Category Archives: Science

Politics, Science, US History, World History

The 4%ers

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Mabon (fall) and the Harvest Moon

Monday gratefuls: The Man of La Mancha. Alan. Ovation West. Struggling to hear. As usual. More and more Au in them thar hills. Not pannable though. Rakeable? Yes. Bistro tonight with MVP. Joanne’s birthday. Irv and Marilyn. My son and Seoah. Murdoch. Leo. Bagel. Cream Cheese. Janet’s dogs. Mark in Bangkok. Mary in K.L. I think. Diane in San Francisco. Ruth in Boulder. Gabe on Galena street.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Don Quixote

Kavannah for the week: Yirah

One brief shining: Little boxes, little boxes, arranged in different rows, each with numbers and colors, each an element of matter that makes up the mass of the universe that humans can experience in some way, all combined only four percent of the total mass, the rest hidden from us in dark matter and dark energy. Can you give me a Yirah!

 

The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality Richard Panek. published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on January 10, 2011. No, I haven’t read it. But the title tells you about the puzzling truth that everything we know and love, everything we understand and for now, can understand at least in part, only constitutes 4% of reality. Or, put it another way, we humans have no idea what constitutes 96% of the universe in which we exist. And, in which we exist on a distant suburb of the Milky Way galaxy, home to billions of stars like Great Sol, and thousands of exoplanets (at least) yet only one of hundreds of billions, possibly as many as two trillion galaxies. Each of which contains billions of suns and who knows how many exoplanets.

Mother Earth may be a blue marble to us when we see her in the famous photograph, but she’s not even a grain of sand in the vastness of space. When I investigated elements 1,2, and 3 on the periodic table for the Ancient Brothers, I discovered that hydrogen, #1, makes up 75% of the known universe and helium, #2, 23%. 98% of the known matter in the universe is either a hydrogen atom or a helium atom. Boggles the mind, eh?

Also found something that revealed our oh so anthropocentric perspective on fish, the universe and everything. One writer referred to these elements in the periodic table as normal matter. Don’t know about you but elevating 4% of the material in the universe to normative status just doesn’t make sense. It’s an old conceit and a damning one. The earth as the center of the solar system. Europe and its Caucasian population with a divine right to conquer and civilize the known world. White folks with the right to enslave black folks.

This conceit that first earthlings, then white European earthlings, then enslavers and their latter day fellow travelers now trying to take control of U.S. governance have it right has created so much pain, death, destruction. Let’s find it and name it wherever it is. Then isolate and defang all who carry this disease of the mind, quarantine them, too.

 

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Health, Judaism, Kabbalah, Science, Writing

Go, Elementals!

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Lugnasa and the Harvest Moon

Sabbath gratefuls: Zoom. WordPress. My computers. Starlink. The Internet. My links to friends, family, shopping. Solar panels & C.O.R.E. Sources of electricity. Mini-splits, electric heat pumps for heating and cooling. The induction stove for electrical cooking. LED bulbs for longlasting, low-energy consumption light. Arts and Crafts style furniture, lighting fixtures, upholstery cloth.

Sparks of joy and awe: Electricity

Kavannah: Yirah

One brief shining: Give me an H, Give me an He, Give me an Li, go elementals! Let’s go 1,2,3. Now entering the big top in the first ring, give me a hand for that most abundant, simplest, colorless, odorless, yet flammable guy, and the lightest element in the whole universe: Hydrogen! Keep putting those hands together as another odorless and tasteless gas, second only to the Big H in abundance in our whole cosmos, floats gracefully to ring number 2, she floats, she stays aloof, there she is: Miss Helium! Finally, plunking himself into our third ring, that healer of manic-depression, that key to batteries for electric cars, that old soft metal guy, the lightest of the solid elements: Mr. Lithium!

 

Blame it on Tom. He’s having us present three of the naturally occurring elements as our Sunday theme for the Ancient brothers. He had us pick three numbers between 1 & 94, then wrote us an e-mail revealing that our numbers were the atomic numbers for our elements on the periodic table. I picked 1,2,3.

