I must move on to gratitude for being a sentient being...capable of finding meaning in the landscape, the element, the relationships, the seasons and their cyclical moods and metaphors, and that in a year of drought, when water has become no. 1 on our tongue, as we speculate the future of climate change.

     In that context, the importance of water, and our attention to it, as well as noticing its scarcity just when the heat most demands it, and scientists themselves speculate whther the experiences of water affect their molecular structure, and even whether water has memory, or whether 'structuring' it could have health and farming benefits.  This promotion and discussion has caught my attention, and there are profound questions that could be solved if well funded experiments compared to control groups can document the events.  New age vegan-health-divas who have begun to promote a new concept called 'structured water' and have even speculated that water has a fourth state similar to 'glass' although it would 'melt' at a much lower temperature and create exclusion zones in our bodies to provide 'structured ' water which is more easily embodied in our cells...etc. etc.

I'm not taking a stand on this yet.

   But.

It's hard to ignore these concepts when we realize how much of our water is not truly 'water only', as chlorine, alkaline buildup, rusts, and pba's, etc.which is why a running stream on the verge of frost and melt is probably about as vital an energizer as it streams and vortexes through the rocks and trunks and banks of sand filtering and ionizing.  

    Focusing on such a moment, for me sparks that sacred nerve in my soul when I suddenly do sense a magnificent miracle just before my eyes which I barely understand, but which my soul and intuition tell me is a fundamental moment of a healthy living being, and that starts with the quality of water.  So in a sense, that first moment when water adapted to the first organism there was in a sense the beginning of life...when some conditions can make water itself conceive.

Amusing Collaboration

Elder dumb is maybe another way to spell ..elderdom, which we associate with wisdom.  Experience and old age will outsmart youth and skills, except that today those skills of youth are from a cyberworld more bizarre than anything we could have imagined.  We are totally dependent literally, for every 'bit' of our lives on this same youth walking down the sidewalk staring at the screen oblivious to traffic, dog leashes, traffic lights or the very attractive lady going the other way with her text...maybe their eyes met on the screen?

Ever expanding technology with ever more complicated programming and updating and hardware shrinking and texting and wi-fi, on and on and on....they spend their entire lives interfacing with this web of incredible complex apps and chats and facebooking after a bit of twitter from server to google and bing, more than you would ever have known about anything random, is there before your eyes, with so many distractions that Aldoux Huxley would scream, "I told you so..."

     And then there's the 'baby boomers' coming off their productive labor years where we were forced to learn this technology, but are about to vomit over Windows 10.

    The state of being older....seniorityism, the pre-tired years, when we can still stand upright, click a mouse with some certainty, pull weeds, and fix food.  And wonder how we got to be here, now, watching our mother planet erode life forms by over-exploitation of the resources needed for a balanced web.

    Born with the ptsd of WWII in our genes, and then the hidden panic attacks for food in the depression, we were already stocking up for the Nuclear Explosion that would result from the Cold War. As children we would hear the sirens, crawl under our desks, or head for doorways, as if the imagery we saw of atom bombs gave us any hope we could ever survive that...

     It does seem humans need a catastrophic vision of the future, and certainly the current one, global warming, climate change, C0 2, etc. etc. mass extinctions, increasing desertification, and on and on, give me a feeling of nostalgia whenever I still see a protected reserve of land or river where I can still cultivate my ignorance of the 'ether' world and search for meaning by sifting through pebbles, watching a praying mantis, or finding a small ripe tomato on the vine. 

    I guess this is called 'retirement' although I'm confused how re-tired is more than being tired over and over already...and retirement could mean disconnecting from this obsessive compulsive medium of communication.

    I am ashamed, as an American:

     There is a profound lack of a national protest and a weak reaction to the Charleston massacre where this psychopathic racist murdered nine of some of our most spiritually American Christian black leaders in prayer even though they welcomed him to engage.

.

            And our politicians waffle about whether or not this is terrorism?  This is the birth of American ISIS thinking…get out of our world unless you can prove you’re white.  A soon to be martyr to the hate group militias, and I hope I’m wrong, with a mission to revive the Civil War using the hate mongering tools of Hitler.

     The death of these people by this sub-human misfit should spark a movement as strong as that of Marin Luther King .... these people were martyrs regardless of my own faith, and this act was intended to spark civil racial war, with tendencies towards genocide...if that's not terrorism, then what is.

