One of my college friends had a shirt that said “Stop Plate Tectonics”. All these years later, I still giggle when I think about it. I never asked him why he liked it, but for me there was something about “taking a stand” against something that absolutely could not be impacted by human endeavor that I found strangely appealing.

I grew up at the dawn of “faux activism”. People have long worn t-shirts that express their political and social leanings, but when I was coming of age, we seemed to enter an era where the t-shirt wasn’t just one more visible extension of the wearer’s activism; it was the wearer’s only activism–as though wearing a Live Aid or ACT UP shirt would end world hunger or AIDS without any further effort on the wearer’s part.

I think of these acts of pointless sartorial expression as the forerunners to today’s Internet petitions, where people add their names to long lists of names that are rarely seen and less often acted on by people with the power to do anything about the issues in question and then go back to playing Angry Birds, convinced they’ve done “their bit” for the environment or racial equality or the day’s other cause celebre.

Maybe my friend’s “Stop Plate Tectonics” shirt was only meant to be funny. But I always read it as a dig against the kind of complacency that choose to let a piece of cotton be its sole defense against the world’s maladies. I can think of few issues less likely to be impacted by “t-shirt activism” than continental drift. If that was the message, it took a very cynical view of human efforts to effect any of the other conditions heralded on other shirts. I choose to think we can make a difference in the world, if we really put our backs–t-shirt clad or otherwise–into the work.

Or maybe the t-shirt was just a reminder that, like the old saying goes, you can’t fight mantle convection–a lesson Pangaea learns in my newest “Restorying the Sacred” column, “The Last Days of Pangaea“.

Oh my gosh, y’all, I love genetics. The fact that the this teeny-tiny spiral is the architect of every living thing on this planet gives me goosebumps. In junior high, I spent endless hours drawing Mendelian charts to predict incidence of heritable features. Heredity is of course much more complex than those four-squared tables could ever convey, but for an eighth-grader, crossing little Xs and Ys to show the prevalence of hair color or handedness was the height of scientiifc awesomeness.

If I were a worshipful sort, I might cast DNA in the role of deity. Largely ineffable beings who control the fate of life on our planet? (For certain values of “ineffable”.) Check. Created humankind? (For certain values of “created”.) Check. Follow–and by extension cause us to follow–a strict set of rules? Check.

But if DNA is a deity, it’s a Trickster. Think of mutations. Think of so-called “junk” DNA, whole sections of the genome that appear, to us, not to be doing anything. Think of transposons. Jumping genes, people. I can’t make this stuff up. Genetic modification notwithstanding, we’re pretty well at the mercy of DNA, and DNA likes to mess with us.

Fortunately, sometimes that’s to the good, as I explore in my newest “Restorying the Sacred” column. In it, I riff on the hypothesis that the actions transposable genetic elements may aid virus avoidance and may also account for much more than previously realized in terms of human personality differences.

Our genes build the foundation of who we are–especially when they’re doing the unexpected. That seems like a good lesson to carry through our often unexpected lives.

The Virus and the Jumping Gene

My mother is a restless woman. When I was a kid, we rarely vacationed in the same place more than once. When I was in college, she made a sort of game out of staying in a different hotel every time they came to visit.

Dad and I are more fixed. We want to put down roots and really get to know a place. There was one vacation we took every year, the same week each year, to Bellaire, Michigan. That was the trip I loved, the one I looked forward to every year. I couldn’t wait to visit familiar places, to see what had changed and what had stayed the same. I relished the rhythm, the routine, the relationship to this place.

But what was the relationship I had to this place, after all? In places with high tourism volumes, especially during the warm months, “summer people” is often a perjorative the residents use to describe the hordes who descend and then depart each year. The scorn, I suspect, is not for the visitors in and of themselves but for the sense of entitlement they often carry with them. The feeling that, because they spend a few weeks or even a few months here every summer, that this is “their” place, that they have the same rights and relationship in regards to it as do those who make it their year-round home and know it in all its seasons and moods.

I think the truth is, as usual, somewhere in between. We should acknowledge that even people who only perch in a place for a few days, but who do so over and over, have some sort of relationship with that place, but we should be honest that it isn’t the same relationship as that of those who roost in that place permanently. Can we, perhaps, learn to harness what is best in both of those kinds of attachments for the good of the place that, after all, we all love?

A few things to perhaps ponder as you read my latest post at No Unsacred Place, On the Function of Time on the Magic of Place.

I get such a kick out of creation myths.

We writers can be pretty obsessive about story openings. “Begin the piece where the story begins” is advice every writer should probably have taped to the notebook, computer, tablet, or bathroom mirror of their choosing. We can agonize endlessly over the “right” beginning–the right moment, the right wording.

In a creation myth, it’s much easier to delineate. There is Void and Nothingness; something happens; there is Creation. Ta-da! Perfect beginning.

Even in a science-based mythos like “Restorying the Sacred”, which accepts the Big Bang as the moment of cosmic creation, the storytelling possibilities are myriad. Where did all of the “stuff” of the Big Bang come from? How did it all get into such a tiny space? Exactly when, and why, did it cross that line from “dense stuff at extremely high temperatures” to “the earliest moments of the Cosmos as we know it”? Heady stuff.

In my newest column, “In the Beginning Was the Potential”, I take a shot at a “Restorying the Sacred” creation myth. It is the first, but I suspect it will not be the last. We writers can be an obsessive bunch. There is always room for a different beginning.

One of the best parts of having pets is the way they draw my attention to things I might otherwise miss. Many of us humans spend a lot of our time blundering through the world unaware of the nonhuman life that surrounds us. But our animal companions are usually much more keenly attuned to that life and can, if we pay attention to them, draw our awareness to it.