Here’s his charge to us: “What you were choosing is the Atomic Number of the element you can read about, research, write poetry about, combine with other elements to compound your effort, discuss the philosophical underpinnings of the origin of your chosen elements (or the universe itself), draw pictures of your element as it stands alone or as it combines with others. In other words, the usual Ancient Zeitgeist applies.”

Not sure where I’m going with mine yet though I like the circus metaphor. Probably will have to touch a bit on Lurianic Kabbalah and the tzimtzum*. Perhaps the Tree of Life as well. Going to have fun with this today.

 

Feeling lighter after Ann’s visit. I have the Celebrex and tramadol to help with pain. That helps, too. Still ouchy, I’d say a 3 most of the time except when I’m sitting, rising to a 7 or 8 if I stress my back. That’s with the pain relievers on board. Why it doesn’t bother my workouts, I don’t know. Must be isolation of muscle groups though I also don’t usually experience pain even on the treadmill. Unless I go past 20-25 minutes. Odd, eh?

I also feel lighter because even though the presidential race is close at least we have a good chance. Looks like the North Carolina GOP candidate for governor is gonna give us a boost in that important state. A Black Nazi? Posted on a porn site. Dude!

I’m also feeling the faint stirrings of a new novel. Something I want to get going. Just a spark right now, but we know sparks can lead to wild fires of creative power. Shiva energy.

 

Time for a workout after breakfast. I’m in contact with a couple of guys who might come to the house, help me with my workouts. I need to freshen mine. Get them targeted even more on my core to help my back. Might even return for another round of physical therapy with Mary.

 

*The term zimzum originates in the Kabbalah and refers to God’s contraction of himself before the creation of the world, and for the purpose of creating the world. To put it another way, the omnipresent God, who exists beyond time and space before creation, withdraws a part of his infinite presence into himself. With this divine gesture, God restricts himself in zimzum, clearing the empty space that is necessary for creation. The emanation and the creation of the world are then able to occur in the center of God following this act of zimzum. In this process, God limits his omnipotence, so that a finite world can exist within finite contours. Without zimzum, there would be no creation.    wiki

NB: I would not use the word God here. What I’m after with the tzimtzum is the process of earliest creation and how we might understand it.

 

Great Wheel, Politics, Science, US History

Sad to say these things

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The Mountain Summer Moon

Monday gratefuls: Joanne. Veronica. The Ancient Brothers. Bill at his family reunion in Door County. Avivah Zornberg, a profound commentator on the Torah. 45 and his lucky ear. Biden, elder statesman. This strange, oh so strange, year. Being alive. Hawai’i for Christmas? Murdoch on base. My sweet son and Seoah. Rich. Susan. Tom. Diane. Marilyn.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Friends

One brief shining: The day dawned as Mother Earth spun round to expose us to the life sustaining Light while giving others the blessings of rest and cooler temperatures, the night calming, dark, a time of sleep; Great Sol remains steadfast, always ready to share the benefits of nuclear fusion, protons joining protons, creating helium and sustaining life on Mother Earth.

 

This cosmic dance of night and day, ready protons in the enormous heat and pressure of Great Sol’s core, our Planet’s orbit, all moving as our galaxy moves, as our local cluster moves, as the universe changes shape, motions constant and the only true state of matter and energy, change, becoming, never still or static or just there. We amuse ourselves with Zeno’s Paradox. You know the one, where the arrow cannot land because it always has half the distance to its target to travel. But this world doesn’t know the strictures of logic, it only knows the demands of novelty, of the forward pull of Whitehead’s creative advance into novelty.

This One which encompasses this one and that one and the one here and the one all way out there in the most distant galaxy never settles into a steady state but rolls and roils with death, decay, nuclear fusion, breathing and hearts beating, births, the growth and development of life from entity to entity until the last syllable of recorded time. Here’s the Big Surprise! It will, too, last beyond that syllable to transform into what must come next.

Ok. Enough of that.

 

Just a moment: The drums have not been silent for years now. The paradiddle of constant political estrangement drowns out the sounds of normal political discourse. In the broader sense I agree with Biden’s call to lower the temperature of our political discourse. We need a more studied, less volatile approach to politics both local and national. Yes, we do.

