Soul Pancake

Rainn in Haiti (Day 4): What little thing is capable of bringing you the greatest joy?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:41:07 -0600

Now comes our time with Planting Peace and its fascinating founder, Aaron Jackson.

We get picked up in their enormous ambulance, which was a donation from a church somewhere in Alabama and was driven to Miami and then shipped to Haiti.

I told you all a little about Aaron before. I’ve never met anyone quite like him before. I don’t know where Aaron gets it, but he is wired to selflessly give and fight injustice and take care of problems as he sees them.

On one of his first trips to Haiti, he had run completely out of money, but, upon leaving the country, he noticed a small child lying listlessly with a swollen belly. He asked what was up with the child and was told it had worms, and that it would cost $20 to de-worm the child.

Lust List

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:07:05 -0600

[LIFE'S BIG LISTS]

“Lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all; ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge, are all founded on lust.” —Marquis de Sade

“Of all the worldly passions, lust is the most intense. All other worldly passions seem to follow in its train.” —Buddha

:: kate supreme by @plasticflora

List 5 things you LUST for.

1. Deep dish sausage and ricotta pizza with crushed tomato sauce and fresh marjoram.
2. A long desert highway and a 2010 Chevy Camaro with a 6.2 liter, 428 horsepower V8 engine.
3. Millions of people waiting in line to buy the book I haven’t written yet.
4. Pete Townshend’s black Les Paul autographed to me and proclaiming my superior guitar virtuosity.
5. That one night of endless Kate Moss possibilities.

:: @CSW

How do you choose your battles?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:01:15 -0600

[SP EXCLUSIVE]

The couple was warming up, but every third shot was either in the net or out of their partner’s reach. After two years, they should have been better players than this; something was off.

“We got into a fight,” Steffanie told me as an airplane roared overhead. Jeff, unable to hear, moved closer to the net.

“When?” I asked.

She looked over to Jeff, whiffing her racket through the air, and asked, “When, did the fight start, honey?”

Jeff cracked his neck. “Which one?”

“Funny, honey. This morning’s.”

“5:45.”

“On or off the court?” I asked.

They responded simultaneously: “At 5:45 in the morning?!?”

“In the bedroom,” Steffanie said as she flicked the ball to Jeff, “but it may as well been on the court.”

“Yeah,” Jeff sighed. “Same crap happens here, too.”

Rainn in Haiti (Day 3): What unsung hero has inspired you and how?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:21:48 -0600

I remember one time that my wife and I found this back road through the California High Desert from Joshua Tree to Big Bear, along a ridge of mountains. It was terrifying. Potholes the size of meteors. Steep drop-offs. Creeks running through the road. I drove in a cold sweat, vowing to never take that road again.

That’s what EVERY road is like in Haiti. Just throw in piles of garbage, goats, kids, bicycles, and countless, colorful, jerry-rigged Toyota pickup-truck taxis, stuffed with commuters, that are called “tap-taps.”

We drive what looks like a short distance on the map but ends up taking us nearly four hours. To the town of Le Petite Riviere Artibonite, in the central flatlands of Haiti.

This is our first taste of rural Haiti. Wow, it’s poor here. Subsistence farmers. Drying their rice on plastic tarps laid out on the roads. (I didn’t know rice came in shells. I thought it was just, well, rice. Like in the bags and the boxes. Silly me.)

Does religion do more harm or good?

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:07:18 -0600

Tel Aviv, Israel

:: masterminded by @Aviv and @Tsiona :: edited by Ryan Lash :: music by MJ Cyr.

Would God create something for the purpose of hating it?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 04:54:21 -0600

Sodom and Gomorrah. The Great Flood. The Apocalypse. Sure, we were all taught in Sunday School that God’s wrath is dished out with love for his creatures, but isn’t the whole "I made it, so I can unmake it" thing a little sophomoric?

Is there a sense of enjoyment in having enemies and punishing His children for their shortcomings? Or perhaps God, in a way, is prescient enough to balance his own impulses.

Would God create something just so that he could exercise loathing for it?

:: say NO to shellfish spied by dustout

Rainn in Haiti (Day 2): Do we have an innate hunger for learning and education?

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:40:34 -0600

Our first full day in Haiti starts early. At 7 a.m., 13 of us pile into two battle-worn SUVs. Battle-worn because the simplest drive on Haiti’s roads is like going to war. Pigs, bicycles, old women balancing bags of rice on their heads, moto-taxis darting in and out of traffic. It’s like a giant Haitian version of ‘Frogger’ for any driver.

We arrive first at the home of Sue Puzo. She is one of the founders of the Zunuzi School who has now taken in about a dozen or two local street kids and is educating them out of her home. They just showed up, sleeping on her doorstep after hearing that she was a kind lady who educated kids. That’s how bad the children here want education. After being orphaned or else kicked out of their homes by abusive parents, they would do anything to learn. Including sleeping on a doorstep.

