Category: Philosophical Message

Arrow

Yesterday, I finally got back to my Mid Michigan Word Gatherers Writing Group after quite a while. It was great to see old friends and meet a new person. It was interesting to write creatively, after my long stretch of non-fiction. Here’s goes!

Gravity’s arrow points downward.

While Motion’s follows a forward push.

Entropy’s arrow flies away, always away.

But Mystery shrouds the arrow of time.

Outer and Inner

Apple paints itself red outside.

Meat bleeds red from within.

Leaf makes its own green, which

Caterpillars ingest and excrete,

eventually the Monarch’s color their chrysalis with the green tint.

Noon sky from inside is blue.

Tiny dots pierce the black night sky.

But from inside or out?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/Flammarion.jpg

AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The anonymous author is of the photo. The original artist for the engraving was French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion. It is from his “L’atmosphère : météorologie populaire,” published in 1888 by the . Wikipedia

Candlelight

One pink candle pokes its white helices

out of the baby’s cake, while the flame

eats downward and the family sings.

One red and one green candle stand proud

on the table. The autumn evening calls for

mother to strike the match.

One white candle sputters.

The old woman gasps, glazed eyes close.

Her niece holds her hand, and whispers

Good-bye.

Mother Nature is Cruel to Female Spongy Moths

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: This has to be one of the ugliest things Mother Nature ever made. Seriously. Why hairy protrusions on the shell of the transformation chamber!

In July of 2022, I found this hard segmented shell stuck to the bricks that framed the door to my workplace. Hanging from it was the outer skin of a hairy caterpillar. The whole assemblage was lightly covered in a ragged group of silk fibers, attached to the anodized aluminum door frame. I’m not sure why so many insects find this north facing door so attractive. Two days later, it was out. After hours of internet searching, I determined that it was a female Gypsy Moth, now renamed in politically corectness to “Spongy Moth.” Note that she has crawled up the brick approximately ONE BODY LENGTH from her original position. This, sadly, is as far as she will ever go in this form.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: She herself is not so bad looking.

One hour and four minutes after the above photo was taken, an unknown time after she emerged, she has attracted a mate.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA: Either is he.

Note the beautiful feathery antennae on the male, half her size. Note also how her face is completely covered by fuzzy stuff. She doesn’t need to see, because she is going to die here in place. Hence, my title. So here below, we see the tan colored egg mass. The “Spongy” stuff.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Well, I don’t really know what’s spongy about it. After a few days, I transferred some of the material to my microscope stage. And the view was remarkable. Tiny transparent balls, held in short strands of silk. The pairs of bright spots on most of the individual eggs are reflections from my microscope lights. Why is one pink? Is it dead? Did some other insect parasitize her egg mass?

These kindof look like tiny bearing balls.

The green arrow shows the developing baby caterpillar, and the beat rolls on. However, I euthanized the entire batch, but not before taking this photo of two of the early hatchlings. Or maybe there are something else. They don’t really seem to be the same shape as the forms inside the eggs.

And this is the sad end of the life of a female Spongy Moth. Even sadder than the life of a barnacle, which has been discussed elsewhere on this page. To end, I will show this beautiful, flaming red bolete mushroom. And below, my giant tomato next to my moderately sized, but very delicious, sweet and fragrant, cantaloupe.

Mushroom Memoir

I joined the Brownie Troop at Oakview Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1965. The troop was full, but the Girl Scout Troop needed leaders, and they told my mom that they would let me join if she volunteered. I don’t remember much about the Brownie activities. I do recall the day an older kid leaving detention, for an infraction unknown to me, set the couch in the teacher’s lounge on fire during our Brownie meeting, and I do remember being one of only two girls who were crying about it. Half the school burned down from that little lit cigarette butt. I also remember wearing the Brownie uniform, and I kept the little gold Brownie pin for many years.

In fact, the little gold pin (not real gold!) was only recently stolen, when someone broke into my house, left my old laptop and took the jewelry box. I live, and have lived, in a rural area for 34 years now. They didn’t have to break the wood frame of the door, but they did. The basement door is left unlocked. But that would have been too easy. Of course, the cops didn’t care, even though it was one of a series of recent B&E’s.

Of course, the size lumber that was used to build the house in the 1840’s no longer exists. My neighbor Wayne had the brilliant idea of flipping the board around its vertical axis, so the damaged portion would be hidden in the wall. That facilitated and sped up the repair.

