The Bowl is a Pool

The Bowl is a Pool

Ancient Egyptians loved the color blue.   Before 3000 BC they were importing lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and had already created faience, a non-clay ceramic that may be the earliest engineered material, by crushing quartz and adding a silica glaze tinted with blue copper.

This little faience bowl, 1.5 by 6 inches, is from an Egyptian woman’s tomb.  She didn’t use it for cereal but rather offered it as a “tomb gift” to the gods to encourage rebirth.  Now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, it is featured in my new favorite book “Blue: Cobalt to Cerulean in Art and Culture,” a lovely coffee table book of blue art ancient and modern. I plan to spend the next few weeks of these Wednesday “Blue Theology” postings celebrating the color blue.

From the Museum’s writeup about this bowl: “The marsh scene painted on the interior surface of this shallow bowl is perfectly adapted to its shape. The bowl is a pool: six curving stems with lotus buds radiate pinwheel-like from a central square, with four tilapia passing over and partly overlapping them to create a sense of depth. Three of the fish have other lotus stems issuing forth from their mouths; these also terminate in buds that float up to the vessel’s rim to join the others.

“In ancient Egyptian art no motif is too modest to be innocent of ritual symbolism. And so it is with this shallow bowl, for in Egyptian mythology, the marsh was the seething hotbed of creation. The blue lotus, whose flowers open from sunrise through midday and close at night, was closely associated with the sun’s rebirth each morning.

“The tilapia was a symbol of fertility and rebirth since Predynastic times, based no doubt on the creature’s remarkable habit of taking its newly hatched young into its mouth for shelter. The young fish appear to emerge from the parent’s mouth as though newly born, a phenomenon the Egyptians interpreted as spontaneous generation.

“This recalled the god Atum, whose own act of spontaneous generation initiated the creation of the Egyptian universe. The waters in which the fish swim are those of the boundless, life-giving Nun, the primeval ocean, while the central square motif is the primeval mound that rose above these waters.”

Blue is life and sky and ocean, primeval and fertile, seething, boundless.  Be Blue!!

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I post these “Blue Theology Tide-ings” every Wednesday here and on Facebook.  Come visit us in Pacific Grove at the Blue Theology Mission Station for a blue service trip or pilgrimage by the blue bay.  Bluetheology.com

Star Spangled Beach Cleanups

Star Spangled Beach Cleanups

July 4 is no holiday of freedom for marine animals.  Like colonial subjects, they have no representation, and are overtaxed that day by even more human trash and disturbance than usual.  Those happy holiday beach crowds leave behind tons of garbage, and it quickly clogs up their ocean waters.

Save Our Shores, a fantastic Monterey Bay conservation organization, runs two big beach events around here each Independence Day holiday.  On July 4 hundreds of volunteers hand out cool recyclable bags and talk to the crowds, in an effort they call “Pollution Prevention is Patriotic.”  Very early the next morning, July 5, over 300 volunteers are back on the beaches of Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties to clean up the inevitable damage.  Last year they collected over a ton of trash, mostly cigarette butts, plastic food wrappers, other plastic and glass, plus another 900 pounds of recyclables.  They call this work “Star Spangled Beach Cleanups.”

Here in California we shoot off fireworks out over the water.  Seems safer.  For us.  But all that rocket fuel and flares and heavy metals go somewhere; just ask the fish.  And you know how our dogs hate those explosions?  What about harbor seals and sea lions whose super fine ears help them avoid predators and communicate with mates?

(Sea World parks explode fireworks EVERY NIGHT, all summer long, not far atop their marine mammals. (2018 – now it’s “only” 10x a summer.)  Sure, they’ve gotten accredited for animal welfare and safety by the Association for Zoos and Aquariums.  But anyone who has seen the movie “Blackfish” about what life is like for captive orcas might wonder if these intelligent animals ever experience an Independence Day.) 

Sorry to rain on your 4^th of July parade, picnic and fireworks.  But on this Independence Day, please consider your holiday impact on ocean critters.  Some people say we Americans are too much about independence; we should celebrate “Interdependence Day.”  I’m sure our underwater cousins like the sound of that.

