Thoughts Negligible

Once upon a time,
When the world was just a pancake,
Fears would arise,
That if you went too far, you'd fall.
But with the passage of time,
It all became more of a ball;
We're as sure of that,
As we all once were,
When the world was flat.
--Dave Matthews

Pythagoras, around 570 BC, was the first to estimate that earth was a sphere. Tyco Brahe was the best naked eye observer there ever was. Kepler was his partner. In the late 16th century, they both looked at the same sun, the same data. Brahe was convinced the sun revolved around the earth; Kepler saw it the other way around. Brahe lost his nose in a duel over who was the best mathematician. He had a midget as a pet. Kepler was a stinky pious fellow. Sometimes the strongest don't win.

As of July 2006, the world's population is estimated at 6,525,170,264 people. But the number of dead will always outnumber the living. It's estimated 70 to 100 billion rest below our feet. “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths are a statistic.” Ironically, Stalin said that; and, ironically, he was right.

The Indonesia quake has killed 6,000, displacing over 650,000. Java was its target. I remember reading a semester or two ago that Java was the sight of hundreds of thousands of refugees who had been forced off their land in east Indonesia. They were encouraged to take up free land to cultivate--a land run--but land had been swallowed up by the rich, and they had neither the know-how nor the resources to cultivate what land they could get. Violence has erupted as disillusioned pilgrims have nowhere to turn, forced there by the government. It was a mess before the quake. Does a rumbling in the ground make their lives suddenly more important to the world? Does God rumble?

Would any of those Indonesians be interested in knowing that if the universe ever achieved critical density (the precise density marking the line between eternal expansion and eventual collapse) it will snap back like a stretched out rubber band. Would we have existed at all, if the universe reverts to the before-day when time and space began? No matter, I'll content myself with the fly on the swing staring at me.

I have before me a picture of the night sky 700 million light years across; galaxies in jumbles; their organization resembles a cross. We are less than electrons floating in a back alley of the universe. We should feel something like paramecium floating in the Atlantic--if paramecium could feel. That's our blessing and curse: we are sometimes struck with the enormity of our insignificance, and then moved to pray to God it's not so. All the while, we're convinced of our importance, that we can feel and think at all must account for something. Right? That we are loved by God--that counts for everything.

I always contrast tragedy with the immensity of the universe. I'm finding I'm rather morbid. But my intention is not to minimize suffering or the lives of people. A coping mechanism, nonetheless. But I wonder, if we realized our smallness in infinitude, would we then truly realize how very infinitely God loves us? I've seen a cross in Creation more than once, many times in fact. Once I saw it as a black locust thorn at the creek (http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/5976/1129/1600/Camera%201053.2.jpg); every bush down there had thorns shaped as crosses. I held it for an hour thinking about the implications, the divine irony I held in my hands. Another time was just today, looking at that expanse of galaxies, time and space unintelligible, damn near infinity to a guy like me. And there it was, a cross, made up of galaxies. Paul knew what he was talking about: "For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse."

I begin to worry when I start excitedly telling others about the clear crawdad in the creek, lightning bugs and their early arrival, the way the colors fell in last Thursday’s sunset, how the baby blue jay hopped right up to the swing, squawked, and leapt on my shoulder. What am I doing? Who am I trying to convince? I see their eyes go blank, their voices on the telephone grow apathetic and wary. We had a saying when I was in the Assembly of God church regarding the “baptism” of the Holy Spirit, which meant speaking in tongues for us at the time: “It’s better felt then tellt.” But I wonder if my baptism isn’t occurring in my swing or at the creek? Sometimes I want to yell “Sha la la la la!” Tongues. It’s easy. No one telling me to keep pressin’ in. With this baptism I don’t have to press in; I just have to open my eyes. There he is---Spirit! Tongues of fire! A lingua comes pouring forth that I didn’t know I possessed. It’s worship and awe, utter thankfulness at such gratuity. Creation is nothing if it’s not gratuitous. Please! See this! God burns for you to receive and reciprocate his affection, and he burns the sky each day to show it. He’ll burn you! He sends grace fluttering by as sparrow; he shows fierceness, even urgency—the danger of staying put—in the ants that bite your feet; he shows his everlasting strength in the immortal sycamore; he shows his creativity and commitment to life in death and decomposition itself, the energy cycle; his fecundity in birth and spring; his compassion and providence in the rain; his passion in the storm; his irresistibility in gravity; his consistency in the laws of motion---"In the absence of a net force acting upon it, an object moves with constant velocity." What is that force that keeps you from leaping into the blue? God wants you here, or he would have given you the capacity for escape velocity. You would have been made less, an angel.

Please! See this!

