Wednesday, November 12, 2003
Where is Your Home?
My home is a floating speck of dust. If you concentrate closely on this photograph, you’ll see it roughly in the center of a golden beam of light—just a pale blue dot. I live on that dot.
I am obviously very small… smaller than you might think. Small enough, if you can believe it, that billions of creatures just like me all live here on this same little dot—with plenty of space left over!
All this extra space is just crawling with other kinds of life, too; and most of them even smaller than we are! In fact, life seems to appear everywhere here. Every moment, we breathe in hundreds of life forms even smaller to us than this dot is to you.
But the problem is that even though my home is so small, it seems really big to most of my fellow creatures. They fight all the time over who controls different parts of this place… and all this fighting means that we don’t share things. Hundreds of millions of us have to go hungry even though there’s plenty of food, or get sick even though there’s plenty of medicine.
Some say that much of this little dot is going to be more or less unusable in just a few of our short life-spans. They point out, quite rightly, that we’re all stuck here. Together. And the thought of that just terrifies them.
But to me, it’s just that terror which causes all these problems. Our dot is not a cage, it’s a home, and the people who live here are a family. If more of us could see this picture of our home like you do, as a small point of light, perhaps more of us would start to think of it as just one place—one home, each and every pixel of it belonging to all of us at once.
It is our tiny, priceless jewel in the mist.
Monday, November 10, 2003
The Color of the Wind
We see color in the wind just as we see meaning in our lives.
Wind, as we usually experience it, has no color of its own—it simply reveals to us the color of whatever passes through it, whether that be your face or mine, blowing sand or leaves, springtime clouds or sheets of rain.
In the same way, a life’s value comes from the thoughts, actions and spiritual qualities which we allow to pass through it. “True loss,” it has been said, “is for him whose days have been spent in utter ignorance of his self.”
But the air itself can be bright as well. The whole sky shines with the scattered light of the sun. If it is seen over long distances, as in the Grand Canyon, the mass of air will make distant red stones appear blue. In fact, any molecules in the universe have a color of their own as long as they move light around, each one in its own way.
My mind shivers with awe to consider that even the wind has a color, that if you look deeply enough even into the blackest corner of the night sky, you will find the brilliance of billions of galaxies, as well as all the stars, worlds, and peoples that must inhabit them.
Perhaps, behind all the darkness of our small and mortal lives, there is a mysterious brightness, an inherent beauty like that of the sky, which all souls, whether good or bad, must ultimately reflect.
Science • Way of Life • Optimism • (37) Trackbacks • Permalink
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Writing in the Mirror
Everyday, we stand in front of a mirror, and we examine our faces for new deficiencies of various sorts. We try to heal them or cover them up, and we hopefully leave home satisfied with our appearance. Ideally, this activity gives us a sense of physical readiness and lets our minds get started on the other activities of the day.
Yet, when we go to bed, we just cut off our experiences of the day, like raw meat, ideas and feelings bleeding all over. Our dreams often have difficulty digesting this and making sense of it.
Writing can help us prepare for our dreams, just as the mirror prepares us for the day. We may not remember what we dream, but we will almost certainly go into it prepared. We can see before us the ideas we carry into that hidden world, and find in them a reflection of our souls. This process of reflection, which writing helps us ignite, cooks the experiences of the day into a fully digestible meal. Our dreams spread its lessons throughout the whole body and soul.
The problem for most people is that they think that they always have to write something really good. They may feel shy about writing down their deep feelings and thoughts. Of course everyone wants a finished article or story to communicate something special to readers, but we must first give ourselves permission to just communicate with our own souls as easily as we do with our own faces.
In these moments of utmost privacy, we may find that writing is more like listening than it is like speaking. We simply record the voices of our soul, our experience, and our life as it was today. From the image of who we are when we go to bed, we may have a better idea of who we want to be once we wake up.
Monday, October 27, 2003
China and the New World Wisdom
The Chinese are generally a proud people, and consider their culture to be a marvel thousands of years in the making. But China is as much a new civilization as an old one. Although the people have lived on this land since before recorded history can tell, their modern ways of thinking are not always informed by that history.
The modern flow of information all over the earth has meant that most Chinese are as much influenced by Hollywood as they are by Confucius. The twinkle of opportunity is brighter than the spark of wisdom in the eyes of a fast-developing nation – and perhaps rightly so. Since the world’s equilibrium is passing through cycles of upheaval and drastic change every day, many people wonder how much of the old wisdom still applies.
American leaders would just love to tell the Chinese all about the New World Wisdom, and to a great extent the Chinese are actually willing to listen. They are not, however, always so inclined to agree. To some, “new” means “Western,” but to those educated in the vastness of China’s past, it means something much more, something they wish to arise and define for themselves. They take what they like from the West, and they leave what they don’t.
Time will not tell us who was right or wrong. Historians of future ages will record how each nation on this earth was a strapping young adolescent at the turn of the millennium, full of ideas about how the world should be run, and equally full of confidence that their ideas would work. They will see an emerging world community struggling to piece itself together while at the same time keeping each part distinct.
For China, as for every nation, “new” increasingly means “together” with the rest of the world, while “old” means “apart.” A new wisdom for the world’s old countries, as well as the young, may very well be the fruit of that process of learning which joins these two identities into one functioning world system.
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
First Things First
Late at night, after sitting at the computer and staring at these myriad configuration pages, I do believe I have made progress, and this weblog is ready to crawl into existence. Like most weblogs, it needs a first entry, a test of sorts, to verify it’s own being. A web log without logs is hardly any use to anyone.
Statistics
This page has been viewed 838613 times
Page rendered in 0.6392 seconds
45 querie(s) executed
Debug mode is on
Total Entries: 55
Total Comments: 757
Total Trackbacks: 1101
Most Recent Entry: 07/13/2008 12:15 pm
Most Recent Comment on: 06/20/2009 01:08 pm
Total Members: 9
Total Logged in members: 0
Total guests: 5
Total anonymous users: 0
Most Recent Visitor on: 09/08/2010 02:23 am
The most visitors ever was 197 on 03/07/2005 04:33 am