Anyway, back to the Girl Scouts. My mother kept on being a troop Leader when I graduated to the Junior Girl Scouts in 4th Grade. Pretty much everyone disliked her. She had a short fuse. Perhaps due to lead poisoning. She grew up in Fairmont, West Virginia. After the Flint (Michigan) Water Crisis (due to lead contamination), a large group of scholars got together for a research project, and they showed that local murder rates in the early part of the 20th Century were very closely correlated with the distance of the town from a lead smelter. Lead, at that time, was the material of choice for all the snazzy new municipal water system pipes. It didn’t rust like steel. Richer municipalities, along with those closer to the lead smelters, used lead pipes. Flint was wealthy at the time. A center of manufacturing.

Back to my mom. Perhaps adding to her lack of patience were her bad teeth. She had a lot of mercury based amalgam fillings. My sister didn’t want to hear my theory of our mother’s temper’s relationship to her fillings, but I think the fillings and the lead pipes in Fairmont probably had a significant effect. I didn’t know her father, who died before I was born, but nobody else in the family ever seemed to have such a temper. Anyway, she was a tough woman, but the Girl Scout Troop did a lot of exciting outdoor activities when she was the leader. We did many overnight camping trips. Way more than most troops. People are always complicated.

Adding to my early exposure to nature, at some time even before joining the Girl Scouts, my parents had decided that we should do family camping. No trailer for them. After the first trial with rented equipment, we had a giant canvas tent that would sleep 8, for the four of us and the miniature poodle. We visited the Shenandoah National Forest on our early trips, and my parents kept the top of the Styrofoam “ice-chest” with the bear fang punctures for many years, as a souvenir of one of the most exciting nights of our lives. The dog was terrified. It made a good story. See, I am still telling it 60 years later!

All that goes to say that, at an early age, I was, despite growing up in suburbia, introduced to nature. My first gardening adventure was growing radishes at age 4. They turned out very spicy. My mother served them as the “bitter herb” for the Passover Seder. The years that I have not had a garden are very few. A couple of summers when I was in college. A couple of years when I lived overseas.

When I had a chance, I moved to a rural area. I live on a forty acre plot, with a hundred by hundred foot fenced area for a garden and small orchard. For the last 5 years or so, I have been growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, parsley, radishes, garlic, nasturtiums, and various other things, to make “veggie juice smoothie packs.” I try to have a home grown juice smoothie every morning for breakfast. My goal is 225 juice packs in the freezer for the winter and spring.

The garden is a big part of why it’s painful for me to contemplate moving away. Losing the chance to see a dark night sky is another big reason. Looking up and the stars, and thinking about how people have been looking at some of the same groups of stars that we call constellations for as long as 30,000 years is just amazing to me. Way back then, Deneb, the swan goddess’s tail, was the pole star. Myths and archeological finds (Gobeckli Tepe) from the ancient near east and Europe hint at the religious traditions of that time. Before I moved out to the country, I knew the Big Dipper and Cassiopeia (the giant double-u). I don’t really remember even understanding the mythological significance of Orion, and his dog, Sirius. The whole calendar of the ancient Egyptians was based on the appearance of Sirius after it had spent time below the horizon. During the Geminid meteor showers last week, it was very clear and the date was close to the new moon, so very dark. Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, was sparkling white, green and red. I feel sorry for city dwellers.

But, as much as I love working in the garden, being in the garden, eating my own produce, ugly heirloom tomatoes and all, and taking a few minutes on clear nights to ponder the stars, there’s something even more special about hunting for wild mushrooms in the woods at the back of the property. On occasion, on my way to the back of the property, I have found Dryad’s Saddles, edible if young enough, in the grass, or sprouting from a tree, or giant puffballs along the south-eastern edge of the property. Neither are very tasty, but they are edible and so a decent consolation prize. But the tastiest prizes are in the back, with the big oaks and maples and other, mostly deciduous, trees.

Learning to recognize and get brave enough to eat chicken-of-the-woods, hens-of-the-woods, shrimp-of-the-woods, green quilted Russulas, black trumpets, white and yellow oysters, red chanterelles, entolomas, and a VERY few morels, while avoiding eating Jack-O-Lanterns, red Russulas, Destroying Angels, “Little Brown Mushrooms,” and Angels Wings…. Now that’s a skill. Because I have taught myself, and have never yet gotten sick. As “they” say, “There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters!”

Most of the people in my neighborhood learned to find morels when they were kids. Nobody where I grew up hunted mushrooms. Or at least I do not recall, even among the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts in my social circles, anyone who hunted and ate wild mushrooms. And even my current neighbors are surprised to discover that when I say I hunt mushrooms, I do not mean “only morels.”

