There is chaos,
then there is elegance.
A blurry photo,
and one focus on the subject's eyes.
A meandering river
flowing in to the sea.
Ugliness and beauty.
There is random noise,
Shiv, then tonal music.

Beth Howard pulled up to Newtown in her 24-foot-long camper, loaded with 240 apple pies.

She dished out pie to kids from Sandy Hook Elementary School, grieving parents and anyone who asked.

She describes herself as an attaché for grief, with her greatest gift being pie “made from love.” Most people simply call her “the pie lady.”

“Pie is meant to be shared,” she said. “It’s meant to be given away.”

As she spoke, there was a knock on her door. Women preparing a wake for one of the slain girls would like some pie for mourners.

“Could we give them three pies?” a helper asked.

“Of course,” Howard said. “Will you please put ribbons on them?”

Her 1,100-mile journey here began with a Facebook post last Friday. Like the rest of the nation, she was horrified by the massacre that killed 26 people at the school, including 20 children.

She told her Facebook friends that she was considering loading her RV up with baking supplies and heading to Newtown.

She lives in Eldon, Iowa, in the American Gothic home where artist Grant Wood got his inspiration for his most famous painting — the farmer couple with a pitchfork. She sells pies there from the Pitchfork Pie Stand.

Within two hours, she had $2,000 in donations.

“I felt like, how could I not go with that groundswell of support?” she said.

She hit the road at 8 a.m. Saturday. She picked up a friend in Chicago and cruised to another friend’s home in Flanders, New Jersey, where she “walked into this pie-baking mania.” More than 60 volunteers were peeling apples and making dough throughout the neighborhood. One family made 60 in a single day.

“They were making pies for Newtown because of this one Facebook comment,” she said. “That was a powerful thing.”

After several days of intense baking, she posted on her The World Needs More Pie website at 8:45 a.m. that the pies were done and en route: “We’re on our way to Newtown, Connecticut, now to hand out slices of pie, gift pies to funeral receptions and grieving families, and later in the week bake more pies with residents of the community.”

They went straight to the Newtown Youth Academy where therapy dogs helped children cope with the horror at their school. Parents were there too. One mother said she realized she hadn’t eaten since before the tragedy. She was glad to eat apple pie.

Another father explained his two sons knew one of the slain children.

“He was talking about how he was talking with his children about the grief, and they seemed to have had a very open conversation about it,” Howard said. “That was very encouraging to hear.”

“It’s a pretty positive energy over there, I have to say. There’s grief, but there’s also an amazing spirit here. It comes through very loud and clear,” she added.

An author, blogger and TV host, Howard knows about grief: Her husband, Marcus Iken, died three years ago of a ruptured aorta. She poured her grief into baking pies.

“Why pie? Answering that is about as easy as explaining why seemingly healthy Marcus dropped dead at the age of 43,” she wrote in her book, Making Piece: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Pie. “If only the answer was as easy as ‘It was his time.’”

Relaxed in her pie-filled RV, she elaborated. “What I learned is people don’t like to talk about grief,” she said. “That’s a big reason why I’m here.”

“If I just keep slicing pie, that helps me. It’s not a cake that you make with a little mixer. This is something made by hand,” she said. “The pioneers made pie; the pilgrims made pie. It’s about endurance. It’s about nurturing. It’s about simplicity. It’s about nostalgia. And ultimately, for me, it’s about sharing and it’s about giving.”

Her love of pie goes back to her parents’ courtship. One night, her mom baked a banana crème pie. When the two finished, her father said, “Will you marry me?”

“Pie makes me happy,” she said. “It makes people happy. It makes me want to do something nice for somebody else.”

Another resident knocks on her door. She wanted a pie for her family and for a friend’s. A smile grew across her face when she was given two.

Howard smiled too.

“People smiled today,” she said. “And that alone was worth the drive.”

So far, she has raised $7,000 in donations. Any extra money — after gas and pie expenses — will be donated to a local grief counseling center.

My dear Tanmit,

It was lovely meeting and learning from you. You and Satinder form a beautiful couple and I hope wageguru will bless me with your friendship. I have been looking at your blog today and will be following occasionally. When I'm on a computer I will probably have a better time reading some of the older material.

You can find my music on http://www.shivpreetsingh.com and my research on raags on http://shabadkirtan.blogspot.com. My relationship with Guru Nanak is not very broad. I just know a few shabads that I keep with me in my travels. There is no better way I found to have him be with me all the time.

Be well. With love and hope,

Shiv

Six year kids brutally murdered at the hands of a gunman in Newtown, Connecticut. We don't know what he wanted. We won't ever know what these kids would have become. As I was playing with my own 6 year old earlier today, I was reminded of the story of Guru Gobind Singh's youngest son: Fateh Singh. In the month of December he was murdered by the government of the time because he refused to convert to Islam. The course of large countries can be altered by the sentiments created by such events. A mass conversion of India never took place. And I am hoping that the course of gun violence will improve with the senseless act of horror in Connecticut last week. I hope.

