This week's subject is suggested by Marycarimom

The subject is Hope

This is Emmett, birdwatching.

I had no clue when I sat down here what I'd write about today.  I clicked a few of the pictures that showed up in my "friends" box (I do enjoy the idea of keeping my friends in a box inside this box on my desk.), and got a glimmering of an idea.  Mystic_In_Training's post suggested it, then mejicojohn's post solidified it.  But I didn't have a word for it.  Google has been no help.

The feeling I mean but cannot name is a sort of homesickness for a place that one has never been or at least has never lived or called "home."    I suppose there's a word in German for it, some kind of "schmerz."

I feel that way about, most notably, Scotland, North Central Mexico, and the U.S. Southwest around the Four Corners where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico come together.  I have Scots ancestry on both sides of my family, so it might be some genetic memory that draws me to Scotland and gives me chills every time I hear the Piobreachd played on a great Highland bagpipe.

There is no culturally correct explanation for the connection I feel to the ancient ruined city of Teotihuacan and the area around it.  Four Corners is the only one of those three areas that I have visited.  When my mother and I used to pass through there on our summer road trips between the Midwest and the West Coast, I'd want to stop a lot, stay and explore.  I got to do some exploring there while Greyfox and I were based in Silver City, New Mexico for the winter of our honeymoon.

I cannot name the feeling, but I have found a somewhat plausible explanation for it.  It never made a bit of sense to me until I started exploring my past lives.  These are all places I have lived before, only not in this lifetime.  The "homesickness" (really less a feeling of nostalgia than simply one of being drawn to that area) doesn't seem to stem from particularly happy experiences in those places.  What I recall from those times is intense, but not pleasant.  I am apparently most drawn to times and places with a lot of what I'll call, "karmic resonance," for want of a better term.

I experienced war, hunger, captivity, grief, injury, and, of course, death in those places. My patterns of interactions with people in this lifetime seem to suggest that those lives left some karmic business unfinished.  In the cultural paradigm where reincarnation and karma are part of the vocabulary, these karma driven patterns of relationship make sense.  The pull that I feel to the geography of those past lives makes less sense, because I have encountered plenty of the people whose karma I share without going there.

It is all less of a mystery to me than it used to be, but still a mystery.

UPDATE

It is now day 2 of this year's World Eskimo-Indian Olympics.  The Anchorage Daily News has these new stories:

Salmon, whale blubber and seals lend unique flavor to Native games
and
One-hand reach is a total body performance

Plus a day one photo gallery and video of the kneel-jump competition.

Today, the 46th annual World Eskimo-Indian Olympics begins in Anchorage.  That is a first.  The other 45 WEIO meets have been held in Fairbanks.

If you have an image in your mind of black-haired, brown-skinned athletes sprinting, pole-vaulting and playing other Greek-style games, wipe those stereotypes from your mind and let me replace them with a more interesting picture.  Anyone who is impressed with the athletic prowess displayed in Olympic competition will be amazed by what he sees at WEIO.

The ancient Greeks, it is said, developed their games as physical training for war.  Some Eskimo games demonstrate skills that have use for survival in a harsh environment, and others demonstrate the imagination and endurance of a highly creative and competitive people.  I watch these athletes with awe as I see them almost casually do the apparently impossible, and it is all done with humor even though the competition is intense.

Beth Bragg's column in today's Anchorage Daily News includes the cautions to spectators to be prepared to wait, and to stay up late:

A competitor in this year's seal skinning contest is trying to break a record set in the 1960s by her husband's grandmother:  54 seconds.  That is truly impressive.  I can't skin a rabbit in less than a minute.  I never tried to skin a seal, but... less than a minute??  You know that's gotta be fast, since the record has stood for this long.

One audience participation event is a perennial crowd pleaser:  nalakatuk, the blanket toss.  Spectators are invited to grab onto the edge of the walrus skin blanket and help propel contestants about 30 feet into the air.  Points are awarded on height and on style.  Dancing feet, running motions, flips and rolls, or all of the above, make this event a fun one to watch, a hard one to judge, and a real challenge to win.  (photo credit:  Bill Hess)

Competitions include a muktuk eating contest -- that's raw whale blubber, said to have a crisp mouth feel and a flavor close to fresh coconut.  Yum.

