Three Simple Questions

Friday, April 5, 2024

I AM DARWIN'S BRAIN

I AM DARWIN’S BRAIN

WHO AM I?

I am Darwin’s brain. It was I who had phenomenal insights. Everyone said I was brilliant, a genius! That’s true. And, I should know, I am Sir Charles Darwin’s brain. Is it because I am so uniquely designed that I am so special? Well, partially. When I was a child, I played freely in nature. Then, up until age of 30, I had Sir Charles feed me a steady diet of Poetry, and Art and Music! Each week we painted, attended concerts and galleries! And read SHAKESPEARE! It was glorious. And jokes! Lots of jokes and laughter... ANYTHING to nourish me and get me thinking in all different ways. This prepared me for releasing my genius. This was way before neuron theory. But I nourished Sir Charles’ neurons so I was like the young Muhammad Ali of grey matter – lithe and quick and ready to get into the ring with Science!

WHY AM I HERE?

Habit! Dammit, habit! Habits of thinking. Doing what you’re good at over and over is a habit! I hurt myself. Repetitive Thinking Injury (RTI). The professional demands were fierce. Sir Charles has only fed me facts and data, facts and data, FACTS AND DATA for MANY years! Forced me to grind out General Laws, and for General Laws you need LOTS of facts and data. I was forced to crunch the numbers, grind out the laws like a machine that grinds sausage. I believe that such a steady diet of habitual thinking has pumped up certain neural pathways while other parts of me have atrophied! Darwin’s Brain has atrophied because of a conceptual, perceptual habit of thinking – who would have thought? I certainly didn’t, and I’m Darwin’s Brain!

WHAT DO I WANT?

Joy! Freedom! To feel my toes in the grass like a kid again! Parts of me are GONE, I tell you! Simply gone. The other day I rummaged through some neurons and realized – Darwin’s Brain realizing, can you imagine – that my capacity to think, REALLY THINK, is now limited to only certain types of thoughts?! Love, my feeling life, I’ve misplaced it. And, has anyone seen Darwin’s morality? I hope it’s here someplace under facts and data! I once read Poetry each week, now it makes me nauseous – ESPECIALLY Shakespeare. I’ve enfeebled myself through disuse. Look, if you gotta make sausage, mix things up! Don’t just make horsemeat sausage, make rabbit sausage! Use ONE horse to ONE rabbit – That’s 50 / 50, right? You’re not laughing. That’s a statistician’s joke. Geez, Darwin’s Brain has lost it.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

HEARTWOOD TIMING

March 13, 2024 – Almost sugaring time. Daytime temperatures in the 40’s.

Early March is not “sugaring” time in Vermont, yet. We’re still getting those polar vortexes and Alberta Clippers which drop the temperature 40 degrees before you can bring in the Brass Monkey. Surface water is frozen. You gotta watch out just walking on the driveway. They’ll be ice fishing on Lake Bomoseen for some time yet. And, the frost goes deep, we’re just on the 45” and 50” frost depth line. How deep is that? Imagine a 3^rd grader standing upside down.

The roots of Maple trees go deep, way deep. They are not shallow and horizontal like the roots of the softwood species; Spruce, Fir or Pine.

Ever pull up a little Maple sprout? It’s got a great long root – 3 maybe 4 inches long - like Dandy-damn-lions. Mature Maples, the 40-year-old, 40-foot tall kind, have this big tap root that puts it really into the earth, 8 maybe 10 times further down that that frostline, really into the living elements.

A 40-year-old tree, 40 feet tall is maybe 1-foot in diameter. That’s the kind of tree that the Vermont Maple Promotion Board say are the ones that are tapped in the sugaring process. A tree-like that yields 15 – 30 gallons of sap in a season. It takes 3 to 4 of such trees to get the 40-gallons of sap to boil down for a gallon of Maple syrup.

That season for sugaring starts when the sap starts running, and the sap starts running because the Maple wants to put on foliage and then put forth seeds.

Maple trees don’t give a flip about syrup. It’s the seed they care about. Maple seeds are called “samara” and they are composed of two one-seeded cells which are in a wing form so they can be carried by the wind.

That means those very sensitive roots of the Maple tree begin a process of drawing water and minerals from the earth and running that through its heart.

The sap runs through a layer called the “heartwood”.

In Vermont, this species is called Sugar Maple, the Latin name is Acer saccharine. The Heartwood is that layer called the duramen and it is this layer through which the sap moves. Moves? Hell, in the springtime, it’s boiling!

In not too many weeks, when the earth rotates just a half-degree or so further, and when the wife and I are on our morning walk, we will look to the mountains to the West, and the ugly winter-grey, Maple forest will suddenly have just an impossibly light yellow-green “wash.” It’s almost time for “sugaring.”

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Saturday, February 11, 2023

THE FLYING FICKLE FINGER OF FATE

WHO AM I?

