Mother Nature is One Hot Chick

I spend a lot of time out here in the Northwest looking at, smelling, and touching the natural world all around me...so many new plants, rock types, odors, and creatures new to my experience.
When I was a kid growing up in Minnesota, I paid attention to Mother Nature but, like all children, I only paid attention to the things about "mom" that pertained directly to my own comfort and needs. I knew mud made a bee sting stop hurting...and salt made a leech from the river let go of my skin. I knew which berries (and some flowers) that were good to eat and where they grew, which bugs not to touch, and where the best swimming holes were located. Most of the rest, however, escaped my attention. As I grew older, the concerns of my family and friends and my social life took preeminence and nature faded into the background.
Funny thing, though, about getting older...you start to notice the world around you once more, maybe because you realize you are closer to returning to this earth from which you once sprang forth like a green leafy sprout. You start paying attention to the weather patterns, the comings and goings of the various creatures, the change of the seasons...or lack of change if you move from a four season place like Minnesota to a sorta two season place like here on the coast of Washington. I feel my senses opening and blossoming in this new place and I do my best to see, feel, and breathe it in every day.
I guess I was either distracted or loaded much of my younger years, caught up in the world of humans, and I forgot about the real world around me, hosted by that lovely lady with the beautiful body we know as Mother Nature...and she is well worth spending time with, let me tell you! Take a moment outside today to look up, down, and around at the wonders right there before you...this is an amazing and beautiful place we all live in...remember to love it, even for just a moment or two each day...starts the day out nicer, that is for certain. Have a most lovely day, my friends...smell a flower or kiss a tree or just flirt with that Nature Mama a little bit, okay?

What Happened to the Future, Anyway?

I tend to get into the occasional "discussion" about the nature of God, usually with Christians. We both put forth our arguments, but since I am talking about some sort of god being  who set in motion if not created the entire Universe without thought to any specific group of humans vs. a Christian God who created the Universe for humans, but mostly for humans who would become believers in Christianity, we are not really arguing about the same thing and it is a wholly useless endeavor and no one's opinion is ever changed, although sometimes offense is taken by one or both sides...sheesh, no fun and pointless.
What really boggles my mind, however, after all the god talk is set aside, is this commonly held belief among even the mildest of Christians ( call them the "church on Easter, Christmas, weddings and funerals only" Christians) that the end of times is only years away and that there is no long term future for humanity. One study I found online stated that fully 22% of Americans believe the end of the world will absolutely happen in their lifetime and ANOTHER 22% are at least pretty sure this is true! Think about it! Nearly half of the folks in this nation believe the world will end in a few short years!This is nothing short of madness. Belief in apocalyptic disaster stories effectively tells our children that we have no hope for their future either, or the future of their children...hell, the entire human race is doomed in these end of the world, godreturnstoearthinblazeofglorytoreardthejustandkilltherest scenarios...hilarious ideas, were they not so frightening and ghastly. To tell ourselves and our children that, despite our imaginative and innovative brains and powerful will to survive, we are all as doomed as cattle in a slaughterhouse is the most irresponsible, uncaring, unloving thing we can do to ourselves and our children. Check out this story by Michael Chabon.
http://media.longnow.org/files/2/Michael_Chabon_-_The_Omega_Glory.pdf
Chabon makes some truly epic points about how we have stopped believing in the future we all looked forward to as children, the world of the Jetson's and Star Trek. Even the darker views of the future, such as the Planet of the Apes movies, still envisioned humans on earth far into the future. We need to regain that belief in the future of humanity, if not for our sake then certainly for the sake of our children. Go ahead, ask any kid in grade school on up through college what the future holds and see how many children believe it will all end badly and sooner rather than later.
An amazing project has been started in the desert of the American southwest, to construct a ten thousand year clock. Give it a Google...truly epic stuff. It is a project intended to restart our imagining of the distant future, a future that may have forgotten even our entire nation, but still includes mankind among its denizens. We live at the beginning of the 21st century and the future of humans, not simply those who follow current religions that preach end of the world stories as fact, but all humanity, is at stake. Unless we begin, as a people, to start imagining a future for our species, a future that stretches long into the lifespan of our planet, then we very likely will engineer the weapons for our own destruction...we will make our pessimistic predictions come true, in other words. But it doesn't have to be that way, people, it just doesn't.
The next time you hear a minister or a believer in whatever religion talk about the end times, look at your child,and then decide...do you want them to believe in imminent destruction of all life as a life to look forward to living, or do you want for them a long life as well as a long lifespan for all of humanity? The choice is ours.

in the beginning...

new blogSo, I am always late to new tech...super late...but I have finally decided to begin a blog. I guess the 420 character constraint on Facebook status updates is just a bit of a cramp to my style so I have decided to try this as an experiment and keep at it until it either succeeds or teaches me a lesson, whichever comes first...or at all. Like any new project, this will begin lumpy and ill-formed, awkward and poorly constructed, but it will, over time, evolve into a sleeker, smarter creature with fewer rough edges and under utilized spaces...I'm hoping.
This space will grow to contain all manner of the magical wonderful arcana I find lying along this path of life we are all tumbling along...smooth stones with stories, feathers of illustrations, fossils of fairy tales, sea glass memories, and little bits of stray magical spells turn up at our feet at nearly every step along this path and as much of this stuff as I can possibly notice, I plan to place such  here for your perusal. See you all along the Path...and let's enjoy this journey together... forward, inward, and onward.