One morning a couple weeks ago, I opened the curtains and noted, in a not-really-conscious way, an unusually large number of crows in the back yard. But I didn’t truly notice them until our cat Mister Brown jumped onto the coffee table under the window and started making desperate “lemme at ‘em” noises. Only then did I think to wonder why we had so many crows in our yard. The answer, and the musings that followed, can now be found in the post “The Squirrel and the Story”, over at No Unsacred Place.

I love music. Have done most of my life. Although I never had aspirations to be a musician of any sort, some of my earliest childhood memories involve singing while I played. As I grew up, music continued to play an import role in my life, be it in my high school band, the choirs I (briefly) joined in college, or any number of concerts and operas I’ve attended in adulthood.

Of late, I’m turning a bit toward writing songs–Pagan devotional songs for use in ritual and personal practice. They’re simple tunes with simple lyrics, easy to remember, to teach to others, and to carry on while doing other work. But I’m quite pleased with them, and eager to teach them to some of my fellow witches in hope that others will enjoy them enough to incorporate into their practice.

I’m sure you can imagine how awestruck I was when I learned that our planet sings. How unbelievably phenomenal is that? The whole planet–heck, every planet–humming a great, ancient song. We can’t hear it, but it’s happening at every moment, and has been from the beginning.

No wonder we love music so much.

I am so fortunate to now have a forum where I can write about such amazing things. And so, as is my wont, I did! Check out “The First Song” at No Unsacred Place, and keep an ear out for that deep, round, Earthsong. It’s in us somewhere.

When I was in school, the English language seemed so easy. Girls were shes and boys were hes and that was all we needed to know.

Then I grew up and went out into the world and met people who consider themselves both she and he, neither she nor he, something else altogether, or out of/beyond a gender spectrum altogether. The simplicity of the language started to feel like a severe limitation. A host of alternative pronouns assailed me: ze and zir, fe and fem–none gaining universal traction, few even known outside the small community of genderqueer folks and their allies. A former teacher of mine said, “I’d prefer to call everyone ‘it’, but people can be so touchy.”

So you can, perhaps, imagine my frustration when trying to write a story whose protagonist isn’t human–or any sort of being we generally think of as having gender. I’ve actually wrestled with this in all of my “Restorying the Sacred” posts. For “Bee and Orchid”, I felt okay using “she” because that is how bee societies work: any bee out gathering “messages” from Orchid would be female. In “S and R Dance On”, you may have noted that I cleverly skirted the issue by avoiding pronouns entirely for S and R.

But now we come to “A Song for Dark”. And I found I simply couldn’t keep saying “Dark” over and over without feeling like I was stuck in a poorly-written soap opera. I was going to have to make a Decision.

“She” or “he” never crossed my mind. I tried “ze”, but that was quite distracting and threw me out of the story–even while I was writing it, which boded ill for people reading it. Plus, to speak of darkness having gender seemed to me to force a complex complex into a fairly limiting framework. So I took a page from my teacher’s book and said “it”, though I worried that that would take away the sense of Dark as a living entity. But, looking at the finished product, I think “it” works. It feels right. This story feels right. The English language lives to fight another day.

“A Song for Dark”, a heartwarming holiday tale about light pollution, at No Unsacred Place.

I really enjoy when writers open a story by throwing me into the middle of characters’ lives or the events of the plot and leave me to puzzle things out as I go, revealing bits and pieces of the back story as we progress. This feels, to me, more like real life; after all, I’ve been alive for 33 1/2 years, and only my parents have been around for all of them. If you were to meet me tomorrow, we’d be plunged into the middle of each other’s lives and would learn about each other as we go. I wouldn’t introduce myself by saying, “Hi, my name is Eli, and I was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the eldest child of…” Any writer who opens a story in that fashion would have to work very hard to keep my attention for more than a few paragraphs.

And yet, I realize that that is exactly what I’d planned to do with “Restorying the Sacred”! “Bee and Orchid” was a guest post, and I’d intended my first “official” post as a staff writer to be a step-by-step explanation of what I planned to do with this new column. An infodump! My first time out!

Only then Tom Keith died, and I rediscovered the article about the Outcast Star, and a lot of other things seemed a lot more interesting to write about, right off the bat. The explanatory post kept getting pushed out–and that’s to the good (though of course I’d choose to have Tom Keith still be alive over a well-placed exposition in a heartbeat). Because I think, in the intervening weeks, that people got curious, got more involved in the story that’s been unfolding, wanted to know more. Wanted to know, if Tom Waits will forgive me, what I’m building in this small corner of the internet.

And now, all is revealed–complete with silly oaths (don’t worry; no falling on your sword required).

What’s She Building in There? at No Unsacred Place.

A tragic love story about binary stars? It must be “Restorying the Sacred” time at No Unsacred Place.

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics press release regarding the star called SDSS J090745.0+24507 and its ill-fated companion was issued in 2005, but I don’t think I found out about it until later, maybe sometime in 2007. Ever since, I’ve wanted to “do” something with the story, but nothing’s ever been quite right. Finally I realized that that’s because I’ve been trying to write about the item, when what I really wanted to do was rewrite it as a narrative, offering it to the world in a way that lets everyone know why it affected me so deeply. I’m honored to at last have had a chance to do so.

My first “official” post at No Unsacred Place is up. It honors the recent passing of Minnesota Public Radio’s Tom Keith and his role in creating my personal story of Minnesota.

I realize that the broad readership of NUP might not be familiar with Mr. Keith, so here’s a bit of MPR’s coverage at the time of his death:

*A Montage of Tom Keith’s work
*Tom Keith, a showman but not a showoff, a commentary by Keith’s long-time Morning Show co-host Dale Connelly.