From 1968 to 1973 comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin hosted the weekly comedy variety series on NBC called “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_%26_Martin%27s_Laugh-In

Each week the, two presented an award for the most dubious achievement; the dumbest, craziest news item of the week. The “Flying Fickle Finger of Fate” Award was also called the “Rigid Digit”, the “Winged Weenie”, the “Friendly Phalange”, the “Nifty Knuckle” or the “Wonderful Wiggler.” The award was a Gold/Silver sculpture of a hand with its index finger pointing, adorned with two small wings. It rotated in a circular “Whoopie!” circular motion. Recipients included the City of Cleveland whose Cuyahoga River caught fire (due to pollution), The Pentagon (5 times), and L.A. Police Chief Ed Davis who wanted to install gallows so that hijackers could be more easily hung. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_M._Davis)

http://www.tvacres.com/awards_booby_flying.htm

Esquire Magazine ran “Dubious Achievement” awards annually for many years. You can Google that title and come up with some laughers which many people post online.

Here’s what others have said about “Fate.”

“Meaning is invisible, but the invisible is not contradictory of the visible: the visible itself has an invisible framework, and the in-visible is the secret counterpart of the visible.” M. Merleu-Ponty, Working Notes[JY1] [JY2] (The Soul’s Code, James Hillman, pg. ix)

“Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruits of his character.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“He that waits upon fortune is never sure of a dinner.” Benjamin Franklin

“Fortune knocks at every man’s door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.” Mark Twain

Are you living your fate or destiny?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sl-scott/are-you-living-your-fate-_b_2194041.html

WHY IS FATE HERE?

Some will say there is no such thing. It is all coincidence. That our brains are hard-wired to look for meaning. This is all superstition. Baseball teams are not “fated” to lose. Or win.

Or, is it actually possible that fate is an agent that changes everything? Is it “fate” which causes my paramedic son’s ambulance to arrive the moment before it is too late to save a life, and fate which causes him to arrive a moment too late? Or are heavy traffic here, light traffic there, the elements of fate?

Fate has been called the “guardian angel” who at the last moment saves the child from plunging into the swimming pool. The Ancient Greeks called fate “Okemah” and described it as the being which carries you like a vehicle.

Others have called Fate “Lady Luck” or “Fortuna”. To Eskimos and others who follow shamanistic practices, fate is your spirit, your free soul, animal soul, your breath soul.

Some call it luck. What would you call it when a person in a trailer in Kansas and a tornado rolls through and they survive despite the fact that everything around them is totally obliterated? Luck, right? Fate, right? But, are the people who live in Oklahoma “lucky” over and over again when the tornado goes just over there? Are they now unlucky because of fracking earthquakes or does “fate” have anything to do with that? I like the Forest Ranger who has been struck by lightning 6 or 7 times and lived to tell about it? Maybe they’ll live to tell about hundreds of tremors a week and their survival will the the amazing thing.

The reality is that we believe that fate is a quality of being a part of our lives. Fate is something else which cannot be explained by the physicality of life. There is more to our lives then meets our eyes. That’s what humans believe, don’t let any smart phone tell you different. It is more fun and rich to live a life which has the random and unexplained in it.

Even mediocrity can be a “fate”, right? It once was attributed to the “stars”. Here’s Shakespeare’s “All’s Well That Ends Well”: “We, the poorer born, whose baser stars shut us up in wishes…” Shuts us up in wishes. Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda.

Mediocrity. Poor choices. Does fate make those poor choices, or do I? Do we blame “fate” for our stupidity? Yes. I can tell you that. Some people, let me raise my hand here, risk to draw on an inside straight in poker, ignore symptoms in cancer (hand down), drive drunk (hand down). We choose. Not fate. Duhh.

Each individual has genius, their own unique selves. Now we’re at the good stuff!

But, genius belongs to everyone and no person has all the genius or can be the only genius. What? But, I’m special, right?

Genius may be an invisible escort for a whole group of people. That family. That band. That team. That school. Those gals. They know how to do it. They are special. Unique. More than just one person in whom genius or character lives.

If you are fated you know that it is not you that makes these “fateful” things happen. But, when it comes to genius, we seem to claim our genius because we are special! Oh, sure!

WHAT DOES FATE WANT?

The “Flying Fickle Finger of Fate” sometimes points at you and sometimes points away. It is important for you to look at your life and to understand that there have been moments when fate has visited you and was with you. Maybe saved you. Something impossible happened.

You should look at your children and imagine that they and their lives will have moments of fate in which things will become radically different and they themselves will be able to release their own genius, or sink back into depression and despair. It can go either way.

Fate wants you to know you can work with luck, fate, destiny - work with others and help them understand that they have gifts beyond belief locked in their little souls.

The intention is to broaden your view of life so that you will not give up hope so that you know that your genius in the right place and time can work miraculous things, can lift the sinking spirit. So that, when you least expect it, that winged weenie, wonderful wiggler and nifty knuckle will appear for you.

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