Flickr Updated

I put up our pictures from Mammoth onto our Flickr account. Or, at least, I put up as many as I could. Check out the Mammoth set.

We had a lot of fun on our trip. We got to see a lot of family. Bill, Becca, Grandma and Grandpa Rowley were all staying at the cabin with us. Also, we made a couple of trips over to Willow Springs to see Grandma Brown. It was good times.

Helpful

This article does a good job of casting light on the debate raging regarding homosexual marriage: it's not always about hate. It is about preserving something valued.

Richard Thompson Ford is the author of Hate and Marriage, published in Slate Magazine.

Happenings

Two weeks ago, Libby and I put up a hummingbird feeder in our backyard. It was a gracious gift from my parents, and we definitely appreciate it very much. Libby and I put it on the window by our dining room table, so that we can watch them while we eat. It took them about 24 hours to find it, but it seems that it's become a regular fixture in their life.

This weekend, things have gotten really shooken up in hummingbird land, though. A pair of Allen's hummingbirds (apparently migrating South for the winter - I've read they begin to do so slowly during the early summer)have set up a territory that includes the feeder, automatically excluding our more persistant companions of two weeks - three companionable Anna's hummingbirds.

It's fascinating because the Anna's don't have a dominant male. They were all cooperating pretty well, taking turns at the fountain (not that they ever drank simultaneously). The Allens' won't have anybody even in our backyard. They've taken up residence on the avocado tree and chase the others if they even come into our backyard at all. It's almost sad because there's more than enough for all of them.

We've also put up a thistle sack feeder to attract goldfinches, but no luck so far.

Oh, and we've got a little house sparrow chirping just outside our backdoor. It's only got a fuzzy covering of dark brown feathers and is basically a very ugly little tyke. I took a couple of pictures, and I may post them here.

It's nice to have a backyard.

If we lived in North Carolina...

...maybe we'd buy this house. And then we'd have to have a bunch of kids to fill it up; it's huge!

Happy Birthday!

Today is Libby's birthday!

Many happy returns!

Idyllwild

Last weekend Eric came out from Illinois, so a group of guys and I went up to Idyllwild for a couple of days. It was an interesting trip, involving unfortunate (and unwarranted) conflicts with law enforcment, a good hike, and some good time talking and laughing around a fire. Oh, and thank God that high elevation lowers the temperature!

I've posted some of the pictures I took on my Flickr account. You can check it out here.

Nostalgic Aches

The world's natural beauty is very powerfully effective, I believe, on a soul receptive to its influence. Such a receptiveness is generally a habitual turn towards beauty somehow achieved in childhod - not that it could not come later in life. I believe that my upbringing has been such as to produce within my own soul a certain aptitude towards the receipt of certain manners of worldly splendor perhaps surpassing other men's. In my case, the education has all been familial, and through the repitious enjoyment of the same sets of alpine beauty again and again under the guidance and from within the sphere of my family, I have come to love the Sierra Nevada with a love I think rightly in accord with its merits. It is there I am most truly at home - though I cannot express exactly in what sense I feel so strongly that I am home. It is not the sense that I feel at home with my wife, in our house. The feeling is different, and I am not sure how. I believe the Romantics are tapping into this feeling (the Lake District of England being for them my Sierras). Therefore I refer the reader to the words of William Wordsworth, who expresses so much more excellently than me, this very feeling in the opening of his Prelude.

OH there is blessing in this gentle breeze,
A visitant that while it fans my cheek
Doth seem half-conscious of the joy it brings
From the green fields, and from yon azure sky.
Whate'er its mission, the soft breeze can come
To none more grateful than to me; escaped
From the vast city, where I long had pined
A discontented sojourner: now free,
Free as a bird to settle where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? in what vale 10
Shall be my harbour? underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home? and what clear stream
Shall with its murmur lull me into rest?
The earth is all before me.

In all of my senses of enjoyment encompassed by the Sierras, this feeling of release now is coming to predominate. But, as a child, it was of course, never the most powerful influence. I think the pleasure is the sweeter, thereby, for the splendor of the beauty of the world is the more sweetly and unknowingly enjoyed by a child because of his relative freedom of situation.

