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 the coincidence as much as by the validation for my own words, and I heartily recommend finding this presentation of the best of our current knowledge and theory of Earth’s history.
Global Warming and 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 it did during The Little Ice Age–the result of the failure of the North Atlantic Conveyer back in the time of the first Elizabeth and lasted up into Victoria’s reign.
The more saline the water is, the heavier it is compared to fresher waters. That NA Conveyer is driven by the flow of those warm surface waters northwards where, normally, their salinity causes them to sink beneath the cooler, less salty arctic waters. Those waters that sank in the north then flow southwards at the bottom of the ocean, and the cycle continues. The North Atlantic Conveyer is only part of a much larger system of water movements about the whole Earth, as, logically it would, all the oceans being connected.
We live such tiny spans of time within the whole of Earth’s time, that unless we have very specialized education, most of us are at best only vaguely aware of the dynamics of this place where we live, where we keep our stuff. Humankind has lived with earthquakes, for instance, for all our generations, yet it is less than one long lifetime since we have understood ‘plate tectonics’ which tell us the why and how of earthquakes. We’ve learned only in the past couple of centuries how to understand the stories the Earth tells of itself.
Do you know how many times life nearly failed on this planet? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events)
…that there was a time some 700 million years ago when the planet was totally encased in ice: “Snowball Earth”? (https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/03/world/life-survive-ice-age-snowball-earth-scn/index.html)
…that lava flowed constantly for 2 million years, over 3 million square miles, 7 million square kilometers, of the lands we now call Russia, and contributed to the greatest of the extinction events over 250 million years ago? (https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2017/october/scientists-find-evidence-that-siberian-volcanic-eruptions-caused.html)
…that 90 million years ago part of Antarctica was a lush rainforest? (https://www.livescience.com/ancient-rainforest-antarctica.html)
And here we are today, with the dubious distinction of confronting that we ourselves, here so briefly yet so cleverly, are contributing to the next great extinction of life on Earth. Ignorance has always been one of our major flaws, and the tendency to seek our own comfort over all other considerations. Humankind, on another scale, are in a typically self-centered adolescence, on the very verge of maturity. We are up against all the selfishness, impatience, and determination to win of the adolescent, energetic and brilliant, but short-sighted.
Whatever end we bring ourselves to, and possibly a major portion of life on this Earth, the planet will go on as it has all these millions of years, changing and rebooting and creating its stories.
Binging Monsters
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 made to pay for their evil, how they finally lose in the end, every time, and the world is made safe again.
A child’s world is full of monsters: Some of them are real.
If, in childhood, the monsters were never stopped, never made to face their own evil, never lost, then some part of an adult is still wandering, in doubt and shame believing in some way responsible for the wickedness of the monster– Lost in a haunted wood /Children afraid of the night/Who have never been happy or good… (WH Auden).
Crime shows give us over and over again the most terrible monsters, losing the game. At least for a while, there’s reassurance in that, a diminishment of those dark and haunting beliefs that are the remains of a dangerous childhood.
The Cost of Abandoning Eden
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 that connectedness.
That’s what was left behind in the Garden of Eden, along with being provided for, with not having to be responsible for our own lives and livelihood: that sense and the sensation of being part of it all, being in a wider family, the great community of all life, all things.
Science has been our tool to attempt to discover how everything works, what the parameters are of life and intelligence and instinct and consciousness… Philosophy has existed since we began using our minds to wonder and imagine, trying to explain not just the how, but the why. Religion has attempted to both mystify and demystify our relationships with the rest of the Universe, adamant about getting everyone on the same page. All of these intellectual exercises have been seeking one thing: the means of controlling what affects our lives.
“If only we can discover and comprehend The Rules, and make everyone follow them, then we can work the world ourselves, we can settle comfortably into our place, and keep the friendship of whatever Gods play with our lives.”
We walked out of the Garden knowing nothing much and came out into a terrifying world: No longer the Garden, but Jurassic Park. We began our education as kindergarteners, we picked up on the most basic understandings and clung to them for our lives. We grew in knowledge and imagination, not always able to tell the difference.
Reality, being what it is, does not test every notion, every plan that we come up with, and lets us believe we are right when we are only just a little wrong, not significantly mistaken. In fact, it is so much bigger than us, we can get away with quite a bit of wrong before Reality slaps us down, and says, Think again… Call it blessing or luck, but I think there must be some force on our side that skews cause and effect in our favor, or human beings would have sillied themselves off the planet long ago.
This could go in a whole nother direction now, but the point of this conversation is not what looks after us beyond the basic rules of Nature and Reality, or what or who are the ‘parents’ of us ‘children.’ It is the wonder of this idea, that there is this vast web of life that has its own consciousness, that we have been deaf and blind to and cut off from for all the generations since we followed the temptations of the intellectual, conscious mind–curiosity, imagination, the desire for control–and that all our researches and studies, our philosophies and imaginings, our spiritual experiments are finally bringing back to the edges of our conscious awareness.
