flower in a thorny hedge by the roadside and my rational brain is thinking, Apocynaceae, almost certainly not native because it’s still got its thorns and there were no native large herbivores, and barely any native plants survive down here at sea level anyway, and then I smell the flower and suddenly I’m seven years old again, wanting nothing more than to climb trees and chase pigeons, with all the world before me. I can feel the smooth bark of banyans under my bare feet.

 My major reason for coming back to Hawaii was to attend the 52nd annual conference of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation. It’s my favorite conference—usually small enough, with about 400-500 attendees, that I can see everyone I want to see; manifestly international (35 countries were represented this time around); and always a good mix of fascinating new research, by both established researchers and relative unknowns. I got to catch up with a bunch of friends and meet some new ones, and I made some new connections for potential research collaborations.

The talk that I presented covered a long-term study of trees and lianas, and on the plane on the way over I realized that the initial survey was conducted in 1987/88— exactly when I was a kid chasing pigeons in the park two blocks from the conference center. The whole first day of the conference I was trying to think of how to work that fact into my talk. The night before my presentation, it came to me suddenly. With my first slide, I mentioned that I’d lived in Honolulu 28 years ago when the initial data were collected— “and so I was a kid running around in Ala Moana Park, with no idea that this study was going on, let alone that I’d be presenting it here today.” My last slide before acknowledgements was a plea for more long-term research. I pointed out that 28 years is a big chunk of a human lifespan, but a small eyeblink of time in the lifespan of a tropical tree that can live for centuries—and we don’t even know within an order of magnitude how long lianas can live. “And to really understand these dynamics, long term data is vitally important. So I encourage you, whatever you work on: keep your data and metadata transparent; work hard to preserve these tropical landscapes that we love; and think of the kid running around in Ala Moana Park right now who might present the follow-up study at ATBC 2041. Mahalo.”

Giving light

Today I am thankful for the darkness, the relative darkness, of this day. The gathering low clouds and muggy stillness of the air set today apart from that other September day now thirteen years ago, which (where I was, on a mountainside in Maine) was crisp and flawlessly blue. In the shadow of this date I am thinking of anniversaries. When the planet comes back to same place in space, or at least the same position relative to the sun, how we feel the return in our bones. The emotional cargo that attached to these temperatures, these daylengths, also comes rushing back.

This coming year will be freighted with heavy anniversaries for me: the sudden death of Peter Ohring, colleague and friend, last November. The (write it!) suicide of my aunt in May. The tragic accident that took my college friend Nadia Seiler in August, two weeks before she would have been married. I’ve been thinking about how, as we get older, the calendar fills up with these disappearances, dark spaces in the Earth’s orbit that tug at us like phantom limb pain as we pass.

At the end of Nadia’s memorial service last weekend, there was a slide show of her brief and amazing life, and the music that her family chose to go with it was from her senior recital at Carleton. She played the cello and I accompanied her on piano. When I heard the music start I could picture those long afternoons in the practice rooms, laughing with Nadia and worrying about small things that are now long forgotten. I can picture the cover of the sheet music but I have no idea what it was called. It was a deceptively simple melody, with such a depth of sadness. I don’t know how we captured that, at those ages, 21 or 22, when all the great wordless sorrows still lay ahead of us. Maybe those dark spaces are in us always, and we only notice when the events of life bring them to the surface.

But this metaphor of dark = loss = sadness is too facile. Darkness is necessary for light to be perceptible. It’s the darkness between the stars that shows us the nature of our finite universe. In these moments when the dark surfaces, we must be most aware of the light in our lives and our ability to give light to others. Hope is most necessary when it seems least justified.

As an educator, I try to give light. I want to build a world with more understanding, more compassion; a world where everyone can feel valued and empowered, while understanding the consequences of their actions and taking responsibility. The root of the word “educate” comes from the Latin educare, meaning “to lead forth.” I want to be a beacon, lighting up a pathway towards a better world. Maybe I fall short of this. Well, of course I fall short. But the ideal is powerfully important.

La utopía – Eduardo Galeando

Ella está en el horizonte.

Me acerco dos pasos,

ella se aleja dos pasos más.

Camino diez pasos

y el horizonte se corre

diez pasos más allá.

Por mucho que yo camine

nunca la voy a alcanzar.

¿Para qué sirve la utopía?

Sirve para eso:

para caminar.

Utopia (my not-very-polished translation)

It’s on the horizon.

I take two steps forward,

and it retreats two steps.

I take ten more steps

and the horizon goes on

ten steps further.

I could walk forever

and never reach it.

What’s it good for, then, this utopia?

It’s for this: for walking.

Y seguimos caminando hacia el horizonte, un paso a la vez, iluminando el camino de los demás.

Today I’ve been upstaged by a rain shower and several species of charismatic mesofauna. I’m back in one of my favorite places in the world, La Selva Biological Station, setting up projects and giving workshops to some of the visiting student groups. Right now the sky over the lab clearing is turning the opaque gray of an overcast jungle sunset, and the vine-festooned branches across the lab clearing are becoming indistinct as the light draws out of the clouds. My office in the newly remodeled Old Lab still smells mainly of fresh paint and varnish, but with overtones of Sarapiquí fungus and wet wood already sneaking in.

