A Buddhist Monk on Death

Geshe Dadul Namgyal:

We can reflect on and contemplate the inevitability of death, and learn to accept it as a part of the gift of life. If we learn to celebrate life for its ephemeral beauty, its coming and going, appearance and disappearance, we can come to terms with and make peace with it. We will then appreciate its message of being in a constant process of renewal and regeneration without holding back, like everything and with everything, including the mountains, stars, and even the universe itself undergoing continual change and renewal. This points to the possibility of being at ease with and accepting the fact of constant change, while at the same time making the most sensible and selfless use of the present moment. . . .

When we fail to look at death for what it is — as an inseparable part of life — and do not live our lives accordingly, our thoughts and actions become disconnected from reality and full of conflicting elements, which create unnecessary friction in their wake. We could mess up this wondrous gift or else settle for very shortsighted goals and trivial purposes, which would ultimately mean nothing to us. Eventually we would meet death as though we have never lived in the first place, with no clue as to what life is and how to deal with it. 

Lisa's Gratitude

My wife Lisa wrote this in October, 2023. I believe that this was early in the episode of depression that ended with her death:

I am grateful for my husband who is the best thing that ever happened to me.

I am grateful for my children who are interesting human beings who have enriched my life beyond measure.

I am grateful for the memory of my parents whom I love and will miss for the rest of my life.

I am grateful for my sisters whom I will always love and who make me laugh.

I am grateful for my best friend who has known me for 55 years and no matter how long we go between calls we always pick right up again. I am grateful that she suggested that we set up a day and time to speak every week. I am grateful for the trust she has in me and that no matter what I say she is generous in her reception of it, interpreting it through the lens of who I am and what she knows about me.

I am grateful for my friends who like me and treat me kindly and warmly.

I am grateful for my extended family who I don’t see often enough but who in my memories make me feel loved.

I am grateful for friends whom I rarely see but who live in my memories and make me smile.

I am grateful for the internet which allows me to indulge my curiosity to my heart’s content.

I am grateful for my profession and my job which provides me with structure and meaningful work and provides me with a decent living and gives me a chance to interact with a variety of interesting women.

I am grateful for my liberal arts education which taught me to think and gave me access to the whole world.

I am grateful for my home which is a shelter and a refuge. And I am grateful to those who made it possible for us to have it.

I am grateful for my neighborhood which is inhabited by decent people and which is lovely and peaceful, situated right next to the state park which enables me to see some of the incredible wildlife that live there.

I am grateful for electric candles which are the coolest thing since sliced bread.

I am grateful for the intellectuals and thinkers and authors who provide with a multitude of things to consider.

I am grateful for music and the musicians who share their artistry with the world.

I am grateful for my body which has been reliable despite the lack of care I give it.

I am grateful for the various critters who have shared my home and brought me joy.

I am grateful for craft stores which enable me to express whatever artistry I possess.

I am grateful for the local grocery store and living in a country in which I do not fear hunger.

I am grateful to live in a country in which I do not live in fear of attack.

I am grateful for my car which gives me incredible freedom to come and go as I please.

I am grateful for hot tea which reminds me of my mother and which is so comforting on a chilly day.

A Eulogy for Lisa

2005

Delivered March 15, 2026

We come together today to celebrate the life and mourn the death of Lisa Johnson Bedell.

My name is John Bedell, and I was Lisa’s husband for 34 years.

Lisa was a beautiful and loving person, and she lived a life with much joy. But her life was also shadowed by sadness. Lisa’s children and I discussed among ourselves what to say about this, and we agreed that there is no way to describe Lisa’s life or understand her death without acknowledging that throughout her adult life she suffered from episodes of depression that were sometimes dark and deep.

1971

Lisa grew up in the Ten Hills neighborhood of Baltimore. Her girlhood home on Woodside Road was three miles from where we are today. She was the eldest of three sisters. I did not know Lisa as a child, and I hope that some of the speakers coming later will tell you more about that time. But I do know how important the memories of her childhood were to her. There was always a sweet smile on her face as she told and retold stories about her girlhood adventures, always involving the same cast of characters: her sisters, her best friend Ellen, her uncle Bob, and her father. I can imagine Lisa as a pirate queen running her hands through her chest of gold coins, sifting them, feeling their weight, holding one up to the light – that was Lisa with her childhood memories. They were her treasure. 

