HEAVENLY SIGNS

TOTAL ECLIPSE, NASA

COMET, HUBBLE

COMET NEOWISE, ISS

The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic infected an estimated 500 million people and resulted in 50 million deaths.  Since that occurred just over 100 years ago, there aren’t many people around today that have any memory of that horrific time in human history.  None of us today that are experiencing the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown have ever experienced this massive effort to slow its progress from host to host in our cultures.  Now that we’re entering the second half of the year 2020, this isolation of relational beings is beginning to take its toll along with the virus.  Combined with an extremely contentious major election year, the old adage that if it happens now, it’s political!

The very destructive riots in many of our major cities that have hijacked peaceful American protests for cultural change are no doubt being fueled by unemployed people with too much time on their hands.  The Atlantic hurricane season is now fully underway with the first landfall in southern Texas.  High heat and humidity in the heart of the summer season grips much of the nation.  All of this troubling activity combined with the serious implications of not opening our schools and businesses has people looking for answers. 

 It's been said that when humans do not understand something, they generally react in one of two ways—they either fear it or worship it.  That certainly goes for heavenly signs in the skies above us.  Two very obvious happenings in both day and night time relate to total eclipses of the sun and the seeming random appearance of bright tailed comets streaking across the horizon.  The planet has witnessed total eclipses every 177 days somewhere including December 26, 2019 and June 21, 2020.  Comet Neowise was first seen by astronomers on March 27, 2020 and its 70-day observation arc will be lost to the human eye before the end of July.  It isn’t forecast to return until the year 8786. 

 Although we now know that an eclipse is a natural phenomenon, many cultures have attributed them to supernatural causes and bad omens.  An ancient Greek battle between the Medes and the Lydians was being waged when a total solar eclipse darkened the battlefield.  Both sides immediately lowered their weapons and declared peace!  The ancients also regarded comets as omens of disaster and messengers of the gods.  These celestial nomads have been blamed for some of history’s darkest times from England’s Black Death to Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas in South America!

So, are all of these signs attempting to attract our attention?  Have we all been sent to our rooms by divine command to reconsider the direction of our lives and that of our planet?  Are these extraordinary happenings one last chance to reconcile our place in the universe and resolve to live together in peace?  

SACRED HOOP

SACRED HOOP

“And while I stood there, I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”  –Lakota native American, Black Elk Speaks

The Medicine Wheel, sometimes known as the Sacred Hoop, has been used by generations of various Native American tribes for health and healing. It embodies the Four Directions, as well as Father Sky, Mother Earth, and Spirit Tree.

 

“As I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the ground beside each creature with its four faces…each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel...they would go in any one of the four directions…and all four rims were full of eyes all around.”  --Ezekiel 1:15-18

Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota native Indian who lived around the turn of the twentieth century and had the sad experience of watching his people’s way of life decimated in his lifetime in exile.  Ezekiel was a priest and prophet to the Israelites in Babylonian exile around six hundred BC after the Babylonians defeated Israel.

 Both of these favored men experienced visions of hope for divine intervention to unite all people.  And it was communicated in the form of a sacred hoop or medicine wheel. 

TRUTH TO SELF

Truth, Olin Levi Warner

Mankind has progressed through many stages in our development including the hunter-gather age, the agrarian age, the industrial age and now the information age.  I think its safe to say that we’re now deep into the digital information age and our lives are overwhelmed with information that we sort into our true and false in boxes.  At no time in our existence does this become more apparent than during an election year—the year 2020 that we would all probably like to request a do-over! 

Solomon was one of the wisest human beings to ever live and he assembled a book of wise sayings called Proverbs, including Proverbs 12:17

“He who speaks truth tells what is right, but a false witness, deceit.”

The sculpture of Truth depicts Truth holding a mirror in one hand up to a snake in the other.  Snakes have historically been associated with some of mankind’s oldest rituals representing the dual expressions of good and evil.  Which will be rightly reflected?  Its important to note that believing a statement doesn’t make it true.  Thomas Aquinas succinctly stated that “Truth is the conformity of the intellect and things.”