Last week my student Tyler and I finished up the plant surveys at Finca Los Nacientes. The incipient forest there has already formed a canopy in many places, and the early successional species are beginning to die out. Solanum jamaicense, a particularly nasty little viny tomato-like plant covered with hooked spines, seems to be dying particularly fast. I’m happy to see it go; pulling the remnants of those thorns out of my legs before they got infected was one of my least favorite parts of the field season last year. Not many new species this year, but the few that did come in are mainly forest species, real trees that could live for decades or centuries instead of the scrappy, weedy, bird-dispersed Melastomataceae that dominate right now. I wish the spiny ferns would also die. My hands are crisscrossed with scabs from battling through head-high banks of spiny ferns. Even less pleasant, there’s still something in the plots that I’m allergic to. Last year I had a massive histamine reaction, partly because I was still recovering from pretty serious poison ivy, and I had to take a double course of prednisone to finally get rid of the full-body hives. This year I was able to keep the itching down to a dull roar by taking antihistamines, but the drawback was the slowed-down, underwater feeling from the drugs. Loratidine is supposed to be the least soporific of the over-the-counter antihistamines, but it still left me feeling drugged. It is very discouraging to try to work in the field in that state—my body could only go about 75% as fast as my brain wanted to. But we still got it done. It’s even more discouraging, I discovered, to try to conduct advanced data analysis and format figures in R while under the influence of something like that.

In the few days after we finished the plant surveys, Alex and I worked on data analysis and figures for our upcoming talks at ATBC (Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation)—more on that later—Tyler got to spend some time with Felix taking care of the farm and seeing the countryside. They fed the horses, harvested yuca, milked the cows, and made fresh cheese. On Sunday afternoon, a hot humid day buzzing with cicadas, they went to the river for a swim. Tyler’s Spanish was virtually nonexistent when he arrived, but he’s picking it up fast. After Felix dropped us off at La Selva, Tyler told me, “Felix is one of the nicest, most patient people I’ve ever met.” Definitely. I am fortunate to have such good friends.

I’ve been very busy in the past two days getting my students set up with the project that will consume the rest of the summer. Tyler and Angie, another Purchase undergrad, will be revisiting a data set from 1986/7, measuring lianas associated with the trees that the TREES project has been following for the past 30 years. This will be the first liana survey to directly compare individual crown occupancy by lianas over such a long time scale. We’ll measure the lianas on the surviving trees from that year’s survey, and we’ll also compare the data to a cohort of trees of the same species that are the same size now as those trees were in 1987. The fieldwork is non-trivial; there’s going to be a lot of tromping through the forest and peering up into the canopy. Tyler and Angie are getting more practice at how to do this safely, paying attention to their surroundings as they go and avoiding the many hazards of tropical fieldwork. Yesterday we located some of the trees and began the survey. It’ll be slow at first, but I’m confident in their abilities to work efficiently and safely. It’s good to see them working together to solve problems and communicating well.

In between fieldwork with my students, I’ve been giving talks and workshops for visiting student groups. Hence the bit about being upstaged by rain and charismatic species. This afternoon I talked with a group of Native American students about plant strategies and what plants do to survive. I love field teaching in the rainforest more than just about anything else. We got maybe 100 m into the forest, but in that distance I found more than an hour’s worth of things to talk about: cauliflorous fruits, iridescent leaves in the understory, lianas, hemiepiphytes, delayed greening, avian and mammalian seed dispersal, secondary compounds… I almost called it off in the first few minutes when the clouds that had been lurking all day decided to open up and dump on us just as we left. Trying to shout loudly enough to communicate over a tropical downpour is a losing proposition. But the weather cleared up after a few minutes, and I’m glad we stuck with it. The forest offered up all kinds of surprises, the best being a cask-headed lizard (Corytophanes cristatus) fixing us with its baleful reptilian glare. Its mottled green and brown colors were so fresh that it must have just shed its old skin. The students gathered around close to ask questions, enthralled by the forest and its denizens. There’s nothing quite like teaching under those conditions. It’s like improvising music: a partnership, an ever-evolving conversation.

Later I gave a scientific writing workshop for the REUs (Research Experience for Undergraduates). A funny story about REUs—the La Selva researchers often use the acronym, rey-oo, to refer to these guys, but the word is suspiciously close to the Spanish “reo”—convict. In 2007 when I was directing the program, I told a tico friend that I was in charge of the twelve REUs doing research at La Selva.

“Doce reos en el bosque? Y se portan bien?” Twelve convicts in the forest? And do they behave themselves?

Music night is starting in a few minutes, so I’d better wrap this up. More soon, and pictures!

Back in the jungle

The storm has moved on, leaving the air thick with humidity and the trees dripping. A few parrots are squabbling over fruit in the high branches. About an hour ago the dark clouds came rumbling down from the Cordillera Volcanica Central trailing streamers of rain, and a few flashes of lightning close by convinced me to unplug the computer and take a break from preparing data sheets for the upcoming field surveys. As you might have guessed, I’m back in the jungle, specifically at Finca Los Nacientes in San Ramón de La Virgen, Sarapiquí, Costa Rica.