The athletic events often involve feats of strength, balance, and agility performed under handicapping conditions, such as the swing kick for height, with a belt binding the knees to the neck, or hopping for the greatest distance on one's knuckles. (The  photo here at the right and the one below, left, are by Lael Morgan, from the 1972 WEIO.)

Some of these events have a sadomasochistic feel, such as the ear weight:

...and the ear pull:

The events (unscheduled but expected to occur) today on the opening day of this year's games include:

and

ONE-HAND REACH

This game requires the athlete to balance on his/her hands with at least one elbow tucked under the lower abdominal area. The rest of the body is parallel to the floor. The participant will then use one hand to reach up and touch the suspended target. Upon doing this, the participant must get that hand back to the floor before any other part of his/her body touches the floor while demonstrating his/her balance to the floor officials. This is a game demonstrating balance, athletic prowess, and strength. Height is the objective.

The photo at right is from Vox of Dartmouth, illustrating a story about Dartmouth student Elizabeth Rexford who won a number of events in the 2005 WEIO.  Descriptions of the various events above (along with many others) are on the WEIO website.   Photos of some of this year's competitors can be seen here and here.  That latter shot, of Manuel Tumulak Jr., doing a one-foot high kick, illustrates a story about him at adn.com.

There will be local TV coverage of highlights from the games, and a few hours each day on ARCS, the Alaska Rural Communications Service.  I don't know if there is enough interest Outside for coverage on broadcast networks or satellite sports channels.  If not, you just don't know what you'll be missing.

The day after the "Fire the Grid" global meditation project, I can think and write about it objectively.  I'm so empathetic that yesterday the metaphysical energies being marshaled and manifested were giving me frissons, tingling electrical surges along my spine and out to my fingertips.

In earlier days I was a sponge, soaking up the "subtle" (intangible, but to a sensitive person, not so subtle) projections, emanations, and vibrations from my environment.  Not a sponge any longer, I have become a processor of a sort.  That's my best succinct description, but if you know me, you know I won't stop with a succinct word or phrase.  I will elaborate.

I do all sorts of things with these mental abilities and capacities I call, "psychic", for want of a better term.  I work with them, play with them, communicate through them, use them to help me learn, and frequently find myself making unexpected discoveries through them.  One thing I don't do is try to shut them down or block them.

I am aware of some elaborate ritual magick designed to block psychic influences, and I am familiar with several ways to tinker with neurochemistry to shut one's receptors down.  Such measures might appeal to someone in the "sponge" phase of psychic development but, if used, they can put an end to that development.  I prefer to deal with this stuff in the same ways I deal with other psychosocial challenges:  openly, honestly, in my own style.

I asked my son Doug yesterday if he was sensing anything from the planetary buildup to the hourlong collective meditation.  He did that inward looking thing he does, unconsciously crossing his eyes and rolling them upward to focus on the third eye.  After a moment, he focused on me again and said he felt restless.  His restlessness was evident in his behavior, too.  Several times I saw him suddenly rise from his seat as if prodded, and just go... out the door, around, walking off the excess energy.

This morning, I was at the computer when he got up.  First thing he said to me was to ask what time the Fire the Grid thing had happened.  I said it was from 3:11 AM to 4:11, our time.  He gave a wordless hum in response that said, "okay, now I understand."  I gave him the raised eyebrows and he explained, "At about 3:45, I felt like my head was going to explode."

I had gone to sleep as usual last night, and woke just after 3 AM.  I lay there and held myself in Theta, the brainwave state between Delta sleep and relaxed Alpha, about 4-7 Hertz.  It is known as the shamanic state of consciousness, and is the frequency found in studies of meditating adepts.  I learned to recognize when I'm in it, and how to stay in it, through biofeedback techniques (also known as "practice").

I wasn't consciously doing anything.  In meditation, one doesn't.  One just IS.  At an unconscious level, I was sensing and processing, as ever.  As the intense energies faded away, I drifted off into Delta, and woke somewhat earlier than usual today, feeling relatively well energized and rested.  I hadn't been giving conscious Beta state thought to the experience until Doug came in and mentioned it.  Then, this thought formed in my mind and came out my mouth:

"If there were not all those Light Workers out there battling the Forces of Darkness, there wouldn't be all that darkness fighting back."