1985?

When her parents divorced, Lisa tried to keep the peace between them, and between her sisters; she wanted for all the people she loved to get along together. Loyalty mattered to Lisa, and she simply did not understand why people held grudges. She forgave everything to those she loved, including things I thought she should not have forgiven.

1989?

Lisa went to college, first in Virginia, and then at UMBC here in Catonsville, where she graduated in 1986. She then went on to graduate school in Minnesota where I met her in 1988. I thought she was the smartest woman I knew, and the prettiest. She asked me out. But she wasn’t looking to have fun. Lisa had goals. For our second date we drove across a frozen lake, something we both wanted to do while we were in Minneapolis. On the way she started asking me questions: did I want children? How many? Would I object if my wife wanted to stay home with them? What sort of home did I want? Later we called this “the interview.” I guess I passed, because a week or two later she showed me a picture of the engagement ring she wanted.

I was not ready to buy it. In fact I was a little alarmed by this rapid progression, and by the intensity of Lisa’s attentions. I tried to be rational about it. This was not easy, caught up in Lisa’s fire, but I tried to think things through, to weigh up the pros and cons. Lisa checked all the boxes of what I wanted in a wife, and the interview had shown that we wanted the same kind of life. We shared many interests – history, folklore, folk music, the history of language – and we got along famously. And she was hot. So I persevered.

1990

One of the things that decided me on Lisa was a car trip. Two of our graduate school friends got married in Rhode Island. I picked Lisa up in Baltimore and we drove up to the wedding together. It was a summer weekend and the traffic on I-95 was bad, turning the trip into a dreary slog, but I had a wonderful time. It did not matter at all what was outside the windows of that car, because inside was Lisa, and she was simply a delight. Throughout her life Lisa was a wonderful companion, a great person just to sit with and talk to. Lisa’s last job as a nurse was visiting people in their homes to give them infusions of medication, sometimes lasting for hours, and we recently heard from some of her patients how pleasant it was just to sit with Lisa through those tedious procedures.

I have no memory of the wedding at all, and the marriage didn’t even last five years, but that drive was one of the key events of my life. Here was a woman who had all the qualities I was looking for, and whose company made me happy.

So I bought the ring. And at least I never had to wonder what the right ring was. 

Lisa and I spent much of the year before our wedding apart, because I was doing research in London. One advantage of this is that I still have all the letters we exchanged during that year, a great record of that time in our lives, when we were crazy in love and looking forward to our life together. Reading over them I was also struck by how tentative we were, and how little we knew of each other, compared to ten or twenty years later. Marrying young enough to raise a big family means throwing yourself into it before you have any idea what life is all about. It's a leap into the dark. Lisa and I held hands, and jumped.

Honeymoon in Paris, January, 1991

We had our honeymoon before our wedding. Lisa flew over to London join me and we went to Paris together. That was back when you still rode the ferry across the Channel, and we crossed in the middle of a January storm. The ship was surging up and down, and people were lying all over the floor in pools of vomit. Lisa and I loved it. We even managed to find out way out onto a small balcony, a place I'm sure we were not supposed to be, to feel the wind and the spray on our faces. We shared a kiss there, the best kiss of the whole honeymoon.

We had no money, so we stayed in the cheapest room we could find and ate the cheapest food. But it was still glorious. Lisa and I both loved medieval history and art, and we basked together in the wonder of Notre Dame, Chartres and Sainte Chapelle. I was over the moon.

September 28, 1991

When I came back to the US we lived at first in Williamsburg, Virginia. We married in 1991, in the reconstructed church on Jamestown Island, with the ruined tower built in 1622. This caused Lisa’s Baltimore grandma to ask, “Why did they have to get married in the dilapidated old church, anyway?” Lisa and I could make each other laugh by bringing up that memory any time over the next thirty years.

For most of her life Lisa was very reluctant to be the center of attention. She loved for her children to shine, or me, but she preferred to stay off to the side, to be the helpmeet. She never wanted to be on stage, literally or metaphorically. But for her wedding Lisa put that all aside and shone forth. She dressed and made herself up to the top and played the role of bride for all she was worth. Of all the photographs in existence that show Lisa actively showing off for the camera, most were taken on that one day.