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(I first posted this 4 years ago, but the issues are the same every 4th – plastics and other trash on the beach, land and sea animals deafened and terrorized by explosives.  Thankfully Save Our Shores will be out there on the beaches today and tomorrow doing prevention and cleanup.  At our Blue Theology Mission Station in Pacific Grove we have a youth group visiting this weekend to learn about ocean stewardship and spirituality, and to visit local colleges, and we’ll do a beach clean-up also – it’s an everyday need.

I post these ocean devotionals every Wednesday here and on Facebook.  

Check out www.bluetheology.com to book your own service trip or pilgrimage by the sea.

Photo: Save Our Shores)

Resilience and Resistance

Resilience and Resistance

Can these cute ochre sea stars teach us something about how to resist disaster? Can their recent return after near extinction give us hope in the face of our own disasters?  When all around us seems to be falling apart (name your daily despair – political, environmental, medical, personal) can the gospel of sea stars help us be resilient?  God, I hope so. 

Indulge me in some metaphor or projection or identification with my beloved sea stars.  From human-related near extinction these ochre stars have rebounded in one generation.  Might their astral light shine on our darkness and lend us their aid?

The ochre star’s coastal ocean home, from Alaska to Baja, grows daily warmer and more acidic (thanks to all our fossil fuel use), to the extent that 5 years ago scientists starting noticing what they later named “sea star wasting disease,” overnight disintegration and massive die-offs of this abundant keystone species.  Researchers identified the cause, a virus, which the sea stars could normally resist, but they were so stressed from the changes in ocean temperature and chemistry they could not fight back.

With sea stars virtually gone from the intertidal, urchins and mussels and snails, the animals that sea stars eat, quickly took over, hogging previously diverse habitats, and clearcutting their own favorite food, the kelp, setting off a chain of massive habitat disruption.  Was this the end?

No! Ochre star moms and dads did an amazing thing.  In a “reproductive frenzy” they spawned a whole new generation of sea stars, much more abundant than any seen in years, stronger and able to resist this deadly disease.  Profs at UC Merced marveled at this dramatic example of microevolution.  The 20% of parents who had survived had a dormant but strong disease-resistant gene, which they passed on.  In one generation, the ochre star’s genetic code changed, and is now resistant to the disease.  We see natural selection before our very eyes, a hope story in the midst of so much doom and gloom.

Marine scientist Elin Kelsey kept hearing her colleagues say “we’re tired of writing obituaries,” charting the inevitable death of the ocean.  So she started a twitter account, #oceanoptimism, to gather stories of ocean resilience and recovery.  She hoped for a few responses; they got two million stories in the first month. Kelsey reminds us that fear shuts us down, recklessly speeds us up and hampers our creativity.  Telling hope stories doesn’t mean we don’t keep working for change, nor imply that we are overly idealistic.  Hope stories make us even more active, more creative, more resilient.

So maybe our one small sea star hope story can teach us something.   God says to Job, “Listen to the animals and they will teach you.”  Find the resistant spirit (gene) within you, it’s there, maybe dormant, but it’s there.  I find myself identifying with the old sea stars, those on the brink, what can they do in face of disaster?  We are few, and death seems all around us, but we can find the resistance within us, and then go into reproductive mode.   (Not literally in my case!)  The few resistant parents must spawn a huge resilient and resistant next generation.  Generate new ideas, pass them on the others, enlist youth, get that resistant spirit into the future.  Don’t let it die. 

One of the UC Merced scientist said, “The ochre sea star is perhaps a species with greater resilience than many.  With projected climate swings expected to be more extreme, the ochre sea star’s resilience is perhaps a small, distant bright light on a pretty stormy sea.” 

Like the sea star, we can hold fast (to that which is good), shine a light in the dark, and respond to crises all around us with a massive mobilization.   Of new life.  And of hope.  Resist.

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I write these “Blue Theology Tide-ings” devotionals on ocean stewardship and spirituality every Wednesday here and at www.bluetheologytideings.blogspot.com.  At our Pacific Grove Blue Theology Mission Station we have seven groups this summer delighting in the return of the ochre star and learning to resist.  NOAA photo by Steve Lonhart.

Ocean March at the White House

The Oceans are rising and so are we! 

Thousands strong here in Washington DC.