Doug immediately came back:  "Yes.  Light casts a shadow."

Sometime approximately four decades ago, I was intensely caught up in the battle of good versus evil.  The theme was coming up everywhere and I was bumping into it any way I turned.  About that time, I read Stephen King's The Stand, and felt as if he must have been on the same wavelength.

Since then, my philosophy has matured and expanded.  I don't believe in "negative energy" or "positive energy."  Energy is just energy, and it can be used in many different ways.  Trying to narrow it down to only two possibilities cannot possibly cover all the bases.  An action or event that one person perceives as "evil" will be unequivocally "good" to someone else.  The rain that ruins a parade or cancels a ballgame, was the answer to farmers' prayers.

I have written before that it is quite natural and probably inevitable that a bipedal species with bilateral symmetry and  bisexual reproduction, which evolved on a planet rotating on its axis in relation to a light source causing "day" and "night", with a lesser light source orbiting it and being visible only during the dark phase, would tend to develop a dualistic paradigm.

Somewhere during that species' evolution, it was also inevitable that some of its members would begin to notice some shades of gray and a spectrum of other colors.   We can think and compare things in much more complex ways now than simply either/or.  We can observe and explore a relativistic continuum of reality in a Cosmos of relativity.

Light does still cast shadows, and each time those on the side of "good" challenge and threaten those whose beliefs and desires differ from theirs, they elicit an embattled stance and resistance.  On my "better" days, in my "right" mind, I'm not in that war.  I'm a noncombatant in principle, learning to practice it.  I have found that it is more conducive to my own growth, development, understanding and peace of mind, to contemplate the Oneness of All, rather than choosing up sides and going into battle.  Not seeing things in black and white, and not needing to make a choice about the "rightness" of any part of it, as I accept it all and explore, I learn and grow.

All my life, I have been farsighted.  Reading gave me headaches from a very early age, my squinting to see caused people to think I was scowling or frowning, and my blurry up-close eyesight caused me to do poorly at draftsmanship and other tasks requiring fine hand-eye coordination.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not complaining.  I could as easily brag about about my ability to read road signs as we approach them, when the rest of my family can't even see the sign yet.  I'm sure that my extraordinary accuracy with a rifle is largely because of my distance vision.  There are compensations.

My husband and my son are the opposite: myopic, extremely nearsighted.   Doug wore glasses from second grade on.  Before he learned to always put them in the same place (or remember where he put them) when he took them off, I often had to find his glasses for him.  Now that I wear bifocals, if a screw comes loose in my frames, Doug has to repair my glasses because without them I can't begin to focus within the length of my arms.

One of Greyfox's eyes has a much shorter focal length than the other, and I have become accustomed to seeing him tilt his head down and bring some tiny object right up nearly to his eyebrow to peer at it over his glasses.  With his unaided eyes, he sees close-up detail that I'd need a big magnifier to see.  Which brings me to my reason for writing this...

On my monitor, at 1024x768 px, the small image at left shows more detail than I can see in knotweed (Polygonum cuspidatum) in real life.  I have always loved this common weed for the delicacy of its colors and the hardy willingness with which it adds some life to barren ground and poor soils, even though to my eyes those colors were just dots among the green leaves.  It wasn't until I started using my Fuji FinePix S602Z on its macro setting that I was able to really see what the flowers look like.  You can click the image for a larger version, or click here for one so big you'll have to scroll to see it all.

Since I discovered that I could use my camera's auto-focus and the super macro setting, put the lens up an inch or two from any little thing I wanted to see better, then load it onto my hard drive and play with it in PhotoShop, this has become a summer of visual discovery for me.  I have not been channeling Georgia O'Keefe.  I've just been looking at things I had never really seen before.

Since the weather started warming up, I have been trying to pin Doug down on a time to cut his hair.  We both wanted it, for different reasons.  He, unlike me, didn't care how it looked -- or smelled -- but it was sweaty and uncomfortable, and even on hot days he needed to wear a hat to keep it from falling into his eyes, making it all the more uncomfortable.

Yesterday when he woke in the middle of the day, even before he'd had breakfast, I told him I needed to talk to him.  When I was sure I had his attention, I explained that I had several reasons for wanting him to take a shower and wash his hair, right then, that day, before he got caught up in any other activity.

The shower and shampoo had been a topic of discussion for weeks.  From my perspective, he needed them.  He recognized that a haircut would make him more comfortable, and he was resigned to the fact that I wasn't going to try cutting his hair until he washed it.  But he is even better at procrastination than I am, and it hadn't gotten done yet.

One of my stated reasons was that I want to take him somewhere for his birthday.  Unstated but well known is the fact that I don't like being seen in public with him in his usual grungy state.  Except on rare occasions I have no sense of smell, but I can see other people's noses wrinkling when Doug is around.  My own mother wouldn't let me out of the house without clean underwear and my hair freshly brushed, and once she even tried to scrub a freckle off my forehead.  I won't do that to my kid, but the cleanliness programming makes me uncomfortable in public with him when I know he stinks.

His birthday is still more than a week away, and I'll be insisting on another shower before we go to town, but I wanted to get the haircut done ahead of time for convenience, as well as to allow some growing out time to soften the lines.  My compelling argument yesterday to get it done immediately was that I had found a stand of extremely tall fireweed in the backyard next to the compost pile.  I said I wanted him to stand beside the weeds to give scale to the pictures, but not looking the way he did then.

For the haircut, first I used scissors to cut the still wet mats and tangles back, then used electric clippers to shear it down evenly, with lots of touching up with scissors.  I stood at the edge of the porch, and he stood on the ground so I could reach his head.  It took an hour or so, maybe more, to get it right.  Doug was restive before I had it done to my satisfaction.

His hair is a genetics demonstration.  It has the color and fine texture of his father's hair, with the beginning of the same male pattern baldness that has already taken most of Charley's.  But that fine light brown hair grows in a pattern of swirling cowlicks that duplicate the ones in my head of red hair.  Each of us has two spots, one on the crown and another on the brow, where the swirls come around in a circle leaving an upright tuft of hair in the center of each one.

Finally, it was done and the tools were put away, and we headed for the fireweed patch by the compost heap.  The vegetation has grown thick out there again, as it does every summer.  During breakup, as soon as the snow was gone, I was all over out there taking pictures of spring greenery and early flowers.  I couldn't go on one of those walks through the woods today without a machete.

The path out to the compost heap wasn't too difficult because we keep it worn down.  Where the difficulty came in was with lighting.  The shot here of the tall spikes of purple flowers backlit by a sunbeam shining through the trees, worked for the flowers but when I tried shooting Doug from that POV, his face was lost in shadow.

I had him ease between the fireweed stalks to stand on their sunny side, while I worked my way around that tree leaning into the frame from the right.  It was rough going with only a camera and no machete.  He could hear me thrashing through the brush and asked a couple of times what was going on.  Finally, I got there, only to discover that there was a different lighting problem around that side.

The fireweed that had shown up so beautifully when backlit was now lost in shadow (behind Doug, at upper right) and the sunbeam was in his eyes.  The stalk of fireweed in front of him is about average in size for those around here, where they are shaded and have to compete with trees and other vegetation for limited soil nutrients.  Only along the margins of the compost heap, where they have lots of nutrients and a small clearing letting in the light, do they grow to over 8 feet tall. 

They're still growing.  I'll try to give you an update before the blossoms top out and they get frosted.

It is a worldwide meditation, invoking the Light, and it lasts for an hour beginning about twelve hours from now, at  11:11 AM Universal Time, July 17, 2007.

From the point of Light within the Mind of God
Let light stream forth into human minds.
Let Light descend on Earth.

From the point of Love within the Heart of God
Let love stream forth into human hearts.
May the Coming One return to Earth.

From the centre where the Will of God is known
Let purpose guide all little human wills -
The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

From the centre which we call the human race
Let the Plan of Love and Light work out
And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.

The Great Invocation is a tad bit too dualistic for me, but -- hey-- it works for most of this planet, eh?

