OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred an Three SOMETHING LIKE GRACE

Despite the rain today was filled with moments of grace.  Yesterday, Friday, was scheduled down to the minute from 6 am until well past 10 pm.   Just to be on the road and traveling north again this morning felt like a gift.  I forget how stressful it is to sit in Manhattan traffic for an hour just to move five feet.......    

Grace filled events to recall:

When the NY Times and NPR reported that the Chicago Cubs had given vilified fan Steve Bartman a World Series ring along with the rest of the team as way to make up for the public shaming and humiliation the followed his accidental touching of ball that may have cost them the world series.
The Cubs and their fans are often vilified as unsportsmanlike so this act seems to address a multitude of sins.
After years of hiding and abuse by the public Bartman's statement, though, seems the most elegant of all:

“we all can learn from my experience to view sports as entertainment and prevent harsh scapegoating.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/sports/baseball/steve-bartman-chicago-cubs-world-series-ring.html?_r=0&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=Baseball&action=keypress&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article

All those diamonds contain more grace then a check for a million dollars,

For me grace was spending the morning at the Rhode Island School of Design Education Center in Westerly, RI learning to make hand dyed fabrics out of naturally sourced plants and flowers with master dye artist Rhonda Fargnoli.

The Education Center is brand new and absolutely spotless and clean.  It is however funded by Electric Boat the manufactures of nuclear subs.  I used to protest at EB in New London when I was a student at Connecticut College in New London.   That they are funding a program about natural and sustainable dyes is a small measure of grace.

Returning to the Cape from RI I was of course stuck in the Saturday Cape traffic to go over the canal bridge, but even here I felt grateful.  There was nothing for me to do and nowhere for me to go but back to friend and the arrival of my family for a week of nothing but play and relaxation.  So I spun through the dial on the radio, listened to Irish fiddle music and then settled on an NPR station for Ted Talk.   The topic was time.   Physicist and cosmologist Sean Carroll asks: Does time exist at all?

https://www.ted.com/talks/sean_carroll_distant_time_and_the_hint_of_a_multiverse

He discusses the notion of entropy or disorder and how the universe started out as a very low entropy system - everything orderly and simple - symmetry, little matter, and all close together.  But the nature or energy in our universe is that it pushes for movement and change.  With change come disorder, but also growth.  We now have a very complex universe with complex and various life forms and issues.  Physics has shown that the universe is not only expanding but accelerating.   We can no longer go back to simple and orderly.   Carroll says the most frequent question about this is, "What occurred before things were simple?"  Which brings up the notion of time and he says that maybe our universe and its expansion are manifestation of a cycle that is larger than us.  Meaning we are in just one in a complex of multiverses which are beginning simply and accelerating and dying out over the course of billions of years.  He points out that when we look up at stars in the sky they are so many light years away that they are already millions of years in the past when we perceive them.  Even in the present moment we are also always partly in the past.   Perhaps this is true of the future as well since we conceive of it before it is manifest.  There is a reassurance to this ability to hold past and future at the same time - like holding the notion of Electric Boat being capable of abetting positive environmental change - no matter how small.

My last comment on grace is the existence of Theatre Oobleck a non-profit company with no director which you can attend a performance of for free if you are broke.   Their latest production is "Baudelaire in a Box" in which they recreate all of the great poets works as songs in the folk and punk rock tradition.

Oobleck is of course slime from a Dr. Seuss book:

From One O'Clock in the Morning - C Baudelaire

Discontented with everyone and discontented with myself, I would gladly redeem myself and elate myself a 
little in the silence and solitude of night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, strengthen me