There are several adventures that have been on my bucket list for what seems like forever, but it is closer to forty years. Two were planted in my psyche by author Colin Fletcher when he wrote books about his 1958 walk from the bottom to the top of California and his book about hiking the length of the Grand Canyon in 1963. Those books placed both the Pacific Coast Trail and a rim-to-rim hike of the Grand Canyon as life goals. Other treks I want to experience are the 800-mile Hayduke Trail through the Colorado Plateau and the granddaddy hike in the US, the 2,190-mile Appalachian Trail. Other adventure dreams are cycling the US coast to coast, summiting Mount Everest, though pictures of the crowded peak make it less and less appealing, and the four-day Inca Trail hike at elevation ending with entry to Machu Picchu.
Growing up, I remember being indoctrinated into the colloquialism that 'practice makes perfect' as a way to encourage the repeated rehearsal of actions or behaviours to perfect our ability to execute them as flawlessly as possible, with the ultimate goal of perfect execution. The fundamental flaw in the expression is that practicing anything imperfectly achieves excellence in imperfection, meaning the trend is towards becoming perfectly imperfect.
For a significant portion of my life, beginning from when I was eleven years old, my parental units owned a cottage in central Wisconsin lake country. Not blessed with generational wealth, we spent the majority of our vacations from the early days of tent camping, through a camper, eventually replaced by a prefab cottage, lovingly termed the summer estate, making visits easier and more frequent. Even with the cottage, I tended to erect a tent in the yard to avoid the noise of the crowded house. I knew when we were getting close, even with my eyes closed, due to the smell of water, intermixed...
I have posted over 4,500 blogs on the interweb and have written two unpublished books with a third underway, and have numerous other writings either collecting dust in journals scattered throughout my home or long lost in the scrap heaps of time. Estimating an hour per blog entry, the investment is more than 180 consecutive days of writing 24 hours a day, nonstop. Realistically, the two books written required several hundred hours each, equating to 60ish 24-hour days. Then there are the countless unposted musings. In all likelihood, I've spent an entire year of 24-hour days writing and editing. I am probably about 1,200 hours shy of the 10,000 necessary to master a discipline, any discipline. However, that is a byproduct, not the goal of my writing investment.
It is not uncommon to view birth and death as extreme opposites on a linear life continuum. But are they? This is a concept fitting the thought patterns of a Western mind indoctrinated in linear time thinking, not so much for a person inculcated into the Eastern mind viewing time as circular. Birth and Death could be envisioned as the same swinging door...
t is a long-standing and well-established fact that the majority of humans will experience Presbyopia beginning sometime in their 40s to 60s that will see them requiring reading glasses or some other form of near vision correction to see clearly in close quarters. By the early to mid-60s, the degeneration plateaus negating the need for stronger and stronger corrective lenses. My near vision does seem to have stabilized at a +2.75 correction. Strangely...
My first reaction upon walking through the Chaco Canyon ruins was to be struck by awe, awe and wonder, then marvel at the masonry still partially standing more than one thousand years after the bricks were carefully laid to exacting standards using earthen mortar between the carefully shaped sandstone blocks by ancient hands. Those craftsmen are long lost to the mysteries hidden by long time. The ruins were long ago relieved of artifacts by grave robbers, both amateur (petty thieves) and professional (archaeologists), leaving the crumbling buildings.
I have oft wondered at my visceral attraction to deserts despite growing up on the Midwest plains, frequently experiencing more rainfall than can be absorbed by the increasingly cement-burdened environs. I am not referring to the sand dunes comprising 20% of desert surfaces, although they do have their undulating charm despite hosting virtually no vegetation. I am referring to the other 80%, also barely hospitable, consisting of gravel plains, rocky plateaus, etc, in which dispersed vegetation armed with daggers, hooks, and barbs grasp tenuously to life. Along with a host of venomous animals, eking out a living. Even the rocks on the ground are known to bite and slice open the soles of feet or any exposed flesh by any unfortunate tripping and falling.
t is a well-established fact that the human animal seeks out patterns with which to evaluate our environment. In our prehominid days, pattern recognition was crucial to surviving life on the savannah, helping our ancestors avoid predators and recognize where reliable sources of water and food could be found. As we evolved, pattern discernment enabled them to interpret social cues, including facial expressions and gestures, crucial to group cooperation and knowledge sharing. In the modern era, patterns are used to solve problems efficiently by applying solutions from past situations to current problems. It helps us make informed decisions instead of reacting randomly to stimuli. At the neural level, the skill compares new input with stored memories, enabling the rapid processing of complex information.