Here is the story of the kid martyrs:

The youngest sons of Guru Gobind Singh Sahib Ji, Sahibzada Baba Zorawar Singh Ji and Sahibzada Baba Fateh Singh Ji were born at Anandpur Sahib. Thier grandmother Mata Gujjar Kaur Ji was especially close to the young Sahibzadas. When Guru Ji's family evacuated from Anandpur Sahib, Mata Ji took charge of both of them as the column moved out of the city. 

Our Deepest Fear by Marianne Williamson

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear
is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness,
that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually who are we not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people
won’t feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine as children do.
We were born to make manifest
the glory of God that is within us.
It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone.
And when we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people
permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson

July 21, 2011

Imagine: Man created God

Humans' need for attachment and authority figures is behind religion, some scientists argue

By Anderson Thompson and Clare Aukofer, Los Angeles Times - July 21, 2011

Before John Lennon imagined "living life in peace," he conjured "no heaven … / no hell below us …/ and no religion, too."

No religion: What was Lennon summoning? For starters, a world without "divine" messengers, such as Osama bin Laden, sparking violence. A world where mistakes, like the avoidable loss of life in Hurricane Katrina, would be rectified rather than chalked up to "God’s will." Where politicians would no longer compete to prove who believes more strongly in the irrational and untenable. Where critical thinking is an ideal. In short, a world that makes sense.

In recent years, scientists specializing in the mind have begun to unravel religion’s "DNA." They have produced robust theories, backed by empirical evidence (including "imaging" studies of the brain at work), that support the conclusion that it was humans who created God, not the other way around. And the better we understand the science, the closer we can come to "no heaven … no hell … and no religion too."


Like our physiological DNA, the psychological mechanisms behind faith evolved over the eons through natural selection. They helped our ancestors work effectively in small groups and survive and reproduce, traits developed long before recorded history, from foundations deep in our mammalian, primate and African hunter-gatherer past.

For example, we are born with a powerful need for attachment, identified as long ago as the 1940s by psychiatrist John Bowlby and expanded on by psychologist Mary Ainsworth. Individual survival was enhanced by protectors, beginning with our mothers. Attachment is reinforced physiologically through brain chemistry, and we evolved and retain neural networks completely dedicated to it. We easily expand that inborn need for protectors to authority figures of any sort, including religious leaders and, more saliently, gods. God becomes a super parent, able to protect us and care for us, even when our more corporeal support systems disappear, through death or distance.

Scientists have so far identified about 20 hardwired, evolved "adaptations" as the building blocks of religion. Like attachment, they are mechanisms that underlie human interactions: Brain-imaging studies at the National Institutes of Health showed that when test subjects were read statements about religion and asked to agree or disagree, the same brain networks that process human social behaviour — our ability to negotiate relationships with others — were engaged.

Among the psychological adaptations related to religion are our need for reciprocity, our tendency to attribute unknown events to human agency, our capacity for romantic love, our fierce "out-group" hatreds and just as fierce loyalties to the in-groups of kin and allies. Religion hijacks these traits. The rivalry between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, for example, or the doctrinal battles between Protestant and Catholic reflect our "groupish" tendencies.

In addition to these adaptations, humans have developed the remarkable ability to think about what goes on in other people’s minds and create and rehearse complex interactions with an unseen other. In our minds we can de-couple cognition from time, place and circumstance. We consider what someone else might do in our place; we project future scenarios; we replay past events. It’s an easy jump to, say, conversing with the dead or to conjuring gods and praying to them.

Morality, which some see as imposed by gods or religion on savage humans, science sees as yet another adaptive strategy handed down to us by natural selection.

Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom notes that "it is often beneficial for humans to work together … which means it would have been adaptive to evaluate the niceness and nastiness of other individuals." In groundbreaking research, he and his team found that infants in their first year of life demonstrate aspects of an innate sense of right and wrong, good and bad, even fair and unfair. When shown a puppet climbing a mountain, either helped or hindered by a second puppet, the babies oriented toward the helpful puppet. They were able to make an evaluative social judgment, in a sense a moral response.


Michael Tomasello, a developmental psychologist who co-directs the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, has also done work related to morality and very young children. He and his colleagues have produced a wealth of research that demonstrates children’s capacities for altruism. He argues that we are born altruists who then have to learn strategic self-interest.

Beyond psychological adaptations and mechanisms, scientists have discovered neurological explanations for what many interpret as evidence of divine existence. Canadian psychologist Michael Persinger, who developed what he calls a "god helmet" that blocks sight and sound but stimulates the brain’s temporal lobe, notes that many of his helmeted research subjects reported feeling the presence of "another." Depending on their personal and cultural history, they then interpreted the sensed presence as either a supernatural or religious figure.

It is conceivable that St. Paul’s dramatic conversion on the road to Damascus was, in reality, a seizure caused by temporal-lobe epilepsy.

The better we understand human psychology and neurology, the more we will uncover the underpinnings of religion. Some of them, like the attachment system, push us toward a belief in gods and make departing from it extraordinarily difficult. But it is possible.

We can be better as a species if we recognize religion as a man-made construct. We owe it to ourselves to at least consider the real roots of religious belief, so we can deal with life as it is, taking advantage of perhaps our mind’s greatest adaptation: our ability to use reason.

Imagine that.

J. Anderson Thomson is a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia. Clare Aukofer is a medical writer. They are the authors of Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith.