And Now THIS!!!

            Terrified children torn from their mothers’ arms after horrendous conditions, refugees who must then witness the land of their dreams behave even more cruelly as the mafias or poverty they escaped.  This is an Alfred Hitchcock nightmare as infants to toddlers, boys and girls are torn away with no certain future…an event which will haunt them, and us, for the rest of their lives, and impact their own children.  How dare we allow people paid by us to isolate a virtually caged child in a kennel and treated with no compassion…and all this because a parent was trying to bring their child to a land of opportunity…if this doesn’t shred whatever final faith I had in The United States ‘propaganda’ I’d been fed in school and citizenship teacher then I couldn’t imagine what it would be…and I’m afraid to envision it.

But, this is not the first time America has tried ethnic cleansing through brutal means from Chinese Railway Laborers, to imprisoning all Japanese people who had jobs and homes and families and lost everything just because of their original nationality.  All waves of migrations, whether through slavery, colonial wars, and overflow from European countries in times of famines, wars, or political discrimination were abused upon arrival  and spent a few generations as second class citizens.

            To survive as a nation we cannot afford a scapegoated ethnicity, especially one that has long standing connections to this continent than any of the Caucasian invasions since Plymouth.   These people carry far more genes from the arrival of humans in North America than any one of us.

            All this to come back to the hypocrisy of a Political Party and Religious Old Testament Values Evangelical Cult pretending they believe in family values, and justify this cruelty by saying the Bible says you have to respect the law…illegal crossing over that line…and you’re done for.   Well, guess what, Jesus was crucified because he wouldn’t obey Roman Law.   And Christianity was born because he arose to spread humane values.

             I’m not even a parent at 75, but my eyes constrict and tears want to flow, I I feel powerless to intervene, and I would be dead if I walked up to the officer and tore the child away back to her mother where she belonged, which is what any decent good Christian Good Samaritan would feel compelled to do…

            America set the Nuremberg Trials AFTER WWII to punish generals who followed orders and obeyed the law that LED TO inhumane ethnic discrimination and thus should have ‘stood up’.  Excuse me?  Where is the Nuremberg Trial of today to judge what should be their sentence for crimes against family values, compassion, and doing unto others as we would have them do to us.  I guess that will only be left to St. Peter to decide.

The Black Hole

     The black hole, the concept of the black hole, the mystery of some barrier of time space, some boundary of reality as we can know it...something almost dark and, dare I say it, evil?


This actual scan of a sand dollar shell, in the sea urchin and starfish family with it's pentagonal tentacles all emanating from a central opening between the hard and the soft, the exoskeleton and the layer of 'skin' and the protected viscera inside.


This scan shows nearly infinite 'tentacles' or 'branching' etchings in a calcified 'shell', and when one looks at this 'non-living' specimen we can see how the entrance, the gateway, so to speak between our internal organs and our external needs of food and energy create a 'skeleton' of how living things interact with the planet...


Could the black hole of the universe be merely a sand dollar skeleton, could the calcified remains of a universe without an undulating black hole even have the potential for infinite existence?


So run my thoughts as I ponder this imprint of the tao, of the morphic resonance of life.

Digitally Visualizing Reality 

Standing at least 500 feet away, with a 30 powered optical zoom camera, I was able to capture the basic lines of this formation on the Icicle River this afternoon.  In my mind, it looked more like this, but because of the later afternoon flatter light, it was more of a monotone, like this:

The Little Time Bombs of Memories

Open a cigar box with old lead pencils, and a mysterious odor from another age wafts below my nose.

My engineer father before CAD Machines actually drew blue prints with pen and pencil, and even in post-war Amsterdam, where everything was sparse after the war, my father would bring me some of these pencils to play with, and I'd color while he drew hexagons and pentagons with his compass and ruler, or he would draw perspective in such things as ships.  We bonded around these pencils, we were at our best together...he the engineer, I the artist but both of us loved to play with the pencil, and I, a lad of 6 was permitted to be free to draw and color as I wanted.  

This stamp brings all that up, because it was one of the first stamps I ever paid money for.  I loved stamp collecting, because it gave me an understanding of the world, history, propaganda, time periods, colonialization, a word once the ring of a century, now no longer in the spelling checker.  So then books and knowledge creative play, Montesorri values, and an appreciation of beauty all began to sink in.  

The memories that moment of opening the box, the ambience of 1950 in the room, the ambience of my father, the mood of the moment, for a deep sniff into the box that all came alive...now I know how the dog experiences the moment...and then, from a drawer slip an old stamp album, and the many letters from my grandfather to remind me of them, and The Low Countries of my birth and early upbringing.