It has definitely been challenging to learn to understand the jargon of mycology. One of my early finds was a whole clump of giant white, funnel-shaped mushrooms at the edge of a water-logged area near the tree that I was convinced for years was an elm, but I now think is a beech. I looked through all my books and could not find anything remotely resembling these beautiful, snow-white, 8 – 10 inch high, 5- 6 inch diameter fungi. Any one would have made a meal! Some months later, I finally “grokked” that the cap shape descriptions in the books were not random. “Oh it might be flat, it might be convex.” No. The point was that they always go through a sequence, usually from convex, to flat, to concave. So the reason that those shrooms looked the way they did was because they were at the end of the cycle of maturity of the “fruiting body,” and the caps had turned inside out. Usually, the pictured examples of mushrooms in guide books are sooner after they pop up.

The aspiring shroom hunter needs to learn all the vocabulary associated with the way the gills, or other “fertile” surface is connected, or not, to the stem; the vocabulary to describe the shape of the stems; and the vocabulary used to describe the habits of the particular species, such as “gregarious,” or “solitary,” or “clustered.” The aspiring mycologist needs to know the difference between gilled shrooms, and shrooms with pores. For the pored shrooms, are they boletes, or are they polypores? Numerous older books say no polypores (which include Dryad’s Saddles, Chickens, and Hens) are poisonous, but newer books don’t want to be that BOLD!!!! Too many people have taken up this hobby. The experts want people to be sure that they have identified the exact species before cooking and consuming it.

Way too many people, IMO, are willing to eat a shroom that someone in a Reddit forum or some software says is ok. This is insane. Ok, there are a FEW mushrooms that are recognizable, just by looking at the cap shape and coloration. But the software apps that act like they can identify a mushroom from the view of the cap are completely ridiculous. Ok, for pure curiosity, fine. But not to eat. Period. Stay cowardly.

A lot of my finds go in the compost, mostly unidentified. For the first time, I found what I was pretty sure were blewits this fall, but after checking in all of my books and a few reliable on-line sites, I wasn’t sure if a) they were blewits or b) blewits are always safe to eat. I was excited when I identified “Woman on a Motorcycle.” I didn’t eat it, but I was highly confident that I knew what it was.

Maybe it would be ok to die of mushroom poisoning, since that supposedly was how the Buddha finally entered Nirvana. But, the symptoms of organ failure that the Amanitas and other really deadly shrooms cause are not reportedly fun to live through. One of my engineer colleagues told me about mistaking Jack-O-Lanterns for chanterelles. He does not care to repeat the experience. My plan is to continue to be a cowardly mushroom hunter.

As I age, and my joints creak, and I don’t move so fast, and I still have to work for a living, I wonder if it even makes sense for me to keep living out in the country, where it’s so hard to find people to help with the garden and mowing the lawn, etc. But then I realize that if I move to the city or the suburbs, I will sit on my rear end even more of the time, instead of getting out in the fresh air and growing and hunting my own produce, and admiring the same stars that all the famous and forgotten people since antiquity, and even before antiquity, have viewed.

Joyous Just Passed Solstice, Merry Christmas if you celebrate, and happy New Year. I’m not terribly optimistic that 2024 will be an improvement over 2023. The world seems to be falling apart. But some people manage to find joy anyway.

Wax On, Wax Off!

Perhaps the most memorable part of the original 1984 Karate Kid movie for me was the scene when the Kid, Daniel, first shows up to his new teacher’s home for a lesson in self-defense, and makes a sacred pact to to obey, no questions asked, in exchange for being taught karate. Pat Morita, as the teacher, hands Daniel a sponge to wash his collection of “Detroit” cars. Daniel is then is told to wax them, as well. Morita demonstrates the hand and arm motions to put the wax on the car, and then wipe it off. Wax on, Wax off. “Don’t forget to breathe!” I love this scene.

Of course, later we find out that the “wax on, wax off” motion is identical to a basic karate move used to block and attack. The Karate Kid learns karate by repeated practice performed doing what he considers menial work.

Way back when, students learned to write by practicing writing. With a thick pencil, then later, a thinner pencil, and eventually, a pen. By repeating the motions, we learned to write legibly, and without having to think too hard about how to make each letter.

anonymous ethnic tutor helping little multiracial students with task in classroom
Photo by Katerina Holmes on Pexels.com

Piano students have to practice scales and guitar students have to practice chords. That’s just the way it is. Acquiring a skill requires practice.

Learning how to safely forage for edible mushrooms requires knowing the difference between decurrent, attached and free gills, and gregarious and solitary growth habits, as well as how to make and interpret a spore print, among many other characteristics, to identify the spore colors. It scares the crap out of me when people show some software a picture to get an ID.

