Mummerings

 

 

Murmuration of Starlings

 

As I searched the internet for a picture of a murmuration of starlings (coordinated flight--scroll to the bottom to see more) I wondered why I had not taken a picture of a group I saw a couple of mornings ago as I sat beside an open field drinking a cup of hot mocha.

I watched, not thousands, as sometimes happens, but hundreds of starlings swirling in the sky, weaving in and out, dancing in harmony, and wondered how in the world they could do it. How could they fly so fast and precisely without running into each other? They must have been wearing little radio headsets.

They would do their dance, then drop all together into the field and disappear into the grasses where I couldn't see them, then, as though on cue, swoop up and dance again, only to drop again a few moments later. I hear this is a predator escape behavior, but from my vantage point, they seemed to be having a happy time.

Could we escape predators with such joy?

Jen Scenario wrote:

"Have you ever had an aha moment that completely blew yer mind? "Don't worry, be happy! Yes! I can choose to place my attention on the joyous instead of the heinous!... I'm gonna hug the shit out of everyone I see!"

Jen, you are masterful in reminding me to live in the now and find a happy place. Yes, I'm a spiritual being here to have a physical experience, although perhaps that physical part tells us to do something.

Be happy and get the job done. That's the challenge.

We were born into a physical body with hands to clean up messes and a voice to tell the young ones to be vigilant.

Many of us have felt in bondage for many years. First, the COVID-19 lockdown separated us from our social group, which helped solidify our belief systems without a conversation with the other side. Many of us lost jobs, thus threatening our security; our kids weren't going to school, graduation from high school wasn't the joyous event it was for us, and newly birthed babies were sometimes removed from their mothers as a health precaution. And the possibility of death was staring us in the face.

It’s no wonder we went a little crazy.

Prolonged stress does that to people.

And then came the arguing, name-calling, lies, and innuendoes that have been a normal part of the media. And we listened—after all, our brains were already fried.

I, for one, felt beaten down. And I questioned the teachings I have endeavored to incorporate into my being for years.

That teaching is that we are masterful creators here to create our lives, not to be victims of circumstances.

Didn't we all come here as exuberant little spark plugs ready for an adventure?

We know the earth will go on without us—it has done so for 4 billion years, but the plants, animals, and people living right now are important to me. Future generations are vital to me. Native Americans believed in planning for seven generations ahead. I've heard that post-menopausal women, while no longer reproducing (what dear old biologists and misogynists told us was our purpose), now we are seeing that the older women, specifically, are here to see that their progeny continues. 

For women who think broadly, progeny extends to all life.

Ancient mythology told us that males and females once rolled about in ecstasy, but the controllers, seeing how powerful they were together, split them apart. (People who are talking about soulmates are talking about that phenomenon. They are seeking their other half.) Because we are separated, we have had a war of the sexes ever since, making both male and female weaker and the controllers more powerful. (Why do controllers try to keep women down?)

Richard Bach, one of my favorite authors, wrote," If you wonder if your mission in life is over, and you're alive, it isn't."

I'm alive.

And I wonder where I fit into this scenario. The famed Naturalist Jane Goodall said that we all affect the earth each day we walk on it. With Douglas Abrams as her interviewer, Jane Goodall wrote a book titled HOPE. In reading it, I wonder how to spread hope.

Jane Goodall calls herself a naturalist.  A naturalist, Jane says, "looks for the wonder of nature—she listens to the voice of nature and learns from nature as she tries to understand it. Meanwhile, scientists are more focused on facts and the desire to qualify. How is it adaptive? How does it contribute to the survival of the species? As a naturalist, you need empathy, intuition, and love. You've got to be prepared to look at the murmuration* of starlings and be filled with awe at the amazing agility of these birds. How do they fly in a flock of thousands without touching at all?"

I do not have the notoriety of Jane Goodall nor the interviewer's skill of Douglas Abrams. However, I am persistent in this struggle for survival. And Goodall emphasizes that HOPE is a survival mechanism.