            Once again, I’m ashamed to be an American.  We’re looking like idiots in the developed world, because our hypocrisy of our values;  when will we practice what we preach?

             All humans are created equal, and entitled to life, liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, and that repeated Bible stuff about doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.

            Americans require volumes of rules and regulations to drive a car so they won’t kill anyone by driving, but no acceptable knowledge is required to hand someone a lethal weapon they can hide anywhere.  And opponent will defend any attempt to regulate guns by saying if you make all guns illegal,only 'outlaws will have guns'.  But we're not but if we don't get this violence in reverse, it will only get worse.

Don't It Always Seem to Go That You don't Know What You've Got Until It's Gone
Joni Mitchell

So many things I've taken for granted,

Now, at 72 I'm finally paying attention to the details,

The harder to capture scale of reality,

The intimate relationships between the insects, the microbes, the microrhizal fungi, their relationship to plants, and on and on,

And just as we learn these things, our impact on the planet has been so profoundly negative, that we've already impacted so many links in the web of life, that we're feeling the effect.

Without bees we'll enter some dark ages of food production,

And our persistent use of the same toxic chemicals to control the current corporate agricultural demands on the land are devastatingly long term with many components no longer available.

There is a disaster lurking on the horizon when the balance between sustainability and lack of adequate components in the necessary web of life, that we ourselves will find ourselves challenged...like the suffering in Ethiopia or other drought and drained lands.

Why Did I Take This Picture?

     Even I don't know for sure.  The red of the Osier Dogwood always draws my eyes, after winter in search of flowers, and the bracken like much waiting to flatten still upright, firm, and contrasting shapes.

WHO ARE YOU?

I can just feel the tree's wisdom
 as it surveys yet another
 encroachment  on wildspirit
by a century of development
 with grazing,
 and orchards,
and pesticides
 and trucks
 and tractors
 until now,
like the a helmeted soldier,
The fencepost, shines with power of
Boundary - Mine -No Trespassing
.
Where is this line,
Twixt yours and  mine?

Tresspass with my feet,
No, the law says, better not.

Trespass with  my eyes,
 or next a drone?

Tresspass with my thoughts,
 my metaphoric vision,
Or don't my feelings count?

these thoughts conjure the muse in me,
to see a whole evolving Wenatchee Valley, ever more developed, ever busier, spread out suburbia,in a metaphor even I don't fully understand,

But, it's a military mood the post brings me,
in contrast to wise old sage, history, the ages that I see in the eye of that cottonwood, damaged by loss of branch and crafted into an eye to express her story.

So many perspectives, so little time left.

       Bette Davis warned me many years ago, with her monicker..."Old age is not for sissies."

     That old Who am i ? question keeps popping up...this image was me some 30 years ago while on the road somewhere journalling and gaping worlds so unlike the one here in America...worlds of Muslims in Morocco, or Hindus in India, or Bhuddists in Nepal, and a mix of both in Indonesia, and there were tribes free from all that, and of course Greek Orthodox, and Lutherans, and Catholics from land to land.

      But I didn't get the feeling that any of those labels really mattered, because they were mostly good people with good motives and civil respect for me, and helpful, friendly, courteous, and many became a friend for a few hours to talk.

       I find it tragic that people like the Klu Klux Klan, or ISIL, or Boko Haram, or some White Nazi Group feel they have a right to call themselves any religion...unless psychopathic

sadistic hatred mongering obsessive compulsive fanatics can be related to anyone's savior.

      It's hard not to break down and weep when we see the state of the human condition today.

Mother's tying bombs to themselves to blow up innocents from another clan.

       Educated men from middle class families willing to be barbarians and hack off the heads of innocent well meaning people just to stage and grab attention.

        An economic system that is virtually sterilizing the planet and creating artificial luxury at the cost of extinction of countless life forms, many we don't know, and won't because they're already extinct.

        Having to accept that our leaders are corrupt, and we have virtually no say about humanity's future because our government has become a grand stage auction of the wealthiest.

        

And yet, even I am more comfortable with a home, a garden, heat, food, sewers, water, transportation, recreation, in short all the 'needs' have been met, and add internet, lights, microwaves, hot water, mobile phones, any food in season somewhere on the planet, stoves, refrigerators, and my grandparents, even my parents would feel overwhelmed with so much luxury.