The biggest change since the last time I visited the farm was the arrival of baby Isabel. She is a remarkably sweet and calm four-month-old with a spiky cap of red hair just like Alex’s and deep brown eyes sparkling with curiosity like Felix’s. Life at the farm continues in a similar rhythm: rising with the dawn, a breakfast of gallo pinto (rice and beans), fried plantains, eggs, and coffee; long days in the field; a second round of coffee and some cake when the storms roll in mid-afternoon; dinner and an early bedtime. Felix’s cousin Yerlin looks after the baby during the day so Alex can get some work done. I’ve heard that a baby’s rate of vocabulary acquisition depends on how many words she hears in her early years, and if that’s the case Isabel will probably be off the charts: Yerlin is a talker.

Yesterday morning Alex and I went to the forest for a few hours to take leaf longevity measurements. For the last three years, she and Felix have marked the emerging leaves of new seedlings with little plastic tags when they emerge, and she revisits them every month to measure the leaf life span. It’s basic science, but with an eventual applied goal—the more we know about how these species behave in different conditions, the better we can plan for reforestation.

It was a hot morning after a night of rain. The red earth of the hillside steamed where slashes of sunlight came down through the canopy, and the thick odor of rotting leaves surrounded us. Being back in the forest always puts my senses on full alert: snakes? ants? scorpions? Nearly a decade ago now, during my first semester in graduate school, I visited the American Museum of Natural History with my systematics class right after three months in the jungle. There was an exhibit of live butterflies inside a climate-controlled tent. I remember that the minute I walked in and felt that air, 85 degrees F and 95% humidity, full of the humid smell of decaying vegetation, all of a sudden I was fully aware of where my hands and feet were and what was around me: snakes? ants? scorpions? It’s not paranoia; it’s more like a sharpened awareness that makes me feel fully alive and present.

Between two sets of plots yesterday, Alex and I paused at the trail junction for water and some oatmeal raisin cookies. Filthy, muddy, sweaty, swatting mosquitoes, we started chatting about biostatistics. There may have been other people in the world at that very moment sitting in the rainforest talking about model selection and the Akaike Information Criterion, but probably not many. And probably very few of them were as happy as I was. It’s good to be back.

The Night Before Christmas, hiker style

Every year around this time, I think about Christmas 2000. My older sister and I were hiking the Appalachian Trail, holed up in a shelter in Virginia on a cold Christmas night. I wrote this little ditty to cheer us up. Still works, most of the time. Enjoy.

'Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the shelter

the rodents were running about, helter-skelter.

Our foodbags were hung on mouse-hangers with care

in hopes that the buggers could not get up there

and Isis and I, in our polypro caps,

had just settled our brains for a long winter's nap

when up on the roof there arose such a clatter

I jumped from my bag to see what was the matter,

and what to my wondering eyes should appear

but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer,

and Santa was there, too, just four inches tall!

"Good gracious," I blurted, "how'd you get so small?

St. Nick shed a tear-- it was sad to behold--

and gathered his courage, and solemnly told

how a bunch of mad scientists, early that day,

had caught him and his reindeer in their Shrinking Ray.

"So now," Santa moaned with an audible sniff,

"it's obvious I can't deliver my gifts,

unless someone helps me out, me and my deer.

And now you know, jackrabbit. That's why I'm here.

I've heard hikers are an ingenious lot,

who jury-rig pack frames and straps and whatnot..."

"Don't fret, Santa!" I said. "It happens that I

have a science degree, too! I'll give it a try."

And I used all the cells in my brain to devise

some method to bring Santa Claus back to size...

"Eureka!" I cried, and I built a machine

the likes of which on earth has never been seen.

Some pieces of foil in Ziplocs, well-sealed,

I used to correct for the magnetic field.

The neutron-colliding reactor I strove

to assemble with Shoe-goo and parts from my stove.

My trusty white Photon provided the beam

that would re-enlarge Santa and his reindeer team...

SHAZAM! The Enlarging Ray worked like a charm,

and Santa and team were restored without harm.

"A miracle! How can I thank you?" he said.

"You could slack me to Springer on that reindeer sled..."

So if you see reindeer aloft in the sky

weeks after Christmas, well, now you know why!

And thus ends my rhyme, which I hope people like--

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good hike!

“This is what I call a clean break,” Kyosa said. Behind him, members of the taekwondo club were setting up cinderblock stanchions in preparation. “Meditate on the things you want to clean out of your life and put them into the concrete. When it shatters, you clean all that away and you go forward lighter.”

Rachel and Kevin and I, the testing candidates, were sitting in folding chairs at one edge of the dojang. Two rows of spectators sat against the wall by the door, and facing us across the floor was the testing board, all 4th degree masters or higher, seated behind a low table. We were three hours into the test already, our white uniforms streaked with sweat from demonstrating kicks, blocks, strikes, and coordinated sets of movements.
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