Lisa was radiant, and it was an amazing day, one of the best of my life, and hers. I remember being impressed that although there were a bunch of last-minute glitches, Lisa was calm. Our minister had to cancel and sent a replacement we had never met, who had never seen the service we wrote, and the wreath for Lisa’s hair did not arrive until five minutes before the ceremony, but Lisa was unbothered. There was no hysteria in Lisa then, and very little at any other time. That was part of what made her a great mother to small children, and a wonderful wife. I never saw her as a nurse, but I imagine that was part of what made her a great nurse, too.

After our wedding we moved to Baltimore and began having children, and I mean we started working on it right away. We had two children in rapid succession. Lisa loved everything about having babies. She loved getting pregnant and being pregnant and planning for the birth and breast feeding and holding her babies in her arms and watching them grow. And though she was no athlete and never otherwise sought out demanding physical activity – it is impossible to imagine Lisa climbing a mountain – she even loved giving birth, and I mean loved it. I have a semi-secret folder of photographs of Lisa taken within hours of each birth, lying half naked in bed, a baby at her breast, exhausted but radiating joy. I helped Lisa through natural childbirth four times, and that was by far the most beautiful and powerful experience of my life.

Lisa was wonderful with babies. She loved all of them, and all babies loved her. They knew at once that she would care for them and keep them safe. Lisa was a giver, a caretaker, someone who wanted most of all to help others. She threw herself into caring for her babies, and they thrived.

1996

We made homes together, two apartments and then a townhouse. I planted flowers in the yard, but Lisa did everything on the inside: painting, decorating, wallpaper. We all lived in a home she made beautiful.

Those were great years for Lisa. From our engagement to the birth of our second child, Lisa loved her life and knew she was on the right path. But after our elder daughter was born, Lisa fell into past-partum depression. It was post-partum depression, and passed quickly, but it was a frightening experience for me. I first learned then about her demons, and saw that they could drag her down to depths where I could not reach or help her. But she recovered and we had another child.

The experience of childbirth and motherhood was so profound to Lisa that after training as a historian she went back to school to become a nurse.

2007

She had three children and a part-time job, but she sailed through nursing school on time, with straight A’s, and then continued on to get a BSN. She went to work in labor and delivery at the University of Maryland hospital, helping other women have babies. In nursing she found her second vocation. She loved caring for people, especially other women, and always told me when any of her patients had praised her or thanked her. She loved mastering the technical skills of nursing, and the sense of competence she got from that. Lisa also loved the camaraderie of nursing in a big hospital and I heard many stories about her nurse friends and their antics. Some of our favorite photographs of Lisa are the ones taken with her nurse friends. The only thing Lisa did not like about nursing was doctors; she told me that one reason she preferred to work the night shift was that there were fewer doctors around.

We bought a new house, and Lisa threw herself into decorating it. Pregnant with her fourth child, she plunged into a frenzy of nesting and made another home beautiful. Looking around me as I write this, I see only Lisa: wallpaper she hung, decorations she bought, furniture she picked out. Just another way she made my life lovely.

2007

Lisa then found a new project to throw herself into: adopting a child. When her father died Lisa inherited some money, and I said, well, it's your money and it's off budget, what do you want to do with it? She said, "I want another daughter." This was 2007, and Lisa was then the mother of four, with a demanding full-time job as a hospital nurse. But she searched the world until she found a child in China she wanted, a little girl with a heart condition, and she handled all the adoption paperwork and made all the plans to take our whole family to China. All I did was sign forms.

Our trip to China was a wonder. We took all four of our children and Lisa’s mother. Lisa planned everything, supplying each of our children with a perfectly sized backpack and rolling suitcase, getting their passports, taking care of every detail. We saw amazing things, met great people, capped off by our meeting Clara and bringing her into our family. She was a frightened girl not yet two, handed over to strangers with whom she could not speak, but Lisa won her over with love and lollipops and she settled into Lisa’s arms. Lisa had done another wonder, bringing a little abandoned girl into our family.