Money
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, only carries the energies of things that do have real value: the affirmation and confirmation of the worker’s worth.
Money and the energy it holds can be very useful stuff.
Accumulation of lots of money allows for acquisition of very high-energy (expensive) stuff like roads and market-places and the other infrastructure and developing technologies that helps the potter and the farmer get their goods out into the world so they can feed and clothe their families and get adequate education for their kids.
That’s, of course, why taxes: Governments–central authorities–pool the smaller amounts to a large lake of an amount to accomplish things for the benefit of the larger community. Those who share in the benefits from such accomplishments, ideally, have shared in the expenses which, if you think about it, is fair.
Money comes out of a community. It is produced by a community and stored in specially-designed containers like banks. And banks are like flower pots: Money can be invested and it can grow outward from the banks like a wild vine, out into the world, join up with other vines and become global. But the basis of all money-generation is the worker and the community. So–it seems reasonable that a certain proportion of it should, even must go back into the community, to keep the energy flowing. Think of feeding the goose that lays that gold egg.
If someone diligently collects all the golden eggs but feeds the goose on the cheapest fare, or as little as possible, or simply lets it wander around eating what it can find, and takes no care of the goose to keep it strong and healthy, that is… well, stupid.
Just sayin’ .
THE GUEST OF HONOR
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 like a lad in his tweens, not a sage–
In his eye there’s a bright bit of rascally look!
He’s well on his way now to match the Old Took
With a spritely spring in his wandering stride.
In his eye there’s a bright bit of rascally look
And it’s long been suspected, there’s a Took inside!
With a sprightly spring in his wandering stride
He is like to go off with a bang and a flash
And it’s long been suspected there’s a Took inside
A-craving adventures foolhardy and rash.
He is like to go off with a bang and a flash
Though he loves to sit out with his pipe in the sun,
A-craving adventures foolhardy and rash…
Old Bilbo Baggins is eleventy-one!
(copyright by CLRedding 2004)
Everyone Writes the Histories
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 that is prey to any agenda, any perceptual filtering, angle of witness, sense of importance and imperative.
This is why we cannot truly know what happened, and the closest we can get to the actuality of the occasion is by getting as many versions of it as we can, by being aware of the sources’ own biases, by taking into account perspectives and pacing of the moment and of the observers of it.
Each and every observer, standing in their own shoes, being within their own heads, possesses the truth of the event from their own perspective.
Every analyst of those observations looks through the filters of their own purpose in looking for the facts of the event.
Professional historians dig deep into the records to find as many angles and versions as they can. They do consider the sources, and work with their own knowledge of how people are, generally and specifically, and how things relate to one another. They look at all the material with some sense of logic and absurdity–both major factors in human actions–and finally come to conclusions with the preamble of, “This is what I think happened.”
So, when history is offered up to students in school, or to the public of a nation, it’s vital to look at why that version has been chosen.
It’s often said that “The winners write the histories.” Glib, but not so. The winners write the school books and the ‘official’ histories. But everyone writes histories, especially the losers who want their perspective known, and the official versions challenged.
Tolkien Tribute: “Speak, Friend and Enter”
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 setting and actions within the spoken words.
—Greetings, friend Elf! What’s that th’art doing, kneeling by the doorstep of Khazad-dum? Elf? I speak to thee– Wilt not look up and greet me?
–I do rise now, Friend Dwarf, and I greet thee, too. I was conversing, as thee came out through the great doors.
–Yes, I did perceive that. But not to me.
–No, not to thee.
–That’s as well, Elf, because I do not understand thy language. And yet, there’s no one here but thee and me.
–Is there not, Dwarf?
–I look there… I look here… See, I even look up…! I see no one else.
–Ah.
—Ah? What, ah? Don’t thee look down thy delicate Elven nose at me, friend Elf, and say Ah, as if thee knows all of my kind, and all of my nature! I beg thy pardon if I interrupt thy converse, I do so but in ignorance. And if thou would but introduce me to whom thee speaks, mayhap the chat can encompass us all!
–I bow to thee, friend Dwarf, and humbly I beg thy pardon. I did not intend rudeness. Let me introduce thee to these two holly trees, just now planted by the doors: I water them from the gate stream, just so… and nurture them with words.
–These two wee twigs? They are to whom thee speaks?
–Indeed, they are! Twigs they are in seeming, but they are trees, too, great and lovely in the fullness of Time, and in the heart of them even now. It is indeed to them that I speak.
—Why?
–Ah,
do forgive my mirth, friend Dwarf, but the tone of amaze in thy voice
and the bafflement upon thy brow remind me that though we are friends
we are not kin, and not all things are understood between us!
