porn for plants and god

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Yesterday, I had a piece over at Religion Dispatches about San Francisco Jonathon Keats.

One man from San Francisco is … targeting priest, scientist, and artist in a playful rally against authority. Jonathon Keats calls himself an experimental philosopher—though novelist, journalist, performance artist, and mad scientist would all fit as well…. Keats feels there is a complete lack of curiosity on the part of the average person to ask the playful and profound questions at the heart of human existence. Scientists have specialized themselves into corners, the “sad consequence of the happy pursuit of knowledge.” The hoi polloi wait, Keats laments, for the artists to tell us the meaning of their art, the scientists to tell us how the world works, and the religious leaders to tell us right from wrong. We have become passive creatures.

To help combat this lethargy, Keats has turned to pornography. It began a couple of years ago with plants—showing zinnias uncensored footage of explicit pollination acts—but now it has escalated to porn for God.

Read the whole piece here.

om. hindu. huh?

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Today, on Killing the Buddha…

Yoga. Fifteen million practitioners in the United States…and not one unified position on what exactly yoga is. What a surprise! And yet the debate rages on, among Southern Baptists and Orthodox Jews just to name a couple of religious groups, about whether or not yoga is a specifically Hindu practice, and whether to practice it is a betrayal of one’s own religious predilections should they not happen to hail from the Indian subcontinent.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a piece for India Today about yoga in America that touched on this infinite mix:

Although it was my father who was born in India, my mother, an American of European descent, took me to my first yoga class. I was about 10, and found myself after an hour of deep breathing and deeper stretches, sprawled on the floor in savasana. We were at church. … Little did I know I was playing out a role in some strange echo chamber of historical experience. The blood of east and west pumped through my young heart. My lapsed Baptist mother had married my lapsed Hindu father and, wanting to give their children some religious foundation, had chosen Unitarianism. It was a flexible faith. In the 1800s, its early American adaptors helped bring Hindu ideas to a New World audience when Henry David Thoreau penned to a friend, “Even I am a yogi,” and Ralph Waldo Emerson published his poem Brahma.

But my ruminations on twenty years of yoga practice aside, some people are getting serious about wanting to remind Westerners that theres a bit of history behind yoga—perhaps as much as four thousands years’ worth. Today, a piece by Paul Vitello climbs the top-ten list of most emailed stories on The New York Times site, about the “Take Back Yoga” campaign being waged by a group of Indian-Americans. They have

ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism. The campaign…does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.

So what do you think? Have Americans, in our physioyoga™-core vinyasa-embodyoga™-anusara-ashtanga-Bikram™-hatha-prenatal-power-yin-happy-restorative thirst for yoga rejuvenation, stolen something? And is that something religious? Who or what are you invoking when, hands clasped in front of your heart center, you open your mouth and emit the eternal sound of Om?

KtB celebrates ten years!

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KtB just turned ten! Join us to celebrate on December 7th in Brooklyn, New York.

Poster by the ever-talented Danica Novgorodoff.

For the past three years, i’ve been in the buddha-killing business and it seems a fine time to celebrate. And ten years! Ten years old isn’t much for a tree. A ten-year-old religion hardly even deserves to be called one. But for a website? Ten years is ancient. It’s venerable. It’s wise.

That’s why, on December 7th, KtB is putting on a Tin (Tenth) Anniversary Spectacular at the Galapagos Art Space in DUMBO, Brooklyn. It’ll feature a Decadent Decalogueof performances by friends of the magazine new and old, including Gangstagrass, Gabriel Kahane, Eugene Mirman, Eileen Myles, Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, and others.

There will also be Buddha-killer drink specials, 6-word testimonies, a DJ afterparty, and unmentionable surprises. KtB editor Quince Mountain (Worldwide College of Auctioneering Class of ’96) will officiate over a live and silent auction.

All proceeds go to Killing the Buddha, which has always depended on reader contributions, so that it can support more exemplary writing and continue to bring people together offline at live events around the country.

On November 13, 2000, Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau launched Killing the Buddha with a quartet of odd, uncomfortable, beautiful essays. By 2001, Utne Reader heralded it one of “15 sites that could shake the world.” Since then, we have been publishing commentary, journalism, reviews, fiction, art, and more. CNN reported just this past year, “Killing the Buddha makes religion interesting again.”