See the grid.

This week's subject is suggested by Sagiscoobious:

Identity Crisis

I did not have the normal psychosocial identity crisis many teens go through, and I have chosen not to post a photo of something shown from a perspective that makes it hard to identify.

Instead, I am taking this opportunity to ask for help in identifying this woody shrub that grows in profusion in and around our muskeg:

UPDATE:  THE CRISIS IS OVER!

gillwildflower suggested "alder" as an identification for this.   I did a google image search and eliminated that possibility.  Then, I tried a new search, "Alaska shrub round leaf catkin," and found an image that is very close to this.  I'm about 99.9% sure this is some subspecies of Betula nana, dwarf birch.

...and these weeds with tiny yellow flowers and three-lobed leaves resembling strawberry leaves:
AHA!  butterflyxlife identified this as Norwegian cinquefoil, Potentilla norvegica.

This summer, I have found help online to identify a number of local plants, including some rare wild orchids.  These two common and abundant species continue to elude me.  Thus, the "crisis".

Anyone whose expertise is insects is welcome to browse through my photoblog album, "bugs," and see if anything looks familiar.  I don't know what I've been shooting.

In this entry I am responding to recent comments on an old post, How Sex Got So Perverted.  In that essay I identified Robert Malthus as a source of the proliferation of modern perversions through his philosophical influence on England's Queen Victoria.

wordwarrior39 said, "It should also be noted that the Catholic Church brought into it a lot
of Greek philosophy. The Greek thought concerning the flesh was that
the body was evil, and the spirit within it was good."

Undeniably, dualism was part of the fabric of Greek philosophy, but it is difficult to find any monolithic system of belief among the Greek philosophers.  This is how Plotinus viewed the matter/spirit dichotomy.

As I read this, "attachment to the body represents a desire not for form but a corrupt
desire for the non-intelligible or limitless,"  Plotinus was perceiving and deploring perversion in his own culture.  To pervert means to twist or corrupt, to cause to deviate.  Usage of, "perversion," implies that there is a natural or correct form or course from which something has deviated.  That seems to be implied in Plotinus, and it is implicit in what I wrote about Victorian perversions. 

adifferentkindofbeautiful agreed with my assessment of Victorian Malthusian corruption, and asked, "What do you propose to fix this?"

I start from the position that pleasure is okay, that sexual activity is natural and acceptable, even if unprotected sex and excessive procreation might lead to destructive overpopulation and/or the spread of disease.  I am not using words such as "good" or "evil."  I am transcending dualism, so in order to understand what I'm trying to say, the reader will need to suspend his or her notions of right and wrong.  My premise is that it is mentally healthier and more socially productive to accept and try to understand all the forms and functions of life (including death) than to deny or try to hide any aspect of reality.

I started with myself.  It was a pragmatic first step, when I overcame the body shame my mother had programmed into me.   I needed money, and was working two jobs.  My night shift could have been bartending or janitorial work, but topless dancing paid three times the hourly rate, plus great tips.  I'm sure I blushed all over the first few times I stepped onto that little stage and let my boobies bounce to the music, but before long the music was the important thing and I was paying attention to what my feet were doing and letting the boobies take care of themselves.

The new freedom extended into my private life, and eventually I no longer needed to make love in the dark in order to be comfortable.  Understanding our cultural taboos surrounding nudity, those on both sides of the law who wish to humiliate and control others often strip off the clothing of their captives because it gives them an immediate advantage.  That advantage isn't there if the captive happens to be a nudist or a stripper.  I think that the first thing anyone can do to help straighten out the kinks in our culture is to overcome one's own hangups.

After that, the next natural step is to pass along your intellectual freedom to your offspring.  I don't advocate trying to force it on other people's kids because that can place severely hung-up parents in a hostile, embattled position and might bring a destructive backlash.  If we refuse to program our children with shame, and inform them fully regarding the origins and background of cultural mores, they can withstand the onslaughts of tabooism in public while retaining their personal freedom in milieus where it will not get them arrested or lynched.