Don’t let concrete and steel, television and internet hypnotize you. Stop reading now, and step outside. Just open your eyes and you’ll see something. Scan the ground, the base of a tree, the sky, the brick wall or sidewalk. You may have seen it a thousand times, but intricacy, the Spirit, has a funny way of striking you when you ask, seek, knock. Don’t think! Look! Look, feel, hear, taste! Think afterwards. Breathe. Lay down your defenses and problems and let creation speak to the heathen; it will, as Paul says, reveal that God IS, even tell us what he’s about. Find a sermon in the songbird, the grass, the clouds, the junebug, your lover’s eyes (don’t relegate “nature” to “wilderness,” it’s more; you’re in it whether you’re in Yellow Stone or New York City, but some places you have to look a little harder). I’ll give you a hint: look. No really! You’ve got to see it. See the color changes, the texture, the shapes, the pores, the moisture, the eyes, the whisps, the direction. I want you to see it. Look before you tell me I’m crazy. You've got to train yourself, force yourself to do it or it won't get done, and you'll miss too much. What you see is really what you get! Happy hunting.

At the center of a star, nuclear fusion takes the only two elements the Big Bang created--hydrogen and helium--and turns them, smashing passionately into each other, into heavier elements. To be sure, scientists estimate the universe's mass to be made up 70 parts hydrogen, 28 parts helium, and 2 parts heavy elements. Those heavy elements explode from the heart of stars when they die and are flung to all parts of the universe.



Now, find the "You Are Here" arrow that points about halfway from the bright huge center of the Milky Way galaxy (much like Andromeda shown above) to its edge. It's in the Orion Arm. A nebular cloud floats naked. This particular cloud is no more than two light-years across (a light-year is how far light can travel in one year, which is, astonishingly, about 9.5 trillion km). Made of a loose conglomeration of hydrogen, helium and heavy elements in gases, it begins to spin faster, faster still, even faster. As it spins it begins to collapse in on itself, drawing its scattered elements to a center (think of an ice-skater, how she spins faster as she draws her arms in). As it spins and the heaviest matter comes to the center, the center heats up tremendously. Spins still faster. A frost line forms as a star does, those heavy elements within the line condense and become solid and the light elements--again, hydrogen and helium--become gaseous. Outside the frost line, heavy elements remain gases and light elements freeze.

See the sun as the center heated mass spins. See a few collections of heavy elements condense, or solidify, under its heat, rotating around it like little gnats. There's earth. There's life. There's a hominid. Is that Adam? There's fire. There's a pyramid. There's you!

"If a million solar systems are born every hour, then surely hundreds burst into being as I shift my weight to the other elbow"

Ten percent of known animal species are parasitic, and I've been being effectively sucked dry by mosquitoes since Sunday. They're monsters that not even the repellent will keep away. I stay outside despite them. The sun has only got 5 billion more years and damnit if a few mosquitoes are going to keep me from enjoying its death throes while I'm here!

I remember learning one time that a third of the world's population is probably infected with pinworms. If you want to not sleep tonight, look 'em up.

Good Hamlet says, " . . . We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service - two dishes, but to one table. That's the end."

Last night I shot an armadillo. What better way to spend your summer? It had been digging up our precious green lawn, leaving blackened, open craters throughout, making a real mess. So last night about 11:30 I looked outside and there he was. One shot knocked him behind the wheel of my swing--my Pew in the Natural Tabernacle, as I call it, now desecrated with armadillo brains; he's still moving though. One more shot to stop. Buzzard food. No remorse. Ya know, it's either kill or have your yard dug up in this life. I'm a cold killer.

Annie Dillard says, "Our excessive emotions are so patently painful and harmful to us as a species that I can hardly believe that they evolved. Other creatures manage to have effective mating and even stable societies without great emotions, and they have a bonus in they need not even mourn. (But some higher animals have emotions that we think are similar to ours: dogs, elephants, otters, and the sea mammals mourn their dead. Why do that to an otter? What creator could be so cruel, not to kill otters, but to let them care?) It would seem that emotions are the curse, not death--emotions that appear to have devolved upon a few freaks as a special curse from Malevolence.

"All right then. It is our emotions that are amiss. We are freaks, the world is fine, and let us all go have lobotomies to restore us to a natural state. We can leave the library then, go back to the creek lobotomized, and live on its banks as untroubled as any muskrat or reed. You first."

You're going to have to grow some hide if you want to make it in this world. The world you're living in is heartless and hungry. You think I'm cruel for ending Steve (an aside: there's an armadillo that's always bustling around at the creek when I go down. One day I affectionately named him Steve the Blind and Deaf Armadillo. I could reach out and grab him before he knew I was around. One day he meandered right up to my feet. It remains to be seen if that was Steve). I'd never stick you with a needle and suck your blood, or live in your intestines and give you diarhea, colic, or hydrocephalus. I won't give you cholera or pneumonia! Everything is after you! And everything is after everything else!

