SUUSI Day 5

SUUSI got dramatic. Yesterday after eating at the dining hall, I talked with some friends from my congregation and got my picture taken with some others in front of Detrick, the dining hall. While this was happening, ominous clouds, thunder and lightning appeared. What were the SUUSI gods trying to say? That the SUUSIBoyz were the best all male singing group ever? That SUUSI was nearly over? That SUUSI at Virginia Tech would not be back for a good long while?

In the Ken Wilber class, I found out about levels higher than Turquoise in the Beck-Cowan system. They go Indigo, Violet, Ultraviolet, and Clear Light. I am not sure if I like that type of notation. For one thing it does not alternate warm with cool, individual with collective. I prefer to go Coral, Indigo, Magenta, and Chartreuse. In any case, these levels imply contact with such entities as God and the Great Void. Someone in the class says these are all mental patterns, circuitry in the brain. Indeed, we all know who Donald Duck is, although there is no such actual animal. But it is still brain circuitry. Yes, there is something beyond our experience, but it is beyond our experience. We have no access to it anywhere. Interesting anyway.

My Polyhedra class built the PHiZZ models of Thomas Hull. Two of them made the models, and the class got a good reception.

SUUSI Day 3; Next Year at Radford

SUUSI 2008 will be at Radford University next year. That was announced in a town hall meeting on Tuesday afternoon. It will be 2008 July 20-26, and the theme is “Pilgrimage”.

SUUSI 2007 is doing great. The dancing at Serendipity is good. My workshops turned out well, including Stories of the Sky, which created some new constellations, including a radio telescope in the sky. I found out about the Biological Test Station near Mountain Lake, and about a local cohousing community. Today in a workshop entitled “Integral sexuality”, we learned about how masculine and feminine attributes affect our lives. I think this is stereotyped, but it does explain some things.

In SUUSIBoyz, we sing a song about the earth turning round and round, as well as one about a homesick World War I soldier.

The best performer so far at Cabaret is the combination of Wishing Chair and Amy Carol Webb. Wish they would do an album together. I took a video of Serendipity doing a Latin tune. I especially like the human motion to an alluring Latin beat.

SUUSI 2007 Day 2

It is now the second day of SUUSI.

Another blogger said this SUUSI would be very very hard because of the tragedy of 2007 April 16, three months ago. SUUSI is held at Virginia Tech. We observed silence on the walk to the Ingathering at Burruss. While I went through the memorial of the slain students and faculty near that hall, the heavens shouted. A crack of thunder split the entire countryside. This sounded somewhat ominous to me. Is this to be a thunderous SUUSI? Are voices from up high calling?

However, I felt the SUUSI was just as fun as ever. I straightened out Serendipity by requesting a danceable number. There was a name game, and I selected the name “thunder”. The moving in was a madhouse, however, as the traffic in the tiny Owens parking lot was horrendous. We had more walking with heavy objects to do than in most years.

Today we had our first workshops, and in the morning I told my workshop about math and religion but had no definite answers, as indeed no UU has. In the afternoon I attended a class on Ken Wilber and my leaders told us something that implies that women are abrasive. I disagree with this completely. The logic: women go with the flow, flow is associated with the Yellow Meme, people at the Yellow meme tend to be abrasive; e.g., Jim Kunstler. Therefore, women are abrasive. We were discussing masculine and feminine types. This puts us into boxes, and even worse, stereotypes the sexes. Take the words “masculine” and “feminine” out – replace with individualistic and collective, perhaps.