HOPE has kept us alive for 300,000 years. "HOPE," says Goodall, "is like a bright star at the end of a dark tunnel. We should not wait for it to come to us. We have to go get it."

It is spring, or almost so. Peaceful spring. I see buds on the trees, and the Cameo flowering quince bush shows its coral-colored buds; if HOPE is withering, we can water it if that's what it needs. Yet HOPE is something that lives inside of us. It's a belief, an emotion—even animals have hope. For example, when your dog sits expectantly for you to get the leash, hope is paired with the belief that you will take him for a walk. The cat hopes you will open the door to let him out. HOPE is also like our heart or brain, organs that will die without the necessary chemicals.

HOPE needs to know we care for it. HOPE needs to know that we will keep it alive. Nelson Mandela couldn't take any action when he was in prison, but he kept hope in his heart. He knew he had a support system out in the world helping him. If we have our hands tired, we need others who don't.

When we have our voices silenced, such as reprisals for speaking out, when we have books banned, when we have the media owned and controlled, we need the free ones to speak. We need those with a voice to rise and proclaim loudly, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore."

Almost every citizen has good reason for suing the highest leaders in the land for constitutional abuse, emotional abuse, possibly voter fraud, overstepping Presidential privilege, changing laws to benefit the leaders personally (like threatening to abolish the two-term Presidential law) for rounding up our people who came here seeking a better life, for frightening children that they might be separated from their parents, for voting refusal without proof of any wrongdoing, possibly for buying an election, for interfering with physician-patient confidentiality. I'm sure you can think of many others.

Geesh, look at how that would help the people if they pulled wealth from the billionaires and gave it to the people—we could pay off our mortgages, we could afford a larger apartment, we could pay for our kids’ education, we could care for our elders if they need special care. We could afford eggs.

Power and Money are at the bottom of the jar, like a banana a little monkey will grab and won't let go of, even when it means he will get caught.

We are the people. Let's get our act together.

 

*Murmuration: (Named because often you can hear the murmurs of wings before you see the birds.) The magic number is seven: Each bird keeps tabs on its seven closest neighbors and ignores all else. Considering all these little groups of seven touch on other individuals and groups of seven, twists and turns quickly spread. And from that, a whole murmuration moves. From the journal PLOS Computational Biology, January 2013.

The Three Things in Control

• An attraction zone: "You will move toward the next guy."
• A repulsion zone: "You don't fly into his lane. Otherwise, you both fall."
• Angular alignment: "You need to follow your neighbor's direction."

(And these birds can process information faster than we can.)

 

 

 

Oracles of the Day

 

“One of the hardest things to make a child understand is, that down underneath your feet, if you go far enough, you come to blue sky and stars again; that there really is no “down” for the world, but only in every direction an “up.” And that this is an all-embracing truth.”

…It is also what “we grown children find it hardest to realize, too.”—Anne Gilchrist

 

Occasionally, I randomly open a book to see what it offers for the day. After the above I found this morning, I opened Natalie Goldberg’s book Writing Down the Bones, (1986) page 48 (30th Anniversary Edition), and this spoke to me.

“A writer must say yes to life, to all of life, the water glasses, the Kemp’s half and half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer’s task to say, “It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café’ when you can eat macrobiotics at home.”

Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist—the absolute truth of who we are—several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop those details from becoming.”—Natalie Goldberg.

At first I wasn't going to blog this week--declare Tuesday a day of mourning, but then I wrote my apologies, and now I can't help myself--well, I could, but I don't want to. In times of trouble, I turn to my computer and books for solace. I am passing on what I found this morning for the artists out there (all of you are) and those suffering for what they fear to come.

Before my last post, titled “I Apologize,” I began writing about writing and on being an artist, then decided it wasn’t addressing what I felt was important. I’ve changed my mind. Becoming an artist is important.