I speak to them because they are young : and newly planted are
their feet in this soil. Because they are uncertain and shy.
–Are they?
–Aye, my friend, they are– and I would not have them shrivel, feeling that, being so slight and meek, they do not belong in this place by the great Gateway to the wondrous Realm of Khazad-dum! My words to them awaken their strength and courage, and remind them who they are. For they are already what they will be.
–And they–these wee baby trees– they understand thy words, do they?
–I
speak to them in their own language, that they shall… Every
Elf knows the tongue of every living thing.
Why now thy
creased brow, friend Dwarf?
–It is a mystery to me, a Dwarf, my friend, this language of twigs and trees. And now I understand thee, I am sorry that I cannot give to these young lordlings the gift of nurturance, too, for I also wish to see them, one day seasons hence, standing brave beside the Door. It grieves me I cannot bless them as thee does, though they grace the doorstep of my home. Therefore, I sigh, and thee sees the furrowing of… Wait a moment, though… Ha! Make a little room there…
–Of
course… but to what purpose does thee kneel? Dwarf? Dost
thou hear me? Dwarf…? Why does thee bow thy head beside thine
own door? Dwarf…?
Very well then, I shall
wait…
Elbereth’s stars are wondrous bright this
night, and light the new letters Narvi made… These letters
and these words, together, shall speak the welcome of friend to
friend down the ages of this Middle-earth, and give honor to the love
and respect of the Free Folk, each for the other.. Fades the
daylight from the sky, and the Moon, she rises great and brilliant
among them and Narvi’s work blazes…!
—Ahh… Oh! Stiff knees, Elf… May thee never know them! I see the Sun has gone through the Gates in the West, and the Moon, she climbs the sky… I did not realize… I did not mean to keep thee waiting… By Durin’s beard, look at how the words shine out above our heads! Oh, but, again, thy pardon, Friend Elf…
–No matter, Dwarf, there is plenty of time in the world! And the lights of the Doorway are good to see… Did thee speak to the trees?
–Nay, that I cannot do in any tongue they could hear. I leave that to thee and thy kin.. I addressed myself to another.
–Friend Dwarf, now it is I who see no other.
–Ah! Thy quick and lively kind see and speak to the green and growing things, and those that scurry about all across the land, but it takes a Dwarf to converse with stone!
–With stone? Stone? This is a marvel! I had not thought stone had will to hear, or speak!
–Yet, my friend, it does! One must have not the quick ears of the Elf, , but the deep ears of Dwarves, to hear it. And the language of stone is one that every Dwarf knows!
–And what words had thee for the stone, friend Dwarf? for I am mightily curious to know!
–Gladly,
then, I shall ease your curiosity! I asked the wild rock of the
mountain, and the tamed stone of the door and the step, to welcome
and make way for the roots and branches of the wee trees; to share
the nurture that they are made of, with these younglings, to shade
and cool them when the sun beats hard, and shelter them from pounding
weather. I asked the stone to give of the warmth it
soaks up from the summer sun, when winter freezes the land, and
to give the blessings of the mountain’s own roots to encourage and
instruct these trees, that their own roots will hold fast and be
strong and go deep.
This is what I spoke to the stone.
–Ah!
—Ah, indeed! Now, we have both spoken, friend– Let us enter, and sup together in good-will, and raise a cup that our friendship shall last as long as the stones and the trees!
—
OCT 2004
“Is a Puzzlement!”
…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 you see some you like, that look like they might fit into your puzzle as you’ve got it put together so far, take them and play with them and see what you get. Ignore the ones that are clearly not part of the part of the puzzle you’re working on. And if you don’t mind, I will paw through the pieces you spill out here, and get all giddy when I find a new one that fits mine!
I love that feeling of exhileration that comes when another piece clicks into place, and its seams disappear, and the picture is that bit more revealed…!
And that is what this blog is about.
I’ve been asking the Universe to explain itself to me since I was about 11 years old. I asked then, how to reconcile God with Science. Being the child of a scientist and a mystic, such a question came naturally to me. Now and then, I seem to tune in on an answer: The puzzle pieces come together.
All that I write here represents not Truth, but what I believe to be true. I have my reasons, and I like to believe, my reason. I hope it will lead to adult discussion. Not prosletyzing… If that’s what you want to do, you will have to create your own place for it.
When We Abandoned Eden…
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 of. I’ve suggested before that we were not punished by any Divine by being thrown out of Eden, but chose to leave, that we could not have been prevented from leaving. But then, perhaps our striding willingly, willfully out of Eden also cost us something.
In that time, while we remained animals in form, our minds took us into a place beyond simple acquiesence to whatever Nature/God provided for our well-being: We took the responsibility into our own hands and minds, to provide for ourselves. We entered a kind of species-adolescence, no longer content to be subject to the demands and methods of Nature or the whims of a personal God.
