Science Musings Discussion
:) :+: :)
“if you know how to look.”
Surely, it is one of the great truisms that I have learned since finding our Bard. Once I read today’s blog, I knew that it reminded me of something which I found profound from “The Path.”
It took me 10 minutes to find it, but there it was, in the Prologue, page 5, a quote from the novel “Fugitive Pieces,” “…if you know one landscape well, you will look at all other landscapes differently.” Learning how to Look!!!
But also via the index, page 147, deep within the best chapter on the book, ‘Water Meadow,’ is the poem “Seeing Things” by Howard Nemerov. Fabulous.
Learning how to see, not merely glancing, or simply recording the image, but to actual “SEE” is not an easy thing. It takes practice, it takes knowledge and wisdom, but most of all, it takes a calm patience that allows time enough for even the minute details to slowly bubble to the surface of our conscience’s eye.
Poets and artists are the greatest Seers, for not only do they challenge themselves with the task of seeing, but they then attempt to share what they see via colorful language or dramatic paints. The next time you see a glorious sunset, try putting what you see to actual words, or imagine trying to recreate the colors by using a child’s watercolor set. Both exercises are great tools in learning how to see and learning how to let the smallest and most wondrous details come to the forefront.
And I thought over again
My small adventures
As with a shore-wind I drifted out
In my kayak
And thought I was in danger,
My fears,
Those small ones
That I thought so big
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach.
And yet, there is only
One great thing,
The only thing:
To live to see in huts and on journeys
The great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.
Inuit song
I have to take exception with Russell's "Staying Put". If you're a geologist you gotta go to the interesting outcrops; Oceanographers must go to sea, and (a hum), you gotta go to Turkey to see the '06 solar eclipse. Anyway, you have walking in your title which is hardly a stationary activity and a likess of Chas. Darwin on the cover, too, who most likely wouldn't have published in 1859 had he not gone tripping on the Beagle. I would (humbly) suggest a different epigraph. This one doesn't work for me.
Good point, Jack. Thanks, Scott does a bit of traveling himself. Certainly, he was once kind enough to travel from Indiana to New Mexico to do a program with me.
Of the two great Johns, Muir and Burroughs, "John-'o-the-Mountains was always on the move. "John-'o-the-Birds" said he could sit on his front porch and the turning seasons brought everything past his door.
Chet
The Secular world:
I want to add a comment about Wednesday’s blog which touched upon the three monotheistic religions. I’ve wanted to say something for a while, but to anyone who reads these, please understand that I have no agenda to prove, but rather, I simple wish to share my experience and express my evolving thoughts.
As I have stated here in the past, I have come, after 45 years as a Christian, to regard myself as a Skeptic, and I don’t come to this point on a whim. I often think of this transformation occurring not like a bolt of lightning from heaven, but rather similar as the slow, gradual lighting of the sky at Sunrise. From one end of the horizon the other, the enlightenment occurs very slowly, but it is profound. Little by little the pieces of “light” keep building on one and other. They fit together like a 5000 piece puzzle. But often we must step back from the table in order the “See” the puzzle in its entirety.
Case in point: another of the many pieces that point me in my new direction was a recent PBS special on the Inca Mummies entombed in the Peruvian mountains. The Inca’s took children, ages 5-13, to the tops of mountains, some at 18,000 feet, where elaborated ceremonial plateaus had been constructed. There the Inca priests made human sacrifices of the children by crushing their skulls with a blunt instrument. The Incas believed the mountains were sacred places and that their gods needed sacrifices.
For me it seems all too similar to the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac. The chieftain of the tribe, feeling he had a special relationship with a god, took his most prized possession to a place his people believed to be holy, and there, upon a ceremonial alter, intended to sacrifice the life of the child.
Is this event the true beginning of the three great monotheistic religions, or was it simply a common practice across the entire planet, which at the time was populated be men and women struggling to understand to powers of the natural world which were simply beyond their ability to analyze or understand?
For me this small realization is but one of the hundreds if not thousands of photons of light that has reached my eye over the past 45 years. Every morning, after we step out of the house and into the dawn, we come to that singular moment in the morning, when each of us as individuals will say to themselves, “I think it’s light, outside.” It is then that we are truly able to See the World for what it is, and see the wondrous things within it.
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