I don’t think I was the only father-to-be who habitually confused “Braxton Hicks” with “Higgs Boson”.

The fetus grows toward soulhood. It began in the land of the unliving, of elements, of formless matter and energy. It was not one thing, it was many things. It had no spirit and no soul.

The fetus spirit moves into the land of plants and dreams: unconscious, potential, dark and unthinking. It grows larger, it moves, “it” becomes “he,” he flutters, he wiggles, he hiccups. He inverts, his eyes open, he hears murmurs of voices and heartbeats. He wants to be born, he makes himself be born. He comes out of the between-world, the womb, the world of unthinking life of the sea, the world of life between dead things and sentient things. He is coming into our world now, the world of action and form and spirit.

Spirit is the gift of all living things, however low. Spirit is the will to animate, to thrive, to reproduce, to sicken, to die. Spirit is the blessing and curse of life. To be born is to die, and between those two is a constant state of Impermanence.

You cannot remember your birth, you cannot remember your first words, you cannot remember the world of unconnected sensations, of thoughts without forms and structures. My son lives in that world now. The world of insects, of small things that want light, warmth, food, sleep, comfort. Ahead of him is the growth of his soul.

Soul is the gift of sentient beings. We take our souls from God when we structure the world for ourselves, when we say: “here is the boundary between myself and all other things.” To have a soul means to know what it is to be unique, and to know that you will die. This the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; as long as we draw that boundary we eat that fruit.

Some souls are big and some are small. An adult human, armed with words and math and art and religion and science, has a huge soul that can change the rest of the universe. To shoot an arrow is to strike something with an arrow, that is the Law of Consequence, a law of nature like the second law of thermodynamics. To act without consideration of consequence is soulless.

If animals have souls, they are tiny souls with small aspirations and abilities. Right now my dog has a bigger soul than my son, but that situation won’t persist very long. Maybe other animals have souls like humans, animals like dolphins or chimpanzees or parrots. They have to think about souls in their own way, if they can. I think that all humans have a soul, but it wasn’t given to us in any one instant, we stole it in little pieces from God, we are always stealing more of our soul from God. To Live in Grace is to sometimes, voluntarily, give a little of it back.

“God” is the word we use when we try to understand the soul. We have written about God for three thousand years and we talked about God for tens of thousands of years before that. The Old Sage said “don’t confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon.” The Prophet said “the human mind cannot comprehend God.” I used to read a lot about God, but you can’t learn to plow by reading books. I think words are suspect. Human beings said every word ever. I think everyone ever, including myself, has misunderstood the nature of God. I think the most definitive thing you can say about God is: if someone tells you about the nature of God, whatever they say is wrong.

Science is a tool for understanding how wrong you are, that’s why science says so little about God.

I call myself a spiritual atheist, does anyone else do this?

Jenny and I recently (re-)read Beverly Clearly’s Henry Huggins (because we’re having a son? because Cleary is from Portland? dunno why, really), which prompted a discussion about the prices Henry paid for things in (presumably) 1950. Life in 1950 was a lot cheaper but conversely money was a lot harder to come by. For example:

In the first chapter (“Henry and Ribs”), Henry pays a 10¢ bus fare. This was well before Tri-Met but we can actually make a direct comparison. He rode from the YMCA downtown to his house on NE Klickitat (or rather, that was his intention until he was ejected), a two-zone fare that today would cost $2.05. (You could make the argument that NE Klickitat in 1950 was on the edge of town, so it might comparable to a three-zone fare today, but I won’t make that argument.)

In the third chapter (“Henry and the Night Crawlers”), Henry wants a new football that costs $13.95. It sounds like a pretty nice football — perhaps like the Wilson F1100 Official NFL Game Football that Amazon.com sells for $79.99.

A ten-year-old with two football’s worth of money could buy one football, and then ride the bus across town 139 times (and still have a nickel left for soda) ... in 1950. A ten-year-old in 2008 could buy the football, and then ride the bus not-quite–across town 39 times (with one penny left over).

So on the one hand, the ability of a young boy to move freely about Portland, Oregon is 28% what it was 58 years ago. On the other hand, his ability to purchase a football is 5.7 times greater than it was 58 years ago.

Or, proceeding from the assumption that the prices of things reflect in some way their actual value — and not to put too fine a point on it — we, as a society, have traded about 70% of our kids’ literal freedom (in the sense of “freedom of movement”) for a five-fold increase in their ability to accumulate stuff.

Rereading Henry Huggins for the first time since the 1970s throws into weird relief how the world has changed since my own childhood. As a kid, I recognized in Henry’s adventures a lot of my own behavior, and that of my friends. In particular, I never felt like I was reading some historical document of childhood from ancient times (something I felt when reading, for example, Peter Pan). Henry was doing things that were recognizably real-world 10-year-old things to do, in either 1950 or 1979. There were differences but they were of degree, not kind: Henry lived in a city where I lived in the country; he rode the bus freely around town and I rode my bike freely around the countryside; he collected night crawlers to sell to fishermen and I collected golf balls from the irrigation ditch next to the country club to sell to, well, golfers who lost their balls in the irrigation ditch.

Could you imagine a kid in 2008 doing any of these things?

