In a burst of heavenly awe, Astronaut Edgar Mitchell exuded in lunarscape: "Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery.  It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth ... home."

The Earth is this season's center of attention, though not as viewed from its splendor at the surface of the moon as it is with what we do in heating up its temperature and the consequent drastic climate warming in its biosphere.

The climate took center stage in the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference for almost two weeks ending December 12.  One hundred ninety-six nations were in attendance.  They adopted an Agreement that is only legally binding if a number of nations producing a percentage of global greenhouse emission actually do something through their legal systems, which is to say, a lot of barks without much bite.

The United States through its executive office is often a leading party to an international agreement only to be denied muscle by the US Congress, e.g., it refused to ratify a treaty on biodiversity.  The numbers in international Agreements guide national targets adhered to by nations that are already poor because of their compliance but ignored by the big guys that emits them.  A good example is COPS 21 (on biodiversity).

Mei mei is a cute little girl's nickname used in China.  Mei is also the black mineral that is dug in Dong Bei, and the coal in Shanxi west of Beijing where 90 percent of the land allegedly is black gold.  The increase on investment in China on manufacturing was due to the low cost of coal energy that devastated China's countryside and biosphere.

Attempts to stifle the economic progress of China focused on its use of coal as its energy source.  China does not have extensive fossil fuel source to rely on though its assertive occupation of the Spratly moves in that direction and is severely criticized by the US and its business interests in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan.  The United States can fly all kinds of B-52 over island structures that China built but the new economic superpower is not going to budge, as the immediate issue of South China Sea is energy source rather than sovereignty, which China considers historically to be a closed issue.  Besides, the place is not called China Sea for nothing!

The United States' current use of coal at its most efficient level emits carbon 130 times what the Paris Conference aims for it to do if the nations across the planet attains economic parity to the US in a hundred years.  This is illusion of the worst kind.  The Summit's intentions were worst than a mirage in the desert.  It lacks operational basis.

Meanwhile, the planet reels as water from melting ice in the Arctic and Antarctic regions continue to add more fluid into the ocean, making it heavier to effect the tremors that dislodges plates, which then causes half of the land areas of the Pacific islands disappear at the same time it induces stronger quakes and a change in weather patterns in many parts of the globe.  Not a lively prospect especially since we do not operate as a globe yet but do so as the archaic leftover nation-states from the divisions imposed by colonizing powers of the previous century.

Mitchell was perhaps prescient in his pronouncement.  A less polite quote: "From out there on the Moon, international politics look so petty.  You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you sonnavabitch.'"  Apologies to the sons amongst us who heard their teacher do math and said: "2 plus 2, the sum of which is 4."  As my Sino tindera would say, the sum of which and sonnavabitch, same same.

If our Apollo 14 astronaut is distraught over our treatment of the planet, his use of the SOB word is on the charitable side.  The Obama administration refuses to extract coal on Federal land and met opposition.  The corporate sector is aghast at this executive act.  The Supreme Court intervened on their behalf.

I made a supplementary workbook for my class using the Mitchell picture on the cover.  Students just added the word "earthrise" into their vocabulary.  A paradigm shift is corroding the defining fealty once held on political structures the Europeans named, like Spain on Señor Felipe's behalf (thus, the Philippines) during the medieval and colonial eras, and unwittingly inherited by the US military in its post-WWII presence in the rest of the world, but now simply a fragile blue orb in the sky.

"We live in the Universe.  On the Planet Earth", they sing.  "We look for life in the sky so blue, down on Marianas for something new, we look at the world we have on our hands.  Oh, what shall we do?"   Then they whisper to each other at the end: "We're gonna build it."

 

For fourteen years, I was a member of a family Religious Order that collaborated with Jews and Moslems, seculars and non-theists, truly ecumenical beyond ecclesiastical structures.  Arising from Christendom that fevered like a pentecostal congregation (our Dean was previously an Ohio revival preacher whose diction is not foreign at Victory Chapel in Saipan) on one end, and a socially-branded liberal unitarian (we lived in the communities we served) on the other, and comprehensive diversity in between. 

 

The body's work was communal and cooperative, a global network of 2500 folks (mas o menos), organized as determined service centers termed "centrum" and "nexus", with metro, regional, and area corporate abodes called Religious Houses.  Were one to compare it to another body, one would be at a loss to find one.  It was a unique experiment, unrepeatable; there has never been one like it before, and there will never be another one like it ever again.

 

We had one task: to create a broad-based human (planetary and global) community wherever we were located, symbolically in every time zone across the globe.  Process and procedure followed were highly participatory.  We enabled the local house and the community we served to missionalize vision; communal resource was utilitarian rather than privately owned (personal property in two suitcases), decision-making practiced broadly until a consensus was pronounced, and self-hood was absolutely self-sustained, self-reliant, and self-confident.

 

My characterization of the body is somewhat like what my class hears and repeats mid-course of daily class session: "I am one, unique, unrepeatable gift of life into human history; there has never been one like me before and there will never be another one like me ever again.  I live my life."  They decide.  They choose. 

 

This is no rah-rah slogan so individuals can believe in an idealized self.  It is a statement of fact, the uniqueness and unrepeatability resulting from the union of one sperm (out of a minimum of 200 million) with an egg that then journeys into finitude uniquely on its own until its completion.  My reckoning on my journey's length, given what I know of my genetics and statistical probability, is 86 years!  I invite my first graders to think of their education and life as a journey!

 

Being a monastic is, thereby, a given reality before it is a choice.  One is uniquely on an unrepeatable journey from start to completion.  It is not that we choose, in the first instance, to be solitaries.  We are born that way.  It echoes Akon and Joan Armatrading's song of "I, me and myself".  Our choice is to declare "what is", rather than ran away from it, to yen for and achieve an imagined objective or goal.

 

As a teacher in a classroom, I have a board with the four core curriculum titles where we post our objective.  (I personally go by what students will retain in their minds, and what they will experience in the process).  The four components of the Core curriculum has underneath Language Arts, the word "words", for Math, "numbers", for Science, "How", and for Social Studies, the "5Ws".

 

"Words" are nouns defined by adjectives and verbs with adverbs; "Numbers" are signs (equals =, plus +, minus -, multiply x and divide ÷), "How" is process standardized, and the 5Ws are "what, when, where, who, and why".

 

Across the room, I posted a picture of the brain of a child that has three parts: the medulla oblongata, the cerebellum, and the cerebrum; the first, processes sensual experiences of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, the second, finds the balance on feelings, and the third, a sophisticated management of words and numbers formally taught in academe, all three becoming the basis for the whole body to respond in deeds.

 

While the eight (5 senses, feelings, thoughts, and deed) seem a lot especially since the students are just beginning the first year of a 16-year learning journey, I teach them to "play attention" so learning shan't deteriorate into the memory work of formulas and forms but of challenging usage.

 

The Monastic understanding clothed on the three classical vows, is that of the vow of poverty as detachment from matters unessential, the vow of chastity as being about one thing, and the vow of obedience as willing the Way Life Is (YHWH in Jewish terms sans Zeus of Olympus) abides.

 

So, what do I teach?  There are only eight items, two less than the decimal system.  Being about one thing is taking the laser beam of the times (symbolized by the smartphone that is now in the hands of more 90 percent of the population) to have input equals output.  Then I transform my lifestyle so the time is managed, space is organized, roles are defined, and a story is told.

 

I am not about the pedagogy of content; I am a monastic who demonstrate methods, secularly and scientifically.  I aim for a first grader the habit of nursing their own brain to intentionally guide their own learning.  Monastic, I am.  Functional monastics, my students will be!