Musings of a Middle Aged Man

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.

It feels, for most of my life, I have been told, ordered, and cajoled to be obedient, to attend church, excel in school, graduate from university with a degree that would support me, follow the rules of the road and land, respect authority, and other such trite nonsense ostensibly to have and enjoy the good life. The implication is that being an obedient drone will lead to prosperity and happiness. Alternatively, to create waves in the societal fabric would bring disrepute down on top of my head, for which I will rightfully be punished. Succinctly, 'go along to get along' as does the majority of society.

For as long as I can remember, I have prided myself on knowing things, obscure things with little value other than making me appear smarter than I actually am. It was an adrenaline rush shouting out the correct answer before anyone else could raise their hand, earning praise and admiration for my correctness, notwithstanding the egregious relational errors in the process. But, does knowing bits and tids of oddball facts correlate to intelligence? Or simply a mind capable of memorization?

For some, rebellion against injustice comes easily. It is because some of us were born with a rebellious streak hard-wired into our DNA that drives us to confront rather than avoid inequity. A rebellious nature can be viewed as a curse because we have difficulty going along to get along. A rebellious spirit is actually a blessing because rebels are not blown about like chaff in a stiff wind generated from the masses moving in the same direction, similar to a dead fish going with the stream's flow. I readily admit that embracing one's rebellious nature is fraught with challenges...

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 read the news today. Oh boy! About an unlucky people about to lose 250 million acres of public lands to the wealthy, helping them stockpile more money than they can realistically spend in a lifetime, while they cheat their employees out of decent wages. The news was rather sad. Well, I just had to cry. I would like to blame wannabe king TACO, but he is little more than a pawn

Growing up, as I did, indoctrinated in a parochial school system and regularly attending church from birth until I figured a way, in my late teens, to pretend I was going to church while, instead, trying to help the mother ship fight off the invaders from space at the local arcade, the concept of kindness was etched into my psyche as the proper way to conduct oneself in the world. The classic text is the biblical story of The Good Samaritan.

The first Law of Thermodynamics states the cosmic reality that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only converted from one form to another. In the simplest form, sunlight energy is converted into plant form energy that becomes animal form energy before morphing into microbial energy. Unlike the Laws of the Game for Soccer with its common sense clause that bestows upon the referee the power to ignore the law for the good of the game, the Conservation of Energy Law is an absolute from which deviation is impossible.