I was reading a blog the other day, and it was full of passages from the blogger's journal from years ago. Very deep.
Believe
it or not, I've kept a journal since about the time I was 20. I wasn't
100% faithful, didn't write in the journal every day, and a lot of the
stuff I wrote over the years was just trivia and nonsense. But whatever
- I have more than three decades of it.
I though it would be
really interesting to see what I was thinking or doing around July 19
in years gone by. So I pulled out some old journals at random ...
July
19, 1981. Humid, mostly cloudy day. Started to rain in the afternoon.
The sky got very dark, and there was thunder in the distance. Skunk was
hanging around that night.
July 19, 1983. Was reading a book about discipline. Hmmmm. Weird - never even wrote the name of the book in the journal.
July
19, 1988. Wrote in the journal just after midnight. Worked really hard
that day. Went to the driving range in the evening, and shot some golf
balls (one of my occasional attempts to become passably good at the
game). Felt totally happy.
July 18, 1995 (didn't do any entry on
7/19). Insects don't have a prayer near a praying mantis. That was the
name of a newspaper article by Floyd King (great nature write, now
passed). I clipped it and pasted it in the journal. "Mantis" comes from
a Greek word meaning "prophet."
July 20, 1998 (nothing on 7/19).
Went to the town festival. WHOA - Gary Puckett and the Union Gap and
the Little River Band were playing. Watched the fireworks.
July 19, 1999. "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar."
July
21, 2002 (nothing on 7/19). Deep summer. Hot. Had a weird dream. Some
new president of the USA was gonna move into my house, and there was a
long stream of people coming to visit. Civil War General Stonewall
Jackson dropped in.
Sat around listening to the latest REM music that evening.
"Diversity reveals genius. Prosperity conceals it." (Horace).
July 17, 2006. Work work work. Decided I need to keep watch on everything with a critical eye.
July
19, 2008. Was reading about a strange epidemic in Tanganyika in 1962.
It was a laughing epidemic - people couldn't stop laughing for months.
Very weird. Some kind of mass psychosis. People kept laughing to the
point where they became physically ill. Decided that the world is a
strange place.
Anyway. It's cool looking back. Reminds me that life is ... well, life. And it's a good idea to pay attention to it.
Back in 1979, Jimmy Carter said we don't really have an energy crisis. We have a crisis of self-indulgence and consumption.
I was just reading that.
IMO,
it's true. We are the most affluent people in the history of the world.
And we fill our lives with pampered actions and selfishness. We crave
comfort and trash responsibility. When we should be worried about the
erosion of the oceans and the air and the poverty and desperation of
Third World People, we get into brutal debates about the softness of
toilet paper.
I'm not talking about anyone or anything in
particular, just our excessive way of life. And we don't seem to want
to change anything.
Just ranting this morning.
Just heard the news that John Bachar,
age 52, one of the world's great rock climbers, died last week. He fell
from the rock near Mammoth Hills, California.
JOHN BACHAR, FREE-SOLOIST, DIES ON THE ROCK
This
guy had been free-soloing for years. I read that he climbed way over a
million feet of rock during his climbing career. Climbed some of the
world's harshest, steepest rock with no rope or harness. Only his
fingertips, working their way into the tiny crevices, stood between him
and death. And last week, he must have missed a crevice, and lost his
balance and his life.
I'm not a rock climber, but I think
free-soloing is one of the most mind-blowing physical and mental feats
people do in this world.
But I still wonder: is free-solo rock climbing purity - or recklessness?
Off for a few days. Finally starting to chill.
But
what's with this crazy weather? Cool and wet spring. And it's rained
almost every day since summer began. The weather is making everything
totally green - grass, fields, trees, flowers, weeds.
Good movie - Slumdog Millionaire. Saw it last night. Totally deep message and fun.
Read Christopher Buckley's Supreme Courtship
a few days ago. Hilarious book and great commentary on America. This
guy has the wit of his father (William F. Buckley, Jr.). A fictitious
U.S. president decides to appoint a TV celebrity-judge to the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Some stuff I stumbled on last few days ...
- It's illegal to hunt whales in Oklahoma.
- The law requires people in Kentucky to take a bath at least once a year.
- A new sport I never heard of before - EXTREME IRONING.
Basically, you go to some challenging outdoor place, like a steep
mountainside or underwater or parachuting in the air ... and start
ironing. No, I'm not making this up. Check the link.
