Daily Archives: March 23, 2009

Dreams

Barriers

Leave a comment

Spring     Waning Moon of Winds

Night time.  Around this time the barrier between this world and the inner world begins to crumble.  Last night’s dreams begin to reassert themselves, as if they want a chance to continue.  Bits and pieces of different excursions come back:  the city street where I often walk, amazed at being in the city, living in the tall skyscraper that is my home.  Or the vastly expanded Alexandria, my home, now filled with bustling upscale businesses, restaurants and fancy homes.  Then there is my favorite the northern city, often called Toronto (to which I have never been).  I drive over an arching bridge into Canada, pass through Toronto on my way north.

When I get out of the city, the area becomes wild and lonesome, ending in a wilderness both inviting and terrifying.  I haven’t made this trip in a while but I imagine I will some night soon.

The dream world has as much reality as this one, all Maya, yet, all wonderful.

Garden, Great Work, Health, Hydroponics, permaculture

Under the Lights

Leave a comment

Spring            Waning Moon of Winds

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. – Walt Whitman

Business meeting and plants this morning.  The business meeting went just fine, our financial management continues to work for us and not against us.  Wish I could say the same for the financial markets.  Sigh.  Decided to check.  Wish granted: Dow Leaps 497 Points on Treasury Plan.  Yeah.

My seedlings, grown over the last couple of weeks, sprouted roots which is the time to move them to their next medium, in this case soil in peat and coconut fiber pots with the exception of four chard and one mustard green that I put in lava rock and in the hydroponics.  The broccoli, egg plants, onions, leeks, mustard and collard greens, cauliflower and huckelberry now have soil around their sprouting medium.  They are all under the lights still.   Moving to larger size containers strained my space, though with some jiggering I got them all in new places and still under the lights.

Some of them have to move out soon to make way for the seedlings that need to get started on April 1st and April 15th.  Just when they were getting comfortable.  Hmmm.  I may have problems here.  Seems onions started by seed should not go outside until May.  This will definitely cramp the April batch of plants.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

A Thought on Extinction

Leave a comment

Spring     Waning Moon of Winds

Quick notes for some future thought.  Often I carry a notion around for days before I set it down and I’ve had one banging around for a week or so.  On Monday last at Frank Broderick’s I offered a view of legacy that featured, as I posted here, Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.  The more I’ve thought of that poem and the sinking in to the sands of time of 99.99999% of us, often not even name remaining for long, I’ve felt strangely liberated by it.

Let me extend  the notion.  Not only will even the best and the brightest of us fade from view, as have all but a very few, but given time even the starship on which we travel will die away, too.  Long before that humanity will have ended its time here on earth, perhaps we will go out to the stars, perhaps not, but at some point the planet we know, that humanity has known as its only home, will disappear from the universe, swallowed by an expanding red giant.

This cheery line of thought led me backwards then to our self-awareness.  We know we will die.  This is said to be the ur-fear, but I think is not.  The ur-fear is not death per se, but the question of extinction.  Somehow extinction makes us uneasy, as if we should be an exception to what we expect for dogs, cows, trees and frogs.  This winking out of aware life carries a potential and, I think, actual message of nihilism.  That is, life has no overriding moral purpose when seen in light of death.

Does this mean no ethical system has roots, punch.  No, of course not.  Camus felt that death made us all brothers and sisters, committed to each other and to as smooth and happy a course of life for the other as for ourselves.  Ethical systems validated only by post death rewards or punishments do fall by the side.  But they are no great loss.