However. The reality. One party to those politics wants to drag the nation back to the 19th century when Jim Crow reigned, wants to elevate our national interest over against all others, wants to ruin our electoral process in so many ways, a real dagger at the heart of democracy. Or, should I say, a real bullet from an AR-15.

I do not see how compromise is possible with racists, America firsters, with those who find authoritarians like Putin and Oban, even Kim Jong Un, men who should be praised and emulated. How is compromise possible with one whose flaunting of our legal system would be beaten down if he were not a candidate for President? And, if successful in his candidacy, who could distort and actively alter that same legal system?

I am sorry to say these things. I am sad to be in a position where they are my truth. But they are.

Judge Dismisses Classified Documents Case Against Trump. NYT. 7/15/2024. Only moments after I finished this post.

 

Politics, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Reimaging revelation, Science, US History

Election 2024: the Novel. Another Twist.

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The Mountain Summer Moon

Sunday gratefuls: The novelist has thrown yet another Big Twist into this election year. Trump’s ear. Oh, my. Red Flag warning today. Red Flag in the day, attention must pay. Numbers. Zornberg’s Bewilderment. Reading. Mitch Rapp. Another week of 150 plus minutes exercise. Radiation consult this Thursday. My son. Seoah. Murdoch. Hawai’i.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: My son

One brief shining: Handed in my Powerball ticket, a big winner, over a quarter of a billion dollars, Tom’s challenge, what are those first moments like, how do I feel, what do I do, the Ancient Brothers topic for this morning, an American, so American, fantasy, yet one with a Rorschach template for our real values.

 

Gotta admit. I didn’t see a registered Republican recent high school student using his no doubt legally obtained AR-15 assault rifle to fire eight shots at 45. That one photograph with blood around his mouth. I thought to myself, no way this can get any weirder. Wrong, so wrong. Gobsmacked. Forehead slapped. Mind scrambled.

No thriller writer would have this much chutzpah. The irony way too obvious. The twist, after the debate and the Supreme Court ruling on immunity, and the felony convictions, and the money damages in the cover up trial and the E. Jean Carroll verdict. Too much. I mean, come on. Is that believable?

It is a page turner though. What will happen next? Russian interference? Chinese interference? Maybe a black hole selectively absorbing only those citizens with way more red than necessary in their fashion statements? Each day a different aspect of the democratic process comes under attack from those seemingly interested in a quasi-king instead of a head of the third equal branch of our Federal Government.

At 77 this is almost more excitement than I can handle. Normally a bit breathless here at 8,800 feet, now I’m attached to an oxygen concentrator.

There are as well all those polls showing the orange one ahead in the swing states, the battleground states, while kind Old Joe dithers. And Kamala Harris runs without running. Democrats dither along with Joe. Somebody has to show decisiveness. Let’s turn this damned election upside down and inside out. Elect a Democrat.

 

Just a moment: Here’s the thing. Revelation. A musty old idea. Communication from the other side, eh? Or, maybe from this or that multiverse? Could be God? Always, and I want to lean on this hard, Always, human mediated. Even miracles only become miraculous when reported and confirmed by some human who experienced them. The implication? All of our religious reveries, our sacred writings, our tales of Jesus and Moses and Zoroaster and Shiva and Lao Tze, all within the human experience. What is resurrection but a tale told by a human?

No, this is not a definitive argument against revelation per se. All I can confidently say is that we don’t know it unless someone told us or we experienced it and are the ones doing the telling. Same thing could be said, I suppose, for science. Only the results of experiments by humans, evaluated and reported by humans.

 

Commentary on the news, Great Work, Science, Weather +Climate, World History

Water

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The Mountain Summer Moon

Shabbat gratefuls: That sinking into a pleasant day feeling. The heat. Great Sol. Carbon emissions at record highs. Life changing politics on tap. Project 2025. The Sea reaching out, claiming more Land. This heated Land. The poor, especially those in cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, L.A. Water. Transpiration. Evaporation. Precipitation. The cycle.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: My well

One brief shining: 28 years with a well and a septic system, Andover to Shadow Mountain, no fluoride, the occasional bit of radon, acidity, and chemicals, flowing in from the Aquifer below, in Andover from the Great Anoka Sand Plain, here on Shadow Mountain the well drilled into fractured bed rock, much of the same Water flowing back out through sinks, the washing machine and dishwasher, toilets and into the leech field well toward the back fence line, returning that Water to the Aquifer.