Green Russula, an edible choice mushroom that I was afraid to eat as I was not sure I had correctly identified it at the time.

It also, as I finally figured out, requires being able to interpret the descriptions of the changing shapes of the caps, often from convex to flat to concave, as the mushroom ages. I drove myself nuts looking through five mushroom books trying to identify a giant white mushroom with a large concave, almost funnel shaped, cap. I finally found it in one of the books. As my studies continued, I learned that this mushroom had been misidentified and argued about by experts for decades. In any case, the convex shape wasn’t what finally helped with the ID. The convex shape was simply because these stunning, large white mushrooms were well into the spore spreading segment of their lifecycle. The convex shape seemed distinctive to me, because this is generally not the time when people capture images for identification guides. They generally capture the photos when the shrooms are young and fresh and colorful and convex. This is only one aspect of why it’s generally not recommended to teach yourself mushroom foraging. I did take to heart the adage that there are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but no old, bold mushroom hunters.

Learning has to start with small skills, and mastery of the basics allows us to gain greater skills. This goes for such tasks generally characterized as “Thinking” as well as playing a musical instrument, swimming competitively, or practicing medicine, repairing cars, or gardening. As the practitioner acquires more basic knowledge of the objects and practices associated with a “body of knowledge,” it’s possible to be more creative with those data and skills, and accomplish more and more. The knowledge builds on and feeds itself.

What is going to happen to humanity if we don’t learn how to learn?

This is the scariest thing for me about SALAMI, or Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences, a more accurate description of what we call AI, or artificial intelligence.

Note that SALAMI and Bologna might be related.

It’s pretty ridiculous to call machine learning intelligence. Intelligence requires conscious awareness, and compassion. It must be grounded in empathy, resulting from awareness of the pains and fears and longings that all humans, most animals, and perhaps even plants, are subject to. It’s part of being alive.

Objectivity is scary, as well as having been proven mathematically and philosophically to be non-existent. I don’t want someone to give me objective advice. I want advice that’s RIGHT for ME! Part of wisdom is knowing how to GIVE advice that’s right for the person seeking the advice!

A professor at a large, accredited university recently told me that many of his current students truly think that they don’t need to know anything other than how to look something up on Google. They believe they will be able to Google their way through their engineering careers. He told me that the students would not want to read a long text book, that many of them don’t buy the short textbook he requires now. I replied that I was not going to pander to ignoramuses. The movie Idiocracy was hilarious, but it’s scary to contemplate the fact that that’s where we’re headed.

We need to wake up, and smell the roses and the coffee, or all we will have left to smell is shit.

pink carnation flower and pink rose flower in clear glass vase beside mug of coffee
Photo by Lisa Fotios on Pexels.com

OR

HERE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A PHOTO OF SOME MANURE. BUT NONE OF THE IMAGE SERVICES ASSOCIATED WITH MY CURRENT SOFTWARES SHOW A SINGLE PHOTO OF A FARMER SHOVELING MANURE. ALL THE FARM PHOTOS ARE OF CUTE ANIMALS OR BEAUTIFUL GRAINS, FRUITS, ETC. 

WHY THIS CENSORSHIP ABOUT SHIT?????

This is the skatole molecule, according to Wikipedia, it’s what makes shit smell like shit. The Wiki article also shows a small image of human “poo” alongside a shot of elephant “POO.” Hmm, looks like precursors to ammonia and methane in there.

By Dschanz – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4834135

100th Anniversary of the END of World War I- Reprise

Please click below to hear the audio Recording of the actual sermon. Note content is an elaboration of some of the points made below.

Today is November 11, 2018.

It is the hundredth anniversary of the end of the first World War.

Some wars, as the Hindu’s great scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, tells us, are justified. Sun Tzu of China also wrote a book held in longstanding honor that explains how to determine when war is justified. Sun Tsu’s classic, The Art of War, is still used today for its advice on how to gain a speedy end to any war that is justified.

We in the West have our own traditions justifying war. The Trojan War between the Achaeans (predecessors of the culture occupying what we now call Greece) was fought due to a pact between rich landowners to defend whichever of them took the most beautiful woman of the times as a wife, from anyone who tried to take her away. The Hebrew Bible documents many wars fought at the direction of God’s commands to cleanse the Promised Land of its supposedly sinful occupants.

