A shady spot

A sign in the middle of the desert outside Moab, Utah reads: “If you get lost, find a shady spot and wait for someone to come to you.”

Sometimes life is like that.

Jeffers’ “To The Stone-Cutters”

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his poem mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave
sun
Die blind, his heart blackening;
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts
found
The honey peace in old poems.

~Robinson Jeffers

The world without us

Just finished Alan Weisman’s book, The World Without Us. Starts off fascinating and stays solid throughout (even if it slows a bit in the middle). It ends with moving thoughts about the end of the world and what human legacy might survive beyond our solar system to say to the Universe, “We were here.” (Turns out bronze etchings sent spaceward can last millions of years, while radio waves carrying out music and laughter can last billions.)

Utterly humbling to consider humanity’s place in geological time, what came before us for more years than we can truly imagine and, of course, what might come after. A wonderful read if you’re looking for some perspective, though it can be depressing to understand the long-term implications of our actions toward the planet.

Must admit that part of me felt glad to read about a planet healing itself once we were gone, but another part of me regretted the loss of human art, story, music, laughter (even the appreciation of nature itself – do animals stop and look at sunsets?) Likely, as with most things, the answer is balance.

Reading about the inevitable end of our world, and for a moment almost actually getting it, can be paralyzing. But then there’s Jeffers’ excellent argument. Maybe part of maturity is understanding that everything you do will someday be gone and forgotten, yet doing it anyway.

Buy one get one cloned

The FDA concludes that “Cloned Animals Are Safe To Eat.” Scary, particularly when “the FDA will not require food from cloned animals to be labelled as such.” I know they needed to make a call, but it doesn’t seem like even 6 years is enough time to determine all the effects of something as (apparently) radical as cloning life and then eating it.

The hugging thing

I’m all for a good hug, whether from a spouse, family, a friend, a teammate. A solid (welcomed?) hug can be therapeutic, even life-affirming, reinforcing the human connection. I don’t understand the “social” hug, where you just hover your head over the person’s shoulder and pat the person on the back. It doesn’t say much. I’d rather a warm, sincere handshake.

On the other hand, isn’t it possible to overuse the hug to say hello/goodbye? If you’re a friend I see once a week, I’m not sure I need to be hugging you every time. Or maybe I’m just a prudish product of a puritanical culture who, you know, needs a hug.

“Planet Earth” on Discovery

This is an excellent series, with mind-blowing cinematography. Favorite so far has to be “Shallow Seas.” Worth the couch-time, but don’t forget to go see the real thing.

The recycling universe?

Listened to a short, funny, disjointed but thought-provoking talk by John Dobson recently. Most encouraging (to me) was his adamant belief that the universe is not sliding toward an irreversible “heat death” but is instead recycling itself infinitely. I didn’t catch the details, and couldn’t possibly defend it scientifically, but it somehow feels right (or is it just my desperate attempt to avoid death?) (John was hard to follow, but this guy summarizes it a bit better.)

As opposed to Dobson’s theory, I sometimes wonder if the universe is perpetually expanding and contracting from and to a singularity, essentially destroying everything in it in order to start over. Even this seems better than heat death. Sort of like the breath of God or the dance of Shiva.

Still, after the talk, I couldn’t help but think of Whitman:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.