 

a more accurate depiction of the global human-integrated water cycle diagram          10 August 2020 Source Own work Author LangeLeslie and Anna Wright cc license     click to expand

. “The water cycle describes the processes that drive the movement of water throughout the hydrosphere. However, much more water is “in storage” (or in “pools”) for long periods of time than is actually moving through the cycle.” wiki

Water. Water. Everywhere. Including outer space. Astronomers find largest, most distant reservoir of Water in the Universe.* Yet as we can see from the above diagram its distribution on Earth is such that only minimal amounts of fresh Water exist and those that are available are not distributed equally across the continents. See this interesting website: A Look at Global Freshwater Distribution.

The notion of increased heat across the globe caused me to go hunting for information about fresh Water resources since transpiration and evaporation will both increase as the thermostat gets twisted higher and higher. This will have the effect of changing existing patters of freshwater distributions. But how? I don’t know if anyone is planning for this.

This will happen whether the red hot MAG(m)A flows through our political veins or not. As will Sea level rise. And all the other climate change sequelae. Which means that a Ron DeSantis attitude might prevail among U.S. policy makers. What attitude? Florida Gov. DeSantis signs bill that deletes climate change from state law. Just don’t say climate change. And it will go away. Right?

The world may soon enter a period of leadership when national interests, dare I say it, trump global interests. Such a good time for it, too. Since dramatic and difficult to achieve carbon emission reductions are necessary to avoid the worst scenarios. Unlikely to happen. Which will result in a world catastrophe. I admit we were headed that way anyway, but these political changes will seal off any hope for effective addressing of climate change.

This puts the onus on those of us in the liberal to leftist camp to figure out how to work on these issues without governmental support. It can be done. Look at the nature rights movement. The many NGO’s out there from Ancient Forest champions to eco-justice. Even the restoration of Axolotls and Chiampas farming.

Perhaps that will be the way of the future for compassionate and justice oriented work. Happening now.

 

*”Two teams of astronomers have discovered the largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe. The water, equivalent to 140 trillion times all the water in the world’s ocean, surrounds a huge, feeding black hole, called a quasar, more than 12 billion light-years away.”

Feelings, Fourth Phase, Great Wheel, Humanities, Judaism, Latin, Letters, Literature, Myth and Story, Science, Torah, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

Liberal Arts, their necessity

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The Mountain Summer Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Gabe and Ruth. Beau Jo’s. Pizza. Cool nights. 22 degree difference: Lakewood to Shadow Mountain, 92-70. Abert’s Squirrel and Red Squirrels running. Chipmunks. Rabbits. Marmots. Fishers. Pikas. Prairie Dogs. Mice. Ravens. Crows. Magpies. Corvids.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Family

One brief shining: Outside along the fence, there, peripheral vision alerted me, found it, a hopping form, bushy tail, then another, Red Squirrels, smaller all black pointy ears, running between the Lodgepoles, an Abert’s Squirrel, a very squirrely morning.

 

Excited. I got a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Plan to read it through as part of Herme’s Pilgrimage. Stephanie McCarter from the University of the South. Not as ground breaking as the new Iliad and Odyssey by Emily Wilson, but fresh eyes and a woman’s perspective. Looking forward to grounding myself again in Ovid’s world of epic poetry, shapes changed into bodies, metamorphosis.

You could call me a classicist. Not in the academic sense, I don’t have the languages, but religious and ancient classical texts do have a gravitational pull for me. In translation I’ve read and returned to the Bible, Homer, Chinese literary classics like Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Greek philosophy, the Talmud, Roman and Greek playwrights and poets like Ovid, Beowulf, the Norse sagas, Dante.

When I say I’ve returned to them, I mean I will read them more than once. Which I don’t tend to do with more modern works. Say after the Renaissance.

You could call me, too, conservative. I also keep returning to religious institutions and religious life. There’s a strong part of my inner journey that’s fed by books like the Torah, the New Testament, Tao Te Ching, Chado: the Way of Tea. Even the Great Wheel emerges from the long ago past.

