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.