 Once, a prominent psychiatrist told me that writing is self-aggrandizement.

What an idiot.

I don’t care how many credentials he had, he still missed the point, traumatized me, and besmirched all literature.

If you have decided that you are imposing your great wisdom on someone, then you might be accused of aggrandizement, but if you want to become an artist—that’s a different story. (The psychiatrist disagreed with the writer of a book I was reading.)

An artist wants to express himself, which takes many forms—artistry is creative expression.

Art is where your heart is.

And HOPE is right beside it. We have to believe there is hope for the future. We have to HOPE that we aren’t all tied up in Plato’s dark cave, only seeing shadows, not the real things.

A scientist HOPES his theory is correct. A singer HOPES her audience likes her song. A songwriter, HOPES his lyrics ring true.

Every artist who sits down to his work begins the hero’s journey. Every time. Over and over. He leaves his comfortable ground to set out, not knowing what pitfalls will befall him. He or she HOPES they live to reach their destination, and they HOPE they have something to offer the tribe. 

The writer-artist doesn’t write to impart wisdom; he writes to find himself, and through that self-discovery, he HOPES to motivate others to do the same.

Who was it, Issac Asimov, who said “I write to find out what I am thinking?” Maybe it was Joan Didion who wrote a book with that title.

That is something my friend, the psychiatrist, did not understand, for if you follow Natalie Goldberg’s way of thinking that writing is a therapeutic experience, it might put him out of business.

Then there is old procrastination (Steven Pressfield calls it resistance) in finding something else to do besides THE WORK. THE WORK (your artistry) is scary, that’s the reason we put it off.

Hemingway said writing was opening a vein.

Liz Gilbert said to enjoy your creativity.

I enjoy writing. While writing, I am in the flow, and time is a no-thing. My demons aren’t as scary to me as Hemingway’s was to him. Or maybe he thought one must suffer for their craft. Published writers have an additional problem; they want to match or exceed their earliest work, which burdens them.

Steven Pressfield found that once he declared himself a writer (found his calling) and he sat down at the typewriter, typed out a few pages he later threw away—he was freed.  A few minutes later he was at the sink washing 10 days of stacked up dishes—and humming.

Suffering comes in the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

While hunting for a different picture I had recently placed in my files, I found this one. I hope that bull didn't land on his once upon a time rider.

P.S. Hey, it looks like I got my follow button back. How about a follow?

The Bad, The Good, and HOPE

 

Do you ever find yourself eager to run to your computer, then instead of going directly to your files, you scroll click-bait?  Oh, those headlines are good, aren't they?

Click-bait: Right now, with California fires burning up over 10,000 homes, our soon-to-be administration is criticizing the CA administration for not being prepared for fires or some inane thing like a vendetta against the governor.  Blame, blame, blame--I'm tired of it.

People are suffering folks.

We need a solution. No we aren't prepared for the wildfires we have been having. We weren't prepared for COVID-19 when it hit us either.

Oregon used to have lookout towers where a person or a couple would spend the summers on a lookout for lightning strikes or puffs of smoke rising through the trees. Those lookout towers set above the forest, and the lookout person could, with an instrument, visually triangle the location of a puff of smoke and notify the position so the rangers. That way, they could catch a fire at a very early stage.

Once surrounded by Oregon forests, we saw a helicopter fly over with a large bag hanging below his plane. Unbeknownst to us, a lightning strike had ignited a tree not far from our house. I don't know who saw that strike, but it set the tree on fire.  A helicopter was deployed, and the pilot dropped a water bag on the tree. It was out, just like that. And we didn't know of the danger.

I could spend a month or so in a cabin atop a tower looking up regularly from my computer to watch for puffs of smoke—Think of all the reading you could do between times of surveying the countryside. I don't know how that would work in urban situations. I know that during war situations in our hometown, people were hired to search and document every plane they spotted.