In that time where intellect took over management of our affairs, we adopted some mental/emotional methods of our own to attempt to do what Nature did not: to make life more comfortable, more fair for the individual instead of only balanced on the scale of species. We came up with the notions of morality and ethics, and as we gathered in every greater concentrations we codified such concepts into law: ‘Fairness’ became ‘justice’ became ‘law.’
As humankind complicated simple living into ever more intricate constructs and rules, we had to evolve record-keeping, first in oral traditions, then finally in written forms. We told stories, and then we wrote them down, creating cultural memories with the force of codification. Specialization in certain areas were the beginnings not just of the legal professsion, but also religion: The attempt to codify spirituality. And politics, through written documents codified the consolidation of power of some people over other people.
Underlying all this was what we might consider the conscience of human culture: Morality. Ethics are the rules by which we maintain morality: the ‘how’ of the ‘why.’ Morality and ethics enabled human beings to live together, to establish traditions and habits of behavior and reasoning, to measure ourselves against some kind of greater-than-the-individual and fairly vague standard of goodness/badness, or Good/Evil.
Morality has also evolved as the human species has continued its path towards maturity. In these times, one of the great moral dilemmas is whether it is moral at all to consume the flesh of other animals, and if that is moral, then is it moral to raise animals solely so that we can consume their flesh and use their bodies for our own comfort? And if killing for any reason, but especially for personal aggrandizement, entertainment, and whimsy, is not moral, then is killing evil?
This is the root of the cognitive dissonance I experience when watching those documentaries about the natural world, “red in tooth and claw.” I watch the gazelle, the image of beauty and grace with big sweet eyes, run down by the noble great cat with her own grace and beauty, who has kittens to be fed. I want the gazelle to live, but at the same time, I want the kittens to live. I want to see all the grace, all the beauty triumph. But Nature doesn’t work that way: there are grass-eaters and meat-eaters, and there are scavengers and opportunists, and those who will eat anything.
Is eating the root of all evil?
But there it is: Evil is another of those human moral concepts, just as is Good. They are two ends of a spectrum that exists only in the human intellect, as far as we know, and these are definers of our comfort/discomfort zones. They are not as absolute, ever, as we would like them to be.
So, I watch the cat and the gazelle, and the spider and the moth, the big fish and the little fish. And I wonder, how is it this is not about Good and Evil? How is it not about moral choices and imperatives? How do I see this without the persistant and pervasive force of my humanity?
It is nearly impossible to transcend the limits of what one is. But intellect and mind are so much greater than the physical package they come in. Imagination takes us through boundaries, transcends limits as far as we will allow ourselves to go. So, to some very limited degree, I can see past the human perspective and see possibilities…
We know that animals use senses differently from how we humans do. Starlings can flock in murmurations; salmon can return to the very stream where they first hatched; insects see into ultra-violet wavelengths; elephants communicate in deep sounds below human ability to hear… Many species migrate by paths invisible to human senses, following them for thousands of miles at the right times and seasons. Magnetism has been postulated as a mechanism for such migrations. But maybe there is more: species-memory or in species of more complex cognition, actual cultural tradition?
Can you imagine… that natural, wild animals who still live in Eden, or Jurassic Park, if you prefer that metaphor, are ineffably, literally, awarely linked in a network of all life on the planet? The network of planetary life-energy isn’t hard to posit, part of the same mechanism as instinct that guides animals through their lives.
I am imagining that such connectedness to the natural Whole gives wild animals a very different sense of what death is and means, and while every creature strives to live, the end of life is an acceptable part of living. Therefore, though the body fights to live as long as it can, the Nature-linked consciousness is not traumatized by dying or death.
I imagine, further, that the more intellect a creature commands, the harder it is to maintain awareness of that link, but as long as there is instinct at all, awareness of the link is possible. Higher-consciousness animals–the Great Apes, elephants, some birds, for instance–and those who live domesticated to humans, such as dogs, cats, horses and others, grieve the death of a bonded other. Some humans transcend the antipathy for death that is rooted in our animal/body self.
I believe that such a link explains many of the animal behaviors and capabilities that have mystified human intellect since we turned away from magic and divine whim, and towards scientific and rational explanations for what we see in the world.
While I can’t ‘prove’ it scientifically, it satisfies what I consider my moral obligation to seek truths that fit the patterns and mysteries I perceive.
Finally, this is what we lost by our abandonment of our animal nature: When we abandoned Eden, when we began the subjugation of Jurassic Park, we diminished our personal awareness of our actual connectedness to Providence that was ours in Eden.
In that sense of superiority that came with taking over management of our own affairs, we attempt to fill the empty space of that loss with anthropomorphic notions of how other animals think, feel, and perceive the world: We try to make them more like us because we have misplaced what it is to be more like them.
LOOSELY SPEAKING... 