Earthing in Big Sur
“Are we dead?” I asked Spouse.
Maybe the EuroVan, the newest family member, missed one of the treacherous curves on Nacimiento-Fergusson Road and plunged a thousand feet or more into eternity.
“Are we dead?” I asked Spouse.
Maybe the EuroVan, the newest family member, missed one of the treacherous curves on Nacimiento-Fergusson Road and plunged a thousand feet or more into eternity.
I just returned to Yosemite National Park after decades of absence. It is magnificent, if you ignore the hordes of people crawling the valley like ants, and the over 66 million dead conifers in the Sierra Nevada, with the grey and brown bulk seen along the roads leading into Yosemite National Park through Mariposa County. I lost my breath seeing the death of these trees.
To believe that there are not those persons who do not respect the planet on which we live, is a sure path to living like fools. To believe that some one person can make your life good again, is a sure path to living like a fool. To believe that there is just one path to follow, is a sure path that ends at the edge of a deep crevice or brick wall.
We’ve apparently become a nation of fat drunks juggling bullets and razor blades in smoke-filled rooms.
Will history determine that 2016 was a year of balancing a scale or tipping it dangerously close to the fire?
And so it is with me and the rest of humanity.
Perhaps this is why the desert drew me in over and over this year. I know the desert well. I grew up in the desert — both in life and metaphorically. The seemingly endless light that heated the soil beneath my feet and cast mirages before me was both a gift and a trick. Sorting candor from myth consumed much of my time.
What are ways that we can give without membership, dues, meetings, committees, and landing on the mailing lists of the never ending mailers thick with dynamic photos of sad faced children, seniors citizens, dogs, and panda bears?
Paralleling a planet in flux, American voters (and European voters, for that matter) are like the Arctic — in meltdown. Conspiracists, nationalists, and folks swaddled in a coat of angry fear, won the day. That bottle of champagne in my refrigerator remains uncorked.
Fast forward to today’s social media and current state of humanity’s soul, we now have a plague of contrary people behaving as trolls and things that go bump in the night. It’s as if a thin-shelled pod opened inside that voodoo shop and millions of troll spores ejected into the air attaching to the already angry and disenfranchised soul of lost citizens.
The nuance of legato vs staccato is lost in conversation. Reasonable thinking has fallen out of tune. Sour notes meant to distract is the current composition.
Will the music die? Will the system collapse?
It’s possible.
It was a circular life moment filled with many spokes in life’s wheel. It was the magic that I wish we could each return to understanding our commonality as opposed to fighting over our differences.