At that time, people were led to believe that they were doing good by helping their God to annihilate offending peoples. I personally have a hard time deciding if this seems morally superior or inferior to the idea of preventing Helen from leaving her short, fat, ugly Achaean (Greek) husband and going off with the handsome Prince of Troy. I am also struggling to come to a conclusion about whether ethnic cleansing is superior or inferior as a supposedly legitimate cause of war, compared to one fought over the refusal of a king to return his cousin’s domain after the allotted time had elapsed since the dice gambling match forced him to go into a 13 year exile.

Are all of these reasons morally inferior or superior to the ones that Americans have used in recent times? (Securing our supply of oil? Liberating Afghan women from those who were forcing them to give up their right to education and liberty to walk about in town? Destroying what turned out to be non-existent weapons of mass destruction?)

Apparently, back in the Bronze age, in what we now call the Middle East, wars fought to perform ethnic cleansing were considered good deeds. The episodes of what today would be called ethnic cleansing, or genocide, were thought to endear the people to their god. Because of this, Israelite editors of the Bible made up the story of their ancestors’ destruction of the great city of Jericho. Historians and archeologists seem quite certain that the city of Jericho was already a pile of ruins at the time of the Israelites occupation of Canaan. But it was important to tell the story of the destruction of every resident of Jericho- man, woman (except the certified virgins of child bearing age), child, even the livestock. Important to remind God of the obedience of the people, and important to remind the Israelites of their fierce warrior natures.

Now, before you, dear reader, accuse me of being NEGATIVE, wallowing in the horrific deeds and attitudes of the past, I want to say that THE FACT that we now find these deeds HORRIFIC gives me some hope for future progress. As the great Rabbi Hillel said, what is hateful to you, do not do to others.

Sure, it’s great to give charity, and to smile as you go about your daily business. But destruction is so much swifter than construction, that you could be loving and kind 364 days a year, and on that one day of destruction, ruin more than you built. Perhaps that is likely if we try to suppress our negative aspects, rather than bringing them into the light of day to figure out how we can move beyond them.

So first, let’s avoid destruction of the beautiful, the useful, and the spiritually uplifting.

How much progress have we made in the last 3 or 4 thousand years?

The kings of Assyria and Babylon used to have their scribes count the enemy hands in the piles that the warriors made, so they could brag to their god of how many enemies his army had eradicated. Most of the armies of the day only killed men and children, sparing all women of child bearing age, and taking the livestock. Women were spared as the men of the day had an incorrect belief that THEY carried the complete genetic seeds of their offspring, and the females were merely incubators.

Getting back to more modern times, World War I resulted in 10 million civilian deaths and 6 million military personnel deaths. Another 20 million were injured. In the heat of the battle, many soldiers had been brainwashed as to the necessity of continuing to kill until the moment of cease-fire at 11 am on 11/11/1918. The last soldier was killed at 10:58 am. This was almost six hours after the announcement of the cease-fire. The combatant had become so filled with hatred that they did not want to waste a chance for a little more glory on the battlefield, a few more enemies killed.

But, as a result of this bloody, horrible war, many people did start to undertake organization building for the purposes of reducing the pain, suffering, and losses of war. Some people also worked to reduce the likelihood of war.

As we look back in history on this hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I, we can’t celebrate the end of war. We can’t even celebrate the end of the desire for war. But we do have some progress to report. We have the knowledge of the Buddhist prayer that all beings be happy, and more importantly that all beings have the causes of happiness. Again, I’d like to suggest that we not pray for the currently unrealistic end to war, which would leave many people in untenable conditions. Rather, I pray for an end to the causes of war.

What are the causes of war? I am not a historian, so probably no historian would take my opinion into account. However, I think that injustice is the biggest. I will claim that I’m not the first to think along the lines of social structures contributing to war. Matthew O. Jackson and Massimo Morelli wrote (in 2007) an article called “Political Bias and War,” in the American Economic Review, 97 (4): 1353-1373. I haven’t read it because I don’t want to pay for the article at this point. From another article by these authors, which I found in its entirety, they apparently make the case that PEOPLE LIKE to CHOOSE those with belligerent tendencies as leaders to negotiate for them. They also provide information that led me to understand that in hierarchical societies (all human societies), the LEADERS actually tend to benefit from war more than the citizens. Let’s think about the rich Americans who benefit from selling arms. They are not the ones being shot at on the battlefields! Be that as it may, these two historians see war most frequently resulting from bargaining failures. To me, bargaining failures is a “HOW wars start” factor, while injustice is a “WHY wars start” factor.

If peace and justice prevailed everywhere on the face of the earth, and people LOVED peace and justice, I think that there would be a lower driving force for wars.