You might imagine that the most memorable part of a trip to China would be the Forbidden City, or our cruise on the Li River. But other than meeting Clara I remember best two things that happened in the Newark Airport during our return. The first took place as we went through customs. This big Italian New Jersey guy looked through Clara's paper work and then got out a stamp. Lisa asked, "Is that the stamp?" He said, "Yeah, yeah, this is the stamp" and then brought it down with a flourish and a loud BANG. "She's a citizen now."

After we cleared customs we were stranded in the airport for hours. We found a spot on some benches at the end of a long, carpeted hallway and plopped ourselves down.  Our older children got bored and started rolling down the carpeted hallway, and when Clara jumped up and started rolling beside them I knew she would be happy in our home. It would never have occurred to Lisa to correct her children for rolling across the airport carpet; she wanted them to be happy, and in that moment rolling brought them joy and hurt nobody, so she smiled. 

2009

I think those twenty years, from when she and I started dating until we returned from China, were the best of Lisa's adult life. It was a crazy time with so many babies and lots of money worries, and some  periods of sadness, but on the whole things were good for both Lisa and me. I have been trying to remember her as she was then, to dwell on those memories, those times. She was a whirlwind of energy, always doing something, always with a new project and something new to talk about. I was totally caught up in that whirlwind, and in her.

Tintagel, 2005

But a year or two after we got back from China Lisa fell into another depression, the worst of her life. Despite a job that she loved and her big, thriving family, the world became a bleak and empty place for her. She tried all kinds of treatments, but nothing helped. Until she tried opiates. That did help; she told me much later that when she first took those pills she finally felt alive again after more than a year of utter misery. But that "help" only mired her a different struggle that ended with her death.

The years of Lisa’s first addiction crisis were bad for me but worse for her, an awful series of attempts to get clean, followed by relapses, followed by more ugly scenes and more attempts to get clean. She lost the job she loved, and the friends that went with it. We nearly went bankrupt. But the worst loss was her own self-esteem. Lisa was deeply ashamed of what she had done and what she had become. Everyone around her wanted to help her, but she found it very hard to ask for or accept help. Lisa always thought of herself as the strong one, the big sister, the mom, the nurse, the one who cared for others, not someone others had to care for.  She once said to me, “I don’t want to be a patient.”

2004

So Lisa tried to hide everything, to paper over her crisis with lies and weak smiles. The most common thing I have heard, as people have learned about Lisa’s death, has been, “I had no idea.” That was Lisa’s intention. She hated the thought that anyone would worry about her, or pity her. She made me her accomplice in her deceptions, and I went along as the price for remaining close to her. I lied for her, including to our own children. I suppose I will never sort out what I might have done differently, and whether it would have mattered.

Not that Lisa told me everything; she did not. She hid much from me. Which means that although she was surrounded by people who loved her, she faced some of the worse moments of her life entirely alone.

If you are wondering why I am up here, telling you about these things, it is because I believe that shame and secrecy and lies are a big part of why Lisa died as she did, and I am through with them.

Lisa did recover. With the help of our families and a good program for addicts, she stabilized herself. She went back to work, went back to her craft projects, adopted cats and dogs. She watched her children grow to adulthood. I extend my sincere thanks to everyone who helped her in that time, wherever you are, so that we were able to have another dozen years of her love.

2020

And yet Lisa was never what she had been before. It is hard for me to think straight now about the past decade, with the image of Lisa’s dead body in my eyes. It may be that I am looking through – what would the opposite of rose-colored glasses be? Doom-colored glasses? But as I think over those years I see decline, contraction, loss. She never had another burst of energy like the ones that carried her through nursing school and adoption. She said several times, "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing with my life now." The death of her mother and three of her friends hit her very hard. She stopped going to family events because she did not want to see people who knew about her fall. Some of them had had equally spectacular falls, but that did not matter to Lisa. She never passed judgment on others, only on herself. She forgave everything those she loved, but was never able to forgive her own mistakes. She never escaped her shame.

I believe that Lisa was at least mildly depressed for all of the past decade, but that in the last two years of her life it got much worse. Her world gradually shrank, and she gave up her pleasures one by one. By last year she did little besides work and sit on our living room couch, watching television and idly surfing. She joined Spotify and made music playlists for our children that are almost unbearably sad.