(A Quick Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation)

• P_g = price of a gallon of regular unleaded at the Chevron near our house = $4.22
• P_m = price of a gallon of Alpenrose 2% milk at New Seasons = $3.89
• P_r = price of a gallon (16 cups) of cooked white rice at New Seasons^[1] = $0.35
• D_fg = mileage of our 2008 Subaru Forester (standard transmission) during a typical week of commuting = 24.5 mpg
• E_g = energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline = 31,000 kcal (aka “calories”)
• E_m = energy equivalent of a gallon of 2% milk = 1952 kcal
• E_r = energy equivalent of a gallon (16 cups) of cooked white rice = 4256 kcal
• p = energy I burn in one hour riding my bike on a flat road with no wind at 15 mph^[2] = 704 kcal
• D_pg = my mileage if I could somehow consume a gallon of gasoline = (E_g/p) × 15 = 660.5 mpg
• D_pm = my mileage on a gallon of 2% milk = (E_m/p) × 15 = 41 mpg
• D_pr = my mileage on a gallon of cooked white rice = (E_r/p) × 15 = 90.7 mpg
• C_fg = cost to drive the Forester one mile = P_g/D_fg = $0.17
• C_pg = cost to ride my bike one mile if I could somehow consume gasoline = P_g/D_pg < $0.01 (greater than half a significant digit [$0.005]
• C_pm = cost to ride my bike one mile powered by milk = P_m/D_pm = $0.09
• C_pr = cost to ride my bike one mile powered by rice = P_r/D_pr < $0.01 (less than half a significant digit [$0.005]

Notes

^[1] Assumes 2 cups of cooked rice = 1 cup dry rice weighing 8oz
^[2] A pretty leisurely speed for me under those conditions, so I might actually burn fewer calories than this, i.e. get better “gas mileage”

I have a few pet issues. Some people would call these pet peeves, but pretty much the only pet peeve I have is “beliefs that have not been clearly thought through.” One of my pet issues is an excuse for not bicycling I used to hear quite a bit. (For some reason people offer this less frequently — to me, anyway — as an excuse.) The excuse is something along the lines of “I’d ride my bike more often but I don’t want to expose myself to all those automobile pollutants.”

Which is kind of silly for two reasons:

1. The research doesn’t support it
2. It doesn’t make any damn sense

First, the facts. Most people have a skewed sense of both risk and exposure re: automobile pollutants. My reading (some references below) indicates that:

• "Gas-phase" (i.e. non particulate) pollutants are at least as high inside a car as outside.
• Fresh air controls or air conditioning have no effect on pollutant levels inside a car.
• Levels of particulate pollutants are higher outside cars, but the effect drops dramatically away from a high-traffic road.
• Cars produce the most pollutants when they’re idling or operating under light load — in other words, at rush hour, or in a parking lot.
• The more time you spend in and around cars, especially at rush hour, the greater your exposure.
• Children living within a third of a mile from a major freeway are more likely to develop asthma and other diseases, and have less-developed lungs.
• Airborne pollutants are lower in neighborhoods with higher residential density and mixed land use (exactly the kind encouraged by a city with lots of cyclists.)

Second, let’s think this through. Consider some other source of air pollution. A steel mill, for example. Where would you find more airborne pollutants emitted by a steel mill: near the steel mill, or inside the steel mill? Generally speaking, how would steel mill pollutants vary as a function of distance from the source? As a function of the duration of exposure to the source?

The explicit premise of the automobile pollutant exposure theory of bicycling avoidance is “automobile pollutants are bad.” The implicit premise is “being near running automobiles is bad.” From these premises we can reason that:

• The greater the distance from running automobiles, the better
• The fewer running automobiles you’re near at once, the better
• The less time, in total, that you’re exposed to running automobilies, the better

Given the premises of the automobile pollutant exposure theory of bicycling avoidance, if your lifestyle necessitates spending lots of time in or near cars (that is, driving everywhere), then you're actually maximizing your exposure to automotive pollutants. Moreover, communities that encourage frequent motoring hit you twice: first, because you spend all your time inside a car; and second, because the town has more freeways, more heavy traffic, more large intersections, more parking lots — in other words, more (and more frequent) exposure to automobiles in situations where they produce the most pollutants.

Finally, and this is the emotional appeal, imagine a scene. Imagine riding your bike down a quiet street, or a bike path, a good distance away from a major highway. Imagine taking a deep breath. What does the air smell like? Does it smell like fresh-cut lawns? Pine trees? Dead leaves? Wet pavement? Bacon and eggs from a nearby kitchen? Coffee roasting in the coffee shop? (That’s what my commute smells like.)

REFERENCES:

• International Center for Technology Assessment, “In-Car Air Pollution: The Hidden Threat to Automobile Drivers"
• Measuring Concentrations of Selected Air Pollutants Inside California Vehicles
• Commuter exposures to VOCs in Boston, Massachusetts
• Collection of links on air quality research at the Sprawl and Health website
• Health effects from car exhaust exposure can last a lifetime
• Automotive Exhaust Chemicals: disease causing effects

(Prompted by a post at the Bicycle Transportation Alliance Blog.)