David Eagleman writes in his book Incognito that mankind had believed the earth was the center of all creation around which all things revolved until Galileo Galilei peered into a telescope that he had designed in 1610.  Galileo observed that Jupiter had three moons that revolved around the planet, giving rise to multiple centers.  Instead of receiving his just accolades this genius was brought before an Inquisition and placed in shackles on a dungeon floor.  Not everyone appreciated the new found truth.

Eagleman follows this remarkable story by introducing us to the newly found truth that “we’ve been knocked from our perceived position at the center of ourselves, quoting Carl Jung, ‘In each of us there is another whom we do not know.’  Or as Pink Floyd put it ‘There’s someone in my head, but it’s not me.’” 

The latest revelation in brain science is that our subconscious efficiently controls the majority of our response to our existence while our consciousness is “far out on a distant edge, hearing but whispers of the activity.”

FEATHERS ON THE WIND

Airborne Coronavirus

There’s a lot of debate out there right now about the efficacy of wearing a face mask out in public to help slow the spread of COVID-19 virus.  A retail health greeter who recently asked a customer to wear one was stabbed in response!  There’s still a lot we don’t understand about how this virus spreads, but scientists now believe that viral particles encapsulated in a droplet of saliva or mucus can attach to a host cell and infect the person.  Unseen tiny airborne bioaerosols simply released through exhalation can spread the disease—like opening a bag of feathers that randomly scatter in the air.  It would seem that these masks are more useful to keep infected people from spreading the virus.  How much virus a person must breath to get infected isn’t known.  Infection from touching surfaces in now considered not to be a major risk and the virus primarily moves from host to host.

The very nature of this relatively unseen and still not totally understood virus taps into the human psyche as something to be feared, challenged or worshipped.  It would seem that the older generation rightly fears the consequences while the “immortal” younger generation challenges it. 

David Eagleman in his book, Incognito, relates the story of a man who wanted to record for posterity some of the most important music ever to come out of Africa using a tape recorder.  He got into immediate trouble when he played the music back to a native who thought his tongue had been stolen!  The quick-thinking man saved his own life by producing a mirror to confirm that the tongue was still intact.  Eagleman notes that “A vocalization seems ephemeral and ineffable: it is like opening a bag of feathers which scatter on the breeze and can never be retrieved.  Voices are weightless and odorless, something you cannot hold in your hand.”    

This virus, like our voice, is unseen, but unlike our voice that moves to others’ auditory systems, the virus moves to others’ respiratory systems and can be deadly for thousands of people on the planet.  And even though many remain skeptical due to its unseen nature, they need to understand that like our voices it travels on our breath like feathers on the wind.  

COVID BOREDOM

Grounded Delta Jets, PTI Greensboro, NC

There’s an old but not so subtle saying that death is nature’s reminder for us to slow down.  Perhaps a more contemporary version would be to substitute COVID-19 for the word death even though this pandemic has resulted in thousands of deaths in almost every community on the planet.  The subsequent social isolation, both mandated and self-imposed for us seniors, has me at least going full circle to my childhood days.  I still can remember rainy summer days when I must have made my mother crazy to hear me winning about being bored as I stared out at the rain drops on a window pane.  She generally let me sort out my boredom which wasn’t always such a good idea!  Fortunately, I learned to read early on and books took me and Toto to exotic places that weren’t in Kansas anymore.  When it comes to boredom and Covid-19, it would seem we need to learn to accommodate them since it looks like we’re in it for the long haul.  We need to take heart that Isaac Newton invented calculus during the plague.  Now that’s getting into a deep state of boredom!  Of course, social isolating for some folks is more like living the dream!  And boredom isn’t always a bad thing.  