The vast deposit of human literature allows us to hop into a Jules Verne’s contraption of the mind, find long ago cultures like the Zhou Dynasty, Renaissance Florence, the Shogunate in Japan, village life in the old Celtic world, and for a time live in them, seeing the sights, considering the patterns of thought, the imaginative creations of other ways for being human.

The wonder and magic of reading.

Our era has begun to focus education away from the liberal arts which introduce us to philosophy, history, literature ancient and modern, languages, music and theater, poetry. We have a science and business tropism, a tendency to bend our institutions toward technology, toward business, toward matters concerning the practical arts like engineering, medicine, corporate agriculture.

Of course those practical paths undergird our day to day lives. Necessary to us all. Yes. But, and here’s where the classical world, the conservative nature of the liberal arts and religion comes into play, to what end do we sustain human life? For what purpose do we earn profits? What is a humane approach to political economy?

Without poetry and chamber music, without the voyage of Odysseus, without the journey of Dante, without the often ancient debates over the purpose of community, of nationhood, of war, of humanity itself, without Lao Tze and Confucius, without Zen and animist faiths like Shintoism and Western paganism we have no compass points to guide our white coated brethren, our C-suite compatriots, our decisions between a Trump and a Biden.

Aimlessness leads to corruption, mendacity, and general rot. We are, right now, reaping the whirlwind of this shift in basic education.

GeekWorld, Health, Plants, Science, World History

Killer Robots

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The Mountain Summer Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Kristie. Orgovyx. National Geographic, October 2009. Learning basic botany. Harder than I thought. Resilience. Zen. Chan. Tibetan. Vedanta. Avatars. Shiva. Brahma. Vishnu. Ganesha. Lakshmi. Zoroaster. Lao Tze. The old man. Zhuangzi. Exoplanets. Exudates. Exdates. Today’s date. This July 5th, 2024 life. Great Sol. All planets.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Periodic Table

One brief shining: Cancer has the same flavor as the tale of the Scorpion and Frog, your own cells growing growing growing until they sink along with the rest of you.

 

PSA cell

N.B.: Yesterday I referenced castration resistant prostate cancer. Castration resistant is a metric, no longer part of the treatment. That is, the standard of androgen deprivation therapy-a very, very low amount of androgens, male hormones, in the body-is the amount equivalent to that of a castrated man. In fact, even for sex offenders chemical castration, which is androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) used off book, is the norm. If prostate cancer grows in spite of ADT, then you are said to have castration resistant prostate cancer. It requires new treatment.

Wanted to make that clear. And, I do not have it.

 

 

Taking a basic botany class on Coursera, as I mentioned. Only the second class session and I’m in over my head. This session focuses on how plants see. Turns out plants see more than we do, more of the electromagnetic spectrum. How a plant grows, when it germinates from a seed, when it stops growing, when it folds up for the night or opens up for the day, all controlled by phytochromes in the photochromic receptor system.

I’m used to taking a class, then a test, and doing better than well. In this case I took the test right after the session. I did not do close to well. Thought I understood when I obviously did not. So today I plan to study before I retake the test. You have multiple tries to better your score.

Not a big surprise, really. This is science and it has right and wrong answers. I’m more of a big picture, relativistic, let’s consider the opposing perspective guy. In case you just said, wait a minute, science insists on the opposing perspective through the experimental process. Well, ok. Not quite the same, but similar.

Madras Courier

Just a moment: Here’s how we end ourselves. The Era of Killer Robots is Here. NYT, The Daily, July 9, 2024. Guess a dystopian writer got this part first. Imagine a technologically advanced but smaller nation confronting a brutal, much larger rival who is fine with using its citizens as cannon fodder. Imagine that smaller nation loses access to sophisticated weaponry already designed and under manufacture. What does it do?

Yes. The Ukraine has tapped its significant technology sector to automate its weaponry and create new weapons using drones and other high tech, easily available machines. That, in and of itself, is not the problem since a lot of weapons have high tech components.