Her favorite thing in recent years was to listen in on the rest of her family being happy together. She used to sit in the next room, listening, soaking in our happiness and loving that she had helped to make us and bring us together. What she loved more than anyone else was to see that those she cared about were happy.

Lisa’s body shrank along with her world. She lost interest in eating and grew thinner and thinner. I had one of my worse crying fits when I found the clothes she used to wear when she was plumper, piles of elastic-waisted skirts that she called “fat skirts.” I broke down thinking of how her body had shrunk away along with all her other losses. As I said, maybe I am exaggerating her decline. She could still be a delight to sit with and talk to. She was still my best friend. But from here, that is what I see.

2022

Lisa had a complicated relationship with religion. As a teenager she had herself confirmed as a Catholic, to the puzzlement of her unreligious parents. But she did not stick as a Catholic, nor in any of the other churches she tried over the years. She had a spiritual soul but also a deep skeptical streak, so although she longed for religious comfort she was never able to accept the teachings of any particular church. She loved religious music, everything from Bach and Handel to bluegrass gospel. For years she made a point of seeing the Messiah every Christmas. Her commonplace books are full of religious sayings. This was one of the things she and I had in common, one of the million things we shared. But whereas I have always been comfortable thinking of the universe as a great mystery, Lisa could not be. She wanted to believe in something.

In particular, Lisa wanted to believe that something would endure. Lisa had a bad relationship to the passage of time. Except during those times when she had a great project under way, she spent much of her life looking backward, regretting things she had lost, not able to see much in the future to compensate for what was gone. Each death of a relative or friend hit Lisa very hard, because she never imagined herself making new friends in the future. 

Lisa practiced many crafts in her life – crochet, knitting, needlepoint – but the one she stuck with the longest, and that I think she was best at, was scrapbooking. Our house is full of beautiful collages she made. This makes me wonder, because it seems to me that scrapbooking is an art form dedicated to freezing time. Lisa's best work is memorials to people recently dead; the ones she made for her father are magnificent. Others document our children at particular ages, trying to preserve the memory at some delightful point in their young lives. Lisa wanted desperately to hold on to every good moment in her life, every happy memory, and dreaded their loss. Lisa had always been a saver of things – going through her stuff we found her first driver's license, and all of her college IDs – but later in her life she became something of a hoarder, reluctant to throw away anything that tied her to the past.

In the many, many conversations when I tried to lift Lisa from one of her dark moods, I can only remember only one thing I said that seemed to help her. I told her that we don’t know what time is. Physicists do not agree about this at all. In some physical theories time is just a direction like north or south, and moving into the future does not destroy the past any more than walking down a road destroys what falls behind you. Lisa loved that. She loved thinking that maybe the good things in her life were still out there, somewhere: her parents, her childhood, her babies, her happy times. She mentioned this to me twice in the last month of her life.

2024

Around Thanksgiving Lisa fell ill. She said she was too stressed to cook Thanksgiving Dinner, so one of our sons helped me do it. I knew something was wrong, because Lisa had always loved cooking at least that one time every year.

By Christmas she was worse, sometimes so weak she could barely stand. I was afraid something very serious was wrong, but she still refused to go to the doctor. In January she started having panic attacks, and we went once to the hospital to have her heart checked out.

A few times over her last few weeks Lisa looked at me very seriously and said, “I love you with all my heart.” I knew this meant something, but I did not know what. When I asked what was wrong, she gave evasive answers. I did not push her to say more.

One Friday night in February our daughter Mary came over for dinner, but Lisa never came home from work. I was very worried, because she loved Mary’s visits. She did not answer her phone. She finally got home around 4 AM, too stoned to walk.

We knew then that she had fallen back into addiction, and she knew that we knew.

After she woke up she lay down on her couch and stayed there, radiating shame. By the next afternoon she was in withdrawal. She was obviously miserable but refused all aid beyond glasses of water. I asked if she wanted to go to the hospital, but she said no. She said, "I want to be here." That might have been the last thing she said to me. She got sicker and sicker. Her sons and I talked about what to do, but I said, she says she wants to stay home. I told her I loved her, and she smiled at me. It was beautiful.