I feel compelled to practice my art daily, be it planting seed quotes at the top of a blank page that will grow into handwritten essays with the pruning relegated to those later hours when my peak creativity has subsided from those morning devotions, or I am carefully laying acrylic paint on canvas when it is too cold to create outside, or composing the images that will be captured in my camera, or editing the photos to more accurately reflect my vision for their aesthetic beauty. I invest more time working on my art than any other activity, with reading a not too distant second.
Unlike in the US, where we hide our elderly in semi-permeable prisons with others of their kind visiting them as time in busy schedules permits, indigenous peoples who tended to venerate the aged kept their mature family members living with them. They were fully aware their ancient ones had earned a lifetime of wisdom from which they offered apples of knowledge for the asking, a tradeoff far outweighing any burden of caring for them as they lost motor and mind functions before succumbing...
I am sure it is a nearly universal trait that humans imagine themselves as gods wishing they could magically right a perceived wrong so the world could be, if not a kinder, gentler space, then, at least, one where fairness is the ultimate outcome of all inter-species and intra-species interactions weighted slightly toward the benefit of the human playing god. Most of us outgrow this childish fantasy of being the ultimate arbiter for the planet. Some never outgrow childish ways...
Back in my fifties, when I lived in Pune, India, I met a Polish gentleman living in the flat below mine. We met when our landlord, the only Zoroastrian I've ever met, invited the two of us to a 'get to know you' dinner. I learned the Polish dude had lived in the building for one month, to my two. He revealed he was struggling to adapt to solo living because he missed all his friends back home with whom he interacted face to face frequently. A month or two later...
If ever there was a man before his time, a man who would bring a revolutionary idea to mankind, that man would be Aldo Leopold. He was an avid hunter and outdoorsman envisioning a hunter's paradise teeming with game animals whose numbers could be boosted by eradicating all predators except man and his long gun. His radical new idea was that nature is not a simple collection of random species separate and distinct from each other, but a singular organism with each part, each species, critical to the overall health of the living organism.
My reality begins each morning when I wake from a dreamless sleep, make a mug of Earl Grey tea sweetened with a 60% honey, 40% brown sugar combination. I carry the steaming mug with a white base decorated in black with Ancient Ancestor, geometrical patterns copied from the stone puzzle walls at Chaco Canyon, place it beside me on the altar I made from a slab of beechwood painted with turquoise, made to appear distressed with sandpaper exposing arcs of the wood's original white bones.
Humanity owes the fruit-bearing serpent a huge debt of gratitude for showing us the way to escape from a state of punishment to one of liberation. Eating the fruit was to break free of bondage, setting humanity on its way to achieving our full potential. The simple act of disobedience put the human in humanity. Eden was never a paradise. Rather, it was a prison designed for continual surveillance. The awareness of being constantly watched enforced discipline and obedience. Every action was subject to divine scrutiny with the potential for punishment for disobeying God's arbitrary rules and regulations. The prisoners are confined to the prison yard Eden with God, the wall and razor wire preventing escape by all means except eating the juicy forbidden fruit growing from the Tree of Knowledge.
write on paper, almost daily, to the tune of one and only one sheet. That amounts to 365 pages over the course of a year, accumulating to 3,650 pages in ten years. In tree terms, that is somewhere between 0.37 and 0.44 trees per decade. This does not account for the bound books I read, a number that is steadily decreasing to a few per year.
As a lover of the written word, I devour books, not as a snake swallows a single book whole rather nibbling at various books as a butterfly flits from beautiful flower to beautiful flower, sipping at their nectar, experiencing an intellectual high of many flavors. Books are as important to my spiritual life as breathing sweet air is to the health of my body. Indispensable! As such, there are books as important to me as the Bible is to believers. The greatest dichotomy, I don't claim my canon is the inerrant utterances of a mythical sky daddy whose ass I must kiss to enter, upon death, and receive the gift of an eternity of servitude.
For as long as I can remember, people have been captivated by the idea of life existing beyond Earth's boundaries. Little green men (assuming they are not hermaphroditic) visiting Earth surreptitiously to either live among us, abduct us for anal probing experiments, or plotting our demise allowing them to strip mine Earth for resources unavailable elsewhere in the multiverse.
I typically feel fear as a constricting knot in my stomach before realizing my building anxiety exists, prior to becoming fearful, and in the most extreme cases, a panic attack finding me curling fetal in my bed, wishing my demons away. Even when the symptoms start, it takes time for me to recognize my pain is psychological, not physical. Upon recognition, I move forward, rearranging the debilitating thoughts into controllable and uncontrollable riffing of the great cricket batsman, Sachin Tendulkar, to control the controllable.
