Start at page 70 for reformat of pictures
Download 1.48 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Monday, April 16, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007The snake Visitors to Dekalb Junction in St. Lawrence County, which is waaay upstate New York, will be familiar with this twisted piece of frozen magma, which is locally referred to as the snake.
It's a terrific example of the remarkable things that go on in rock when it's hot- as most of the interior of our planet is, starting not very far down. We tend to forget that we live on a very thin crust of cooled rock. 99% of the rock on this planet is hot, molten, and seething with movement. Our impression of rock as a static substance is at complete odds with the facts. In fact, most of our perception of nature is formed inside a very narrow band, where much of what we observe and take to be the status quo is anything but. Another good example: the vast majority of the organisms on this planet, both by numbers and by weight, are tiny creatures living under its crust. We don't ever even see them, although--as some geologists might tell you-- it's entirely possible that the oil we use every day is a byproduct of their life cycle, given the very extraordinary amounts of it that we find under the surface. So we don't see the status quo on earth: we see a small, special set of conditions and we presume that's informative as to what is normal. And we owe a very great deal to what we do not see. Our lives are much like this. We each see a tiny slice of all the things that go on during life on this planet and try to draw conclusions about it, not remembering that everything we see is fragmentary, partial, divided: just the surface of a molten pool that has hardened in front of us. This normal, "ordinary" life is a thin crust we skate on. We're always separated from the incandescent reality of what our situation is by this thin crust. It lulls us to sleep. We don't understand how uncertain, how fluid everything is: we do not see that we inhabit a landscape of perpetual change. Instead we grasp the few frozen icons that protrude above the surface and adopt them as sacred; in our desperate attempts to worship some kind of permanence, everything becomes a graven image. Even things that we declare are not graven images become graven in the act of declaration. Let us hope we can, at times, refer ourselves to the ground under our feet-- and accept the fact that it is prone to change. May your trees bear ripe fruit and your wells yield cool water- Monday, April 16, 2007A moment of silence
Thursday, April 19, 2007Poison
The events of this week left me stunned. It wasn't until today, as I browsed through the pictures of the people who were killed at Virginia Tech, that I really began to cry. To cry in public, at lunchtime, at my desk in the office. It was appropriate. Characteristically, our media descended upon this event like sharks at a feeding frenzy. Every news site I opened up had one picture after another of the killer- as if one wasn't enough, thank you very much- until I was positively sick of seeing him. It all culminated with the obscenity of NBC airing portions of his hate-filled video, which objectively speaking should have been consigned to the garbage and destroyed without even one person ever watching it. This man did not deserve to have his voice heard. This type of fare is the darkest kind of pornography available on the planet, and the media served it up warm. Are our news organizations now competing with Al Jazeera to give air time to murders? I consciously avoided listening to it or trying to see any of it. Impressions of this kind are a poison that does not belong in human minds. Passing it on to infect others with its paranoia, its negativity, its inhuman cruelty, is a downright criminal act. Not that you'll see anyone prosecuting our news media. Freedom of speech means freedom to say anything, no matter how disgusting and poisonous it is. Today was a relief, because I was finally able to turn from those repeated images of the killer and take opportunity to share in mourning all these fine lives cut down for the most selfish and narcissistic of reasons. As I paged through the various photographs, I felt that these people were not just strangers- they were part of my own family, of all of our families. Each and every one of them represented us, as we are, each one of us struggling to survive and make a life for themselves on this planet. Little people, just doing our best. Not rich people or bad people, just ordinary people. What is this darkness that reaches out to slake its cold, bloody thirst on the warm flesh of innocence? They say no one knows the answers, but perhaps the answers are not so hard to come by. Darkness grows in a man when his wish for goodness gets lost and twists itself around. This whole event stemmed from a desperately mistaken wish that the world somehow be good- which it is not. This pathetic, misguided young man actually thought he was on the side of good- fighting against a perceived evil that was perverting the world around him. And in the end he fed the tiger of his inner anger until it grew so large that it ate him. This is how negative emotions work. They consume us bit by bit. If we don't work against them, eventually they can consume all of us- even our soul. And once they eat our soul, there are no boundaries any more. Every day has to become an effort against negativity. It's a battle we cannot always win, and one that will never end, but we must, each one of us, hold up that one candle instead of cursing the darkness. For whenever we curse darkness, no matter how right it seems, the darkness finds ways to turn it back upon us... and we are transformed from its adversary into its servant. May your trees bear fruit, may your wells yield water- and may we all move closer to that moment when we will dwell within Truth in the joy of the Lord. Download 1.48 Mb. Share with your friends:
|