I had a strong sense that Lisa did not want to go on as she was, and that she had decided to either beat her addiction then and there or die trying. She could not, I thought, bear the shame of rising from that couch as an addict. I believed in her; I imagined myself in a week, praising her for her courage. It seemed from what I could find on the internet that she was not in much real danger.

Lisa had very strong views about bodily autonomy. She was fanatically pro-abortion, horrified by the thought that the government could tell her what to do with her own body. As I have said, she hated going to the doctor, hated being a patient, hated letting anyone else control her body. I thought about EMTs charging into our house to inject her with Suboxone, and I knew she would hate that. I thought she was living as she chose, maintaining control of her own life and her own destiny. I thought that was what she wanted.

So I did nothing. That decision is also, I suppose, something I will never sort out.

Sometime around 3 AM on February 17, Lisa died.

We do not yet have a medical cause of death for Lisa. But I believe that she died of sadness and shame.

I believe that when Lisa felt that she had nothing left to give, that her future was to be a patient, someone who was cared for rather than caring for others, someone who was pitied, for whom others had to do the work of caring, who would be a burden, she could not bear that future. She risked her life to avoid that future, and she lost it. 

This has been a sad speech because I am very sad. But there is another way to think about Lisa’s life. She was born under a dark star, or with mangled genes, or whatever it was that gave her the curse of depression. But she lived the life she wanted. She wanted above all to marry and have children, and she raised five children with the man she chose. She made many friends, and kept in touch with the old ones who meant so much to her. She found a career doing work she loved. She did the things that mattered most to her. Part of Lisa's problem, later in life, was that she had done all the things she set out to do. She had achieved all of her goals, and she could not conjure more goals to pursue.

I have been thinking about going back in time to see the young Lisa at some rough point in her early life, perhaps after her parents divorced or after she dropped out of VCU and moved home to finish college in Maryland, and telling her about the rest of her life. I believe that if I had told her that she would fall in love and have a honeymoon in Paris and a storybook wedding, that she would raise five children in a homely house, that when she died she would be surrounded by people she had long loved, she would thought that sounded like a fabulous life, and she would have been happy.

To all of you I say, thank you for coming to be with us in this time. And to Lisa I say, “I love you with all my heart.”

Links 13 March 2026

Church of Sainte Pierre in Chauvigny, France

CAR-T therapy shows remarkable promise in treating lupus and other autoimmune diseases: New Yorker, Nature, NIH, short video. Unfortunately it is, for now, very expensive.

Back to uploading chapters of The Voice from the Darkness at Royal Road.

The 2026 British Wildlife Photography Awards.

Terry Tempest Williams, "An American Prophet of the Natural World". Emerson updated.

Freddie deBeor against Incels and LooksMaxxers: sex is a normal thing that normal people can have.

Profile of Stewart Brand at 87: a 60s counter-culture icon who created the Whole Earth Catalog, he went on to be an advisor to governor Jerry Brown, leader of tech libertarians, and now a prophet of making things that will last a very long time.

Polling of American voters shows that "The Trans Backlash is Real." The author of this piece got savagely attacked on BlueSky for publishing it, even though it merely reports polls done by others.

Matt Yglesias writes that people involved in political discourse need to toughen up: "Everyone gets canceled sooner or later. You may as well just stir the pot."

Prototaxites, the largest living things on land in the Devonian period, have long been considered giant fungi, but new evidence suggests they were an entirely new branch of life. (12-minute video, Scientific American, wikipedia)

Glowing, color-coded map of all the lighthouses in the northern seas, which Ethan Mollick got Claude Code to make.

Breaking Bad: some Danish data shows that people commit more crimes in the years after a cancer diagnosis. (Twitter/X)

Roman lead ingots found in Wales, cast in 87 AD.

Microsoft announces a data storage system they say should preserve information for 10,000 years. Let's hope; a few years ago I tried to retrieve data from a 10-year-old "archival" cd and it was hopelessly corrupted.

Summary of what's in the ROAD to Housing Act, from Alex Tabarrok.

Derek Thompson, On Being a Dad. Parenthood is truly one of the most wonderful of all experiences, a pedestal it shares, for me, only with being in love and having a true friend.

