Conservation in the Shrinking Commons

Conservation in the Shrinking Commons
L. Edgar Otto

15 September, 2012

 
Nomads between the desert and the mountains

freedom and wealth measured by their livestock

Caught up in the ocean currents like endangered turtles

into an ice age, our stature as the globe warms

The mounds of Trempelo, palisades square from a

single pole skyward to the solstice aligned

So crops divined, stacks of mud and deepening barrows

flint and swirl designs, culture on clay in the later day

Began with simple utility bowls to trade as did Athens's

art of vases along the Mississippi follow snows across

The Atlas mountains, their children named today descended

from the prophets millenia since Christ and Mohamed

All fear their loss of love in rows before the pulpits and

lecture halls not had enough of war to create equations Words in clay on dins of noise drawn on life's white boards...

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Faith and Universe

Perhaps it is not the content of our faith, our remembering in perceptions some truths that are beliefs in the state of delusion, but the grounding itself of doubt and indecision while irrelevant, constrained or not, in a non necessary reality or that reality an illusion.

In this sense the great secret of the universe to be revealed to history, the dust, or a mind, is that there is no universe!

The awakening of nature and the movement of life continues despite this as does our cultures and learning without effort in the background of existing and not just the nothingness we create of all there is that we infer outside or beyond us. If we are lucky to survive, avoid risks of disillusionment that in the total summation feel we have to believe in something, not just react against the frame of mind- even the force of words we resist or resent paradoxically, in truth of falsity against such awakening.

Our relation to time, its measure, speed of it experienced in different years as to its span, enough or too little over a space, how we think of time at the time and in retrospect can change over a lifetime as surely as this question of what is the grounding of our foundational beliefs. In a given instar of our growth and aging life can seem long enough where at some other instar it seems now too short- or at our prime we may see ourselves and act as if quite immortal. But in this new contemplation on the world to see it only as mortal time is equally a mistake at least on this side of some possible heaven.

Here in the clarity, my character and form of enquiry usually to accept and yes then try to weigh all inputs, at least take a second look beyond face value, the persisting and not forbidden necessity, taking thought in a poetic habit and long practice of being close to the discovery of a rhyme or line, a thought, a seed or title that contains ten thousand words, engaged in mostly passionate creativity, each idea, moment, can escape me although these may return. For time itself may recreate, rewrite the world in all of time's directions.

But if we are at least reasonable with, thus comfortable with our idea of self and not overwhelmed or anxious in real or imagine conflicts with such truths of others, we can ride the natural streams of nature's creative currents content to continue at some level or lifestyle. Or we may want more with careful but greater longings to enquire if that the state over tests that do not default into boredom as an awakening evidence of distance and vanishing, atrophy without challenges. For those of us in the many worlds and multiverse (these to equally not existent) are most our true selves where the living is the highest state in our creating.

Yes, the poetic line comes back to me, the seed of this essay and the mood, it almost from the deepest source:

I do not desire to preach to you from some pulpit anymore than to stand before you in the pews of an academic lecture hall as if we cannot occasionally get on with some sentient being outside the formality of academia or hierarchy of command to make what they may believe or not real decisions for the life or death of others for the sake of the state or way of life that may not be sustained otherwise. But to train such people like a branching tree is to set up the canopy of what moves us along in an adversary system that inevitably stirs our human resources to real or proxy civil war.

The line or thought was how in another short golden age of my creativity I am confident in what truths and methods I have found, can lead out as well as the hard works of professionalism in teaching so to indoctrinate the tools needed that we can do the job and negotiate the rules of a society. That is I feel comfortable with myself despite the realization of the scars and wounds that apparently would be too much for anyone without a strong core faith, at least in the maths and sciences to bare. But although my fingers and my words race up and down the musical scales and the lyrics are original and fundamental- too much has been lost of my simplicity in the beloved folk and plain songs, the old nursery rimes and I do not know if the technology concerns, the esoteric physics has tied my tongue- on the other hand to see some writers of the past in his total work is to see that these may be best forgotten once understood as a system in its simplicity- no necessary rules, even the awakening young musicians have to be interpolated as to their worth in the future as writers, if one has that knack, this too a time thing, faith in the creation awhile if such uniqueness and originality is to flourish and add to our human civilization over time.

So too, my lifelong preoccupation with this music of the spheres.

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