As with anything loved which is separated from us by space or time, any small reminder may bring crashing into one's mind a thousand pleasant memories and thoughts - pleasant and joyous in themselves - but pained by the coloring of nostalgia that necessarily arises (as bile at a distasteful scene) when the fact of its distance impresses itself powerfully and fully upon us. Such has been my lot today, when I found a stranger's Flickr account, completely by chance, on the internet. There are many beautiful photographs in the link I am putting below filled with pictures of places that I have been, or would visit, portrayed in all of their most spectacular glory. Therefore, I recommend them to you all.

A Stranger's Flickr Account

I spent two nights at Pioneer Basin on a backpack trip, once. Mono Lake I have seen innumerable times, and it is special because of how close it is to where I proposed, as well. I've never been over Pine Creek Pass, but the lakes he shows are typical of the kind of lake ornamenting the craggy back country of the High Sierra.

I also recommend to you this other Wordsworth poem - Daffodils. It comments on the restorative power of memory as an intercessor between us and the object of our love.

The Daffodils
By William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed–and gazed–but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

I think he may overstate memory's power, personally, but he has immortalized forever a powerful truth - one that we may all use to our advantage.

Superman Movies

Are you interested in Superman?

Try Jesus.

Last Wednesday evening, Libby and I went and saw the new Superman movie. That Friday, urged to super speed by an impending power outage, we ducked into the Biola library and picked up Superman: The Movie and Superman II for our weekend enjoyment.

I liked Superman Returns and Superman II the best of the three. Superman I's plot didn't feel cohesive or compelling. It also seemed to bite off far too much for one movie. Not only does Kal-El forewarn Krypton of its coming peril, and sentence some of its citizens to eternal torment, Superman comes to earth and grows up in Smallville, he has to save California from falling off the face of the earth and fall in love with/ inspire love in Lois Lane. That would be an accomplishment for any superhero, even the mightiest, and it turns out Superman has to make the world spin backwards to do it (that makes time go backwards?).

I'm still not sure whether or not I like Superman II or Superman Returns best of the three that we viewed this weekend. Superman II was pretty exciting, and the characterization was pretty great. Superman Returns uses computer graphics to have Superman do some pretty breathtakingly awesome things. There are some goose-bump raising "Oh man!" moments in that movie, for certain. Oh yeah, I also liked the plot.

Ok, now back to my main point - how Jesus is better than Superman. Superman Returns gains interest from its compelling questioning. Superman leaves Metropolis (and earth) for five years to see his home planet of Krypton. I'm not sure how he got there, but he came back in a pointy meteorite/ Kryptonian space ship, same as before. In the meantime, Lois Lane writes a Pulitzer Prize winning piece entitled "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman." This is how she deals with the loss of the love of her life. Superman has to answer that question for all of us - why do we need a savior? Why can't we just take care of ourselves?

Throughout the movie (and the previous movies) Superman is parralleled explicitly to Jesus. He begins his ministry at the age of 30 in the first movie. His father sends him to earth to be a light in the darkness (Brando's voice is recycled in the new flick). Though Luthor's evil envelops him, the darkness does not overwhelm him. Superman Returns features Superman falling away from a meteorite - his arms spread in a cruciform pattern.

So, the question of "Why do we need a savior?" is tied into the very question that Christians are having to answer for the world all the time.

Singer, the director of the new movie, seems to answer it this way: we are all weak, and we need the help of others to overcome our own inadequacies. Where one is weak, another may be strong, and this will hold the whole system together in an ever progressing goodness. Superman himself needs help during the movie from mere mortals.

This is all a load of huey - because whatever flaw humanity has, we all seem to have our share in it (though unequal). Jesus does not. Therefore, our relationship to Jesus must be wholly and completely one sided. Whatever we bring to him he does not need, though it does not follow it would not please him.

Therefore, Jesus is more super than Superman - even though his physical body was as weak as ours.