Very depressing look at American governance through the lens of the tiff between the Pentagon and Anthropic. (Twitter/X)

Statistician Cremieux on the horror of RFK's directive to medical schools about nutrition and other topics. (Twitter/X)

The Danish women who knit clothes for naked statues. (NY Times)

A meditation on individual and collective emotion.

Trying to distinguish what people actually want in a romantic partner vs. what they say they want. (Twitter/X)

Big year for wildflowers in Death Valley (NY Times, BBC, USA Today, Smithsonian)

This year's Asian Art Week at Christie's includes a ton of anime and other Japanese pop culture.

Coffins and sealed Papyri, 1000-700 BC, found in Egypt.

Interesting photographs taken in the 1970s in the crypt of St. Botolph's Church in London, which the priest opened to all homeless people.

Excellent, lovely, meditative 80-minute video on Rumi and Sufism. Just what I needed now.

Asian Art at Christie's

Large (15 inches) floral scroll dish, 1403-1425 AD

Dragon Moon flask, 1736-1795 (20 inches tall)

Bronze dragon head finial, Han Dynasty or Six Dynasties Period, 206 BC to 589 AD

Figurine of a noblewoman, Han Dynasty, 12 inches tall

Ming Dynasty Horsemen

Striding dragon, gilt bronze, Tang Dynasty

Silvered bronze  mirror with a rabbit doing – well, what?

Pounding something with a mortar and pestle, apparently. A toad watches.

So this lovely being must be Chang'e, the moon goddess, and that must be the rabbit who was the great friend of Chang'e and mixed the elixir of immortality for her when she ascended to the Moon Palace.

The rather late story that Chang'e (an old goddess) ascended from earth to the Moon Palace, there to live forever but with only a rabbit and a toad for company, inspired many poets of the Tang and later periods. Here, via wikipedia, is an example:

Now that a candle-shadow stands on the screen of carven marble
And the River of Heaven slants and the morning stars are low,
Are you sorry for having stolen the potion that has set you
Over purple seas and blue skies, to brood through the long nights?

Vanity vs. Love

The NY Times today is running a long article about the women who are irritated with the photographs their husbands and boyfriends take of them, because said photographs do not meet their aesthetic standards. I mentioned this to one of my sons who said, oh, yeah, people complain about this online all the time.

You people are sick.

Signs of Spring

First daffodils, morning and afternoon. Below, frog eggs down in the mill race.

Matt Yglesias on the Iran War

Intelligent take:

They say that defeat is an orphan while victory has a thousand fathers.

So even though the invasion of Iraq was extremely popular in 2003, you rarely meet someone who’ll own up to having supported it at the time. Both that war and the one in Afghanistan shook out so badly that their architects have been retrospectively cast as a team of buffoons.

At the time, though, Colin Powell was the most popular public figure in the United States. Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were old policy hands with long and wide-ranging track records. Their actions were widely embraced by knowledgeable elites, including top former officials from the Bill Clinton administration.

Which is not to say that the ideas of these members of the George W. Bush administration were good or that their policies worked (clearly they were not and did not), just that it’s not right to think of what happened in the early aughts as “a bunch of clowns took over and wrecked things with their clowning.”

The danger of this line of thought is made clear, I think, by the way that Donald Trump seems to have talked himself into a new round of military adventurism in the Middle East. If the problem with the Bushies was that a bunch of morons got the United States sucked into “forever wars” through their obsession with nation-building, then the solution is to build a team that’s not made up of morons, a team that is relentlessly focused on lethality. They put their ideas to the test with a smaller-scale strike on Iran last year. Then again in Venezuela. And it worked, so why not try it again?

What all this misses is that this is exactly what the Bush administration thought they were doing.

In the 2000 campaign, Bush denounced nation-building and peacekeeping missions as a waste of time. His team contained many believers in a Revolution in Military Affairs involving (to quote a 2002 article) the “use of smart machines that allow networked, integrated forces to become more lethal at the same time they become more agile.”

Which is just to say that they didn’t intend to get bogged down in simultaneous counterinsurgency missions. It’s not like someone was sitting around the Pentagon saying that it would be a good idea to engineer a situation where, years after the invasion, Marines were engaged in intense house-to-house fighting in Anbar province, and years after that, isolated garrisons were trying to secure American interests in a country whose politics are dominated by pro-Iranian political parties.