More info here and RSVP on Facebook.

yoga in america

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In honor of president Obama’s visit to India, India Today published a special issue looking at Indian-American life. Here’s my small contribution…

Although it was my father who was born in India, my mother, an American of European descent, took me to my first yoga class. I was about 10, and found myself after an hour of deep breathing and deeper stretches, sprawled on the floor in savasana. We were at church. It was a weekday night, in the same room where my Sunday school lessons were held, and the teacher instructed us to close our eyes and let our bodies sink into the floor. It may have been the first time I paid attention to my body when it wasn’t calling out in the pain, hunger, or chill born of a child’s needs. I closed my eyes and did as I was told. I felt my back, legs and head in contact with the carpeted floor. And then I melted into the hard surface. It was magical – probably the closest I came to a religious experience in any house of worship. Something happened.

Read the rest here.

some hints for freelancers

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At the SEJ conference, I teamed up with fellow freelancer Karen Schaefer and hosted one of the beat dinners during the conference to share information about how to make the freelance life work, at least a little better. Here’s a resource list we ended up with, put together from a variety of sources, including many gleanings from the ever helpful SEJ Freelance listserv, participant suggestions, places people learned about from Maya Smart, and more. It’s by no means exhaustive, and possibly redundant to other resource lists out there, but we wanted to share it in case it helps even one floundering freelance soul out there. Feel free to share widely.

The Business of Freelancing:

Poynter Online: http://www.poynter.org/

Writer’s Market: http://www.writersmarket.com/

Elance: http://www.elance.com/

CNN Small Business: http://money.cnn.com/smallbusiness/

Wall Street Journal Small Business Marketing: http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news–small–business–marketing.html

Inc.com: http://www.inc.com/

Biz Journals: http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/small_business/

Small Business Planner: http://www.sba.gov/smallbusinessplanner/index.html

Writer’s Digest: http://www.writersdigest.com/GeneralMenu/

Writers and Editors:  http://www.writers-editors.com

Writers Weekly:  www.writersweekly.com

Writing Coach: http://www.writingcoach.com/

Freelance Success: http://www.freelancesuccess.com/

Association of Independents in Radio: http://airmedia.org/

Daily Freelance Net: http://www.freelancedaily.net/

Editorial Freelancers Association: http://www.the–efa.org/

Editorial Pay Rates: http://www.the–efa.org/res/rates.php

Registering a business name: http://www.business.gov/register/business–name/

Small business FAQ: http://www.business.gov/faqs/

State taxes: http://www.business.gov/manage/taxes/state.html

IRS Small Business, including Employer Identification Number (EIN), taxes and more: http://www.irs.gov/businesses/small/index.html

Best Business Practices for Photographers: http://www.best–business–practices.com/

Tools:

Blog Talk Radio:  http://www.blogtalkradio.com – social network Internet radio site that supports free talk radio show hosting, podcasts and more.

Transom.org:  http://transom.org – a website showcasing the work of new public radio, with a fantastic section on tools

PRX:  http://www.prx.org/ – Public Radio Exchange, a website where radio stations and independent producers can share their work.  If radio stations air indy work, there’s a small royalty.

The Non-Designer’s Design Book by Robin Williams:  http://www.amazon.com/Non–Designers–Design–Book–Robin–Williams/dp/0321534042/ref=sr_1_1?s=gateway&ie=UTF8&qid=1285258063&sr=8-1

Sound Reporting, put out by NPR: http://www.amazon.com/Sound–Reporting–Guide–Journalism–Production/dp/0226431789

Rights:

Media Perils: http://publiability.com/ – Liability insurance.

Contract Lingo: http://www.writingcoach.com/blog/bid/43764/Contract–Terms–Every–Freelance–Writer–Should–Know

Creative Commons : http://creativecommons.org/ – An open-source approach to copyright.

Covering your Ass (by SEJ-er Alion Kerr) http://writetodone.com/2010/10/15/are–you–using–protection–free–speech–libel–and–covering–your–ass/

Health Insurance:

Freelancers Union: http://www.freelancersunion.org/insurance/explore/

MediaBistro: http://www.mediabistro.com/insurance/

The Artists Health Insurance Resource Center directory: http://www.ahirc.org/

E Health insurance: ehealthinsurance.com

National Writers Union: www.nwu.org

Alternative Funding Sources:

SEJ list of fellowships and workshops: http://www.sej.org/initiatives/awards–fellowships/non–sej–environmental–journalism–fellowships–and–workshops

Spot.Us: http://spot.us/ – Spot.Us is a nonprofit project of the “Center for Media Change“ and funded by various groups like the Knight Foundation

Fund for Environmental Journalism (SEJ): http://www.sej.org/initiatives/fund+for+environmental+journalism/overview

Kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/ –

National Geographic Expeditions: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/field/grants–programs/ec–apply/

Fund for Investigative Journalism: http://fij.org/

Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting: http://pulitzercenter.org/travel–grants

Investigative Reporters and Editors: http://www.ire.org/ (Also have trainings)

Foundation Center: http://foundationcenter.org/findfunders/fundingsources/gtio.html

Consider museums, historical societies, etc.

