personal/social/political philosophy & opinion–sometimes in poetry
Just today I have been watching LIFE ON OUR PLANET, a new documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman I surveys the origins and progression of life on Earth. It covers in far more detail, graced with Freeman’s compelling voice, some of the very same geologic history I presented in my essay here. I am tickled by …
Continue reading “footnote: Global Warming & Snowball Earth”
Ironically, the warming of the Earth bringing about melting of polar ice–which decreases the salinity of polar waters thereby slowing and possibly even halting the North Atlantic Conveyer current which brings the warm Gulf of Mexico waters up past the British Isles–sets up the British Isles for winters lasting through the year, for years, as …
I finally got it, why I binge-watch crime shows. People love stories, not just for amusement, but to show us the way through the dark forest, the way through the terrible haunted swamp, the way to deal with monsters. Crime shows are stories about how the monsters are caught and stopped, how the monsters are …
We have been operating for so long on such simplistic, egoistic notions of how the world works, our place in it, what other animals and even things are and can do… When we traded in instinct for intellect, maybe we also lost a sense of the connectedness of everything, of the wonderful intricacy of all …
Money is a battery for storing the energies produced by human work. It’s a transformer, too, changing human work into stuff. When the potter trades pottery for the farmer’s grain, it is a device for equalizing any difference in the relative values for the goods generated by the work. In itself, it has no value, …
Old Bilbo Baggins is eleventy-one! For a hobbit, indeed a respectible age. Though he loves to sit out with his pipe in the sun He acts like a lad in his tweens, not a sage! For a hobbit, indeed a respectible age He’s well on his way now to match the Old Took! He acts …
History is such a fragile, mutable, conditional thing: History is ineffable. It’s all very well to say, no, it is what happened, it’s indelible, it is actual… So it is, an event, an action, plays out its options and leads to its conclusion. But that isn’t history. History is the story of what happened, and …
Several years ago, I spent a lot of time on a Tolkien-based website that ran writing competitions. This was a dialogue Challenge with these parameters: Characters: A dwarf and an elf Setting: The West-gate of Moria. Theme: Speak, Friend, and Enter I set myself the added challenge to write the entire piece as dialogue, showing the …
Continue reading “Tolkien Tribute: “Speak, Friend and Enter””
…To quote the King of Siam. The Universe is, to me, a great, multi-dimensional jigsaw puzzle, with no outside edges. Each of us has bags of pieces collected over our lifetimes from our own experience, and from others whose experience we trust. What I pour out here is my bag of pieces: If …
I have written about the ‘abandonment of Eden’ as the time in which our developing, evolving human intellect outpaced and replaced animal instinct as our primary means of interacting with the world around us, particularly the physical world. I have suggested that choosing intellect and self-reliance was something to be celebrated, not to be ashamed …
LOOSELY SPEAKING...