Quagmires happen by mistake. 

I was thinking this just the other day: Trump and Hegseth keep saying that their war will go better because they are not idiots, but whatever label you want to give to Cheney, Rumsfeld, Addington et al. they were not stupid.

What they shared with Trump and Hegseth was the belief that violence can be used to reshape the world as we would wish. This belief may sometimes be true, but it is always very dangerous.

Gerard Trignac

French artist and printmaker born 1955. Above, The Defile of Fools.

The Archives

Waiting

The Temple of Doubt

Station Brobourg

The City of a Thousand Towers. More here.

First Flowers of Spring

I don't know these folks manage to grow crocuses; deer eat mine down to the ground as fast as they come up, and I never see a flower. But I was thrilled to see these today.

A Strange Iron Age Ritual

Interesting find on top of a rocky hill in northern Germany: The hill, known as Feldstein, if made of porphyry shot through with veins of quartz. Last year a metal detectorist found two iron axes lying in a cleft in the rock. Beneath them was a hollow that had been cut into the rock, then filled.

The analysis of these materials has allowed specialists to reconstruct the sequence of actions that took place at that point more than two millennia ago, sometime between the 5th and 3rd centuries BC. According to Dr. Zeiler, the sequence began with the opening of a small cavity in the rock to extract the quartz embedded within it, a task that required considerable effort given the hardness of the material and the exposure of the location to harsh weather conditions.

Once the quartz had been obtained, it was processed immediately on the stone slab itself, using the crusher to reduce it to fragments only a few millimeters in diameter. Once this operation was completed, the cavity was refilled with the crushed quartz and with the very tools used in the process, that is, the slab and the crusher. Finally, on the leveled surface of the sealed pit, the two iron axes were deposited in the arrangement that the detectorist was able to observe millennia later.

But wht does it mean? Is the quartz being interpreted as some kind of magical substanced? By extracting and crushing it, did the performer of the rite hope to release and use its power? Were the quartz veins, maybe, the blood of the earth? So that the earth's power is being invoked?

Honestly this is one of the weirder rites I have come across in my career.

Chimpanzees and Crystals.

There is archaeological evidence that people have been into crystals for hundreds of thousands of years. So some researchers gave crystals to chimpanzees and discovered that they love them too. 

NY Times:

For the first experiment, the researchers used two pedestals that were installed in the chimps’ yards. On one, they placed a multifaceted quartz crystal that stood about a foot tall, and on the other, a sandstone rock of similar dimensions. (Dr. García-Ruiz named this experiment “The Monolith.”)

The chimps went crystal cuckoo. In one yard, they repeatedly approached the monolith until the alpha female, Manuela, wrenched it off its pedestal. After that, the crystal rarely left the troop’s sight, while they largely ignored the sandstone rock. One video shows a 50-year-old male chimp named Yvan carrying it while he climbs and eats cabbage, passing it between his hands and feet with great panache.

In the other yard, the experiment was cut short after a chimpanzee named Sandy immediately grabbed both items from their pedestals and brought them into the dormitories, where human caretakers don’t generally go. . . .

For the second experiment, researchers set out piles of pebbles in the gardens, with a few small crystals incorporated into each. The chimpanzees immediately sorted the crystals out of the piles.

Then they carried them in their mouths, turned them in the light and held them up to their eyes like old-timey prospectors.

Xeroxed and then Scanned Photo of a Cache of Crystals

I find this completely unsurprising. The human attraction to bright, shiny rocks, especially when they have interesting geometries, seems very primal to me, something so old as to defy any assignment of "meaning." Archaeologists are used to finding caches of crystals in all sorts of places; the one in the photo above was found buried next to the foundation of a house on the Manassas battlefield, probably built around 1870. The occuants were free African Americans, and an interest in in crystals seems to be a habit their ancestors brought from Africa. But they were far from the only ones to have such interests; I know of a cache of crystals hidden in the coffin of a wealthy white woman buried around 1920. Notice the stone point that was included in the collection above; this is also a common habit around the world, and many folks have been interested in the stone tools shaped by their distant ancestors.

We love bright, shiny, interestingly shaped things, and always have.