7:45AM.\u00a0 Bright sun.\u00a0 Blue water.\u00a0 Breeze off the ocean.\u00a0 Mourning doves coo.<\/p>\n
The mourning doves have had it goin’ on the last week.\u00a0 Males walk up to a female, bow, stomp their feet, then spread their tail feathers.\u00a0 Oh, yeah.\u00a0 I saw that move before.<\/p>\n
Last post from Da Fish Shack.\u00a0 My bags are packed and I’m ready to go.\u00a0 Just 12 hours until my jet plane.\u00a0 Da Fish Shack check-out is 10AM and my flight doesn’t leave until 8:15 PM so I have time to\u00a0do some more sightseeing, shop, visit the museum in Lihue, have lunch and dinner.<\/p>\n
One point of comparison I forgot between Da Fish Shack and the Hyatt was showers.\u00a0 At the Hyatt the shower was an ordinary shower in a tub, found in most hotels.\u00a0 Here at Da Fish Shack showers are al fresco although with appropriate screening.\u00a0 Kate suggested I use flip-flops when I used the shower.\u00a0 Although I would not want to take showers outside at home, here in Hawai’i’s wonderful climate, it provides a note of adventure to a routine task.\u00a0 You can hear the surf and feel the wind all over.<\/p>\n
On driving back last Sunday night to Da Fish Shack after supper in Wailua, I turned on NPR.\u00a0 Guess who was on?\u00a0 Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion.\u00a0 Right here on route 56 headed north toward Princeville and Hanalei.\u00a0 This morning I read the NYT while I ate breakfast.\u00a0 Lead story in travel?\u00a0 Skiing on the Gunflint Trail.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Something I’ve started rolling around.\u00a0 It appears to me that the true radicals of today are conservatives.\u00a0 No, not the George Buckley, Russell Kirkland variety or the neo-con versions that got us into this damned war, but conservatives who focus their conservative tendencies on species and eco-systems, on cultures and life ways.\u00a0 These eco-conservatives are in fact conservative over against\u00a0enlightenment liberals,\u00a0 free-market economists and raging bull capitalists of multi-national corporate organizations.<\/p>\n
In tandem with this thought, which still percolates, is another.\u00a0\u00a0 Rather than the nexus of evil, the world’s faith traditions are vast resources that represent the human heart and mind at its most integrated, its most daring and its most compassionate.\u00a0 Yes, the religious institutions that accrete around these faith traditions often become like the coral reef, rigid and sharp, but the faith traditions themselves preserve the world’s oldest stories and humankind’s most radical dreams.\u00a0<\/p>\n
When anti-religion dogmatists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens rail against these institutions, all they are doing is raising the enlightenment flag of REASON.\u00a0 Well, here’s the big news guys, REASON is not all there is.\u00a0 In fact, reason works its magic by dividing and parsing, by reducing the world to manageable portions, to forumlas and laws.\u00a0 Not a bad thing as far it goes, but turn the process on its head and move out toward the whole, toward life and the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos.\u00a0<\/p>\n
These things are.\u00a0 And, they were before science and reasons and they will be after science and reason has passed away.\u00a0 They do not need to consult either Newton or Einstein to go the speed of light or engage gravity.\u00a0 It is\u00a0this whole, the buzzing, blooming whole that is most precious and it will not be dissected because there are too many variables, too many data points moving in too many disparate directions.<\/p>\n
And so forth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
7:45AM.\u00a0 Bright sun.\u00a0 Blue water.\u00a0 Breeze off the ocean.\u00a0 Mourning doves coo. The mourning doves have had it goin’ on the last week.\u00a0 Males walk up to a female, bow, stomp their feet, then spread their tail feathers.\u00a0 Oh, yeah.\u00a0 I saw that move before. Last post from Da Fish Shack.\u00a0 My bags are packed … Continue reading The True Radicals of Today Are Conservatives<\/span>