"J. Henri Fabre . . . Describes a bee-eating wasp, the Philanthus, who has killed a honeybee. If the bee is heavy with honey, the wasp squeezes its crop 'so as to make her disgorge the delicious syrup, which she drinks by licking the tongue which her unfortunate victim, in her death-agony, sticks out of her mouth at full length . . . . At the moment of some such horrible banquet, I have seen the Wasp, with her prey, seized by the Mantis: the bandit was rifled by another bandit. And here is an awful detail: while the Mantis held her transfixed under the points of the double saw and was already munching her belly, the Wasp continued to lick the honey of her Bee, unable to relinquish the delicious food even amid the terrors of death. Let us hasten to cast a veil over these horrors.'"

Today I found two bird eggs that had fallen out of their nest, one cracked, and one appeared unscathed. Looking closer at the whole one revealed an entire side caked with ants. They were a blanket! Were they trying to incubate it, to let the bird hatch healthy and alive, to fly away with joyous rapsody once the ants had raised it and taught it to sing? I turned it over and when the blanket tore I found the egg was cracked. The ants were sucking on the yellow of the egg, maybe even trying to pry it open to get to the inside. Nature is cold and impossibly hungry.

Simone Weil says, "Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love."

In Springer there was a wreck last week. A neighbor said he was driving west on the highway and found the smashed truck with a bloated body hanging out of the window. The obituary tells me Kevin Ray Kirk, 43, died in Springer May 14.

"I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil. I the LORD do all these things." - Isaiah 45:7

"Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God, King of the Universe, THE TRUE JUDGE"

Again, Hamlet says, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will--"

It's not a wonder that we die here; it's a miracle that we live at all.

You are a Social Liberal (61% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (18% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

…the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.

Today's the first day of my summer, and I awoke alive, after three hours of sleep, too excited to return to slumber. I'll be heading home tomorrow in time for Mom's Day. It's great because I'm ready to live now. I've got big plans! At the beginning of spring I start to thaw, but by finals I'm a drone, plodding through life as if my lot is to make A's and try hard not to be too depressed. I can't help it, I just forget to live, forget the present and its "freely given canvas." By summer I can think and feel again. Spring breezes have wisped away the last final, the last hurriedly written essay, the last sleepless night, even the pain experienced in a semester. It's sad really, at this point in my life I measure time by essays and deadlines, semesters and summers.

My thawing process begins with the quickening of spring, which reminds me to read Annie Dillard, which frees me from monotony. If you were going to be stranded on a desert island with room in the bag for one book, or were going to die after the next 288 pages you read, and so desperately wanted my advice as what to take or read, I would never hesitate, now and forever, to recommend (almost tearfully plea) you take Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Never before have I been so challenged and excited to take in each moment and to see things in the world I never knew were there. To hallow the beauty and meaning of it all. Dillard is not some romantic nature observer; she's fire! Don't take the Bible! Take Dillard! You have enough memorized Scripture to do you fine and, most likely, if you're on an island, a missionary will find you soon enough and dump a handful of green New Testaments in your hands: "Share them with your friends!" If he's got black pants, a black tie and white shirt, and found you on his bike, and the book is blue, don't take it! Just starve with Tinker Creek in your hand. You'll die quicker of boredom by reading the blue book anyhow.

Just go to the library and spend an hour pouring over chapters 2 and 6--"Seeing" and "The Present": "Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you can catch grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall."

Did you ever think you could learn something about the world--even God!--by reading how a giant water bug sucks the liquefied innards from a frog? You won't, unless you see it for yourself or have Annie Dillard describe it to you. What about a female mantis mating with the always-sex-ready male as she devours his head down to his abdomen, where he just can't stop? Literally, his body's sayin' yes but his mind is sayin' no (did I just quote Brittany Spears?).

Have you ever seen the lights in the trees? I never had until Annie Dillard told me about them. Have you ever watched a 4.6 billion year-old sun set just past a green pasture while little calves--only weeks old--buck and run like little black shadows? Well then come to my house this summer! We'll have a beer and sit on the corner posts of the barbed wire fence, get oxidizing beige paint on our asses, and take it all in; we'll watch till the last light drains the sky and leaves us in black. I'm serious: Come! After that we might walk down to our own little Tinker and listen to the water if it hasn't been too dry. Then we'll talk about the 5 billion years the sun has left before it croaks, eats up the earth and all the energy that was once you and I, then collapses on itself. Where were you when the sun died? We'll talk about catching neutrinos! They pass right through your body, a thousand trillion of them in the time it takes you to read this sentence. You'll say, "And we'll never catch one." We'll laugh until we realize what a metaphor for so many other things that little neutrino is. That's the point: reverence. Reverence, mystery, and awe. God's fierce, he is, and if we ever thought otherwise I wonder why we serve him in the first place. It's a captivating display of love and might, even terror, but we've got nothing else to do but turn our faces to the burning white world, then, like so many monks and sages, we'll see what's in ourselves.

Get ready to be annoyed by all my meandering summertime "Natural Meditations."