Nonprofit Journalism:

ProPublica: http://www.propublica.org/ ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest.

Rocky Mountain Investigative News Network ((I-News): http://www.inewsnetwork.org/

InvestigateWest:  http://invw.org/ – A non-profit investigative journalism team started by former investigative journalists from the now-closed Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  InvestigateWest uses foundation funding along with donations from private individuals to create multi-media content for the general public and media partners.

InvestigateWest, Lessons from the First Year: http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/leadership_blog/comments/20100824_investigatewest_lessons_from_the_first_year/

The Journalism Shop:  ww.thejournalismshop.com – A cooperative composed primarily of former Los Angeles Times staffers laid off or bought out during the current financial storm.

Oregon News Incubator: https://newsincubator.wordpress.com/ – A nonprofit network that advances entrepreneurial journalism in the evolving media ecosystem, supporting structures, tools and collaborative space for independent and emerging media producers.

**Many more at sej.org**

the dark side of the festival of lights

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Today, on Killing the Buddha…

I knew something was changing in India when I arrived for Diwali about ten years back and some of my nephews were boycotting the five-day Hindu Festival of Lights. While subtler forms of light are used too—a cascade of clay oil lamps illuminating sets of stairs—firecrackers are the big attraction in this annual commemoration of good over evil. Sparklers and M80s and things that go Pop! Bang! Boom! Ravana has been vanquished. All hail Lakshmi, goddess of wealth… with a thousand firecrackers strung together producing a magnificent five-minute-long series of explosions that surely the gods can hear in the heavens, making their ears ring and their eyes water.

My teenage relatives were having none of it. Not only does all that bang lead to missing fingers (a close call for one cousin) and house fires (an uncle’s rooftop thatch hut was engulfed), but the city is subsumed in a cloud of noxious smoke. The firecrackers themselves, my nephews explained to me, are produced in unsafe work conditions by child laborers. They didn’t want to support such a business.

Add to that the revelations that Diwali spurs an increase in the ritual sacrifice of owls to woo the the gods into helping the lives of humans. Something similar was happening during the World Cup in Africa, when smoking vulture brains was thought to help predict winners. (Little did they know they could simply ask Paul, who sadly passed away just last week.)

For Hindus, with their 300 million incarnations of god, it must be hard to please them all. And so many are intimately connected with the animal world. Last year, I met Jitu Solanki, a young naturalist making a living by running a guest house and offering desert tours in Bikaner of western Rajasthan. We were talking about the lack of dog control in India, the world’s leading country in rabies bites. He said:

Hindu people, you know, there is a lot of god and all, so we have a god we call Bhairava, reincarnation of Shiva and his vehicle is a dog, so people believe that if you kill the dog, Bhairava will be angry. This is a very nice concept that I like. If you see any god in Hinduism, you will find some bird or animal related and it is a very nice way to conserve wildlife.

But, everywhere, everyday, we lay lesser forms at the altars—little kids making firecrackers for our celebratory fun, exhaust from the transportation that carries me to a conference on conservation, the wind turbines that create “green energy,” daubed with the blood of birds. If only good and evil were just a bit easier to distinguish from one another. Give me more comics and less complexity. Give me light and the sweet, loud, smokey, conscience-free childhood memory of climbing rooftops in Chennai with my pack of cousins. Me in my brand new clothes, my clean hair freshly oiled, looking for the match to light my next sparkler.

flathead lake—the pristine & the alien

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCCmD_IQU2Q&fs=1&hl=en_US]

A grateful Society of Environmental Journalists 20-20-20 fellowship recipient, I arrived early in Missoula, Montana to take the Wednesday video workshop. On Thursday, with the official SEJ annual conference underway, I headed out to Flathead Lake with my Nikon D90 (but, sorry, no tripod), and on Saturday afternoon, turned the footage into this, my very first video.

judges say: share!

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Today, the Allahabad High Court in Lucknow, India announced its decisions in the Babri Masjid case, the controversial site that both Muslims and Hindus lay claim to in Ayodhya. Among other questions, the three-judge panel was determining whether the controversial site was indeed the birthplace of the Hindu Lord Ram. Sopan Joshi, of  the Indian newsweekly Tehelka wrote, before the verdict, “There is always agitation when a matter of faith is tested on scales of science and history.”