That is what I have done with my son, Doug.  The most difficult thing to convey to him was the public taboo against genital touching.  It is common in my culture for parents to slap their babies' hands and shout "no" or "bad" when they touch their genitals.   I never did that, and Doug had to reach a fairly advanced level of intellectual development before he was able to understand that it was okay in private but not okay, for example, when he was standing on stage at school to receive an award.   If he was a rapper, I guess it would be okay on stage.

Interactions with the mainstream culture can be difficult for children who are reared in "alternative" lifestyles.  Even homeschooling Xian fundamentalist parents will agree with me on that.  It helps if one has a supportive subculture, and we were fortunate enough to have a few Pagan neighbors and a lifestyle that took us each summer to a series of fairs and music festivals where we had a broad circle of counterculture friends.  Doug survived his school days without having his love of learning stifled by the oppressive environment of public education.

When his friends and classmates in junior and senior high school were expressing their individuality in vulgar four-letter scatological and urological terms, Doug was expanding his vocabulary polysyllabically in fields as diverse as physics and philosophy.  He continues now to explore and learn on his own terms.  I am continually amazed and impressed with the information he picks up wiki-whacking and websurfing.  He is now as likely to have an answer for a question of mine as I am to be able to answer one of his.  If neither of us knows the answer, one of us will probably know where to look to find it.  No information source is out of bounds, and each one is evaluated on its own merits.

We didn't evade adolescent rebellion entirely, however.  As Greyfox expressed it, I had left Doug nothing but personal hygiene against which to rebel, so that was the direction in which he went:  dirty and grubby.   I don't have all the answers.

To return to the question of how to correct institutionalized sexual perversion, it seems obvious to me that if the number of taboos was reduced and we were to redefine what we mean by "harm" in the context of the common assumption that children are harmed by exposure to nudity or sexual images, we would have fewer broken taboos and less perversion in general.  Children are genuinely harmed by shame.  Tell them long enough and often enough that they are bad and they are likely to come to believe that they cannot be "good," and some of them will choose to excel at badness, and be the best they can be by doing their worst.

At the age of 26, my son shows no signs of having been harmed by open access to any and all visual and verbal material.  He enjoys hentai, but no more than he enjoys non-pornographic anime.  His appreciation of humor tends toward absurdity and plays on words.  Words that are commonly taboo in our culture have no special weight for either of us, and if that were the only result of my efforts, it would be sufficient.  It is not, however, the only result of my choice not to censor my son.  There are no bounds on his creativity.  He expresses himself freely, articulately, and with fine literate flair.

What does that mean, "what I can"?  Obviously, I'm not doing what I can't.  I'm doing what I'm able, what I think I can get away with, what's not too odious or strenuous or ridiculous.  I'm following instincts, impulses, drives and biological imperatives. 

I'm not doing much else.  I feel like my skull is stuffed with fluff.  I remembered to take my meds this morning, and fed the dog and cats.  I took the rain cover off the tadpole ranch.  I saw some flowers and had an impulse to get the camera and take a picture, but lacked the energy to obey that impulse.  I still have not risen to this week's photo challenge, and that is truly infra dig because this week it is my challenge.

For no discernible reason, I am happy.  I believe that no reason is the best reason for happiness.  I feel loving and loved.  If I were only as wise as Yoda, life would be perfect.

"Difficult to see. Always in motion is future." (The Empire Strikes Back)

Wait a sec!  I know that stuff that Yoda knows.  Yoda and I both draw from the same spring.  Life is perfect.

Seventeenth Tuesday Topic
Tuesday, 10 July 2007
Are you planning on participating in the upcoming August Challenge at One Million Blogs for Peace?
It will entail making a YouTube video promoting peace in Iraq and One Million Blogs for Peace.
Why will you or will you not be participating?

I don't know at this point whether I will participate or not, so I suppose my answer to the first question is, "No, I am not planning on participating."

If I do end up participating, it will be because I was inspired to create a five-second video that I felt might be worth the effort.  If I don't, it will have been because the inspiration wasn't there.

I am limiting my videos to five seconds because anything longer than that takes so long to upload that my internet connection gets reset and I have to start over again.  If I figure out a compelling way to convey the idea, "NO MORE WAR!" in five seconds or less, I'll do it.