Whatever faults humans have, we are still good detectors. Like other animals, we can see when something is out of the ordinary.

Perhaps we need a net of fire spotters, for it appears that wildfires are regularly upon us—Oregon forests, Lahaina, Hawaii, and now Malibu, CA. Perhaps fire berms could wind through cities- that would be a good place for mountain bikes to travel on dirt roads, and kids could play in the dirt. That would give tractor drivers a weekly job of tilling the dirt. Or what about regularly irrigated gardens planted in the fire berm, or fields of wheat, corn, or oats? One would think that streets would provide fire breaks, but apparently not. Fires jump streets, rooftops send sparks, trees and houses explode.

I asked my physicist husband about detection devices, and he said that satellites can detect a single rocket launch and a fire within a city block, so apparently, they have detection covered. Our problem is with putting them out.

Ocean water could be used for homes near the ocean—pumped under the streets, a spraying device to implement them. Automatic sprinklers in the streets? If you have ever watched the TV documentary, "The Curse of Oak Island," you would see that someone back in the 1700s had the ingenuity to hide a treasure 150 feet underground, booby trap flood tunnels to thwart other diggers from getting it and do it so well that 200 years later no one has found it, and it isn't for lack of trying.

When people are presented with a problem, they will devise a solution.

From the time of tribes, a good governing situation was to take into account all individuals of the tribe.  

"When given the choice of whether to work for the benefit of society and future generations, or to act only in their own self-interest, the majority of people will do the right thing. If we allow people to choose, unhampered by undo pressure and disinformation, democracy works."--

A great example is from a study in France in 2019.

The government chose 150 French citizens at random from all walks of life, ranging from 18 to 80 years old. (Hey, why stop at 80?)

They gave the group eight weeks to figure out a solution to the global warming problem. More specifically, the task was to reduce overall carbon emissions by 40% by 2030.

The citizens were provided with a panel of experts to interview and a way for them to all communicate with each other. Throughout eight weekends, this group of 150 citizens would work together, get expert input and feedback, and develop solutions.

The French government informed this group that by the end of these eight weeks, whatever proposals they came up with would be put up for a democratic referendum vote. If one of the proposals gets voted in, it will be implemented.

This acted as an excellent incentive for people to take this task seriously--that their voices mattered.

"The first thing the group concluded was that economic growth would have to be stunted. Remember that this neoliberal capitalist model that we've been talking about is based on unlimited growth with limited resources. We know that this is not a sustainable concept, therefore, the group quickly realized that stunting economic growth was necessary to make responsible decisions to cut emissions."

They decided to ban advertisements of things that are exceedingly harmful to the environment, ban short flights and single-use plastics, and make recycling mandatory. Landlords would be required to renovate their properties to be sustainable by 2034. They would increase taxes on polluters to about 4%, which would apply to anybody who made over $10 million. The higher "pollution taxes" would help pay for these changes. They would also work on eliminating trucking in favor of using trains. It was a comprehensive plan.

"When the French government started to see what they were putting together, they immediately interjected to tell the group that they needed to keep their proposals reasonable because money doesn't grow on trees."

But the group was on a roll. They stuck to their guns, insisting that this was what needed to happen and what they wanted their fellow citizens to vote on.

They came up with a 400-page proposal of actions that could be taken.

Though Macron, (a neoliberal capitalist) promised to put any proposal they came up with to a vote, it shouldn't surprise anyone that this never happened.

The proposal was torpedoed.

They did implement some watered-down versions of the stuff they came up with, but the suggested sweeping changes were never put up for a vote.

Here's the point.

"When you take ordinary citizens, from all age groups and walks of life. Give them pertinent, accurate, expert information, and then ask them to vote… they can be counted on to make the right choice." 

 

And then there is a giant in the form of a small 90-year-old lady named Jane Goodall, who with interviewer, Douglas Abrams has written a book called HOPE, A Survival Guide for Trying Times.