Like so many of the selfless people I’m meeting on this trip, she’s paying for everything out of her own pocket and sacrificing everything to simply be of service to the children of Haiti.

Why is it so hard to quiet the voices that keep us up at 4 a.m.?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:51:44 -0600

[SP EXCLUSIVE]

I live near Dodger Stadium, close enough to see the big lights, close enough to hear the announcer’s voice. And even though I know I must be imagining it, close enough that I can hear the sound of the leather ball against the bat.

People park on my street and walk to the game. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say 75% wear blue, the team color. I can see them from the window near my desk: Entire families in blue shirts! They know there’s a chance they might leave the stadium with a broken heart, but they are positive—they are ready to cheer; they are hopeful.

I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, since I live near the stadium, I have to endure game-day traffic. People take over the playgrounds with their grills and loud music and coolers of beer. Don’t they have jobs? And then the games: They are slow! Sometimes nothing happens! What can you do but sit in the blazing sun and eat a $7 hot dog?

But still. I am sentimental.

Rainn in Haiti (Day 1): Where have you seen the most extreme disparity between wealth and poverty?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:11:33 -0600

Hi there. Rainn here. Last week, I went to Haiti with my wife to check out first hand the work of some charities that I’ve been raising money for. Should be an adventure!

I’ve never blogged about a trip before. I hate that word ‘blog,’ by the way. It reminds me of poop, for some reason. Why couldn’t they have come up with a better name for web log? Who insisted that it be called blog? I didn’t vote for that name. Did you? 'Post' is a good word. Solid. Proud. Dependable. 'Diary' feels a little bit girly, as in The Princess Diaries or The Notebook. But it works, too. Personally, I’d like to try to replace the word blog with … ‘Webary.’ Boom. New word. That’s how I roll. Webary is like “web diary.” Sounds Web-y, which is spidery and almost rhymes with aviary, which is beautiful.

So this is my ‘Webary’ of my trip to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Unlike Most

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:07:52 -0600

[LIFE'S BIG LISTS]

"Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else."—Alison Boulter

:: odd man out by Candy Critic

List 3 incredibly idiosyncratic ways in which you are NOT like everybody else.

1. I drink two pots of coffee a day and have zero issues falling asleep.
2. I toss my own pizza dough every Tuesday night and speak with a fake Italian accent the whole time I’m doing it.
3. I can recite every word of every line to the very first episode of Three’s Company.

:: @CSW

I See Your Haiku and Raise You a Renga

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:13:40 -0600

[SP EXCLUSIVE]

Our new Hectic Poetic column isn't just about reading poetry; it's about actually trying poetry on for size. So let's put on our thinking caps! (If you actually own one of these mythical hats, that is. If you do, please send me a photo. I'd love to know what one looks like.)

Today, we're taking our popular haiku challenges a step further. Yes, there are are a few "next logical steps" possible, with the most obvious being the renga and the haibun, or forefather and spawn of the haiku. First, a word about the one we won’t be tackling just now—the haibun. Simply put, haibun is roughly a paragraph of poetic prose preceding a haiku. The economical, often playful, language used in a haiku is used in the prose, which leads up to or elaborates upon the moment sketched in the haiku. These haibuns were pioneered by Japanese master Basho in his travel journals, which I lovelovelove. (He’s such a dreamy ancient man, if ever there was one.)

Now, on to our current task—the renga! Renga, a traditional form of linked poetry, is responsible for the appearance of what we now know as haiku. Typically written by two participants, the first writer composes a haiku (three lines with a 5-7-5 syllabic structure), the second adds two 7-syllable lines, and the renga is constructed by alternating verses in that pattern.

How do you know when to quit?

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 08:12:39 -0600

Do you have hope for the future of the earth?

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:16:08 -0600

My students recently asked me if I’d ever want to get off this rock and move to a big bouncing lunar suburb. I said no, and they were totally aghast. Why the hell would I NOT go to a new planet where the imported air and water were fresh and fragrant and clean and everybody was in love?

Perhaps it’s the fact that even though we are destroying our planet at warp speeds, I kinda have a soft spot for this place that Carl Sagan calls our pale blue dot—the only home we’ve ever known, infinitesimally lost in the vastness of space, an insignificant speck that Sagan says demonstrates the folly of human conceits.

When this pale blue dot still needs so much work, what makes us think we can just hop-skip-and-jump over to an entirely new planet and start anew? If you had the opportunity to move to another planet tomorrow, would you do it? What lessons from earth should we take with us? And more fundamentally, does our eagerness to blast off belie a feeling that the earth is a lost cause?

The earth has a future, but is it one that we can still have hope for?

