The Washington State History Song

     Existentialism moderated by some bliss from ignorance seems more and more necessary for me to remain interested in life and future.

     The headlines of current history are so appalling and alienating that I'm searching for some new perspective on the human condition that allows me to empathize, instead angering me with the hopelessness of our human families inability to see our commonalities, rather than our differences.
     It all comes back to: * over- population, *diminishing resources, *genetic and racial and class conflicts, *excessive wealth by corporate chronyism veiled as democracy, and the impulse all living things to protect their own most immediate gene pool be it tribe, family, or culture regardless of moral teachings to the contrary..."The Whispers Within" from a biologist clearly illustrate that whatever we want to call our patriotism, it all comes back to our most immediate clan when the going gets rough...call them militia, or call them the new tribal chiefs of red-neckia, the impulse to segregate is highlighted in almost all species of animals as well.
A current demagogue is currently trumping most racially nationalistic local leaders and followers.
     The Territorial Imperative, another biologist's perspective makes clear that even humans find that pissing on the boundary keeps the wolves further away.
Good fences make good neighbors, but only to a point, and when one neighbor drains the neighborhood of peace, quiet, and a parasitic disregard for the well being of the community, then fences alone, are not enough.
     So what am I trying to say?  I'm very discouraged.  All my life has been about de-illusioning myself about all the values I was told were human morality and ethics.  "Treating others as I wanted to be treated" I was told was the guiding principle of this heroic martyr wanted his followers to practice, and I was gullible enough to believe, despite Dachau, that deep down this is who we really wanted to be.  But each step of the way, from friends interred in Japanese Internment Camps, to realizations of the genocide of natives in North America who have never received an apology, to realizing even two black African cultures can be so vicious as to try genocide.  Gradually, I no longer have faith that Peace, as I understood it is possible, and even now, at 72, that brings tears to my eyes.
     Still, I am thankful, despite the humiliation of  being a gay draft dodger not to go to Viet Nam, and being grateful that despite not serving, life has given me opportunities, and it is painful to accept that power confrontations are as inevitable as volcanoes under the right conditions.  The Syrian refugees are the latest to try to run away, and are identified by their 'host' as invaders of  another culture, faith, color, dress, diet, and on and on, so it take a lot of determinations to put all other almost involuntary reactions aside...
That takes a lot of work, and risk for not adhering to the 'heil hitler' response of the crowd phenomena, so luckily I still can avoid crowds, and hide among the hills of our valley, to watch two ant colonies fight over a newly created openings in the ground en route to the aphid bushes...
I guess sighing, and shedding the odd tears is a natural phenoma to try to be at peace, again.

From  some perspective, somewhere, this little blue ball has too many pests, and as with other organism, a great die-off will result...I'm grateful it might be past my lifetime, but I'm not counting on it.

    This Aspen tree has grown over the previous 32 years since I moved in this neighborhood.  I've watched its bark form the eyes of Egypt, and enjoyed its siblings along the edge of town.
     But now, the city wants to expand, and thus make a wide road where once the farmers raised their cattle.
Like everywhere in America, towns and cities spread out like a parasitic bacteria that destroys life, ecosystems, and environments one road or house at a time.
At 72 years of age, I am not surprised for every year the virus spreads out into the natural environments that were still here when I arrived.
    Orchards mowed down for housing developments.
Supermarkets with gigantic parking lots where a stream and meadow used to be.
An now the wetland once abloom with blue lupines, will become another parking lot, even though its a wetland, so that the city can abandon their historic elementary school, and sell it as it is in the center of town, and then build a new elementary school where this tree now still stands.
    I know planning is against the constitution in America, so farmland isn't necessary any more when we can get our Asparagus from Peru, Our garlic from China, and apples from New Zealand.
     I don't want to sound like an anti-globalist Trump-pet because he's as hypocritical as one can get, but I am sad to see every year how the work of our pioneers, farmers, loggers, cattlemen, and others who struggled for a sustainable self-sufficient life style which once, was the American dream of the west.

Rodin's Thinker - Legion of Honor Museum

     I recently came across this photo I'd taken years ago, and the masculine, muscular sculpture sitting with his hand to his chin, and I had sat in the same posture only minutes before I saw it, pondering the fate of man...

Guilt will do no good, I know, but our generation has certainly not lived up to the promises to make the world a better place...

     Indeed, overpopulation has long been seen as 'the problem', but for America the problem is affluenza, the insatiable urge to replace, recycle, upgrade, with fancier and fancier technology, with a virtual  reality that is really not virtual, but real to a whole new generation.

     And who can blame them, when the daily news is full of the most inhumane events dreamed up by perverted religious fanatics reminiscent of the inquisition.

So, yes, I'm trying to hold up my head, be grateful that I had white male advantages in this life, parents who educated me, and a wonderful life of learning and exploring the human condition.  

     But as I see the children of my friends cope with the frighteningly expensive options of education, without which they'll be virtual lackey 'slaves' working 60 hours a week on minimum wage to support a family, and build debt with their credit cards.  This system reminds me more feudalism than representative democracy.

     I know, I'm saying nothing new, and I'm just venting my pain before I shed more tears.  I had bonded with that tree, in the beginning, it had represented the edge of town, the open sky of fields, the stages of green buds, and golden yellow leaves in fall, like sort of time clock of the seasons.

     I know, get over it, and I will, but the with the elimination of each small living being with which I've bonded, each acre I seen alive with birds and plants, each hill with Pines and Lupines in spring, not to mention the increased sounds of cars, sirens, chainsaws, OSHA beeping also change the aural environment as well...so you go back to the house and hide, a house 100 years old that has little value, except as a old geezer luddite who remembers his own parents saying...

"I'm glad I'm not part of your generation."

 So, I need to withdraw back to nature, at a smaller scale, where the chances of 'extinction' in my lifetime encourages me to appreciate and witness, and share the grandeur of the web of life, in the hopes that I may learn to live with less shame for my lifestyle.

     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.