- Another extreme sport - THE ANTARCTIC ICE MARATHON - an ultra-marathon run in Antarctica near the south pole. Amazing.
-
The human foot has 52 bones, more than any other part of the body.
There are about 206 bones in the entire body, although the exact number
of bones varies from person to person.
- If you ever find
yourself in a car that's hanging over the edge of a cliff, everyone
needs to first climb into the back seat. Then, if you can open the back
doors, you can get out ... veeeeery slowly. If the doors can't be
opened, the only safe way out is to smash the rear window and climb out
that way.
- 38 painters work continuously on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Fran.
Anyway.
"Everything is a miracle. It's a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar." (Pablo Picasso)
Hoping to get some weeding and outdoor stuff done today. Maybe shoot some pictures. Looks like rain, though.
"Certain things catch your eye ... but pursue only those that capture your heart." (Ancient Tribal Wisdom)
Saw some caterpillars hanging out in a big open field last Saturday.
And
then I was reading a quote from my friend Lela - "What the caterpillar
calls THE END, the rest of the world calls a butterfly."
I got thinking.
Caterpillars are always in the act of growth. And transformation.
I figure we can learn a lot from caterpillars.
Lot of people want to live off the grid these days.
It's
possible to grow food, reduce power, live simply, and a lot more people
are doing that. Some people are even getting into alternative energy in
their homes, doing the bicycle thing, relying less and less on the
commercial grid.
I was thinking that it's not really possible to
get totally off the grid. Along the way you end up needing the coin of
the realm (currency), medical care, and things that are produced by
others.
But I was thinking that it is possible to live mentally
and emotionally off the grid. It's possible to learn how to think
independently. To disconnect from ideas that are inconsistent with
earth values. To be a radical force for service and goodness in a world
that sometimes just values doing and taking.
Just a thought.
Could be sort of naive.
But it's a thought.
The solstice is here, and summer begins.
Time to chill out.
Time for adventure.
Time to be free.
Time to seek and re-create and re-invent.
Time to think and be.
Time to sing. Like William Carlos Williams says, in summer, the song sings itself.
Rock gardens always take a lot of work.
No idea why, but this year the weeds and crabgrass totally overran the rock garden out back.
You couldn't see anything except weeds.
BTW, the rock garden isn't sun-fogged - the light stuff is blooming crabgrass. 
So I spent a chunk of time for the last two weekends recovering the rock garden.
First step was to start clearing. Some weeds went deep into the soil. They had strangled a lot of the plants.
I
managed to save some plants where the weeds weren't all that thick.
Like the plants off to the right. Have no idea what they are - they
appeared three years ago and for all I know they might be a weed. But
they look cool, like they belong there.
Some
plants were just tangled up in weeds. So I tried digging them up,
separating the roots, and then replanting. Worked for some plants, like
these ornamental chives - which took years to grow. They look a little
wilted, but I think they'll come back OK.
Finally
- I got it cleared out, and planted some new shoots: lamium, blue
bells, miniature asters, a few kinds of sedum - low growing plants and
some alpine stuff that make a rock garden look really great. 
It will be a few years before the foliage spreads. But the rock garden is a rock garden again. Ready to meet the summer.
Just read (from a credible scientific
source) that a couple of generations ago native Alaskans were never
nearsighted. ("Farsighted" means you can't see things up close.
"Nearsighted" means you can't see things at a distance.)
The
theory is that native Alaskans spent so much of their time in the wild.
They needed their distance sight. Their bodies responded.
Today native Alaskans have TVs and computers and stay indoors a lot more. About 30% of native Alaskans are now nearsighted.
Which got me thinking that when we're not forced to use some physical or mental or emotional capability ... we lose it.
We
don't have to figure out how to grow our food. Or run five miles at a
clip. Or explore beyond what we read in the newspaper or see on the
tube. Or think out of the box. We don't have to do that stuff, so we
don't.
We are lulled into complacency. Freakin' pampered. We
accept limits and walls and rules and borders. Like sheep. It's easy to
become insignificant and weak and learn to like it.
In Nepal,
if you're nearsighted, the Sherpa wisdom is to spend time staring at
the distant moon and clouds. The Sherpa wisdom is that your eyesight
will improve.
We need some new wisdom. We need to fix all sorts of nearsightedness.
We need to learn how to see the walls and fences closing in on us. And then push beyond them.