         Meanwhile, bee hives have shrunk to 30% of their population since 2007.  1000 year drought is hitting one of our most agricultural regions.

Everywhere soil is blowing away because the microrhizal layers have disappeared and nothing is holding the dirt together, or helping plants bond, or retaining moisture and nutrients.  

         I feel a debilitating helplessness watching us destroy our planet that could be overtake my attitude of awe that comes from exploring and learning about our universe, the miracles of life & consciousness, geology, chemistry, hormones, DNA, and all the other ingredients of reality which we're just now beginning to understand..

           

     We recently bought a Celestron microscope which takes pictures of what you see, and then those pictures 5 mp can be manipulated to bring out what I see...a decayed leaf, a lettuce seed, and some 'salt cubes'.  Life at this scale is fresh to me, and the deeper we now look into the structure of matter and life, from string theory in space to our DNA and its continual evolution are so astounding, and mind boggling, that I can focus on a level of reality within my range, and over which I still have some control and where there is still so much to be learned.

      Keeping the mind active, leaving the cybernetwork to be outside, hands in dirt, planting seed, pulling weeds, smelling my hands with that odor dogs roll in with bliss.

Again the moon rises, a whole sterile planet just ten times length around the earth away from us.

What opportunist plants and animals will be able to survive an increasingly unpredictable climate with extremes and huge portions of the agricultural world newly formed desert?

Will we write and even more gruesome "Grapes of Wrath".

 

   
Yes, emigrants and immigrants are the same people, but they are separate roles of the same soul.

Oh the blessings of being an immigrant,
to live in a country with so much natural scenery, mountains, rivers, valleys, space to live...'lebensraum' as Germans call it.  My father had the dream after being in the Merchant Marine of Holland and seeing Seattle and Vancouver he was lured, postwar, to escape all the Re-occuring ethnic divides, 'nationalities and principalities fighting for power, wars after wars...and for what. I was 8 when I left,
     Now, even 62 years later, I still manage to utter that Dutch in a way that my family and friends can understand me...?

Oh the sadness of being an emigrant.  To lose your extended families, have all your values constantly challenged, treated like an outsider and leaving grief behind when you see your grandmother for the last time.  Here 6 decades later, my nostalgia for the reflecting canals of Amsterdam on my way to school will always be missed...and the sense of community, the feeling of being safe as a kid on the street, with everyone looking out for one another.  I miss the history, the lapses of time, the stories of the past, the respect for the architecture...the parks where I played, the food that we ate, my grandparents. In short, emigration is a sort of inner ethnic cleansing...storing the past, and creating a new life.

Winter Doldrums

To adapt, or, not to adapt? 

That is the question.

Whether 'tis nobler to avoid the rings and textings of outrageous nonsense,

Or acquire the generational obsession of the times.

Asking the fates for the path to follow once one spends a septet of decades musing about how to create the meaning of my life, while adapting sufficiently to be "able to fake it" while trying to preserve the values and lifestyles I was raised to believe in.

On with eye contact,

Conversations in person.

Manners, sharing meals, 

The Rules of Civil Conduct and in person engagement.

From the farm by car,

From visits to telephone calls.

From families facing each other at dinner,

To TV tables with TV Dinners all eyes on the tube.

From one distraction to the next,

Until peace and quiet are like some zombie unreal moment to avoid at all cost.

Which way forward...adapt or die said Darwin,

And no doubt he was right.  

But for how long?  How much more annual change in

Eternally updating internet asking for more attention to operate the system, than to have any time left over to use it for the intended reasons...

Expanding my awareness, yes, but not at the expense of ever speeding up the illusionary cyber-reality while we remain apathetic and indifferent to a dying planet around us.

I feel I should be down right Luddite and Thoreau-ish

About all this geeky tech stuff, and then I hear tales of the great solar flares totally wiping out the 'grid'

Thus bringing us all back to a reality we've totally forgotten...communicating, exchanging goods, and dependent on our local range of goods and services locally delivered.

I guess it's called the 'generation gap'

Should old fogies actually believe that they have some wisdom to offer the younger generation?  Oh well...at least I can run a blog.