Earth thought 250 of 365 : Gandhi reportedly said that he had thought God is truth, but then realized that truth is god. I wonder how he would feel now, facing the environmental crises of this century. Which shibboleths would he challenge? I believe he would challenge at least two -the national border and the corporate ownership of Earth. He would challenge the former, because national borders keep us from protecting all humans and most creatures from the pollution some of us cause. He would challenge the latter, because hunger and thirst are bound to be a blight in this century as climate change progresses, and yet agriculture and water are becoming commodified by massive transnational corporations that hold the reigns on each to a large extent. But then, think how the first of these challenges would change the Gandhi we know from history -Gandhi the nationalist. He'd have now to become a cosmopolitan of sorts, a citizen of Earth.
Earth thought 251 of 365 : I've been having flashes recently of ... I don't know the word to describe it. I suddenly *realize* -the intuition, not just concept is there- that everything I or others do on this planet is here today, gone tomorrow -that the entire history of life is a point, gone, and with no one to record or watch it, or with no way to make sense of what it would be to record or watch it. It's just gone. This means that by gone-s are just that -in history, and also in my life. There is a speed under all this, rushing headlong forward. The funny thing is, though -none of this feels sad or morbid. It feels, rather, dry. Startlingly the way it is. And instead of a desperate nostalgia, I feel both freed to try again or anew at things that matter to me and responsible for my point in time. In all this, the meaning is intrinsic, since any larger point is a fantasy. And so my love for this point of life on Earth, for handing it down to Isaiah's generation -for instance- that, too, is intrinsic. Simply because it is more meaningful to have been a point in time that way, to have been an unrecognized, unrecorded, headed-to-dust lover of beauty here in this blink of an eye.
252 of 365 : Paradoxically, we could use a can-do attitude like that found in Dubai, most un-ecological of cities, before the Great Recession. What that city bloated on building and speculation, whose input of energy and output of waste was the largest per capita in the world, what that city felt like was change in the air. And now our entire civilization must change to become eco-logical. Entrenched in its ways, tired and reactive, it can't do. What conclusion to draw from this conjunction -that we need to feel ourselves creative and wealth-generating to seize innovation in our sensibility? And do the environmentalists speak to this motivation? They sometimes do, and are cynical about it. But modernity has its truth in the human spirit -we need to go forward, to something more glorious?
But what is glorious? Hegel suggested it was self-consciousness and the freedom that brings, self-consciousness shared across a society. And what is wealth? In the deserts outside Dubai, the sand sifts in eddies through the air, smooth and beautiful, and the Qaf tree dots the crown and level of the land, tough in its persistent adaptation. This wealth was erased by American style buildings. Can do, can't do -can do what?
253 of 365: All the hankering and dickering around which duties we have and to whom -to human rights or to species preservation, to humans or to non-humans- strikes me as a lot of smoke. When compassion leads you -and, contra Kant, it simply should, to lack the virtue of compassion is to lack a feature of morality- then there is only this -- some people who hurt, some beings who are suffering a loss of habitat and whose glory may disappear. That is to say, there is only life. We're alive; they're alive. Yes, I save the human over the snake, but the basic idea is that we should co-inhabit. Philosophers obsess over the trade-offs and miss the goal, toward which creativity can be harnessed far beyond expectation.
254 of 365 : Meet our kids. They are alive with wonder. This is the newly opened life -the miracle. In front of the innocence ---the shrunken-browed adults, cloud-eyed with background thoughts. "Tell us what you've been doing, grown-ups? Have you been outside of yourselves? No, don't tell us. Pre-oc-occu-pa-pied. Most definitely pre-occupied. Whether a penny is less than two, two seconds less than three?" Meanwhile, the kids, lost in the wind in the trees, wondering why.
255 : "I have been in the wilderness for a while." What does that mean? I have been lost? Why is the wild lost? Or, must it be the opposite of civilization? Aren't we lost in civilization, often? I am lost in the wild when I cannot reach medical care for my child. I am lost also when I forget human intercourse -an inarticulate silence. I am lost in civilization when I forget I am alive, and am also lost when oppression or status make me unfree or feel unfree. Wildness brings a sense of my living principle -yet it also brings cruel danger and numbing silence. Civilization brings conversation and the benefits of orderly cooperation -yet it also brings cruel classification and numbing routine. So, contra Thoreau, in wildness is not necessarily the preservation of the world, but of only certain things, and it is also the destruction of other things. And civilization is equally mixed.
256 of 365 : Poetry and the open, finite life. "Who, us?" Upstairs, the neighbors squeaking on floorboards, sound of cars on Lee Rd. Cold seeping in. Fall, not yet -soon.