This pandemic has given me the quarantine time to clear out my closet and open space for more stuff reclaimed from the eighty percent of the clothes I will never wear again, restore tranquility in my sock drawer and get all those singles together again, thoroughly clean the house including the eviction of all those mold farms in the refrigerator, really detail my vehicle so that even the inside of the windshield is clear for the first time in ages, upend overgrown bushes and trees in the yard to make space for more plants, toss out the eighty percent of canned goods in the pantry whose expiration dates start with 19, confirm that there are about 7,500 grains of rice in a package, put up thirty quarts of spicy salsa from my Covid victory garden (Actually I made one that up.  I only make reservations.), practice putting inside to keep golf strokes on the green to one or two but forget about correcting the driver slice, finish a book on neuroscience that’s been a work in progress for months, write a new blog post, and increase my time arguing with strangers about politics on social media.  Perhaps I still need to work on that last item!  

Neuroscientists now understand that boredom is the gateway to creative thinking and pondering the direction of our lives.  Just like today, Covid Boredom has prompted me to exercise my flow of mind creativeness.  Calming our unconscious chatter and observing our conscious mind clears the way to some very insightful thinking, especially once we’ve cleared the “to do list” that we’ve been ignoring for way too long!  Use boredom time to creatively insert some joy and fun into those habits and activities that create the boredom.

I appreciate that it can be very difficult for some folks to stop the merry-go-round of life and hit the pause button.  But at least Covid Boredom has resolved that for us!     

INVASIVE INCIVILITY

Graffiti and Kudzu, Jamestown, NC

INDEPENDENCE DAY 2020

I was returning home from my traditional Saturday morning drive to nowhere in particular with my coffee container on empty.  I use these weekly morning drives to clear my head, seek inspiration and sort out recent events.  And this year the drive is even more appreciated in this unprecedented time of an extended pandemic lockdown amid protests and too many destructive riots.  Rioting that has included the destruction of historical statues and many small businesses across our major cities.  I’ve watched this unrest unfold with disdain, sadness and a growing concern for the lawlessness and incivility that it birthed in my country, America.  I watched in disbelief as mayors and governors obviously had our law enforcement stand down and let criminals destroy fellow citizens’ lives.

Yes, there has always been a certain irony and concern about our founding fathers who declared independence from a taxing foreign power 244 years ago, while many were slave owners themselves.  Slavery has been with humanity for all time and still exists in many facets as a serious social issue.  Some later freed those slaves and hundreds of thousands died in a civil war to grant all people freedom.  However, simply reversing a social wrong may be a good start but it generally doesn’t alleviate the problem.  Martin Luther King, Jr. studied history and Gandhi’s struggles in India from foreign rulers and understood that violence only tends to stir up the hornets’ nest.  America is humanity’s great hope for peaceful civil protests and freedom from oppression.

As I approached home this morning, I passed a scene that is all too common in America’s southeast.  An invasive stand of smothering Kudzu vines had already covered a wide section of newly accessed trees near the bypass.  It is native to China and was innocently introduced in America to control erosion and serve as an ornamental shade plant.  However, it also absorbs all the sunlight for the plants under the canopy, suffocating them.  It now occupies an estimated 3,000,000 hectares and is destroying the environment at a rate of 50,000 baseball fields per year! Kudzu transposes living organisms into lifeless topiary support structures.  I was then forced to stop for a passing freight train whose cars were covered in graffiti.  I witnessed similar spray-painted graffiti being used to desecrate our national property and fellow citizens’ communities.  Both the Kudzu and lawless violence are a smothering scourge on our country.  And both are indications of more underlying problems for the future.

As an American citizen, I fully support needed social change and righting wrongs.  That’s the promise and job description of America.  But freedom is not the right to do as we please.  It’s the opportunity to do what is right!  I believe in the premise that love, not hate, is the most powerful force for personal change and for changing the world.  As an individual, I intend to do whatever I can to build a better world.  And I plan to exercise my lawful right to vote!