But injustice is the hardest thing to eradicate. Or perhaps I should say that the manifestations of injustice are very difficult to eradicate. When we start to try to disentangle a single strand of injustice, we find ourselves pulling on one end of what seems like an infinite spider web.

Two years ago I studied the Flint Water Crisis, in order to prepare a presentation for an engineering conference. The “ROOT CAUSE” of the children’s lead poisoning was eventually found by the American Civil Liberties Union to be a failure of democracy. Of course with any big failure, there are multiple points of view. From another vantage point, the Flint problem was economic in nature. The city had been a thriving center of manufacturing, but the losses of the automotive industry had left it as the home of one of the most poverty stricken populations in the country. But defining the situation in those terms is philosophically defeatist. It implies that poor people don’t have a right to safe drinking water. Or it leaves poor people waiting for charity.

Calling the situation a failure of democracy leads to more immediately actionable plans. The control of the government of Flint has now been returned to its elected mayor from the State appointed emergency manager, who took control after the bankruptcy of the city. Several years on, there are still a lot of lead pipes in Flint, and some people are still relying on bottled water to drink, although it’s been safe to wash even babies in the water for some time now.

There are still ongoing lawsuits over the actions taken by the officials appointed by the State, who abused their authority and ignored safety warnings from the employees of the water department. Some of these former authorities are facing criminal charges. (Feel free to contact me for a copy of my slide show or paper on the subject.)

Should all humans have safe drinking water? Is that a matter of justice? Lead in drinking water has been shown to cause irreversible brain damage in infants and young children. The brain damage leads to a higher incidence of behavioral problems, and even murder rates. (My previously mentioned paper has references to a scholarly article on this issue.) Of course “normal” people don’t want violent, brain damaged people in their neighborhoods.

What about toilets? Should all humans have toilets?

And education? Should all humans have access to basic education? Should they learn how to read, do arithmetic, and practice basic hygiene?

Are these issues of justice?

If we are able to envision a world of both peace and justice, we bring it closer to reality. Jesus’ teachings encouraged his followers to enter the Kingdom of Heaven within. Yet, as we leave the Halloween season, and approach the Thanksgiving Season, overshadowed as it now is in the American Retail environment, by a frenzy of Christmas capitalism, let’s rejoice that Christians have not totally given up the idea of the Old Testament prophet, that one day there would be Peace on Earth.

If all of us spread the word that our chances of Peace on Earth coming sooner will be improved once we start praying for an end to the CAUSES of war, we will be doing a small part to making it happen.

What is the Human Condition?

Who knows what these bugs are? But they are doing what they were made to do. Glorious lust, but short-lived. Bugs mate when the opportunity arises. Humans sometimes have a little more choice about it. But we are still driven by many natural and social conditions to want to mate.

Never confuse the human condition for human nature. The first is real, the second mostly used as an excuse for personal failings, of self and others.

The human condition is a consequence of the evolution of consciousness. The pain associated with it results from conflicts between the necessity of providing for the body and the higher ethics we’ve developed to make life bearable. Modernity has brought with it ever greater conflicts due to our membership in complex, nested and overlapping sub-groups. These include family, neighbors, residents of our town, village, city, etc., fellow citizens and other residents of our nation, other nations around the world, professional societies, clubs, and more.

So-called “human nature” is a distorted epi-phenomenon arising from the sequence of difficulties that the powerful have created and manipulated for their own gain.

Humanity has not yet figured out exactly what real human nature is, but surely there is a strong component of co-operation and helpfulness.

Without that, we would not have thrived as much as we have.

Merwegon the Great

I came from behind. Did you?

This is a “Ghost Pipe” plant! It seems unbelievably cool, and I am really amazed to have found several clumps on my property this past summer. That way, I did not have to feel bad about taking one back to the house, for science!

I come from behind. I imagine that many people might think that. David Levy quotes Barry Switzer having said “Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.” What proportion of our characteristics must be underdogs before we have a legitimate claim to having come from behind? For that matter, what scheme would be available to define the basic characteristics of any human?

I will try out my Thinking Skills to address this issue.

Hmm, would this ghost pipe be considered to have come from behind? As a plant, with no chlorophyll, that seems like it COULD be a disadvantage….

I found this “Ghost Pipe” or “Indian Pipe” while on a mushroom hunt. This is classified as a plant, but has no chlorophyll. It gets its nutrients from fungi in the soil.