So, what is the problem? Ukraine has lost many of its fighting age citizens and faces a shortage of soldiers. In that situation and willing to do whatever it takes to fend off the Russian Bear, it was inevitable that they would produce weapons that not only have high tech killing potential, but weapons that can make the decision to fire on their own.

That’s SkyNet territory. Without a human mediator it’s all about the algorithm and the sensors. The deeper ethical concerns get set aside when survival is at stake. Understandable, but very dangerous. For us all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Memories, Minnesota, Politics, Science, US History, Weather +Climate

I’ve seen Fire and I’ve seen Rain

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Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Shabbat. Leo. Luke in Jacksonville. Ginny and Janice. The Blackbird. Kittredge. In case of flash flood climb to safety. Black Mountain Drive to Brook Forest Drive. Down the hill to Evergreen. Passing a green Arapaho National Forest. Full Streams thanks to recent Rain. Seeing individual Trees like the Ponderosa growing alone on the side of a Cliff.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Rain

One brief shining: Leo sleeps on the rug next to the computer, dreaming of Luke and bones and tennis balls with squeakers in them while I hit first this key then that, glancing up to spend a bit of time with my Lodgepole Companion, looking past them to Black Mountain and beyond to the milky gray of a Cloud resting above it, wondering if that means yet more Rain.

 

We have had Rain. Seems like more than average though I can’t find data to support that. Hoping for a healthy Monsoon season which usually starts in July. Afternoon Rains. Whatever combination of precipitation types that keep our wildfire risk low.

The Cloudy weather we’ve had on occasion over the last couple of weeks reminded me of an early problem I had with Colorado. Too many Sunny days. I missed good ole Midwestern gloomy, overcast weather. Weather that meant I needed to stay inside. Read. Write. Cook. Sunny days meant I needed to be outside, enjoying the limited moments of great weather. Which meant. I constantly felt like I needed to go outside, not dither around inside. So much so that I longed for a stormy week loaded with Thunderheads and pelting rain.

Over that now. Except. When it’s Cloudy and Rainy. Then I revert to Midwest nostalgia, remembering Rainy days curled up in a chair reading. The world of the moment subsumed by the world of the text.

 

Just a moment: Yeah. He should step away. Too much confirmation of stereotypes and GOP talking points about his capacity. Yes, I believe he can still do the job. But I don’t see him or Democratic chances in November recovering from the debate debacle. We need to win this election. It matters and we all know it. If Biden can’t win, we need someone who can.

 

Friend Tom Crane found this. It had a profound affect on me as I watched it.

“About 12 seconds into this video, something unusual happens. The Earth begins to rise. Never seen by humans before, the rise of the Earth over the limb of the Moon occurred about 55.5 years ago and surprised and amazed the crew of Apollo 8. The crew immediately scrambled to take still images of the stunning vista caused by Apollo 8‘s orbit around the Moon. The featured video is a modern reconstruction of the event as it would have looked were it recorded with a modern movie camera…”  Astronomy Picture of the Day

Commentary on the news, Great Wheel, Great Work, Science

Cosmic Context for Election 2024

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Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Irv. Tara. Veronica. Her Bat Mitzvah party. Blazing light from Great Sol. Black Mountain’s gentle curve against a Colorado blue Sky. My Lodgepole Companion, among the Lighteaters. Monkeys in Bangkok and K.L. Primates. Gorillas. Bonobos. Chimpanzees. Orangutans. Lemurs. Gibbons. Humans. Monkeys. Baboons. So many relatives.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Our order among living things

One brief shining: Sunlight filtered down to Earth after its 93 million mile journey, some eaten by Coastal Redwood crowns, some by Kentucky Blue Grass on unnecessary lawns, some by the Saguaros in Arizona, some by fields of unnecessary Corn in Iowa, some by Moosehorn and British Soldier Lichen, photons into carbohydrates, raw energy into matter, a transubstantiation so real and true that it supports life of all kinds on the surface of Mother Earth.