Eighteen years after the mosque was destroyed by Hindu extremists who had already made their decision on the matter, 89 court witnesses, and a thousand-page report later, the verdict is in. Sort of. Of the three judges, two have stated that the site is indeed the birthplace of Ram. This was just one of more than a hundred major and minor issues at hand in the four suits that together made up the Ayodhya case. It could still be contested and brought up before the Supreme Court, but for now the site, bare but for its weighty history, has been declared two-thirds Hindu and one-third Muslim. Seems a perfect time for some fusion architecture, no?

Robert Mackey writes in The New York Times today:

Since they do make factual assertions about beliefs and faith traditions, the rulings of the three judges make for remarkable reading. One judge, Dharam Veer Sharma, for instance, ruled, “The disputed site is the birth place of Lord Ram,” and then added this, about the presence of the deity’s spirit at the site:

“Spirit of divine ever remains present everywhere at all times for anyone to invoke at any shape or form in accordance with his own aspirations, and it can be shapeless and formless also.”

Spirit of divine. It is land on a hill in Uttar Pradesh. Sweet water emerges from a well. Maybe Ram was born there. Archaeology shows there were Hindu temples there before the mosque was built in 1527. Jains say they had a temple there as well. A report from 1918 mentions Buddhist shrines. How easy it is to forget that the land now known as India, which is predominantly Hindu today, was ruled by Muslims from 1000 AD until the Brits arrived in the 1700s. The Muslims and Hindus, at least for a time, shared the sacred space on Ramkot Hill, brought together to drink from the magic well whose waters were believed to be healing. The Brits, in a literal divide-and-conquer move, erected a barrier in the mid-1800s separating the space. Muslims here. Hindus there. Violence would burst periodically — mine! mine! — but it was the destruction of the mosque in 1992 that  resulted in 2000 dead, mostly Muslims, who make up 13% of India’s population today.

There are 40,000 extra police on the streets of Mumbai, but that city, and the rest of India (less Kashmir, but that’s another story. Or is it?), is calm. It seems a good sign. Politicians and community groups cite a “maturity” in India’s manner of dealing with such matters. Perhaps. Perhaps.

unconventional arrangements

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Photo by Jay Holcomb/IBRRC archives

Things are rarely as they appear. For birds in which there is little differentiation in outward appearances, it is easy to assume that two birds sitting on a nest are a male-female pair. But when biologists start testing blood for sex identification, it reveals an altogether different story for the Laysan albatross. Some of these findings have made their way into the news lately.

This morning at the World Seabird Conference, biologist Dr. Lindsay Young presented her research from eight years of studying female-female pairings of the Laysan albatross in Hawaii. Her driving interest was to figure out if these birds are genetically wired to prefer their own sex or were they simply expressing what scientists call a “behavioral flexibility” because of a skewed male-female ratio. There are way more female birds than male ones. It is the old question – nature or nurture? The answer, in part, depended on finding out how the females fared in their parenting and survival, and if the females were willing to switch their mates to male should the opportunity present itself. She did her best to steer clear of the “dicey territory” that this type of investigation inherently drifts into, given human inclination to anthropomorphize, at least when it comes in handy for their own preconceived notions of “normality.”

First she turned to the genetic fathers of the offspring, for the females were sitting on viable eggs. These males often had other established mates of their own (albatross often stay in supposedly monogamous pairs) and took the extra females in both consensual and forced – often when the female’s other protective female partner was absent – copulations. Both females would take turns incubating the egg, an adjustment for the birds, who usually have the male incubate for the first three weeks before the female takes over. The juggling throws the females off a bit. Some get a bit antsy and leave their brooding duties, to the detriment of the egg. Something about this switch also causes energy stress to the females that results in failed nests early on (and the need for females to take a breeding sabbatical the next year).

But if the egg survived past that initial stage, the chick had just as much likelihood of making it to its first flight as the offspring of male-female pairs. Two moms, ultimately, did just fine.

As for making a switch back to hetero pairing, it did happen, but interestingly, seemed more likely to happen if the female-female pairing had successfully produced an offspring.

Yes, Young concluded, it is behavioral, a plasticity of pairing that allows for reproduction even when there are not enough males to go around in the conventional arrangement. Yet if the albatrosses weren’t adopting this strategy, the population would not be growing but staying steady or even declining. It’s physically hard on the females, but it’s good for colony health, and what’s good for the colony is good for the Laysan albatross. Overall, these all-female pairs are responsible for raising a fifth of the colony’s chicks.