A human is a certain type of animal that evolved on the planet, called Earth by its English speaking inhabitants. For the last 5,000 years at least, by the accounts of the social scientists, at least those finding themselves clinging to conventional wisdom, most humans live in fairly strongly hierarchical societies. I’m not talking a village chief, or even a multi-village “Big Man.” I’m talking multi-level with multi being definitely more than three. Three levels of society goes back to what some anthropologists consider the original human social hierarchy of Alpha and Shaman versus the men, women, and children. Of course it was always more complicated than that. But, we have to start somewhere. So does than mean that everyone but the Alpha and Shaman are coming from “behind”? Or are the men still in the top half? In matriarchal societies, would that mean the women were on top? So, thinking about it in this new way, I guess most people DO come from behind.

My ex always got very aggravated when someone would imply that he was part of “the people.” The people were uneducated, shallow, and boring. All characteristics that he most certainly did not apply to himself. Boring was definitely the biggest sin. at least in his book.

A week or so later, the white was staring to discolor to brown and black, and the open shape of the flower was starting to pinch into a seed pod. Eventually, it turned completely dark brown and black, and head dried and shrunk. I took the head back out to the swampy area where I found it, and sprinked the seeds on the ground.

So now we are moving from our place in the basic social hierarchy as the source of defining who we are / where we come from, to the realm of learned or/and chosen behavior. Behavior, as we all know, starts in the mind. I don’t think I have ever seen “entertaining and boring” as poles of a foundational system of categorizing people. But that brings us perhaps to something akin to either the Myers-Briggs personality typing program, or the Enneagram, or astrology of the Eastern or Western types.

The most promising on short reflection seems to be Myers-Briggs, where we could say that extroverts are ahead, or at least out front, and introverts are behind. Going on extroverted people being more likely to be regularly entertaining. Maybe I err, in using my exe’s system. But I will keep going on this premise for now. So going back to the main story line, most personality type statistics indicate that the extroverts are a bigger group than the introverts. So where’s the cut off for being behind? Do only the top 75% (or whatever the statistics say) of extroverts belong in “the ahead,” and the bottom 25% of extroverts have a legitimate claim to coming from behind?

Of course in today’s economy, a big chunk of what determines if you are coming from behind, or not, has to do with your financial resources. Sadly, the very few are on the very pinnacle, and the rest of us are not. So, by basic statistics, it seems that a lot of us might well have a legitimate claim to be coming from behind.

Do we get to combine the less “desirable” traits to claim greater disadvantage? Certainly this discussion is happening today.

Hmm. I am going to have to think about this….

Well, since I mentioned a mushroom hunt above, I will include this scanning electron microscope image of a spore from what I am quite confident was a Green Quilted Russula. They are edible, when fresh. Now t that I am confident I know how to identify them, the next time I find one, I will overcome my “Green Eggs and Ham” “yuck factor,” and cook some up. They are reputed to be very good eating!

What do YOU think???

What is a River?

Today’s prompts were “greatest first lines of novels.”

We started with The Go Between by L. P. Hartley published in 1953.

The first sentence is:
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

My friend Sean said he would like to be able to hear me read this to think about it. So if you would rather listen than read, please click on the audio file here. Or scroll down to find the text.

What is a River? A muse by Shona Moonbeam

As soon as we mention the past, we invoke the existence of time. Of course physicists and cosmologists know that time is not linear, and the past does not disappear. When we look at a starry sky, we are seeing light that left the surface of its star at different times, depending on which star we are looking at. Unless we’re using a telescope, probably many different stars, so we are simultaneously receiving light that is young and old. But from our conventional experience of time, it does seem as if the future becomes the present, and then the past. In other words, metaphorically, time flows.

Heraclitus warned us that, despite a river having a permanent name, you can’t step into it twice. Furthermore, he noted that the person doing the stepping changes along with the river. For now, I will focus on the river. The point being that the name, perhaps, carries not so important a set of data with it as the temperature of the water, the pH of the water, the minerals carried along, dissolved and traveling far, or locked into pebbles or sand, and merely vibrating, rolling a short way, or participating in a mixture of those activities. The fish, the algae, the protozoans, the insect larvae, all contribute to the entity we call a river. The shoreline spreads to a varying degree, sometimes shrinking to almost a true line, other times widening to a broad swath. Is the young kid casting a lure into the trout pool a part of the river now? What about three hours ago, when she was eating breakfast at her mother’s kitchen table?

The land and the river merge into a unity. Without land in sight, there is no river. Perhaps a lake, and certainly an ocean, reaches far enough to conceal its boundaries from the one who floats on it or within its volume. But a river? A river carves the land, and the land contains the river. The land the river crosses defines the river itself. So how to separate the river from the country it flows through? The otter doesn’t care. Nor does the dragonfly. Alive for a few seasons, these entities might not notice changes. Either the environment supports its life, or does not.