 

Here is the best piece of theology I’ve read in quite a while: Earth’s Mysterious, Deep Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet. Ferris Jabr, NYT, June 24, 2024. If you choose to read it, you will learn that the Gaia hypothesis has infiltrated much of contemporary science that deals with matters biological, ecological, and, yes, even geological. Life shapes our Earth. Our Earth shapes Life. Here’s the closing paragraph:

“For more than two centuries, Western science has re­garded the origin of life as something that happened on or in Earth, as if the planet were simply the setting for a singular phenomenon, the manger that housed a miracle. But the two cannot be separated in this way. Life does not merely reside on the planet; it is an extension of the planet. Life emerged from, is made of and returns to Earth. Earth is not simply a terrestrial planet with a bit of life on its surface; it’s a planet that came to life. Earth is a rock that broiled, gushed and bloomed: the flowering callus of a half-sealed Vesuvius suspended in a bubble of breath. Earth is a stone that eats starlight and radiates song, whirling through the inscrutable emptiness of space — pulsing, breathing, evolving — and just as vulnerable to death as we are.”

https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2024/05/30/nasas-james-webb-space-telescope-finds-most-distant-known-galaxy/
Just a moment: Here’s another look at God: Piping up at the Gates of Dawn. Dennis Overbye, NYT, June 22, 2024. In this article scientists enthuse that something like JADES-GS-z14-0, a luminous Galaxy formed a mere 300 million years or so after the Big Bang, could have done all it did in “such a short time.” That makes geological time seem like a Mayfly. JADES-GS-z14-0 is the most distant Galaxy ever found.
The James Webb at work.
Commentary on the news, Family, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Friends, Science, Torah, Weather +Climate

Talmud Torah

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Summer and the Bar Mitzvah Moon

Friday gratefuls: Sleep. The fan. Rain. Vince. Jamie. The dead Lodgepole. Books. Storm Before the Calm. Orgovyx on the way. Juneteenth. Love. Justice. Compassion. Irv. The Ancient Brothers. A dull white Sky. Little Breeze. The Mountains with their green clothes on. Rock outcroppings. Mule Deer. Elk. Fawns and calves. The life of June 21, 2024. Sweets from Durango via Melbourne. Where it is the Winter Solstice.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Low Fire Danger-in late June

One brief shining: Opened a pocket-knife I bought when the shoe store in Evergreen went out of business, slit the tape on the box from Durango Chocolates, discovered a sealed foil bag, inside it paper shredded insulation, then two cool packs-colder than ice!-and below them a box wrapped in clear plastic announcing chocolates inside, the knife again, the box has yet more shredded paper inside covering a melt in your mouth chocolate bar, sea salt toffee, and Bear balm; a bar mitzvah present I received a day before the Winter Solstice in Melbourne where Mary sat with her computer and ordered it.

 

Started torah study with Rabbi Jamie yesterday. Once a month we’ll read the parsha of the week and Aviva Zornberg’s commentary. The current torah readings are in the book of Numbers. Her commentary, “Bewilderment” will be what we use for now. Jamie’s also going to share a weekly commentary he gets from Art Green, his mentor and former president of the Reconstructionist Seminary.

This is a rare privilege for me. He and I decided to continue our monthly sessions that had been focused on conversion lessons and turn them into torah study. When I was in seminary, the classes on the New Testament and the “Old Testament,” now the Tanakh for me, were my favorites. Something about studying source materials, getting to know them and their stories really well. About revelation and its history. About literature, ancient literature. About myths and legends. About adapting their meanings to the contemporary world. That fascination is still there.

If I remember, I’ll share some from our sessions.

Yesterday we discussed how to interpret God since neither of us are supernaturalists. How do we make sense of the character god’s role? Didn’t get far with that, but as I’ve thought about it since I found myself wanting to go back to Rabbi Toba Spitzer’s book, God is Here, about metaphors for god. Lowercase god is the way Rabbi Rami Shapiro differentiates the henotheistic deity of the Torah from the One who is all who is us who is becoming new right now and always.

 

Just a moment: Heat. Across the U.S. Across the world. High heat. Record breaking heat. Don’t hear much, except in Florida, about climate change deniers. Down there in that puzzling state DeSantis has perfected the nah nah nah nah response to Black history, queer life, and climate change. If you don’t talk about them, they’re not real. DeSantis hasn’t passed the object permanence stage of human development. That’s when babies learn that peek-a-boo’s a game, not the way things are. Poor Florida.