Last night, I read an excerpt. In Abrams's introduction, he wrote this:

"We are going through hard times. Armed conflict, racial and religious discrimination, hate crimes, terrorist attacks, and a political swing so far right that it is fueling demonstrations and protests that all to often become violent. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is evidence fermenting anger and unrest. Democracy is under attack in many countries. And climatic crisis temperately pushed to the background is an even greater threat to our future, indeed to all life on Earth as we know it."

Douglas Abrams also interviewed the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu as they talked about JOY. This interview was captured on TV and in The Book of Joy.

I have been a fan of Jan Goodall since I first heard of her, and quickly read her book, In the Shadow of Man (1971)—that was 54 years ago. The shadow was that of a chimpanzee falling on Jane's own shadow. This was after she sat on a hillside for six months watching through binoculars before getting close to one.

When Goodall published the film of the chimpanzee, David Greybeard, where he stripped leaves from a twig and used it as a tool to fish termites out of their termite hill, she set science on its ear. Before that account, one definition of a human being was that he was a tool user.

Then, I read a little treasure: SOLO, The Story of an African Wild Dog by Hugo van Lawick, the photographer who became Jane's husband.

Solo isn't on Amazon, but I found it on Thrift Books—one left for $6.69 plus shipping—you can find one on eBay for 85 bucks. Solo is about a little orphaned wild dog whose legs became deformed from following his pack when he was too young for the job. The team put aside their Prime Directive of non-interference with a wild herd or pack. It figured out what, in God's great plan, it would hurt to rescue one little puppy. They did and later reintroduced him into the pack where they observed him suddenly itching and scratching and wondered what was wrong with him. He was reintroduced to fleas. When in captivity, they used a repellent.

And when the chimps caught polio and would drag their hindquarters around and couldn't clean their beds at night—typically chimps move to another tree and make a new bed every night, the workers climbed into the trees and cleaned their beds for them.

I must tell you all this because when I was young, I used to say that Jane Goodall had my job, but she didn't. It was her job. She was perfect. I do not have the patience to do what she did, and her trip to Africa, a month's trip on a boat, would have killed me. (I get sea sick.) No planes were going to Africa when she went, and the Panama Canal was closed.

Yet, here we have a lady believing in HOPE and two religious leaders of different persuasions believing in JOY. (Their love for each other is contagious.)

Goodall calls herself a Naturalist, not a scientist. A scientist is more apt to focus on facts and the desire to quantify.

A Naturalist looks at the wonder of nature, listens to its voice, and tries to understand it.  A Naturalist needs empathy, intuition, and love.

HOPE and Faith are not interchangeable words. Faith is belief in the unknown, "HOPE," says Goodall, "is a survival mechanism." Your dog hopes to be let outside. Your cat hopes to be fed.

Whatever endeavor we begin, whether it's building a gizmo, a home, writing a book, a song, or starting a new job, we HOPE it will turn out well. We HOPE we can make a contribution.

Without HOPE, spirituality dies.

A friend sent this to me a few days ago:

"I listened to a YouTuber speak last night about how some of us are like birds in a cage and don't realize that the door is open, and we can fly out whenever we want.

"Some just want to stay in the cage because they're used to it and are okay with following the rules and belief systems that make them comfortable, and they don't want to leave and enter the unknown while others of us have flown out of the cage but still may be feeling unsettled because we want a home and don't want to be out there by ourselves.

"Also, we have friends and family members still in the cage, and we miss them, but we're not willing to live in that restricted environment to have it. So, we're on the other end of this and feeling very isolated, alone, and unsettled because we gave up the structure and security of whatever that was for this freedom.

"Bottom line - the cage is dissolving and we're moving into a new way of being and we get to choose how we react to it. This is a new chapter in the book that hasn't been written yet. It's being written now."

Thank you, dear one.

'
 

 

P.S. Is anyone trying to read this blog on their phone? How is it working?