Yet, longer lived entities, holding greater networks of memory, may note that these water molecules, with this concentration of dissociated hydrogen ions, and that concentration of dissolved calcium atoms, the exact position of the edge of the water, the depth profile of the silt along the 43rd parallel, vary from the characteristics recorded during youth. The air above the water-land-country mixes with the under-layers, providing the oxygen that the inhabitants, both visible and microscopic, require.

As the composition of the atmosphere changes, the transfer of energy to the water-land-country varies. A thick layer of ice covered what we today call Alaska and Chukchi. Now people refer to this same range of latitudes and longitudes, modified as required by the ongoing drift of the tectonic plates, as Beringia. The people who scientists believe, and aboriginal Americans say, skirted its edges in boats to people the western coasts of the Americas, or walked along the edges of its widening corridor to the interiors of these continents, likely used a different name. Whatever its handle, Beringia is a different country, and the history waves plying the ether carry onward the observations, thoughts, stories and acts of a different time, no less vital than the one we currently call now.

Pinky’s Beads

The prompt in our writing group was “Breadcrumbs.” As usual, I fell into the rut of SOC (stream of consciousness) writing.

Pinky’s beads are really cool and I hope that nobody uses them for breadcrumbs. Although as metaphorical breadcrumbs, I suppose they are suitable, so I am going to go against the hope I recently expressed.

Just what is a breadcrumb? I am not talking about a single breadcrumb, of course, or even the scattering of breadcrumbs left next to the plate of a messy eater like myself. Or even the thinner scattering of breadcrumbs that might be found at the place recently used to open a bag of sliced bread, or to slice a loaf of home baked bread. No, I am talking about breadcrumbs in a line, or a nominally one dimensional curvy pseudo-line, intentionally left as a clue to where to find something. Or by metaphorical stretch, how to find something. Or by further metaphorical stretch, how to figure something out.

The point being that someone else has already figured out how to accomplish the target, shall we say, of the breadcrumbs.

Of course calling Pinky’s beads breadcrumbs implies that Pinky herself intentionally left clues. But again, by metaphorical extension, maybe we can still legitimately call the beads breadcrumbs, even if she only unintentionally created breadcrumbs along with the beads.

For how does the one who sees the trail of breadcrumbs know unequivocally whether they were intentional, and thus truly breadcrumbs, or unintentional, and thus simple data? Unless we have separate data as to the intentionality, these metaphorical cases are harder to classify as either true breadcrumbs, or the result of our natural human tendency to find patterns where none exist.

With actual breadcrumbs, it is easier to see that it was intentional, especially, as in the case of the original breadcrumb story from which most of us probably get our idea of a trail of breadcrumbs leading us on. That story being, of course, Hansel and Gretel. But if we think a little harder, we are reminded that the breadcrumbs were a failure, until metaphorical breadcrumbs in the form of small stones were substituted.

Personally, I am struggling to recall the details of the story. Did Hansel’s metaphorical breadcrumbs lead Gretel to risk? These children were really smart, I just realize, to carry out the breadcrumb experiment in the first place, and keep modifying their procedure as needed.

So, back to Pinky’s beads. To me, they are breadcrumbs because we see Pinky’s creative mind at work. They help us figure out a little bit of how Pinky’s mind works. They let us see that she saw a way to make complexly patterned colorful cylindrical beads out of a flat piece of colored paper, through the use of a double symmetry procedure around mutually perpendicular axes. Very cool. And this observation from someone who really struggled to pass her crystallography class in her junior year.

I don’t know if she told Jim Z how she made the beads prior to his explaining it to me, or whether Jim figured it out by himself. My first assessment was wrong. Doing it the way I originally thought after a cursory glance would probably not look as good. Doing it the way she did it, rolling the paper around a chop stick, removing the chop stick from the center of the now cylindrical piece of paper, flattening the cylinder to create a very skinny and thick strip, which she then rolls into a disk with a small hole conveniently left for a matching colored string to create a necklace, looks very good. Before attaching the string, the bead is coated with a shiny transparent gloss coat. Very cool. If I did it, due to my clumsiness, it would not look so nice.

Breadcrumbs to see Pinky’s creativity. Metaphorical breadcrumbs. Is it too much of a stretch?

If you like the idea of these beads, even if the only one I had left to take a picture of when I finally posted this today, having given the other four I bought to friends, leave a comment and I will send you info on how to reach Pinky. Maybe she has some left.