:: @pascali

Keep Within the Lines

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 08:27:46 -0600

[CHALLENGE: QUICK, WRITE]

“There’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…” —Dean Moriarty, On the Road

:: Kerouac snapped by Tom Palumbo

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road largely in one six-week outburst on a single-spaced typewriter fed with one continuous roll of butcher paper. Talk about boundless creativity unlimited by rules! Why, then, is it so easy to become frustrated without direction? Like the writer’s block that comes from staring endlessly at a blank sheet of paper.

We think adhering to format might actually supercharge the creative process, forcing the artist to make decisions and commit to something. Think you have the mental muscle to take your creative karma in a different direction? Then throw caution to the wind, find something you’re passionate about, and take up the most demanding of all structures:

Write an impassioned sonnet. (Remember: 14 lines of 10 syllables written in iambic pentameter with an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme.) Post your opus here.

"For someone who is going to hell, you sure are a nice person."

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 04:45:28 -0600

[SP EXCLUSIVE]

And 5 other things NOT to say at an interfaith gathering.

5. “So does that make you kind of like a Jedi?”
4. “I thought you were supposed to cover your ankles?”
3. “So, do you follow any rules, or do you just freestyle it?”
2. “Let's rank the religions! You in the turban, go first!”
1. “Excuse me, but I thought you weren't allowed to eat that.”

Here’s the awful truth: While most of these statements aren’t made at interfaith gatherings, people think things like this all the time—or variations of it, at least.

How do I know this? I’m a confessed religion junkie, an addict who spends his time exploring the collision of religions and how religion affects daily life. From my time studying comparative religion at Harvard University (no, Harvard is not just for studying law, medicine, and Reese Witherspoon) to helping organize local interfaith groups in the New York and D.C. metro areas, I’ve watched the interfaith movement unfold. I have developed a growing interest in trying to understand conflict and resolution amongst religions, understanding unfamiliar faiths, how different religions bring about different perspectives, and why the word “interfaith” has become so taboo. And those are exactly the kinds of discussions I’ll be exploring with this column.

What's the most important thing you learned about yourself this year?

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:17:10 -0600

:: tree life lines by ktylerconk

Can hate sometimes be healthy?

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:52:32 -0600

“Anger can be cured by time; hatred cannot… Much may happen to make the angry man pity those who offend him, but the hater under no circumstances wishes to pity a man whom he has once hated: for the one would have the offenders suffer for what they have done; the other would have them cease to exist.” —Aristotle

We use the word “hate” far too freely. I hate getting up early. I hate tailgaters. I hate turnips. I hate hate crimes. That’s probably why the word gets such a bad rap. What if the truth about hate is entirely different? What if hate is a perfectly natural human emotion—and one that has its place? Right now, I’m angry with the man who broke my heart and want him to suffer. I would much prefer to hate him. Because then, according to Aristotle, he would cease to exist or matter to me. And that’s a coping mechanism I can get on board with.

Is there a place for hate?

:: hate-cake by kayepants

Put the 'do' in done

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:04:07 -0600

[LIFE’S BIG LISTS]

“Make a beginning and all will come right.” —’Abdu’l-Baha

We all have a running list of things we plan to do “one day.” Daunting things. Like quitting smoking. Dealing with our baggage (not the Samsonite kind). Reading Sartre. It’s the matter of ‘doing it’ that’s often easier said than done.

List 3 things you have waited far too long to just do.

1. Resolve the angst-ridden relationship I have with my brother.
2. Create a financial game plan.
3. Take my artistic outlet (read: photography) seriously.

:: @golriz

Are tolerance and certainty mutually exclusive?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:10:13 -0600

[SP EXCLUSIVE]

Atheists are a bunch of intolerant bastards. Believe me: I hang out with a lot of them.

We’ll sit at the diner smoking cigarettes, looking effectual. You'd think we're having conversations about humanistic reflections, seizing the immediacy of the moment, and the presence and power of life. You'd be wrong. Pretentiousness rules the day here. Given our narcissistic surety, it’s surprising we don’t order cabernet instead of coffee to wash down our plates of French fries. Granted, cigarettes and high-fat foods probably aren’t a rational combination for people who believe existence is a finite flash that should be relished, but that proves my point: Smugness rules the day. When it comes to our greasy spoons and the possible existence of God, we know best.

Not that we’re all angry atheists, mind you. (OK, there’s Donny, but he’s more of an agnostic, and I think he’s got issues of whether he ultimately fits into the group.) It’s just that we seem unnaturally consumed with ire for the believers and their supposed ongoing negative effect on society, the human race, and our own self-absorbed carpe diem-ing (which should be unfettered by other people’s beliefs). Our whole diner scene reminds me of my grandpa and his WWII buddies sitting around scarfing down burgers and complaining about Bill Clinton two years into Dubya’s second term. Puh-leez. Just pass the ketchup.

Which is more important: life or art?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:03:42 -0600

“If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat… you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It’s just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It’s just to destroy life.” —Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, 1992

Do we deny life when we only live for art?

:: cat curator by mark williams